Thanks to every for responding in constructively. I’m actually kind of surprised that there wasn’t a single obvious troll response here… Well, I guess this is a rather small, obscure community. Hell, when Heroes Rise first came out on steam I made a few posts on it’s forum promoting CoG in general while expressing my dislike for this game in particular. It does really bug me that I just can’t seem to understand why people like it so much as I consider it a personal failing on my part.
@FairyGodfeather You mentioned that CoG official games can’t be expected to have as many choices as a user created game, and I forgot to talk about that, but it was something that caught my attention. The way I see it, why shouldn’t they? They’re the official face of CoG. Shouldn’t they strive to be the best at it? I would strongly disagree about your choice of sidekick having a major effect. They all do the same things, lead you down the same path, and then get kidnapped by Prodigal. I suppose if you pick the rich girl then you actually get an option that doesn’t result in someone dying… assuming you pick the less heroic choice. The problem with the black magic choice is that it stems specifically from the game’s almost total lack of choices. You’re forced into this relationship with black magic by prodigal’s magic fate powers it’s never actually said she has. And the choice is not meaningful until the next game. And I don’t mean any offense with this, but if you felt that the first game gave you so many more choices than I felt it did, I can’t really trust that your interpretation of the second game isn’t similarly dissimilar from what mine would be.
I though you were talking about feedback given to the first game.
@Everyone It’s kind of interesting if you think about it. One of the few times you actually have the power to affect things in the first game is when you choose whether or not to let Prodigal live. Before that, basically everything was controlled by Prodigal’s unofficial super power of writing the plot to suit her whims. Then it turns out that that choice was actually negated, by Prodigal’s unofficial super power to write the plot to suit her whims. Then in the end your power to affect things in relation to Prodigal is taken away once again, this time finally officially by the Author themselves. Then again I find it kind of interesting to entertain the idea that it was in fact Prodigal’s final act of psychotic manipulative violence. Using her unofficial super power to rewrite the plot to suit her whims to take away the PC’s love interest, herself, as one final act of idiotic revenge. After all, prodigal’s mom wasn’t actually killed by your parents, but that doesn’t change the fact that she had to live as if they had been for all that time… If your parents hadn’t existed in the first place they wouldn’t have been able to be used to hurt her. That seems like something a violent psychopath would come up with.
To everyone saying that Sonja wasn’t powered. Ok, she had some weird eye thing or something. Nothing she could possibly have used to defend herself. My point is that the game considers it more heroic to rescue someone who willingly put themselves in harms way knowing the risks and had previously proven their ability to defend themselves versus someone who was relatively helpless and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or would have been if Prodigal’s powers of arbitrarily limited omnipotence hadn’t put her into that position in the first place.
@From_Beginnings Here’s the thing. You can easily experience being helpless and impotent in the real world. It’s an entirely unpleasant experience, and at least in the real world you don’t know it’s being written that way by another human being. The game was marketted as a super hero game. That was basically a lie. You never actually get to be a super hero in the first game. Just a sucker forced to carry the idiot ball as you’re lead around by the nose until the very end when you’re saved by an almost literal Deus Ex Machina. The fact that you finally win in the end feels hollow and empty, because you didn’t win based on any effort you put in. Only the fact that you had a hidden more powerful power inside you that was barely foreshadowed. Let me see if I can give an example. It’s like if Naruto basically made no progress whatsoever in making friends throughout the entire first series, up until he fights Gaara. Then he just wins because of his Kyuubi powers. Naruto won because his love for the friends he worked so hard to make despite being a social pariah for reasons he barely understood motivated him more than Gaara’s hatred and apathy due to similar circumstances. And in the end Naruto’s real super power isn’t actually the Kyuubi, it’s his ability to touch the hearts and minds of those around him with his communicative abilities.
It’s rather disturbing to me to read that I basically have to play through the first two games and get an endgame save file in order to actually enjoy the third. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
