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

General
1041

I was tempted to reset, but decided to ride my decision through in the hopes it could be salvaged later on. Long story short, it could not!

While I enjoyed the game overall, I do think it would benefit from more depth, and it often doesn’t allow for proper emotional reactions at key points. What happened with Kyle shook me up, but the narrative rushed on while barely acknowledging ‘oh, I guess your character might be sad to have lost the love of their life?’. Like, I get that it tries not to make too many assumptions, to fit a broad variety of players, but that would have been a pretty safe assumption in those circumstances.

Why does a character who’s happily married to Kyle not get any special options or dialogue during the breakdown? Why can a character who has a child with them not bring that up, when they start going on about family? Why was there just a single line afterwards about ‘Kyle’s stuff gets taken out of your quarters’? Why did K’lk have nothing to say about losing his favourite sibling? Why did it get blamed on ‘the Synths who created Kyle’, when we’re supposed to have no idea who created them? Why was Kyle designed with the same sort of socially adaptive functions as a Synth MC (can cry to express grief, can taste food to join in on meals), if they’re really meant to be a self-replicating death machine? I’d bring these questions up in the main game thread, but it’s already published and too late to change anything now, so might as well just vent here and make my peace.

…Er, so that this comment is slightly more on-topic, I’ll say that there’s one RO I’m surprised I haven’t seen mentioned here, and that’s Silvanus/Silvana from Fatehaven. Probably because it’s one of the older Hosted Games, and not all that good compared to newer titles. They’re a character I personally like, but since I’m also in the defence camp for Manerkol and Hayden Winter, my liking them doesn’t mean they aren’t still kind of awful.

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1042

I recently finished relics 3 demo and my intense dislike for Cleo has not gone away. The second relics made me dislike her so much.She is skeptical, i can understand that, but her constant need to mock spiritual mcs got on my nerves and I just left her ro route halfway.

She left us all alone in that goddamend castle and expected us to kill the lady even when she knew that everyone was after us and we didnt know the layout well enough. No, she had to dump all the responsibilies onto us.

The third demo shows the mc that she is jealous of them working in the frontlines while she is stuck in the back. When
she gets her chance she screws it up so many times and my mc wanting to help her points out her mistakes and she insteads threatens us sweetly and tells us to write a good reports because we are such close friends. If the same thing would have happened to someone else she would have protested against it and mocked them. But she expects the same treatment now that we are “close friends”.

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1043

I generally never had a problem with Cleo in the first two games, but everything you said about her in part three I completely agree with. I hope this was vague enough I don’t need spoilers.

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1044

I personally liked the interactions with Marcus cause my mc was defiant and it was funny to see them banter. But I still hate him, he doesnt repsect the mc even when he knows that he murdered mc’s father. He uses every scene just to show where the mc stands and how pitiful their attempts at revenge is. If he really had any regret or remorse, he would have shown them by maintaining a distance and helping the mc only when they needed it not by forcing them to become his errand person.

When we confronted him about our siblings he just said that one person couldnt handle it all. Even if he may be right in some aspects just doesnt mean that he shpuld completely let go of his remorse and regret I was itching for option to just punch him and show him how his posturing and taunts doesnt help in our letting go of the past process. On the contrary, the more I see him the more I am reminded of my hatred.

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1045

I’m not a fan of enemies to lovers trope either because if we hate each other enough to think of ourselves as enemies chances are that I’ll try to kill you first before I even think of romancing you, like that one RO from a itchio game where they uhhhhhhh break open your head to steal your AI implant and leaves you unconscious on a street of a burning city under attack.

But I do enjoy some pull and push between characters with different motivations who may or may not get in one anothers way but wouldn’t actually want to hurt them (too much). Then I saw a post on tumblr that just made it make sense.

Annoyances to lovers
Just what I described above, with room for a respectful distaste, friendly rivalry or straight up flirting in the middle of/with danger without the, y’know, possibly having morals that clash in a very dangerous way. I very much liked that description lol

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1046

It’s a matter of liking chocolate quiche or vanilla pudding - both can be liked by a person, both can be hated. Personally, I find annoyances to lovers absolutely and utterly boring, unseasoned and tiresome - but it’s a personal opinion that should not affect someone else.

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1047

The most RO i would wish to see to just dropped dead and roll over to the very abyss of hell is Robin/Robyn after what that cheating A-hole did to poor loving MC in price of emeralds.

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1048

I’ll say here what I said to the author in the main thread - I don’t see Price of Emeralds as being a game with romance in it at all. I see it as a hostage drama, and my one and only objective is to escape at all costs. The author unfortunately made every single RO so despisable for me that the idea of romancing anybody is completely off the table, as far as I’m concerned.

The author took it well, to their credit, and I hope they continue to enjoy writing the story even with myself (and, actually, a number of similar-minded folks!) having outright said that the ROs aren’t worth it, because them aside, the story is actually kind of interesting so far. Plus, of the heist stories on offer between HG and CoG so far, only a couple of them really have any option to strike out against the heist and turn on your team, and to the best of my knowledge, HC doesn’t even have any heist-focused games, so I’m all for that, especially since I find the team in question so reprehensible in the first place.

