Really? Where?
I’ll take that over most Heart’s Choice. How the ACTUAL romance line manage to consistently make the most forgettable ROs will always be a mystery to me.
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I’ll agree with this, aside from the introduction of explicit content, a lot of the romance in Heart’s Choice feels like a step down from most modern Hosted Games and even CoG.
At least in Heart’s Choice games I’ve read recently, they give very early CoG romance vibes. Like, “while plot happens, pick flirty option x number of times and then confirm romance, have a couple romantic scenes inserted, game over”.
Idk, Heart’s Choice feels less romantic than non-romance focused CoG, like you took a CoG, gutted the story to replace with extra romance and then just… didn’t add extra romance. And still acts like the main plot is important.
I really, really wanted to like Heart’s Choice, I love reading trashy YA Romances, but I think the only one I really liked was the Wrestling one because knew it was erotica barely held together by a plot and it owned it. The smut wasn’t exactly to my taste, but it wasn’t trying to be something its not.
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Because if there is nothing for the characters to do there are no characters, not really.
But it really amazes me how people are trying to reinvent visual novels with romance and fail to do so completely. Like, there are games about romance. A ton of them. Some of them are really good. Learn from them. At the very least look at fucking Wayhaven, it’s just text otome, why is it so hard to get?
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And considering a lot of HC games are gender-locked–with fewer ROs–it should make it easier (and faster) to produce than Wayhaven. And definitely faster to produce than a VN.
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Yeah, honestly when I played that one gladiator Heart game, it ended up feeling like a bad gladiator COG game instead of anything particularly romantic in nature.
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Gave up altogether on heart’s choice because, for a line which supposedly should focus more on romance, those games are excellent at giving you neither interesting characters and/or plot.
They feel really shallow, compared to some HG titles which supposedly are not about romance and yet give you a balanced amount of ROs interactions and story.
And HC’s games last the time of a sneeze, too. I’ve read a couple, but couldn’t name a single character I’ve liked.
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On the Hearts Choice games romances sucking I have to agree. Although I did like Scandal Notes. Its was quite plesant even without Romance.
On the others I tried out I have to agree. I didn’t ferl attracted to anyone at all.
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I mentioned earlier that Their Majesties’ Pleasure introduced me to a game where I was thoroughly meh about all the romances, but I never quite went into detail why, so while we’re still on the topic of HC (And also as a means of redirecting conversation back to the ROs before we get in trouble), here goes:
To begin with, I don’t know if it was just how I played it, but I wound up spending like… no time whatsoever with either the Cabaret or the Fae. Maybe a solid 10% of the story had anything to do with them, which is a hell of a thing, considering how much of a stink the plot tries to make about their respective situations. I spent more time listening to the royals complain about how unfair and cruel each group’s treatment is than I did actually doing anything about it.
Speaking of the royals, the Cabaret and the Fae:
Prince Julian Ga’Vaan: The resident bad boy rebel prince who likes to hang out with the Cabaret and is demonstrated to have quite the intimate relationship with the local Robin Hood-wannabe mob boss. The story mentions multiple times how good with a sword Julian is, and he does actually get into combat at least once in the story and utterly shred his opponents… but like, if you pay any amount of attention to your own combat stats, so do you, and you get far more combat screen time, so it’s not really that impressive. Apart from wearing black leather and dark reds and greens, I can’t recall a single standout detail about Julian, nor can I recall any moment where he actually stepped into the “bad boy rebel prince” role. In fact, by the climax of the story, he’s throwing himself into royal politics to try and argue for better treatment of Rumia’s citizens, and I wound up getting him appointed as governor of the nearby local town which serves as the one and only example of mistreatment of citizens by government authority in the entire game. Hell, the most bad and/or rebellious thing he or his sister do is tell you not to spoil their late night fun or else they’ll probably get you fired… and then they turn around and grant you carte blanche to continue being their wingman without consequence, which I guess could be annoying to your fellow guards if… if any of them, you know… gave a crap.
So… is Julian really a bad boy rebel prince if he’s not being rebellious, or bad?
