In a way tho it’s a good thing, because if people keep mentioning the same ROs over and over then it should mean there are a lot of good characters (or at least ones you might not care about, but don’t hate to the point where you get ptsd whenever you see their name sdfks)
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EDIT: This post is way too long and I said it too many times to go through and fix every single one, but remember how I said this game was the first HC? Yeah, whoops, egg on my face there, it’s one of the first. So just replace “First of its kind” in your head anytime you see me say that in the post.
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I did it again.
I was awake until 3 AM. This post took me until 8:33 PM to finish writing.
So, because I’ve been enjoying these ROverviews (hmm, nope, no, that one sucks, Zyri), I went ahead and dove into another HC game. This time, I chose Never Date Werewolves, which was, unless I’m mistaken, the first HC game ever published under the bracket, so don’t be too surprised by what I’m about to write - the first of its kind tends to be overshadowed by later entries.
The basics of Never Date Werewolves is this: you (yes, you!) are a single mother of six kids. Six werewolf kids. And your ex husband ran out on you and dumped the responsibility for raising the puppers right in your lap.
What a prick!
Immediately, this sets the tone for the romances: If you romance a female character, you’re bisexual by default, because you had a husband previously. If you romance someone nonbinary, that makes you… pan, I think? There is no 100% homosexual option in this game, is what I’m ultimately saying. Your MC has a history, and that history is how you wound up having six kids.
That’s all well and good, might be a turn off for readers hoping for flexible genders, but ultimately it’s not what we’re here to talk about.
So, how ‘bout them romances?
Once again, as the first of its kind, Never Dare Werewolves started off small, with only three ROs to choose from (I used to think there were only two. More on that later).
You can also duck the romances in this game, and there’s even an achievement for doing so.
Chafiq: Your new neighbor at your apartment (it’s really more of an old medieval house that got restyled into apartments, says the worldbuilding), who makes his entry into the story by saving one of your colossal idiot moron children from accidentally breaking every bone in her body when she goes plummeting off of your second floor landing because she wanted to ride down the stair rail. Chafiq is hard-locked to male, works at the courthouse, and at the start, is portrayed as a perfect and good-looking gentleman who immediately catches your eye.
Yeah, that doesn’t last long.
It turns out that Chafiq doesn’t really think too highly of your kids, even before learning that they’re werewolves. Early on in chapter two, one of your kids puts up such a fuss that Chafiq comes running to see if you’re under attack, and after the situation is resolved, the narrative makes note of him giving one of your kids a “disgusted, but intrigued” stare.
And also, this:
It’s a good thing he doesn’t know the kids are werewolves. He looks at them as if they were another species as it is.
He also states that you’ve “learned a lot by raising children; more than [he’d] ever care to know, [he’s] sure.”
Not wanting kids is fine and all, and I’ll be the first to admit that if anybody ever wanted to hire me as a babysitter, I’d be “busy at work” that night (and yet, for some reason, kids gravitate towards me? I genuinely don’t understand why), but I still have the good graces to not be visibly repulsed at the sight of a small child, no matter how much the thought of interacting with them skyrockets my stress. And besides that, this is a romance story where you’re a mother of six, so that kinda complicates things a bit.
Chafiq is also a Warden, noted in the worldbuilding as a group of people who used to hunt werewolves relentlessly but nowadays primarily spend their time being racist jackasses on the internet. The worldbuilding states that werewolves and humans have been known quantities to each other for a decent amount of time (apparently, werewolves played a pivotal hand in the French Revolution), but the relationship has always been between the realms of “strained” and “openly hostile,” and at several points, random werewolves are described as being out and about, doing their own thing, only to have people brandish silver charms at them in threatening gestures or purposely do damage to their properties, or otherwise stay on one side of the street to avoid having to walk by them.
So Chafiq is one of those guys.
And uh… you know, call me crazy, but I can’t think of a single good reason to want to romance a bigot. Especially if he’s bigoted against my kids.
It’s okay, though, because Chafiq does a perfectly fine job of giving you plenty of reasons to never give him the time of day. Like, for example: The fact that he’s racist against werewolves is strictly because a werewolf, who had gone rabid, murdered his wife.
Yep - one lone werewolf, who had gone off the deep end. And he’s using this as an excuse to condemn the entire species, who are for the most part civil and well-mannered, or certainly make an honest effort to be.
