The hell of it is, as others have pointed out in the past, yeah the MC is a backwater country bumpkin who has never known the battlefield before… But prior to meeting the rest of the party, they were getting by okay. When you get jumped by the bounty hunters in book one, if you choose to fight them, you pretty handily serve them their asses.
Is it Manerkol’s soldiers or literal dragon gods? No, sure, but you’re hardly as helpless as you become after everybody else shows up.
Uh then maybe don’t be evil
I think it’s pretty fair game to mind control someone trying to mind control you. Evil unto evil, eye for an eye and all that. Besides it’s one of those things that I can’t really view the character happily after that.
For me it depends entirely if the world dieing includes me which like 99% it does. Having just got past Fate/Go it had a fun example
of a girl in a prophecy, who was the replacement to another woman who gave up and is now her opponent, who had to die to save the world, and not even getting an afterlife. She was enslaved by the village, (they wanted to raise her to defeat the queen, the previous one and barring that sell her off due to being valuable) being super weak until the prophecy actually undergoes due to a power up from a pilgrimage. Everything she had was taken away (examples being her prophecy staff which let her hear the voice of a guy literally prophesized to destroy the world, he felt bad and wanted to speed up the prophecy for her and decided to help teach her magic, since she spent a lot of time smiling at it it was taken, and a friend on the hill she was ordered to kill because he wasn’t from around the area and everyone thought he was a spy, and she was thrown in prison for not killing jik) Despite everyone praising the prophecy no one actually helped her. And so she’d do random task to try and convince people and then get tossed aside. And she meets the main party trying to wipe away her identity in a magic forest and became friends entirely due to believing since the mc and another guy’s memories are wiped she can be the mc’s friend.
Anyway the prophecy is just as much saving the world as punishing the populace for the sins of their ancestors (them being fairies it leads to %90 of them being awful.). One of the main differences between her and the evil queen is that the queen had nice memories. And then was betrayed. So she was optimistic and kept trying to save everyone until she broke (as she was constantly
betrayed by the people) and became a tyrant, while still protecting the land. The heroine on the other hand literally has no good memories (like the protag actually goes through her memories for a bit and she teleports away and is back in a second) While she didn’t care for it and her main motivation was proving her worth towards herself and punishing them is integral to saving the wider world the protagonist is from.
.
Usually in a character i hate it because most of the time it’s from like one event or group in particular, and dumb.
Here I go, back on my silliness again.
So Forbidden Magic just released not more than two days ago (probably longer, by the time I get this thing finished), or not lol, and I was intrigued enough while playing the demo to buy it on the spot and blitz through it in one go when it released on Thursday.
The premise is as follows:
You are a mage who got arrested and convicted for bullshit (or maybe not, you can decide how innocent or guilty you actually are - also the supernatural police force is wizards, and therefore arguably more corrupt, because the internet has taught me that all wizards are criminals), and are now out on parole, which takes the form of enforced employment at OPSS, the local supernatural agency in town. Much like Wayhaven, this agency is out to ensure that magic and supernatural beings are kept secret, but in stark contrast to Wayhaven, this agency actually has their shit on the ball.
Your boss is a literal devil (well, lesser devil, if you wanna get specific about it); your partner is a hellhound who used to be your buddy back in school; your coworkers include an uppity centaur, a snobbish vampire, a manic pixie dream girl (as in, she’s literally a pixie and also the main villain), an elf who is dramatic and needlessly verbose about everything, and a trash goblin (his name is Gork, and his job is to clean the trash cans, and he takes pride in his work. Not to be confused with Warhammer 40k’s Gork n’ Mork, propa’ Orky gods who’re kunnin’ly brutal and brutally kunnin’); your very first case is a string of mysterious, magical arsons which you have to investigate while also keeping them under normal society’s radar, and as if all that wasn’t enough, you soon get approached by an agent from a rival organization who has a proposition for you…
Also, I have no idea what OPSS stands for. I don’t know if it ever got mentioned in the story.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Now let’s get to the part we’re here for:
This game features a whole four ROs (
) for you to choose from, and like with Their Majesties’ Pleasure, you will eventually have to choose one. You get a Neapolitan (plus one) of flavors - male, female, nonbinary, and a gender-customizable person to cap it off.