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1049

Huh, so all the ROs and the MC are despisable? Because I definitely despise the MC in that game, so much so that I never bothered to play long enough to discover any ROs.

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1050

Keep in mind, I’m saying that I, personally, despise all of them, not that they are all that hateful in general.

Except the MC’s ex, who all but the most spiteful roundly declare is not worth it to rekindle the relationship with.

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1051

I would feel really bad for the ex if I forced them to be with someone as awful as the MC.

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1052

After seeing this chat, I decided to go back and play the demo again. With the right MC, I actually enjoyed it more, and the ROs (save for the ex, who I want to die in the most excruciatingly painful and torturous death possible, right along with the bitch he banged) do seem to hold some appeal, given that it seems to me they all (except for Atlus) may have been forced into the whole situation.

That said, RPing a MC who has snapped and turned to icy anger for sustenance, is extremely satisfying. And, thus far, there is room to do that with what we’re given–only exception was the weird overly dramatic freakout, where my MC would’ve been much more calm about destroying something in that moment. She might even pursue a romance, even if it’s just so she can knife whoever it is in the back (I’m looking at you, Atlus). Or she might fall for one of them–V is the most honest of the bunch, and seems to have that same cold, calculating way that my MC developed after having to put up with the bullshit that has been heaped on her. Might be a match made in heaven, especially if they can kill off the benefactors together. Who knows.

The ex is a piece of shit. The MC has just had a bad hand dealt to them, something that the ex made worse by being a lying, cheating sack of shit. I really hope there’s an opportunity to kill that bastard.

Honestly, I won’t be the least bit surprised if Beth and Robin were the ones who took the emeralds and replaced them with fakes. Seems too good of a setup to have a showdown with them. Wonder if Valentin will let my MC borrow one of his knives…

Seriously?

Considering they walk in and find their soon-to-be-ex on the couch making out with Beth, with her shirt half undone, I think it’s pretty much a given. Since they aren’t in a poly relationship, and the MC didn’t agree to this, then yeah, it’s cheating.

Don’t get how it could be anything else, unless you only consider it to be cheating if you find your boyfriend with his dick literally in one of someone else’s holes. Personally, as soon as he stuck his tongue down that woman’s throat and grabbed her tits, it was cheating. But hey, whatever works for you.

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1053

I still have no clue why everyone thinks the ex cheated on the MC. That’s not in the game. People have showed me the exact screenshots that led them to believe that the ex cheated on the MC. It’s not there. All it says is that the MC thinks the ex cheated on them and is so sure of that that they refuse to ever speak to their ex.

There is no such scene in the game… If there is now, it’s been rewritten to be more obvious. When I read it, they were just… sitting on the couch… doing nothing at all.

1054

Gonna be honest and say ignore that person, I had a whole argument with them and they were in the games thread while ago making the same claims the writer doesn’t even acknowledge. Like even if they weren’t having sex at that moment, the cheating was happening for a while so it doesn’t matter really lol. I even showed screenshots that directly proved them wrong and yet they’re still evident on it was a poly relationship and no cheating happened.

R literally tells you they had B over to stop the affair when you catch them lol.

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1055

We’re not starting this again. I’m shutting this down now. Arguing is bad enough already, restarting old arguments is just ridiculous.

This has happened once already. It didn’t need to happen then. It’s not going to happen now. Pick a different topic to discuss and move on.

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1056

Thanks for letting me know. Now that I’ve said my peace, I’ll drop it!

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1057

I’ll drop it after this reply, because I don’t want to argue either, but uh… I feel I should point out that I definitely never said what Patrick said that I said.

1059

This particular discussion has run its course. Please find a new topic.

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1060

Price of emerald suffers from generic and annoying cast with a pity party plot (is that how it is said?). If at least we could choose what type of miserable person we are would make it more fun and feel that I’m actually influencing the story, but we barely have choices as it is, we can only choose how we react to the events around us and some skill checks when fleeing from the thieves. I do think I’m being harsh since it’s an early WIP, but like I stated around 500 comments ago (holy shit lol) I hate when CoGs don’t give me any agency

And this is more of a pet peeve of mine but I hate when CoGs are in first person lol. Most of them try to dictate what I’m (or my characters is) feeling instead of letting me choose and it makes me groan everytime until I close the game

Also I noticed how generic romance options in other types of media tend to do reasonably good while here they’re super obvious and a few of them fall flat on their faces. Seem like artworks, voice lines, music and endearing quirks you can show on other types of mediums like visual novels really do wonders for these types of characters

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1061

Yeah when it’s all text and descriptors, it really puts the tropes to the forefront. Just having some visual reference to distinguish the character some does a ton to help individualize them. A lot of characters I like (in other mediums), I think would be way less interesting if you reduced them down to their personality written in text.
That’s an idea I’ve never thought of before, to explain why tropey/archetypical characters seem to have a harder time here than elsewhere. Thanks for that :slight_smile:

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