-_-

I enjoyed this story. Yes, it was overly long. Yes, there were a LOT of scenes that should be trimmed at least. But most of the time I enjoyed it, for the world building, for the characters, and yes for the (sometimes ridiculous) fight scenes.

Hey, at least you weren't as bad as OverMaster and Shadow Crystal Mage in terms of pointless characters, plot lines, and scenes in their insistence on writing Mega Crossover in expense of their quality as writers.

AMAZING. I've left this story alone until I was sure it was over and it was soooo worth the wait. I love how you gave everyone moments of awesome and most of all your original characters were also amazing and cool.

ALSO, Of course Hayate and Ammy would get along! OF COURSE. I can't lie tho out of all the moments of awesome in your story my favorite was the one with Ammy and Signum as she comes out of nowhere and drives the sword into an arm and shoulder. Seriously. Amazing.

And, oh man, the ending talk about bittersweet!

Thank you for writing this! You deserve all the kudos! I'll definitely check out your original work!

I think this story was PERFECTION, the action scenes were well done, the talking scenes were well done, the characters (especially the OC's) were lovable, I think Tsuku, at the very least, should have lived. I would've loved to see a StrikerS AU/sequel to this, with Susa, Tsuku, and Ami as members of Riot Force 6. My imagination tells me that any story you write with Subaru and Tia would be priceless, adding in the 3 gods would have made it even MORE laugh inducing. I would love to see another MGLN/A's/StrikerS/ViviD/Force fanfic by you, you did great work!

First off, you deserve huge congratulations for finishing off this story! Nearly 400,000 words, added to the fact that you haven't been part of the Nanoha fandom for about four or five years now, is an amazing undertaking. And hey, now you can devote the writing time that you had penciled in for "slogging through Infinity to finally finish it off" to other things that you actually *want* to write! Or just use it for naps. So there's a direct reward over and above the sense of completion!

Most of what I could say in summary you commented on yourself in the author's note. Going over the strengths and weaknesses of the fic as a whole is almost pointless, as we all know what they are ("Fight scenes are awesome but too long!" "OCs are quirky and fun but get too much focus!" "Humor makes me laugh but occasionally just distracts when it interferes with story flow!" "Needless subplots bogged down the last third of the story!") and they've been addressed in greater detail in previous reviews. Ironically, the Section Black plotline was never really properly addressed (ironic in that a 383K-word story could have something left out...); the wrap-up with Jail in this chapter actually seems to have some subtextual commenting on that fact-the Director appeared, took some actions, got shuffled aside, and now is being pulled away from Jail without ever being identified, a plot device being put away now that it's no longer needed without even dignifying him with a name and characterization.

But still, Infinity remains one of the best MGLN fics out there. It's one of the few attempts to tell a proper story in the actual genre the original show exists in, it has the scope of an entire season instead of an episode or two, and it features both humor that is routinely funny and action that is genuinely exciting. It's a monumental undertaking that, when all is weighed and measured, was done well and worth the time to read.

Ahh, the big finish at last! (And wow, did I leave this review sitting here undone for too long. Bad me.)

Most of this chapter was predictable in a good way: Stuff blowing up, magic being thrown around wildly, explosions being dramatic. Other parts were unpredictable in a good way-Hayate, for example, was actually useful! Ultimately, though, it was not as effective as Chapter 46, because the continual escalation started to play around with the classic shonen-manga battle tropes where instead of matching up with a set selection of powers to be used in new tactical ways, the characters react to each step of the battle by pulling out a NEW, MORE POWERFUL ATTACK! Mind you, it's not like the Nanoha franchise is in any way alien to this particular trope (for example, Starlight Breaker's introduction in S1, or Fate's True Sonic Form Riot Zanber in StrikerS, and the "everybody pigpile on the Defense Program" in A's was almost a parody of that), but it does steal from the drama a bit when the reaction to "how will they escape THIS?" is "show off some new power heretofore unseen"-of course, it's also the villains, Tsuka, Susa, and Ammy who are doing this here rather than the canon characters, which helps.