Oh, and also these lovely little gems:
“We don’t have mass shootings in France, because people don’t have guns. We wouldn’t have rabid werewolves if we limited the damage they could do."
(Alix says this one) “According to him, wolves should have to declare they’re lycanthropes, shouldn’t be allowed to do certain jobs, the full thing."
Jesus Christ.
Now, I’ll be fair here, the narrative makes it plain that he’s very much still grieving. People aren’t at their most rational when they’re grieving, I understand that. But that does not, and should not excuse vilifying an entire species for the crime of a single individual, and I simply can’t look past that. There are chances in the story to bring Chafiq around to a gentler line of thinking, but if my options lie between “convincing my neighbor who had to bury his wife that her killer’s species aren’t all criminals” or “protecting my kids from a man who thinks they’re all the spawn of Satan,” my MC’s first instinct is and always will be to protect her kids.
I’m not an “I can fix him” guy. It’s not my job to be a therapist. While I do feel bad for what Chafiq has lost, I refuse to condone a line of thinking as narrow-minded as that.
It’s a fatal flaw that permanently shuts Chafiq off as a potential RO to me, and I don’t feel the slightest bit of regret for thinking so.
Besides all that, stat checks involving Chafiq make him out to be the kind of person who judges other people’s life choices (he is visibly disgusted if you order your favorite dish while on a date with him and don’t have the Authoritative chops to make him cope with it) while also looking down his nose on people who he thinks are shallow.
This is what happens if you fail a Glamorous check while at the restaurant with him.
“You know," he says, “you remind me of my colleagues. They always want to know everything you’re doing, thinking, eating, at any given time.” He doesn’t speak unkindly, but you can hear the weariness in his voice.
“It’s just a way of getting to know you better,” you explain.
“But surely there is more to people than a multiple-choice quiz?” He watches you seriously above the rim of his glass of wine. “If I asked you all the questions you’ve just asked me, would I know anything important about you? Would I know what kind of person you are?”
Would he know about your children being werewolves? No. You realize, with a start, that he finds you shallow.
Apart from the werewolf hate, it’s a whole bunch of little things that add up and make Chafiq look like a real asshole. Just all around not a great guy.
Alix: The teacher at your kids’ school who the narrative tries really hard to insist that you immediately find “cute,” while in the same breath talking crap about how they obviously don’t dye their hair, because they clearly don’t care about their appearance… because they wear clothing that indicates that they work with young children. (Paint-splattered jeans, a jacket covered in pins, boots, you know.)
Don’t believe me? It’s practically verbatim. And I quote:
No, she doesn’t dye her hair. This isn’t someone who cares about what she looks like, which makes it surprising that she’s so cute.
Not cool, bro.
The word “hippy” also gets thrown around a lot for Alix, I noticed. It seems like “hippy” is the favored word to fall back on when all other descriptions of Alix as a character fail, because it shows up frequently, to the point where the narrative seems almost a bit obsessed with it.
Now, don’t let those pronouns fool you, Alix is gender-variable. I simply have her set to female.
Alix is described as being generally unflappable, with the narrative using poetic descriptors such as “smiling while the world drifts around her” and stuff like that, but in chapter three, you come across her and Chafiq having at it with one another and are left to try and break it up. This turns out to be because the two have a sordid history:
Alix was in court in Paris for threateningg violence against her previous partner in her wolf form.
Chafiq, a lawyer, prosecuted her case.
The charges were dropped, and Alix walked free.
To Chafiq, this may as well have been a perversion of justice, and when he bumped into her by chance again in Lyon, he took it upon himself to try and “defend” the students from her because he feels she shouldn’t be allowed to work around vulnerable people, what with her violent history.
Alix has a different tale to tell, however - she sees herself as a failure of a werewolf; and while she thinks that she deserves to be a teacher, contrary to Chafiq’s concerns, because the next generation should be taught how to accept and be at peace among each other, she, herself, believes that she’s screwed things up beyond repair. That’s the reason she doesn’t outright tell you that she’s a werewolf - she’s ashamed of herself, even if she’s not ashamed of werewolves, as a whole. She’s very invested in werewolf rights, because it’s the right thing to do, but she sees herself as a cautionary tale, not an inspiration:
“Believe me, if you knew how badly I messed up before, you wouldn’t want me to give any of your kids advice about beings wolves."
