I'm Sorry, But I Think We Should See Other People - ROs You Hate

No, the question at this point is why you didn’t just… lead with that info, since it’s literally the question I asked.

Still don’t know where anyone is getting the idea that it’s marketed as a romance story, though, or how that’s somehow clear to everyone. The author may have said that in a discussion somewhere that I apparently haven’t read, but that’s not marketing. Marketing is what I see when I look at the Hosted Games page. There, it’s marketed as a detective story.

I guess the demo doesn’t do it justice either because it still feels like a detective story after playing the demo.

I’m totally fine with a vampire romance story. But I’d want to know that that’s what it is. Hell, I just learned today that every single one of them is a vampire. I thought it was a group of various different supernatural entities. And I can’t stand slow burn which seems to be every romance in Wayhaven, so I guess I won’t buy it.

It’s actually seven, but that’s still not much when the book is 21 chapters long.

I got the impression that the game’s primary conceit was that the team assigned to help you solve the case is secretly desperately trying to prevent you from solving it.

5 Likes

That’s the problem: it should have been marketed as a romance story, given that Sera does want there to be so much focus on the romance (and the aforementioned, “if you don’t do romance, the story will read much differently” warning in book one for going ace), but as you say, it’s instead billed as a detective story in its official release, which, after one readthrough of book one, you can tell it’s not.

If I had realized Wayhaven was supposed to be a vampire romance story from the get-go, I’d have never bothered reading it. I got suckered in because I believed it was a detective story and I’d actually be, you know, solving crimes, rather than having the crimes solved for me in order to shove them aside and make room for the romance I don’t care about.

I’m gonna assume the demo is the typical first three chapters, so I can tell you, around the time chapter four rolls around, the “detective” side of things starts coming apart at the seams, and continues to dissolve until the facade drops entirely. So yeah, if you, like me, thought you’d be reading supernatural Sherlock Holmes… well, I was a little bit miffed, myself, even though the story was interesting enough for me to keep reading.

Ah, my bad, then. Still, though, chapter four is about the point when I started thinking, “man, are we ever gonna get to me solving this case, or…?” and it just got steadily worse from there until I finally realized what I was actually reading.

More or less, yeah. Because solving the case puts the detective directly on the path to Murphy, who’s looking for special-blooded people like the detective in the first place, which Rebecca knows, so she decides that having her team step all over her kid’s toes is the best way to prevent this. It’s not, the big secret winds up coming out, and the detective gets involved with Murphy anyhow.

18 Likes

I didn’t mean literally blush, but rather certain way of behaving.

1 Like

I agree that Wayhaven isn’t a detective story. It’s a story FEATURING a detective, which is a different thing. Detective CoG games, as far as I can remember, are just Relics 2 and the Evertree Saga. And one chapter in each of the Pon Para games.

9 Likes

…Evertree Saga? But you aren’t a detective in those games…

I mean, it certainly can be a mystery-solving game. But I’m not sure it can be a detective game unless you are a detective.

It’s not even an option though?

I actually am, but that’s besides the point. You still do detective work, which makes them detective games.

2 Likes

Friendly reminder to everyone (myself included) that we’re starting to go too far off topic again

9 Likes

To address a more on topic part of Wayhaven…

N and F’s romances are not slow burn. The F romance, in particular, is probably the closest to a “real” romance you can get out of the series, with N close behind (though if my husband ever shoved me into a bush because he thought I was too incompetent to protect myself, he’d wake up in a hospital).

The A romance is as slow burn as you can get, with hints on her tumblr that it won’t be resolved until book 5-6. And there are plenty of reasons to just hate A, to the point where it no longer feels like a romance and just a situation where your MC bangs their head into a wall over and over again, expecting a different result. But part of that may be that the author considers longing looks to be romance. I don’t.

The M romance is nearly as bad, with hints that it’ll be book 5 before there’s an acknowledged relationship (though M will treat the MC like a SO sometimes, when they aren’t announcing to the world, and the MC, that the MC is a fucktoy and means nothing to them).

So yeah, you can avoid those two and go for F or N if you want something that isn’t slow burn (and I also hate slow burn, but I like M and find N boring… and with F, I had to make a MC that is basically a wet-behind-the-ears, unprofessional, child-in-a-woman’s-body character to make it work because F seems so young in his behavior. But your mileage may vary…

8 Likes

…I think we have different definitions of slow burn. M is by far the fastest at Book 2, and that’s still incredibly slow.