Also, before we get into it, just real quick: the way this story advertises its romances kinda irks me, because it outright admits that it’s just a bunch of romance tropes - like, verbatim, calls them tropes. Look, I know that you’re never going to get away from tropes, it’s the nature of the beast. Even if you go out of your way to subvert them, you’re just going to end up conforming to a different set of the damn things. But apart from that one tongue-in-cheek WIP we had here where the author was writing a story based entirely around the concept of the MC being a victim of tropes, there’s really no good reason to be so bluntly on the nose about it.
Well, anyways, that’s my little tangent over with.
One more thing before I get going, because the story JUST came out, certain important details will be blurred out because they’re super big spoilers that I kinda can’t avoid.
So:
Sasha Stevens: Your lesser devil boss, and the one responsible for overseeing your parole. Sasha is head of the office at OPSS headquarters (but NOT the big boss of the organization, who you never meet), and they have a bit of a reputation for being a hardass. If you make the mistake of saying such to them, though, they’re liable to think less of you. Professional and stoic when on the job, but very laid back in private, you eventually find out that your boss participates in open mic night at a local supernatural nightclub named The Revel, where they’re apparently a local celebrity under the stage name Red Hot - subtle, Sasha.
Your first introduction to Sasha is when they purposely send you on a wild goose chase through headquarters to determine your problem solving skills. You actually bump into them right outside the elevator to the lower floors, but as you don’t know they’re the boss yet, you don’t recognize them immediately. After that, they’re much less prone to trolling you, instead being all business for most of the story unless you go out of your way to romance them. They care deeply for all their staff, considering OPPS to be one big family, though if they like you enough, they eventually confess on their own that they’ve started seeing you as more than just their employee.
Sasha takes it in admirable stride if you turn them down, stepping right back into their role as your boss without missing a beat and with no lingering hard feelings besides. If they’re in a relationship with you, their dedication to their work makes things a little bit tense during the latter half of the story for certain reasons (hint: you get accused of bullshit again), but their care for their subordinates sees them hatch a plan to bust you out that ultimately culminates in you solving the arson investigation at the end.
Sasha’s… okay. They’re the white bread of romance options. Far as I can tell, the nightclub and potentially the sex (by the way, you can have sex in this game, which I naturally didn’t bother with) is, ironically for a devil, the spiciest they ever get. I didn’t romance them, so if there’s anything interesting about them that I didn’t learn, uh, well, I didn’t learn it, so that’s that.
Tyrian Bristlecoat: Your hellhound partner and former buddy from school, and you are not happy to see each other. There’s a variety of reasons you can choose from for why you two aren’t buddies anymore, from them being into you and you breaking their heart, to you being into them and them breaking your heart, to you both pining after the same classmate, to you needing comfort after your parents divorced, only for them to gleefully announce that they were moving away.
If I’m being honest, none of these are good enough reasons to justify you two hating each other at the start and needing to reconcile your friendship now that you’re both adults and coworkers. Not to me, at least. Maybe the divorce one, because not everybody handles divorce well, and learning that your closest friend won’t even be around to help you cope kinda sucks, but the rest of it? My dudes, y’all need to get over it already, you were kids. It was years ago. Actually, seriously grow up.
I went with the divorce because it was the only one that makes a modicum of sense as to why we’d still be salty towards each other so many years later. Tyrian is also gender-customizable, so I set her to female.