Also, the fact that he and the Rogue King are already an item makes him an off-limits RO for me in the first place, because I don’t see the appeal of stepping on a thriving, happy relationship’s toes just to get in the pants of someone I like. Which is not to say that I liked Julian (though I didn’t hate him either), it’s just a matter of principle for me.
Crown Princess Lissa Ga’Vaan: Our resident Fae-obsessed Disney damsel who refuses to marry any of her suitors because they’re just not the right fit for her and who loves to gallivant around in the woods at night and hang out with the Fae and experience the wonders of magic and nature and-Thbpbpbp! Seriously, if you’ve ever watched any of the old Disney princess movies, you can practically feel the tropes radiating off Lissa. They’re not subtle. Oh, and get used to being her errand bitch, because you will have to run multiple communiqués back and forth between herself and the Fae over the course of the story.
The story regularly insists that Lissa is an uppity, spoiled brat who’s used to getting her way, and I dunno, maybe it’s because I played my MC as a guard who had no particular interest in losing her job by arguing with royalty and was very dedicated to her duties, but I sure never saw any of that. Hell, Lissa was almost too nice, I thought.
Ultimately, I ended up hooking up with Lissa, because the story forces you to pick a romance and she was the only one who didn’t seem to be engaged in prior entanglements with anybody else, but boy, lemme tell you, that romantic confession scene was the most cardboard thing I’ve read in a long time. I wasn’t exactly out to win anybody’s hearts, so to find myself happily bound into a romance with a lovely wife that I had all of 12% relationship points with and spouting all kinds of saccharine lovey-dovey crap that neither I, nor Lissa, should realistically be saying according to our supposed characterizations, sure was… a thing. I guess.
Javier, the Rogue King: The nefarious(?) leader of the dastardly(?) and devious(?) underground(?) organization known as the Cabaret, Javier is a master assassin(?) who built rapport with the broken and downtrodden, and from their loyalty built a powerful criminal enterprise who… are honestly more like a citizen militia more than anything else.
Yeah, Court of Miracles the Cabaret ain’t.
For starters, literally everybody knows they exist, despite being a shady underground group. Secondly, they do an exceedingly better job at policing the streets than the actual city guards do, who are written to be so ham-fistedly crooked that you can’t even take their villainy seriously. Third, it’s a wonder that they even have to exist in the shadows, considering that they can just muster a damn army the second anybody threatens them, which is exactly what Javier does when the hysterically evil city guard start harassing his people. And fourth, for being a supposedly criminal group, they treat the people of their city extremely well, for basically zero cost. Nobody has to pay protection fees, nobody has to hand over a portion of the take or risk the wrath of the “Rogue” King, nobody gets their knees broken for failing to pay back their debts…
Ah, but I’m getting off track. We’re here to talk about Javier.
…Well, if there were anything worth talking about, I sure would. He’s a super generic suave rogue-type who has a pair of swords with edgy names, and that’s literally it. Oh, and he also loves Julian very much, I guess. But again, it’s hard to call him a rogue when he’s arguably the most law-abiding citizen in the whole game. The most criminal thing he does is wage war on the city guard and slaughter the captain, and even then, it was justifiably in self-defense against the physical violence and tyranny of the guard, and he was open to negotiating a peaceful arrest of the guard captain instead, but I didn’t have the stats to pull that off.
“But Zyri, that sounds like a very compelling-“ No no no, trust me, go and read the story yourself and you’ll see exactly where I’m coming from, here. In a more thought-provoking crime drama, he absolutely does sound like a great character, or at least has the makings of one, but the crime drama in this story is open and shut within a handful of chapters.
The funniest part is when a knight of the kingdom who was supposed to be tailing me and Julian for his safety rocked up at the end of the street war all, “Hello! I am a knight of the kingdom! Look upon me with awe!” And meanwhile I was over here all, “Bitch, the fight’s over! I did more bodyguarding in a minute’s time than you did all damn night! Where were you?! Weren’t you supposed to be tailing us?!”