I don’t… want to? Does the game assume your MC wants a romantic relationship? If so it’s probably just not the game for me.

2 Likes

M’s path is fast in one respect (well, so to speak, my MC was ready to smush in b1), but it’s slow in the actual relationship aspect. To paraphrase Chiana from Farscape, “fast with the body, slow with the heart.” It takes a long time to get M past the sex stage onto something meaningful, that was my point.

3 Likes

You get to choose a career to pursue in Game 2. One of the options is Detective.

3 Likes

In the full game, I assume? That’s weird, because you get to choose in the demo portion as well, and Detective isn’t one of the options there. Don’t know why you’d re-choose with a different set of options later on.

Ah, yeah, it seems investigator is an option in Book 3. Dunno why it’s not in the earlier books.

I’ve mentioned before I thought it was really strange that you come into the game from the start of Book 1 thinking you’re a detective, but then it’s just not an option at all (apparently, until Book 3). If it were an option from the very start I wouldn’t think it’s strange. Actually, in many ways it seems like Lux is Book 1 and Evertree Inn and Sordwin are prequels.

2 Likes

I never followed those options, but some of the M choices seem to suggest you can be totally cool and approving of keeping the relationship just sexual.

Example: In Book 2, there’s an undercover date mission, and M says “I don’t do dates”, and your responses include a disappointed “oh” and a flirty “that’s right, you just do people” - that last one always struck me as “the just sex” option.

And I think it’s Book 3 (Lux: City of Secrets) where you can pick the job, IIRC, and gives you detective or investigator or something like that as one of the options (it’s the self-employed freelance job that let’s you pick the things you train in).

2 Likes

I bet a ton of people are gonna drop the series because of this. It already feels like a damn chore, who wants to wait until the end of the series to smooch A? Hawkings was easier to romance and they require a specific character archetype.

14 Likes

Sera has hinted that A-mancers might get a smooch in book 3, it’s just probably going to be one of those things where A kisses the MC then runs away after lamenting that they can’t do this, blah blah blah.

13 Likes

I dunno, presumably people who are going for A is because they’re into that sort of stuff in the first place, so, ya know, YMMV.

I’m personally severely allergic to “angst due to generalised stupidity”, which is why A is my second least-favourite route (the LT has it beat for a variety of reasons).

17 Likes

My big one is probably Fiametta in Magicians workshop. I don’t know why but I always end up with her hating me, and hating her right back. Plus she is soo stuck up and kinda a brat. She is annoying.

3 Likes

It’s true that a lot of fans of angst like a‘s route because of that, but there’s a difference between an angsty route and stretching something out for so long that it starts to feel ridiculous and that’s the point that it seems to be going toward

19 Likes

God, I just gave up even trying to care with Magician’s Workshop altogether. The ROs all felt insufferable to me, and the general premise of, “our workshop master is dead, and instead of growing the hell up and working together to lead the shop in his absence (which is not helped by the guild forcing us to have to choose one instead of having all three), we’re gonna play the backstabbing game to try and scum our way into being the new workshop master - oh yeah, and we’ve now incurred our master’s old debts of unresolved commissions that our clientele expects us to finish for him, even though we barely know what we’re doing half the time and don’t have nearly the experience between the three of us that he had, alone!” was such a negative for me that I just had my character decide, “to hell with this,” fudged his odds on purpose to let one of the other jackasses have the position since they wanted it so bad, and my character just left Florence altogether - anywhere is better than being surrounded by morons.

But I agree, Fiametta was easily the most insufferable of the bunch. I don’t know why authors keep thinking “hothead” means “rampaging asshole practically looking for a fight,” but I wish they’d cut it out. I’m a hotheaded person in real life, and I don’t behave nearly that poorly - I’d rather not have people looking at me like I’m an ape, thanks.

Literally, all a demo is there to do is try and hook you into reading the rest of the story, yeah. It’s not supposed to tell you anything beyond, “hey, this story’s real neat, you should buy it and see what happens.”

10 Likes

…I’m starting to think most demos are not representative of the game in the slightest, and it’s just usually not very obvious unless you buy it.

That’s… literally called false advertising and can get you sued.

I first noticed it with Sins of the Sires because it’s really obvious that the story makes zero sense from the demo alone. But if this is a trend among CS games, that doesn’t convince me to buy a single one of them.

2 Likes