Per Chafiq’s side of things, “how badly she messed up” was transforming and threatening violence against her partner. Per Alix’s claims, however, her transformation was an uncontrollable thing that was provoked by hot-running emotions after she learned that her former partner had cheated on her. And the reason that the charges were dropped was because her former partner backed out of the lawsuit, because she was afraid of Alix retaliating against her. In spite of Alix’s attempts to right her wrongs, her former partner refused to hear it, stating that nothing could be done to make it right.
Frankly, if you ask me, that’s rich talk coming from the bitch who did the cheating in the first place. I’m not a fan of blaming victims, but in this case, in the absence of any other proof to the contrary, this reads very much like none of it would have happened if Alix’s partner hadn’t decided to cheat on her to begin with.
This was the first time since she was a teen that a transformation happened beyond Alix’s control, and the end result of it all is the Alix we know, currently: ashamed of herself and regretful of her werewolf heritage.
Now, to briefly go off-script for a moment, there are two sets of hidden stats that get calculated in the background - one is Hunt/Tolerance, the other is Ritual/Acceptance. These two stats can easily be inferred to be Chafiq’s and Alix’s respective character arcs, considering what I’ve said so far.
Chafiq needs to be talked down from hunting werewolves to tolerating them.
Alix needs to be talked down from undergoing a ritual to permanently remove her lycanthropy, to accepting who and what she is, warts and all.
If you choose to undergo either of their romances, these hidden stats become very, very important. They decide which version of Chafiq or Alix you end up with in the end.
But as it’s possible to not romance either of them, you could just as easily never have to even worry about these stats, which honestly kinda kneecaps how impactful they’re supposed to be. Had I not peeked in at the code, I would never have even known that these stats even existed, nor how deep the character arcs go. Not romancing either Chafiq or Alix really takes the intended sting out of the discrimination undertones of the story.
Anyhow, back on topic, now. We still have another RO to discuss:
Ayaan: I literally didn’t even know Ayaan was an RO. I’ve read this story three times, and only found out by looking at the code and seeing an achievement for it that you can romance Ayaan. That’s… that’s not great. Probably, this is a consequence of putting in so much time on Chafiq and Alix, Ayaan just kinda wound up getting the shaft.
Well, anyhow, Ayaan is your boss at work, and a (former) buddy of your ex, who has since written the punk out of her life for what he did to you. After the breakup happened (Which you can choose to be certain degrees of awful, from your ex just bailing on you out of nowhere, to the both of you breaking it off, to you deciding you deserve better than him and telling him to piss off), Ayaan was your MC’s rock in the storm, holding you steady and helping you get back on your feet again. She’s hard-locked to female, and what do you know, she’s also a werewolf. A werewolf with a… peculiar take on humanity:
“Let’s face it, they’re just dinner that got cocky. No offense, hon," Ayaan concludes, before hanging up.
That’s, uh… that’s a mite concerning, Ayaan.
(That comment was preceded by Ayaan mentioning anti-werewolf demonstrations and how the MC, a human, shouldn’t “let any smart meat push [her] around,” To which the MC replied that Ayaan shouldn’t call humans “smart meat,” by the way.)
Ayaan runs a clothing boutique that you work, seemingly alone, with her at (or at least there’s never any other employees mentioned), and she is described as wearing glamorous clothes with the same casual air that someone might wear a pair of sweatpants. She’s a self-confessed matchmaker, which would almost be endearing if it wasn’t written in such a way that it honestly kind of feels like an attempt by the story to guilt trip you into dating one of the ROs if you choose not to do so:
“Come on, those are all excuses! It could be fun. And one night to the restaurant, that’s nothing!" She goes to the rack of summer scarves at the front of the room, where silk and crêpe foulards are arranged. She starts re-arranging them on the rack. “I don’t see why not,” she says glumly.
“Oh my God, you can be so unreasonable," grumbles Ayaan, shaking her head. She lets the scarves fall back onto their rack. “You spend every evening of your life with your kids already!”
“What about your love life?" She goes on, still focused on her work. “Still nonexistent?”
I don’t appreciate being hassled about romance, so Ayaan’s whining really only serves to make me more certain that I’m not interested.
Plus, she takes a liking to Chafiq, of all people. Granted, she doesn’t know at first that he’s a racist prick, but still, I can’t trust that kind of recommendation, Ayaan.
