Subject: A criticism of "Fallout: Equestria."
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Posted on: 2014-10-02 03:45:00 UTC
WARNING: The following post contains vague spoilers for "Fallout: Equestria" and serious spoilers for the Fallout series. Proceed at your own risk.
It's been a while since I read the "Fallout: Equestria" series, so I will admit up front that I might be misremembering some aspects of it. However, I'm not writing this post to talk about the minutiae of the story. I want to present why I believe that this story does not execute the crossover concept well. "Fallout: Equestria," in my view, fails to understand key aspects of both My Little Pony and Fallout. Especially Fallout.
First off, My Little Pony. I felt that the characterization of the Mane Six (who appear in various flashbacks sparked by stored memories) was exaggerated to fit the concept of a Fallout-colored universe. They felt flat to me; exaggerations of the character's most notable qualities slathered with a grim paint. The decisions they make in the story don't gel with what I know about them from the show (and that is taking into account when the story was written in relation to the show's production).
The story's relationship with Fallout is even more tenuous. For all its destruction and horrors and war that never changes, Fallout is at its core a story about hope. We see in that series -- particularly in Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas -- a world that may scarred and nasty, but at the same time is mending. People are surviving. Civilization is recovering. In Fallout 3, that's admittedly a bit harder to see (and I feel like "F:E" takes the most inspiration from that entry). But even there, the audience has hope. In "F:E," the only real suggestion we get that the world might repair itself comes at the very end. Up until that point, the audience is continuously hammered with the point that almost everything is terrible and almost everypony is suffering.
Yes, player choice in the video game does mean that you can potentially make things even worse. But consider what we know about the canon of Fallout. We know that the Master's army from the original game was destroyed. We know that the Enclave's plan to dose the world with a modified Forced Evolutionary Virus from the second game was stopped. This implies that ultimately the characters from those iterations of the games were forces for good (for the most part). I admit that's an area up for debate, though.
There are also other problems with the story that don't necessarily extend from the canons involved. The characterization of Little Pip, for one. I found her constant angst to become rather grating as time went on, especially considering the amount of praise she receives from others. The pacing of the story is also really rough. You can get away with padding and side-quests in an open-world video game; not so much in a written story.
It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but neither does it necessarily deserve the praise it has received. There's just too much wrong with it, in my mind.
PC