Decent. Sub-par for frontpage material....
There is a lot about this flash that could be great, but I can't say that any one feature of it really hit the mark.
The story overall I haven't seen, only this submission. I feel that even when a flash is just a small part of a larger story, the pieces should be able to stand alone as entertainment. This story failed to do that, the action was not that engaging, etc.
Your characters seemed unbelievable. Maybe I missed something in not seeing act one, but the messenger with the eyepatch telling a king to listen up because he was only going to say something once was pretty absurd, unless I'm REALLY missing something there. The prince and assassain in the fight were both flat and uninteresting. Their dialogue just didn't do anything for me in the realm of drama.
I found the backgrounds and settings to be wonderful, but shots from the view of a person on the ground staring up tended to go on for too long, despite being well done. Fog that rolled across in the rain moved from one side of the screen to the other, but didn't change shape. It was, thusly, a wasted effect. Chatacters were well drawn, but poorly animated. Animation was stiff unless we were seeing a silhouette. Lip sync really didn't go over fantastic either.
Sound recieved a four only because I liked the scoring you chose. It fit each scene. Your voice acting however, could use a lot more emotion. Further more, warping one person's voice to fit an entire cast is a bad idea, and didn't work here. Everyone still sounded the same, though some sounded like unrealistically inhuman versions of the same character. The king was like the prince, only in a cave. This pretty much helped to ruin the entire experience.
Your style was inconsistent. I saw art that is getting to a good point, but isn't developed enough where realistic characters look like the same person from shot to shot. Stylistically, a lot seemed inspired by anime, yet these were comic book-realistic humans in a hodgepodge high fantasy. It just didn't mesh.
Overall, your art was what got you a four, with me. If it had been on the same level as every other aspect of this piece, nothing in it would have made me stay through the whole thing. Get some more voice actors, tighten up your art and simplify your style to match your still developing animation-knowledge, spend more time on lip synch, and think harder on what it is that your characters are saying. Even if it progresses a story you understand, it won't work if dialogue is unbelievable. Finally, spell check your subtitles. I'm glad you had them, because I wouldn't have made it through, otherwise, but the errors are a real distraction for a literate audience, and subtitles in general are already a distraction to the illiterate audience.