As a consequence of (presumably) being a Johnny-come-lately addition to the RO roster, you don’t get to even think about romancing Ayaan until basically the end of the story (specifically, the very end of chapter seven - and the story is seven chapters, not counting the prologue and the epilogue). And beyond everything I’ve already said about her… well, there’s just not as much content for Ayaan as there is for the other two. By comparison, you barely interact with her at all, and her romance comes down to a, “do you want to romance Ayaan? Y/N” choice that gets sprung on you with all the grace of a drunken bellyflop. In order to even set up her romance, you have to spend the entire story prioritizing work at the cost of all else and jumping through hoops to keep her relationship with you from tanking, then you have to get her to come along for the puppers’ first hunt, then you have to go along on the hunt with them, and then, and only then, will the option to engage in her romance present itself, so you have to take the leap or lose out.
The deepest that Ayaan’s character is ever allowed to get is that she’s hesitant to get into a relationship with you because she doesn’t want to botch it all up and ruin what you two have got already. There’s simply no time for any other development.
So there we are, all three ROs, done and dusted. The only other note I have is that sex is possible… at the end of the story. And you can skip it as easily as just saying, “Nah, not for me, thanks.” So it really doesn’t bear mentioning. (Not that I would’ve gone into detail about it to begin with, since I’m not into sex.)
Being the first of the brand, I can’t harsh on Never Date Werewolves too hard. It did the job it set out to do - establishing the general format of the HC line of Choice games. In fact, it used to be that I didn’t think there was any real depth to the story - it’s only now that I go back and dive through the code that I realize just how much nuance is in this story, and consequently how much was left on the cutting room floor.
Does that mean I would call NDW a good game?
Eh… personally, no.
It’s not awful, by any stretch, it’s mechanically well-written, and I’m genuinely shocked at how deep the subplot of werewolf discrimination actually tries to go for only being seven chapters long; but it definitely is a strong example of why so many people feel like the Heart’s Choice games are a bit underwhelming for what they’re meant to be. If you choose not to engage with any of the ROs, you simply don’t get to see the whole story, and with one RO who’s not worth it, another who only exists at the end and has no real impact on the plot, and the third who you might feel you have no choice but to romance if you want to do romance at all, it’s kind of a hard sell to get me interested in engaging with that content, so for a long time, I thought this game was much more shallow.
But that’s all a discussion for another topic, I feel.
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Want to say, it’s technically not the first story under the label but one of the firsts. That, Dawnfall, and All-World Pro Wrestling were all released simultaneously, if I recall, being the starter batch. Pretty sure about that, at least.
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Ah, my mistake, then. I knew it was an early one, though.
Dawnfall, All World Pro Wrestling, Jazz Age, and A Pirate’s Pleasure were the starters in December 2019. A Player’s Heart was February 2020, then Never Date Werewolves was April 2020. If It Please the Court and Belle de Nuit were both 2021, and then Brimstone Manor, Freshman Magic, Heart of Battle, Belle de Nuit: Point du Jour and Scandal Notes were 2022. We’ve had Changeling Charade and Their Majesties’ Pleasure so far this year; Vampire’s Kiss’ beta is completed and Devil On Your Shoulder is pencilled in for November. Edit: oh and Forbidden Magic’s beta completed recently too!
I think 2022 onwards has seen some Heart’s Choice catch-up with what I assume is at least partially a backlog due to the pandemic. Looking at the releases across all three labels, 2021 had a lot fewer which I interpret as having to do with the whole… world state around that time. In 2022 it went up again, which is nice to see.
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I’m not familiar with this game but, like, no, dude. Cheating is terrible, but the correct response is not “turning into an animal and threatening to hut them”. Like, just, no. Ever. Never ever. Break up? Definitely. Throw their shit out the window? Fair game. Threatening violence? All the nos. Like, all of them.
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I was wondering about that, because it seems like the label has exploded all of a sudden, we’re getting new releases like every other month it feels like, now.
Obviously my theory that it’s the pandemic is speculation, but it seems likely considering the other labels having a dip in 2021 too. I may be projecting given that the pandemic added at least 6 months to the time taken for Royal Affairs to come out. I hope we carry on getting more!
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I agree. I should definitely have clarified that Alix’s response was wildly over the top, and that’s my mistake.