Similarly, the ending of the story managed to be well-written and heartfelt, with meaningful sacrifice, but that was laced a bit with "and now we pull back into canon" as the new characters and new tech erase themselves (okay, the Epilogue changes this a bit, but I'm dealing with these things one chapter at a time and that's how *this* chapter left off). That was probably necessary *if* canon was to be returned to (an underlying assumption), since Al-Sethis and the assorted god-units would really throw off the power scale for the subsequent conflicts. This story even feeds into how Nanoha burnt herself out and got shanked by a Type IV Drone in the pre-StrikerS era; after all *this* she's got to be running on fumes and "taking time for proper R&R" is so out of character for her as to be insane. But there's still a certain Status Quo is God over-neatness to it, the sense that 380,000 words ought to have more meaningful consequences apart from "threat shows up, NPCs are interacted with, threat is defeated, NPCs vanish, move on now."

There is one false note struck in this chapter, which is the repeated mention of the "Fall" in the flashback scenes. Basically, it comes off as a hint for a sequel, at the next threat to be confronted in the next story...except, well, there isn't likely to be a next story in this series.

All in all, though, it was a solidly rousing ending to a surprisingly good final battle, and you are definitely to be commended for keeping up the cinematic quality and dramatic pacing of the fight up even as I'm pretty well sure that you've been well ready for this thing to be over years ago! As always, your combat scenes scream out for someone to animate them in all their glory, and that's a hellishly hard thing to accomplish even under the best of times.

Very good

Well, it took goddamn forever, but it has finally come to an end. A little surprised to find the title wasn't actually the intended length of the story.

It's been a fun ride. I liked all your characters, to the point where Tsuku, Ammy, and Susa's final scene made me sad. But it was sort of inevitable. The benefit is that it makes this whole story a plausible post A's arc. So that is nice.

I don't know if I've pointed it out before, but I love your writing style for most of this story. It just seems to fit the universe. Recent example: Four of the heroes attack Enlil at once. "Enlil responded by exploding." It's so humorous, yet so... deadpan? Dry? Not sure the proper word, but I love it.

I suppose it's always sad to see something end, but now I get to read your other stories, so at least I have something to look forward to.

So... this is finally done. Wow. I've been a fan of this story for... probably three years now? Close to that, anyway. I've honestly been a fan of yours since the Yu-gi-oh fanfics you did way back when, but Nanoha was the next fanfic you wrote for that really caught me interest. And I was massively enchanted and entertained from the start, and never looked back.

It's definitely been quite a road, waiting for each chapter to come out and thrilling at what we've got. I've even read portions of this story to friends I liked it so much. But it's over now. Finally done. And to celebrate that, I've decided to get this story an attempt at a fair, nuanced critique. Strap in, because this is going to take a while.

We'll start with the plot and similar elements and work from there. I was planning to reread the story from the start, but after I got to chapter 5 I found that I just didn't have the time and couldn't get motivated to read the whole thing again. So mostly I'll be working from memory.

The plot itself turns out to be a relatively simple "Take over the world" plot. There is a slight amount of complexity added to it in that the other side has some motivation for their actions beyond being evil, but in the end that's all that it comes down to. The key plot twist- Igdrasil being crazy and evil and the Man behind the Curtain, so to speak, is also a well-used cliche. But by itself, that isn't inherently a bad thing. Cliches are cliches because they work. And in this case, the plot baseline is perfectly functional.

On the other hand, it definitely does feel like there are just far too many elements to it. You have the stuff with the Twilight Queen, you have the stuff with Al Hazard, you have the stuff with the Founders and Jail (which I'll be getting back to in a moment), you have what the purpose of the interdimensional gates is, you have this "Fall" that gets mentioned every now and again, and so on. There's just way too much stuff going on in this story and although it mostly fits together in a cogent whole, it does it in a less-than-perfect, relatively messy way.

The Founders and Jail stuff feel like they simply should have been cut from the story. They really add nothing particularly valuable to the narrative and there isn't much payoff for their appearance. In the end, their appearances feel like pointless padding that really should have been cut. And speaking of padding, this story definitely does have a lot of it. It's very ENTERTAINING padding, don't get me wrong, but there are still entire chapters where nothing concrete is accomplished, or only a couple things are. And given how long the chapters often are, that is something that could definitely be relatively frustrating. Especially when there are cases where there were multiple scenes that relatively easily could have been combined into one- such as the scenes with the guard while Arf and Yuuno are in prison.