It turns out that you got set up at OPPS and assigned Tyrian as your partner because of Tyrian, who heard about your court case and jumped on the opportunity to get close to you again, giving your name to Sasha and requesting to be your partner in the hopes that you two might possibly hash things out and be friends again. Unfortunately, I found Tyrian to be kind of annoying, so I just didn’t give her the time of day and we ended up never reconciling. That said, we worked well together, because again, this isn’t Wayhaven, so the agents in this story actually care about getting the job done.
Tyrian is a perpetual snacker, whose munchies for the day get steadily stranger and stranger as the two of you get several days deep into a stakeout operation. She’s aggressively jealous of the other ROs, getting salty at you any time she catches you talking to one or paying them a visit without her present. She likes to purposely antagonize you, such as making you ride a bus because she knows you hate how filthy public transport is, and also withholding critical information about one of your coworkers snooping about in your desk because she wants to make a game out of giving you the information (yeah, Tyrian? I’m here on parole. That information could get me fired and arrested. Not cool, bro).
She also doesn’t like shifting to her hellhound form, because there’s a certain discomfort among shapeshifter supernaturals, where they don’t like to change forms where anybody can see it, and many prefer to maintain a human-ish appearance to avoid the demoralizing treatment of getting pet-pets and ear scritchies from people who think they’re big fluffy dogs and don’t realize there’s a person under all that fur. I’d be more inclined to feel bad about that if it weren’t just kind of a surface-level thing that never becomes important.
Oh, and that reconciliation? Literally a single conversation. Here, I’ll sum up how it looked when I checked it in the code:
Tyrian: We need to talk.
MC: (Divorce path) My parents broke up and you moved away and it made me very sad.
Tyrian: Bro, I’m real sorry bro.
MC: It’s okay bro, we’re friends again bro.
Tyrian: Bro.
That’s it. That’s all it was.
I’ll tell you what, I sure wish patching things up was so simple, I could’ve shaken off a lot of nasty arguments and awkwardness afterwards much easier that way.
At the end of the story, if you choose not to remain at OPPS (since you’re only there for your parole, once you pass your probationary period you’re free to quit if you want), a romanced Tyrian will be kinda bummed about it but will stick by you anyhow, whereas a not romanced Tyrian won’t even give you a farewell handshake to send you on your way, even if you made up and are friends again.
So uh, Tyrian kinda sucked for me, gotta be honest about that one. She didn’t suck nearly as bad as Officer Kerelli, who you briefly work with later in the story, though, I’ll say that much. Kerelli’s a super stereotypical up-his-own-ass bully cop who’s got more cowboy blood in his veins than brains in his skull, every paragraph with him in it was an eye roller. Tyrian’s at least better than that.
Special Agent Jared Oliver: The rival agent (or, as the game insists, “parallel agent”) you meet at the scene of the first arson. Formerly a beat cop with the terrible misfortune of being Kerelli’s old partner (don’t worry, he hates that fact, too), both Jared and Kerelli came upon the supernatural one day, and while Kerelli did the typical, “WHAT THE HELL EVEN IS THAT?!” routine, Jared was a little bit more graceful about it all and came to be okay with it over time.
Well, upon learning this big secret, the pro-supernatural mayor had the both of them recruited to her special organization that happens to rival OPPS, but due to Kerelli being Moint Cunt -
…And falsifying reports to get ahead, Jared is struggling in his job lately and has the mayor breathing down his neck, which only makes him hate Kerelli worse.
Jared first appears during the onset of the first arson, where you need to cancel the spell that’s magically spurring the fire on so that firefighters can actually put out the damn thing and civilians don’t start seeing rainbow-colored smoke, but you have to try and sneak your way past the police without being spotted since, you know, secret supernatural agency and all that. The MC initial mistakes Jared for a detective, and doesn’t quite manage to fool him, since he insists on escorting you inside personally… where he then starts grilling you about how long you’ve been working with OPPS, before then offering an olive branch: your two organizations are both trying to keep innocent people safe, so why not just work together and double the efficiency?
