“For joy, first you’ll have to suffer”
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“You wanna go no romance? You have to suffer through the complete romance paths of all four vampires before we’ll give you the option to go no romance!”
Ugh, that right there would be an enormous dealbreaker.
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OK, now that’s just being unnecessarily cruel
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Think that should’ve been Adam sitting by a casket instead.
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This would’ve been a great way for me to quit halfway through the first playthrough and make SSW not the only CoG series where I only bought one game.
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Same here (though I bought b2 for SSW). The first route I played was Adam’s and I got to the scene at the facility, where you go to A’s room, and was like “yeah, eff this guy” and restarted. I went for M during my second run and immediately made an MC just for him.
I ended up making an MC for all of them, just so I can see where things go, but the only route that actually interests me is M’s.
F’s route is cute now that I have a woman-child as his mate. N… I stuck him with a hellion because the saccharine-filled romantic lines from him nauseate me. So she completely craps all over them (literally, she just stares at him like “wtf are you talking about, dude?”). That’s fun to watch.
If N has a Dark Phoenix thing going on, that route will get more interesting to me. But I think his romantic “words” will just get worse as time passes. 
For A, I stuck him with someone that thinks he’s deranged. Much like my N-mancer, she often just looks at A like “oookay” and, now that she has the chance, walks away whenever the opportunity presents itself. She’s interested in him, but thinks he’s too emotionally constipated to have anything with.
I just wish our MCs weren’t forced into the heart racing/stomach fluttering crap all the time. It kinda ruins who some of them are. So I have to head-canon it.
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I’m an unabashed M-mancer, as you well know, but I’m playing N and F’s routes as well because their personal reveals are interesting (I still need to find out if my “N has got a Dark Phoenix thing going on” is right nor not, for example). A’s route… exists? And has the hilarious spider plant scene, I guess.
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Ngl, it’s been a while since I’ve played Wayhaven Chronicles. But talking about it makes me actually want to restart the game and see what the other romances in it are like while I wait for the third book.
Tbh, this thread is making me consider If I should pick up Wayhaven. What’s the best romance out of the 4 RO’s?
Depends on what you like. N is syrupy sweet romance, F is “young” feeling romance, M wants sex but will do without it if your MC isn’t into that (and will eventually have a relationship of sorts around bk 5 or 6, as long as your MC never has to hear “I love you”), and A… well it’s a lot of pining till bk 6.
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Besides what @EvilChani 's said, M also has the funniest lines that you can’t access outside the romance (F trumps them on funny, but you get them regardless of the path you’re on) and has the most dangling plotlines (which may or may not be resolved outside their romance path), and F is the most open about their feelings, as they wear their heart on their sleeve.
That said, CoG games all have demos, and you can get a pretty fast lowdown on each of the Bravos personality pretty fast (M’s the only one whose interactions with you change in tone down the line if you’re either on their path of if you accrue enough friend points), so you might as well play the demo and find out before you throw money at your curiosity.
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I guess you’re right there, must just be the experiences I’ve had. The only relationships I’ve been in are with close friends where we’ve been friends for years beforehand but definitely not on the same level A is towards MC 
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At this point, I’m convinced if moderation around here wasn’t so with it, your average Wayhaven RO discussion would resemble the Somme, a blasted landscape with people who have seen far too much to ever really recover.
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Ya know, at the end of the day, ain’t the real Wayhaven romance the friends we made along the way?
Neat, that rhymes
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I’d like to add my two cents to the slow burn portion of the conversation. Personally I like a slow burn since I’d like to get to know the character a bit instead of getting thrown into the deep end straight away and being expected to just choose based on such few interactions but there are limits.
If you have several books of attempting to romance a character and calling that a slow burn, that is no longer a slow burn, it’d feel more like the said character is just indecisive and doesn’t know what they want. And frankly that’d get quite annoying because you’re basically just getting taken on an emotional rollercoaster that is bound to end in a crash. To quote Bill Withers “Good things might come to those who wait, not for those who wait too late.” And that pretty much just summarizes it for me, if you’re unsure that you like me, don’t expect me to give you the courtesy of waiting months on end or in this case several books for you to make up your mind. I’ll just find someone who, you know can admit they have feelings.
I think Alessa from The Golden Rose is a good example of a slow burn for me, I got to know her well enough and could also go at my own pace but there also came a time where both characters to some degree know they like each other and will admit it. And will actually have some semblance of progress into the relationship path. Even N from Wayhaven does it fairly well, A and M have some serious problems they need to figure out before getting into a relationship though… to the Detectives romancing them, good luck.
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“I swear this was never meant to be a Wayhaven post!”, I scream wildly as another tidal wave of Wayhaven discussion crashes upon me
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Well, in everyone’s defense, you can’t really discuss the problems with Wayhaven romances (or story) on the actual Wayhaven board without people having a meltdown.
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That’s kinda the vibe I got when we first started talking Wayhaven in this and other topics, because it seems like it’s a massive release for everybody to be able to actually say things about the game, good or bad. I can only imagine trying to be so candid on the main topic(s) gets you screamed into oblivion.
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Lydia and John from Jazz Age. Initially, I was interested in John because he seemed to jell well with Hiromi (my protag). But after the raid on the speakeasy I realized he’s a jerk. I don’t hate Lydia, per se, but after I noped out on John, I felt it was her or nothing. I never thought I’d find a “one and done” game on cog but after I finished the game I was like “yeah, ok, once is enough.”
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My opinion on Jazz Age was that both romance options were pretty “meh” all around. I wanted to like John’s “I fight booze because my old man is a horrible abusive ass when he’s drunk and I’ve grown to despise the substance as a result” angle, and I didn’t necessarily mind that he was a big tough Fed bringing down the hammer on me by association with my place of work, but as far as the romantic angle went… well, I honestly didn’t feel like there was one. It was just, all of a sudden, my MC starts thinking about how sexy he is. And as for Lydia, the idea of a speakeasy owner with a heart of gold, again, is something I don’t hate - honestly, I just wish there were more stories set in the Prohibition Era altogether, I’ve said it before but it’s seriously untapped potential - but there was just something about her that didn’t sit well with me, and to this day I still haven’t figured out what. Likewise with John, I feel like the only “romance” there existed with her was the few times where she tried to overtly flirt with my character, in particular when she was trying to woo me away from John, and beyond that… nothing, really. I ended up going with John regardless, because I played my MC as a thoroughly naive, strict follower of the letter of the law (who also refused to union up and fight for actors’ rights because she was worried that doing so would screw her out of her big acting career that she needed the money from to pull her family out of their financial funk back home, so suffice to say, whether she meant to be or not, she was part of the problem), but if I hadn’t been playing such a specific angle… I dunno. I’m not sure if Jazz Age is one of the HC games that forces you to lock into a romance, but if it’s not, I feel like I’d just give both options a miss.
Not to mention that, even though it’s a romance game first and foremost, the advertisement for it makes it out like you’re picking a side in a heated conflict between extreme views, and thus, you’d be in for more action, or maybe you’d have the option to say “no more” and break free from the whole debacle altogether… and then it just kinda turned into a lukewarm story about a small, relatively harmless business coming under fire from the FBI who don’t seem terribly concerned about actually shutting the joint down, with some Hollywood drama on the side. But all of this is another topic of discussion entirely, so that’s hardly important here.
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