Very long chapters, atypical of usual web serial lengths (and more like those of a physical book). The first is like 4-5 of standard chapter lengths on Webnovel. This isn't necessarily bad, but I'll touch on this again later. Later chapters are not as long though.
Writing Quality: Below Average
Stability of Updates: Great!
Story Development: Average
Character Design: Below Average
World Background: Poor
First Chapter---
Usually, I'm all for jumping right into a story instead of info dumps. While I still believe this to be one of the better techniques for beginning, the caveat is being able to understand what's going on still. For example, if you're starting with a war scene, then you must explain the two sides and the conflict and not just have combat fighting/action and list names without understanding the significance and who's who.
This is the problem I faced in the first chapter, halfway through. You can keep this jump-right in beginning, but more details need to be threaded through sections to explain:
1) what a Revenant is and the whole conflict about them (I read the synopsis and understood a little better, but a story synopsis never should be in place of actual clarification/information in a book);
2) Urasaria and what exactly everyone's doing there by catching other revenants, like what purpose/founded by for what reason, what makes one person with a Revenants allowed to attend versus those indicted as criminals;
3) and the world background of this world, the laws, the people, culture, society, make it envisionable, how this and Revenants came to be about, etc.
Additionally, way too many characters introduced when Mia arrived at Urasaria. It was very difficult keeping track of who's who, what they do, their potential significance in the story, what they said. Only Aimee I sort of followed due to her speaking and interacting with Mia the most.
With that said, I found Aimee's character to be inconsistent. She's the top of the school, yet she has many verbal pauses, aka "um", while she speaks to Mia. I'm guessing because many female Revenants are lesbians, Aimee is attracted to Mia. But if so, then her nervousness cannot just be conveyed by her dialogue. And this goes for all characters too. More gestures and "context" in between dialogue is necessary. It's partly due to so much back and forth dialogue between multiple characters that also made it so hard to follow. However, you are skilled in creating the dialogue itself, even if feels like too much at times because of this.
Also, for every kind of relationship, usually it's not "love at first sight" or "I want to (beep) you/get in your pants" unless said person is not using their upper brain as much as they should. You can have love at first sight, but it's very tricky to make it well done without making it feel unrealistic and cringey. In your case, this could be more successfully accomplished with more in-between words outside dialogue such as inner thoughts, noticing of gestures and features that are attractive, etc. Otherwise, it'll feel contrived or superficial.
In the next half of the chapter, I roughly made up and grasped what a Revenant is, but I'm still lacking background on it. This leads to what I see is the main issue of your story so far. It's the execution of the plot. The pace is fine, but it's too dialogue heavy, resulting in almost a script for a theater piece rather than a story for a book. Thus, many details for settings, world background, and even the personalities, thoughts, and feelings of characters are greatly left out. This isn't at all ideal for a book, and considering so many characters are introduced at once, I can imagine it'll become overwhelming or frustrating for some readers, especially since the chapter is very long, so the struggle of understanding everything feels very drawn out.
Back to the dialogue, you're generally good at crafting the dialogue, the part in quotes. But all the stuttering is a little much. I know Mia is very sky and awkward, but unless she has some medical condition that causes to stutter in basically every sentence, then I really don't see the logical reason for expressing that awkward quality through stuttering. Honestly, if it weren't for the stutters, she sounds and acts like another other normal person. If you want to really describe her as shy and awkward, then you must do so through other means besides mainly dialogue. This again goes back to the more context in-between dialogue point I mentioned previously.
For the writing correctness itself, it's generally fine. But there is some odd phrasing that makes me do a double take and re-read in order to piece together what's trying to be said. Also, the frequent cutting of sentences such as in the fighting/testing scene with Mia's new Revenant makes it a little disjointed to read. Usually, dashes are more for important inclusions within a sentence, or a dramatic cutting off. Here, I found it to be used more like in place of "then." Lastly, the punctuation is often incorrect such as with "Sweet." said Name. instead of "Sweet," said Name. or "Sweet." Said Name.
In short, you have an interesting story idea going, but you lack the necessary information for readers to latch onto and understand those ideas. By including more settings, background, gestures/movements, and inner descriptions of characters' while also organizing their introductions in a more batch by batch way and not all at once, I think you'll have an intriguing and more successful story that draws more readers in and retains them.
I thought about continuing to chapter 3 as you mentioned, but doing so wouldn't change everything that I stated above because this is based on suggesting proper writing and story technique in order to compel readers to read and continue. I didn't have a problem with the plot, just the execution of writing this story, and reading a nice scene between Mia and Hirogane in chapter 3 isn't going to change my opinion. The first chapter is the most important in a story, and since my review is getting long, I'm just advising on this first chapter alone.
You're doing great with outputting and writing a lot, so keep it up! I hope this review can help you if you ever decide to revise your first story draft.
Good luck!
So I didn’t feel compelled to go beyond that as it would require mentorship rather than just a review.
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