Unfortunately, it seems that Jared is the only one who thinks this is a good idea, as the mayor and Sasha have frequently butted heads in the past in spite of the mayor being pro-supernatural because of OPPS’ insistence on keeping supernatural affairs to themselves, not trusting normal citizens to be able to handle things as they would need to. Which, you know, fair, normal humans don’t really know magic, as a general rule.
Ergo, Jared reaches out to you, in the hopes that you two will be able to set an example for your organizations to go by and help two equally capable groups come together and work in tandem with one another for the greater good.
Jared’s a pretty chill guy, and is the much friendlier stereotype of the cool cop who likes to eat at fast food joints and has his finger firmly on the pulse of this whole case. He’s got rugged good looks, and is more than happy to run at your own speed if you choose to romance him, since he’s been hurt before and has trouble trusting people these days and wouldn’t dare force that on you. He is just the tiniest bit insistent on getting you to cooperate with him if you don’t just agree to it right away, but beyond that, he really doesn’t bother you very much and is perfectly pleasant to work with if you choose to. Given that he doesn’t have many friends to turn to in his workplace thanks to Kerelli’s meddling, he really banks on you being the one to cut him a break for once, and has a noticeable bounce in his step if you do. For some reason, he and Tyrian don’t get along well, even though there’s no excuse for them to hate each other? I blame Tyrian’s jealousy for that one.
My only real criticism is that he likes pineapple on his pizza.
Utterly unforgivable.
0/10 worst RO.
(/s)
Honestly, Jared was the only RO of the bunch that caught my attention, and so for only the second time ever, my MC ended up being a gay man - not because I have a problem with two dudes being guys, it’s just not what I tend to gravitate towards is all. It’s worth it for Jared, though, because he’s a real sweet guy when you romance him.
You know, unless you’re not into good guy romances, in which case he probably really is a 0/10. I can’t help that.
Minerva Plume: A plant-loving former social worker who you initially meet trapped under some debris inside a burning building. At first, she seems like just a victim of a collapse while trying to evacuate the building, but then she books it the hell out of there when she spots you talking to your boss over the rockio (you use magic rocks to communicate like long distance radios in OPPS), and she also happens to leave behind a bundle of herbs - it should be noted that the fire was spurred on by an enchantment that used herbs as a binding source.
So that’s not great.
As you continue to investigate Minerva, she eventually confesses to you (if you pass your skill checks) that she has a highly domineering “friend” who’s been making her do terrible things. (That would be Rina, your aforementioned evil pixie coworker at OPPS. Minerva was her case worker when she first arrived in the mundane world, and didn’t see it coming when Rina suddenly placed her under a spell that forced her to act as a patsy in the pixie’s grand scheme.) Provided you pass the necessary skill checks, you can find evidence to suggest that she’s being manipulated from the shadows, and it’s not long before her strange behavior and the coincidental igniting of new fires blur just a bit too closely together to ignore, and she becomes your primary suspect for the arsons.
And because of that, uh, she’s kind of disqualified as an RO, for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not into dating suspects during an active investigation.
Beyond that, Minerva trends towards being gracious and bubbly in demeanor, a little bit flirty if you let her be, understandably paranoid, given her current situation, and she really, REALLY loves plants. Like, really loves them. Her house is basically a disaster zone of plants. One of your skill checks in her house is simply to avoid tripping over shit on the floor. She laughs at you if you fail.
So… you probably noticed that I was very to-the-point and not overly expressive about these ROs. Well, uh, I’m sorry to say that Forbidden Magic has also fallen into the HC trap of the ROs being weirdly lackluster for the genre they’re in. The story, itself, is alright, I liked the investigation stuff and the crime drama, but if you’re hoping for exciting romances, I’d caution you to look elsewhere. They still have a wealth of character that the ROs of Their Majesties’ Pleasure completely lack, mind, but right now, the bar for depth of character in these RO overviews of mine sits right around Never Date Werewolves, and these ROs don’t really reach that height.