That said, just to be clear, it’s explained in the story that Alix’s transformation was completely out of her control. She was mad, upset and hurt, but had zero intention of turning into her wolf form, or threatening violence against her ex. The transformation happened as a consequence of being emotionally compromised, the threatening violence happened as a consequence of the transformation. That’s part and parcel as to why she’s ashamed of who she is, after all.
I’m not saying that to try and excuse it, because again, I should have clarified that even if the situation could have been avoided by the cheating not happening, Alix’s response was far out of line; I just want to be sure that part is understood, that’s all.
When I said it was rich talk for the cheating ex to say that the situation was too broken to fix, I meant that purely as an ironic thing: Though Alix was in the wrong in her own way, it’s interesting that the ex who cheated on her is the one acting like Alix caused their relationship to fall apart like it did, and not, you know, the ex cheating on her. Alix is responsible for things being taken to court, but it was the ex who broke Alix’s heart, not the other way around.
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Now I’m just curious: is that an Alix-exclusive problem, or just how in-game lycanthropy works?
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Apparently that’s just a werewolf thing, since you have to calm one of your kids down in chapter two after they go wolf because the computer was lagging while they were gaming and it pissed them off (yes, really).
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So, uh, racist RO is actually right, then?
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No, he’s still very much wrong. Even with the number now sitting at three, that’s still only three incidents of werewolves being dangerous, and all of them were beyond the actual wolf’s control - your kids are in the 5-10 age range and have no idea how to control their powers very well because their werewolf dad skipped out on the family and you’re a human with next to no lycanthropy knowledge, Alix lost control because she was in emotional turmoil from having been cheated on, and Chafiq’s wife was murdered by a wolf who had gone rabid, i.e., they were no longer there.
And besides that, Chafiq never even learns about your kid losing it because they’ve locked themselves in a different room where he can’t see them, so from his perspective, that’s still only two extreme cases that he’s using as justification for his racism.
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I mean, that’s three cases you know of. If it’s a werewolf thing that whenever they get mad they wolf out and go violent, that’s, uh, not great. That’s why I specifically asked if that was a general werewolf thing.
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Only having the circumstances in the story to go by, I can’t argue for or against that point in good faith. All I can say for certain is that, yes, the two/three cases that I’m aware of are what Chafiq is justifying his actions with.
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I mean it being beyond the werewolve’s control that’s exactly what makes it right. Like if it was an individual thing. But like if an entire race was dangerous and you’re refusing to take into account genetic difference that are fundamental kinda of a problem . Like if a monster species ate humans but were otherwise people, or survived of souls or the like.
Especially if the violence extends to minor things like a lagging game.
…What even causes a rabid werewolf?
Anyway the only one ro based off you’re description the only one that’d really annoy me is Ayaan.
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Presumably rabies.
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That part never gets explained, so I couldn’t tell you on that one.
But see, this is what I mean when I say I didn’t realize at first how deep into the matter the story actually goes, I never thought we’d be having actual discussion about this sort of thing, so kudos to NDW on that one.
I suppose we don’t have vaccines for rabid wolves in our world so…
Mostly commented because I kinda dislike the racism angle when there’s noticable differences that harm each other or even just a strength difference. Which is also why I didn’t mind Chafiq
Like mages/ strength differences become a weapon parallel, wolves and vampires generally eat people etc.
I have no interest in being a mother and barely any in werewolves unless part of a larger setting (like if I could choose, generally if I’m forced I’d prefer vampire or wendigo). Also going into traditional family unit mode despite being a werewolf sounds even less fun. Like wolves already do a different family structure with a pack, I’d feel cheated.
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You know, the weird part about that is, they still try to do the whole pack thing, while being a (-n admittedly somewhat uncommon but still perfectly reasonable by modern society’s standards) family unit.
Like, you have to choose one of your kids to be the alpha, there’s a whole big to-do about it.
And hey, that’s fine. Generally, when I’m forging opinions about characters in stories, I don’t tend to consider bigger picture stuff - I just go by what actions they perform right in front of my eyes - and it wouldn’t be the first time that I got an incorrect read of a character’s… well, character, as a consequence (I was very unanimously told that I got it wrong when I once claimed that one of the ROs in Golden Rose was a cold-hearted bitch), which is how I came to the conclusion that Chafiq is racist against werewolves.
I’ll also be the first to admit that I don’t always have my finger square on the pulse when it comes to this kind of topic, so the possibility is there that I’ve misread more than simply the “werewolves losing control of themselves” thing, and don’t yet realize it.
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