The Darkwood Queen: I literally can’t even remember her name. That’s how little impact she had on me, or the story. Queenie is the, well, queen, of the Fae, born a demigod from a union between a dryad mother and star god father, and that’s about the last interesting thing you ever learn about her, to the best of my knowledge. I think you get all of one, maaaybe two chances to flirt with her directly, and after that, if you want to build any relationship points with her at all, you just spend the entire story whinging about how you wish you could hang out in the forest, because again, you only spend like 10% of your time around the Fae, ever. And a solid 1% of that is with the Queen, which is why I have so little to say about her. I convinced her to negotiate a peace treaty between the Fae and the Kingdom of Rumia at the end of the story, I guess, for all that that’s worth (i.e.: not much).
Prince Galen: You know Legolas? Now, imagine him, but the first time the fellowship meets him is in the middle of an orgy. And that’s about the last interesting thing I can say about him, because if I only ever spent 1% of my time with the Queen, Galen took up a whopping 0.5% of my time. Hell, he pretty much stopped being a character after that orgy, because if you decide not to indulge in any sex or Fae drugs (you know, because you’re not stupid and are well aware of the dangers that lie in both), he just kinda never bothers trying to interact with you in any meaningful way again.
Hilariously, both Galen and the Darkwood Queen’s relationship points with me remained at 0% for the entire story. I have only to assume that the only way I could get those numbers up would be to relentlessly simp for the Fae, and given that my character remained guarded at all times around the Fae because she would sooner be damned than be caught in one of their infamous trickeries, that was essentially a Sisyphean task that she had no prayer of accomplishing.
Well, uh, I didn’t mean to spend so much time harping on the story as a whole, but as you could probably tell, there’s really not much to go on with the ROs. Like I said, meh all around.
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Why can’t MC be some royal in these games, for a change. In HC, MCs always seem to have boring or lower roles than ROs.
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Well, if you play your cards right, you can become a knight of the kingdom by the end of TMP!
…Please, hold your applause, your enthusiasm is infectious, really.
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Woohoo.
Being a knight. The height of my ambitions…
… 
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I assume it’s a similar reason to why the Triumvirate member RO in Heart of Battle just drop a twitter thread on power imbalances on you every time she how up.
Kinda crazy how almost all Fae CoG games seem to be cursed to mediocrity, especially when it comes to ROs.
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You’d think, with all the mythology about the Fae, that a story dedicated to romance that may or may not involve them if you so choose would be a treasure trove of sexiness, but nope. Even the literal orgy was blink-and-you’ll-miss-it.
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Honestly I think that’s just an extension of a problem almost all CoG games share: The romances feel platonic as hell. It just hit Heart games even harder because it’s a line that for all intent and purposes sells itself as smutty ‘choose your own adventure’ novels.
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Problem? Agree to disagree I suppose. I’m pretty happy with platonic romances, and I really appreciate it when the game lets me choose whether I want to go sexual or not. A certain game I’m beta-testing literally just gave me the option to cuddle and eat garlic bread with my RO, and I think I’ll rate the game like a whole point higher for that alone.
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Then you can surely understand why it’s a shame when it doesn’t give you the choice, just in the other way.
Also I didn’t mean ‘platonic’ in relation to being sexual or not, I meant platonic in the sense you don’t really get a different vibe from when you’re just friends.
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And I mean, that’s fine, in fact I agree, I wish more stories would treat “romance” and “sex” as separate entities rather than an inextricable pair, but the story I’ve been talking about is supposedly three peppers - which, according to HC’s metric, should mean that it’s the spiciest level of romance story.
And yet the romances are all bland and forgettable.
So in this case, it actually is a problem.
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I was on the fence on getting this game, but you just sealed the deal for me. Bullet dodged, these heart choices games have been major lacklusters. Only the wrestling one was worth the money, just wonderfully goofy all around
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No problem, but just to be on record about it, I’m absolutely not out to be all, “Don’t buy this story, it’s crap!” “Buy this story, it’s a masterpiece!”, I’m just relaying what happened when I played, specifically. I don’t want to be the reason that an author gets screwed out of their due after putting in the hard work that comes with writing an IF story, you know?
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