But hey, for a (currently) $2.99 price tag, you could do worse for a quick eleven-chapter crime drama with supernatural elements, so I can’t rag on it too hard.
I can only speak for myself, but I like having an evil RO every now and then, if for no other reason than it feels good to be the bad guy every now and then. Not enough stories let the MC be evil…
Honestly I found every character except the trash goblin annoying
The “professional” boss that’s sent me on a pointless walk just to “test” me? Suck it
The annoying partner? Irritating and desperate.
The guy? I’m the alpha around here buddy. A lone wolf, a solitary eagle, a cuddly baby tapir. I dont need some desperate guy hanging around me with a crush because I simply don’t like guys.
The plant witch? Eh she was just boring. I made her as the suspect being forced to do it the very moment she shows up on screen saying “I DIDN’T WANT TO DO THIS” with a flashing neon sign behind her and it kind of made me just disregard her.
It’s the kind of story that goes “haha tropes lol XD” like it’s self aware subversion and then just plays the tropes entirely straight.
That annoys me.
Trash goblin is a real one tho. Does his job and lives his life.
I think that the intent for why Leon would execute you would be a mix of betrayal, confusion, and external pressures clashing down on him. I think that if it were written to emphasize more greatly the real threat of revolt by the masses against Leon for ‘letting the traitor sit pretty’ so to speak while the great Priestess was killed by them would have made it much clearer why he felt like he had to. I think the biggest push towards me myself resenting Leon as an RO is that, iirc, he just doesn’t believe you were forced to do it.
Like, everyone who personally knows you except Leon is trying to sing your good graces and he just immediately buys into that you are an asshole who betrayed everyone else the second that things settled down. I think if anything, he should have believed you, believed in the others too, but he had to execute you because otherwise the entire country would have been thrown into chaos and he as well as Sean (what is the younger bro’s name?) would have ended up dead.
As he is currently handled though, Leon just seems like a dense piece of shit. At the very least he could have had the good graces to have you knocked unconscious just before the fire is started through magic or something but no, you are alive to be burnt and asphyxiate as your flesh melts to the flame. I can imagine few other ways to die that are so grotesque and painful.
I don’t agree with just finding the ‘do you have a grudge or forgive him?’ as being interesting because Leon wasn’t really forced to do anything, he is just an idiot. He is literally just dumb, and that is the reason you die. There is no compelling question for you to answer there, at least not for me. Like, literally if he just WAITED than they all would have uncovered the ruse that your sister had forced on you and then you wouldn’t have died. there is no real reason your execution NEEDED to happen when it did, had these things been addressed in the novel then I think I would have found it all much more compelling.
Had he taken the line of ‘I need to let you go, lest the entire nation fall into unrest,’ then the question would harbor more weight for me. But as it was written I just… UGH.
For me my frustrations with AMR has always been more about the POTENTIAL for something
interesting that was squandered for what I perceive to be little gain in terms of what was offered in it’s place.
Speaking of other romantic interests from the series, I don’t like any of the new ones… F & Y are just… yuck. Like, F is just fine killing whoever for fun because Tahlia says so and Y just comes across to me as kinda slimy. Eli is kind of bland since they just default already are interested in you / close with you and there isn’t as much of a journey to that. Plus the fact that if you try to escape Arcadia you get tortured by Tahlia and Eli agrees to not let you attempt escaping again.
Lets not forget that Tahlia intentionally gave Mireil a loose leash. I get where others are coming from when choosing Arcadia, but personally giving them a free pass to the root cause of the Mage’s eventual death just baffles me.
But, to keep on topic, about the only romance im not a fan of so far is F, moooostly because the reason they hate you so much is just…shaky? “Oh, you killed my mentor/sort-of-crush in a life or death situation, this immediately excuses their evil politicking and the slave collar.”
To be fair, you were also best buddies to and sworn bodyguard of the king of the country who enslaved them for most of their life. Also, please spoiler that bit, because, well, it’s spoilers. XD
Eh, thats relative.