This is partially the fault of just trying to cram all the characters in the Nanohaverse (As of A's) into the story, and I honestly think that was a mistake. It allows them to all have the chance to do something cool, but it resulted in a massively bloated cast that you needed all that extra space to properly cover, and needed that padding to make their appearance worthwhile. If you wanted to streamline things, I'd cut out the Wolkenritter for sure, put a lot less emphasis on Linda and Amy, put less emphasis on Yuuno and Arf, and so on. StrikerS take on the same issue is that it just couldn't juggle the entire cast, so it decided to cut some out. While a lot of people don't agree with that, it definitely is understandable because you just can't balance that big a cast while adding new ones, which is a problem you encountered here.

Now, let's talk about the fight scenes.

The first two fight scenes were excellent. The first fight sets up the villains as a key threat, and the second one is extremely interesting to read, especially the Nano-Tsuku segments. However, when we get to the third fight, there's a sort of disconnect. Everything has suddenly become so much more massive in scale in terms of the amount of fighters and intense dramatic moments that it just feels slightly awkward. It feels like it would have been better if there had been more gradual buildup, leading up to a final climactic showdown for the Gates. The big fight after this one doesn't have as much impact due to how big and epic the previous one was. And the effectiveness in which you balanced the characters in Fight 3 just doesn't really work in Fight 4- at times I simply couldn't remember what character was doing what or how all the parts played into each other. It just was far too chaotic and messy. The fight between the two Guardians and Nanoha and Fate was quite good, however. You kept it simple, and you managed to balance exposition and battle narrative basically fantastically. There were one or two cases where characters made slightly questionable decisions, but in general everything they did was narratively sound. The final showdown was fantastic. Everything played into each other extremely well, it was fun to read, and it possessed none of the problems of Fights 3 or 4, despite also being large in scope- both in terms of setting and amount of characters used. It was the grand showdown that this fic definitely deserved.

But let's set criticism aside for a moment. The fic fundamentally works. The story is told in a compelling manner through and through, and is continually interesting to read. You do some fascinating world-building with El-Sethis, its past, and The Fall. You do a good job of tying it into the canon El Hazard without it stretching credulity, and in fact having it flow quite nicely. In fact, some of the most interesting things in the story were in Tsuku's flashback sequences.

Your story manages to be consistently funny, with snappy dialogue that is quite cleverly written, and your characters play off each other quite nicely. Even the plot points that I feel are totally unnecessary are written in an intriguing way that left me curious where exactly you were planning to take them next. However, you manage to be far from a one-trick pony, knowing exactly how to tug at the heartstrings too. The final scene with Precia was genuinely heartwarming, especially how it brought direct closure for Fate in a way the series criminally never did.

While you do have too many characters, in the end you balance them relatively well (despite the sacrifices that result), and every character gets to have a memorable moment or two. The fight scenes are incredibly well-written, I can perfectly visualize everything that goes on in them, and they're written in an incredibly active and fluid fashion, which is great to see.

And the conclusion, both the ending and the epilogue- is completely satisfying, providing an appropriately bittersweet ending to the story and reminding the audience that, in the end, things truly aren't truly over in the most effective manner possible.

The canon characters are, with one exception, fantastically characterized. They're slightly characatured for comedic purposes, yes, but you manage to retain their core personalities to the extent that they still do feel like the people from the show that we know and love. The only real exception to this is Hayate- I get that meek humble Hayate is hard to write in a humorous way, but it still strains credulity that she would go from that to fanon!Hayate in the space of six months. If you wanted that, a much larger time gap would have helped.

The OCs are generally really good. The Guardian Gods are all fantastic characters- they have incredibly entertaining interplay with each other that really manages to humanize them, to a degree. All three characters have some nuance beyond their base personalities that makes them endearing, even though in the end they are all sociopathic at best (psychopathic at worst) to a massive extent. The interactions between Raijin and Susanoo were fantastic- I always love it when writers emphasize the human-Device mechanic and note that, at heart, these Devices are like people. Mizetto and co. I did like a bit less. Aside from providing exposition, there really isn't much narrative purpose for them, and otherwise they accomplish next to nothing the story. I understand that it is impossible to cut them, but I do wish that more could have been accomplished with them, at least.