Considering who the mage was killed by.
The author simply had to add one asshole to the cast since most of ROs are nice (Leon, Ilya, Y, E.) Who cares if it’s unfair to MC. Any reason is good.
THIS is why I’m on the “never forgive Leon” side of things. Seriously, you were in the cell with me, close enough to punch me in the face while I’m chained to the wall (another thing I’m not willing to forgive,) how hard would it have been to slip me some poison? At that point it just reads as cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Leon, however, always seemed to be written as big, good-looking and dumb, though. Like a golden retriever bred for the show ring instead of for work. He has the basic instincts, and boy is he pretty, but all the brains has been bred out of him chasing the “desirable” traits. If Saine were the next in line, or if Julian hadn’t been assassinated, it would likely not have gone down like that. It’s why after my first playthrough I don’t romance Leon. He’s thick as two bricks in cold oatmeal.
Now I’ve done heard some interesting colloquialisms in my time, but I ain’t never done heard that one a’fore.
+1
But let’s not start talking about him again 
Okay so when I originally played Night Market before release (I know it’s a twine game but people were talking about it earlier iirc), I played a character who was pretty ‘tame’ and as a result just lied for a name in order to get through things smoothly. I romanced Gabriel.
I decided to reread, now I don’t remember much from my initial playthrough so I was fully intending on romancing Gabriel again with release. However, upon playing through the Prologue and first Chapter I realise that if the main character refuse to lie then… Then you are seriously telling me a romantic interest in the game casually consigns you to death for REFUSING TO SHARE A NAME??? What in the everloving hell. How am I ever supposed to reasonably take this man as a ‘romantic interest’ when he treats human life so casually? Sure, he might change his mind, but even if he does he had full intent to do it leading up until a last second changing of minds. How is anyone supposed to see this man in a remotely positive light after this???
I am actually shocked. I don’t think I could have ever romanced the character if I saw that before, but I seriously cannot figure out how someone could be so callous. "It’s the rules, so it’s fine if people are put in cages and dismembered for parts for small crimes, you just don’t understand muh culture’
Also this is a place with magic everywhere and nobody has a way of ensuring if you are speaking the truth? There are no potions for that kind of thing? No special devices? Because consigning someone to death for assuming they are lying when they could have literal brain trauma / amnesia / etc… I just… I am stil reeling about it.
So naturally, I dragged that bastard down into the flesh pits with me.
I might have a new most hated love interest, congrats to Leon for finally being beaten! And it’s a romance option I previously thought was fine. Who knew!
Response to @JBento :
I’m not reading the spoiler text about the ending, because I’m not done doing a new playthrough of the completed game. I am actually so upset now, there just isn’t a romantic interest for me anymore as someone who is masc attracted because my 2 options are an RO who cannot have to have a closed, monogamous relationship and a monster. I hope the second book will had a new masc character who is like… just a guy. You know?
The man is a cop AND an angel , did you expect him to act differently? And he’s SOMEHOW still not as bad as Milo fucking Next. I actually feel sorry for straight women and gay dudes playing Night Market, because their romance options are unsalvageably garbage people.
Since I have you here, does the game always end the same way, as a setup for B2? With everything going dark because the Baron of Gems fucks you up thanks to Milo fucking Next betraying you (again) and fucking up (again)?
Oh, my bad, I thought you’d done a full playthrough already. Or maybe you did, but you don’t remember the ending clearly. If you remember this when you finish the new playthrough, lemme know, please. 
And that’s why I won’t buy it.
I really wish someone would leave a review explaining just how horrible the ROs are for male-attracted MCs. Otherwise, people will buy it thinking they’ll get a good romance and be left angry when they get this garbage. Plus, they’ll feel screwed out of 13 bucks. I’m glad I read all of this stuff before taking a chance on this game. I’d have been livid.