Finally, although there were a few typos, in general the prose was fantastically written and structured with no real grammatical errors that obscured the meaning of the text.

And well... that's it. There's my attempt at closure. And I think the fact that I went to the effort to write over 1000 words about this story says more about what I think of its quality than any sum-up ever could.

It has indeed been a very long ride. Like you, I'm a little sad to see this end, but you're right, it was time, indeed, past time, that it did.

I've been following your original works for some time now (I think I've purchased all of them) and I definitely feel that you've gotten better in your writing. I look forward to reading more, both your fanfiction and your original works.

Take care, good luck, and I look forward to your next update.

Right. I once again forgot to sign in for my last review so here it is again:

Your welcome sir.

T'was a fun ride, I'll say that much. Though the ending for the guardians was rather abrupt. I knew it would happen, but still.

I can't blame you for wanting to bring it to an end though. When you spend this much time on something, you either can't put it down, or become desperate to put it away.

At least you finished it the way you wanted, and that's the important thing.

Alright. This time, you'll know it was me. A bit annoying putting down the same thing twice, but I guess I gotta remember to sign in all the time before I write a review.

Keep on writing man.

Your welcome sir.

T'was a fun ride, I'll say that much. Though the ending for the guardians was rather abrupt. I knew it would happen, but still.

I can't blame you for wanting to bring it to an end though. When you spend this much time on something, you either can't put it down, or become desperate to put it away.

At least you finished it the way you wanted, and that's the important thing.

I find it sort of ironic. This story finally comes to a conclusion - the same week I finally am getting my Nanoha-inspired starfleet (which has itself been sittig around for about four years). (And I also find out about the ViviD anime, and I managed to track down a DVD for StrikerS...)

Why did we let write it? Well, in my not-even-slightly-humble opinion, I, personally, think this is one of the best Nanoha stories I've read. And a lot of that is due to the humour and writing style on top of everything else. Had it not been for that, I don't think it would have been as good as it was.

I have very much enjoyed all the SIGNIFICANT effort you have put in (and I'm sort of sorry that Susanoo won't go on to wind Teana the hell up...); so thank you for all the effort.

(In fact, I find myself actually thinking I should go through and see what other Nanoha stories are floating around, now since I haven't done that for ages (blame MLP:FiM).

Superb work and I hope maybe at some point, you might consider writing some more Nanoha down the line.

Actually, I could see this adding up to only about two seasons of an anime (about 26 episodes worth). Stuff that's ridiculously long in prose practically zooms by when animated. It's just how it works.

That said, the absolutely absurd length of each chapter aside, this story had always been one of my guilty pleasures. I loved the first two seasons of Nanoha, but couldn't even bring myself to get half-way through StrikerS. Somehow, it had just lost the magic of the first two seasons for me, pardon the horribly lame pun (I just did not give a rat's fuzzy butt about any of the new cast). This felt like a darker, more serious Season 2 for me (which wasn't a bad thing), but still retained some of the series' original charm, plus your own brand of humor and affectionate parody.

In a way, it's sad to see it go, especially since it ended pretty much the way I predicted it would (with all the characters you introduced being removed permanently so they couldn't interfere in the canon future events), but from the start this was essentially a multi-season long filler arc (like the various filler arcs in the Bleach and Naruto anime; only, you know, your story wasn't horrible, irredeemable garbage).

Still, it was enjoyable filler with enjoyable characters, memorable scenes, and awesome fights; which is better than 99.99% of what most anime writers give us. So kudos to you for that! Rather than worry about the flaws, take pride in how even a work you viewed as defective proved to be capable of entertaining your audience! See you later in Chaos Theory and if I run into you while I'm lurking on Beast's Lair!

Hi. I have been following your story since I discovered it at chapter 28. I loved and looked forward to each new chapter as it gradually came to the climax, and then to the end. I am a HUGE fan of this, and will admit that I cried when the siblings died in the last chapter. I loved Ameratsu so very much, and Tsuku and Susu were wonderful, ingenious characters as well, not to forget Enlil, Thor, Loki, and Odin as well. PLEASE WRITE MORE! Preferably another with the characters of Magical Nanoha (when their still kids), but I'll follow you from now on. Thank you for entertaining me, making me laugh out loud, and making me pull an all-nighter (Just once, I swear) by reading your story time after time again.