Personally, I just like the ridiculousness of the idea that, rather than the usual fare of silver for werewolves and garlic for vampires, we instead use legalese, zoning permits, local politics, and if need be, a tire iron across the dome in order to keep the peace. In fact, as I said before, the idea of a bureaucratic office mandating its employees to have either improvised or proper weaponry and be trained in their use just in case negotiations break down is absolutely hysterical - no, we don’t hunt supernaturals because they’re a threat to civilized society, that’s racist, it’s the modern age, let’s get with the program here. But beating your ass to get you to follow our complaint filing system properly? Now that, that we can arrange.
As for the individual points:
I would say so. Just the impact of a narrator, blank-faced, telling the reader something so outlandish as a flock of harpies attempting to prophecy doom to a cow makes it hit a lot harder than it would have if you tried to purposely play up the comedy of it, I feel.
This is blatantly untrue, Vanja has a sword and knows how to use it.
Serious time now, it will always be one of my favorite things in fiction to see just average everydudes going about their business in a world where they should clearly be on the back foot, but they just shrug off all the bombastic, fantastical happenings around them and keep working on that report for their boss that needs doing by five. It’s the irreverence of it, the fact that these events which, in any other story, would rally armies of light to fight for the dawn of the coming day, are just this ho-hum sort of thing that you call on the local hazmat team for instead.
Or, to use an example from another story on this site: In A Kiss From Death, one of the many things you can do is run a magic shop. You might have a bounty hunter be chased in by necromancers who you’ll have to fight off. You, being who you are (an immortal superbeing), wipe the floor with them easily, at which point you can either get involved in the bounty hunter’s mission… or chew her ear off for making a mess of your store and tell her to get the hell out instead. Priorities, you know?
Similarly, I love how a modern setting is used to be similarly irreverent with these fantastical races: You stumble across a werewolf or vampire in other games, and it’s a big deal. They’re big, scary monsters who could kill you with little effort, and it takes a monster-hunting badass to stand against them.
You come across them in this world, and werewolves are meat-headed gym bros while vampires are stuffy lawyers and politicians and such.
Stone Trolls - Trolls of any variety, really - are typically big, hardy beasts who could Hulk Smash you through the floor, but in this game, they’re miners and mechanics and construction site workers and maintenance folk who drink motor oil in place of coffee.
Wizards are politicking rules lawyers who will twist the letter of the law as hard as they can to get away with doing whatever they want.
Snake people are silver-tongued bastards who love negotiations and diplomacy to death.
Harpies are little shits who love causing trouble for others because they think it’s funny.
Angels are basically living supercomputers, whereas demons are so deeply involved in their own infernal politics that a demon out of hell who doesn’t need to screw everybody they see, scheme to get ahead, or stab everybody in the back, has no clue what to do with themselves.
If I could sum this all up in a word, I’d say my favorite thing about this story is that it’s so disrespectful. You take these concepts that are treated so highly in other genres and just casually crap all over them and make them the butt of so many jokes, and it’s great.
I didn’t really try to engage with the romance at all, particularly not with Hikaru due to poor first impressions (not really a fan of sexual coercion as a means of getting what one wants, but that’s a personal beef and not a problem with the story itself), and Vanja’s romance doesn’t get the chance to really happen until late game when the promotion is no longer an immediate concern of either of yours. You can make them stop being a prick to you as much in the meantime, but the end of the game was a hell of a time for them to try and spring a date on me - I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t interested about four chapters ago.
Honestly, the romance in this game is such a non-priority that I didn’t feel bad about dodging it. Besides, being work buddies with everybody instead seemed to be the superior option anyhow - yeah, Hikaru got bored of me and left, but I didn’t exactly suffer for her loss because I was playing mini golf and getting casual drinks with Patricia, or visiting the zoo and talking workout routines with Shay, or commiserating with Lee about how all this damn drama is getting in the way of people doing their jobs and it would be nice if we could all just shut up and chill for once so we can all get back to friggin’ work. Tack on talking red tape with Vanja and grabbing drinks with the day shift crew and bribing harpies to not eat my cat, and anything I might have lost from not engaging with romance was more than made up for.
Not enough stories put such fine focus on casual acquaintanceship and banter, it’s always got to be about love and sex. I honestly found it refreshing to be able to just talk shop with my coworkers and be relatively safe in the knowledge that there wasn’t any underlying objective of getting in each other’s pants if I didn’t feel like it.
Honestly, you could have set the story in a brainpunk setting (short version: think cyberpunk, but all the cyberpunk tech is implanted in your brain and psionics are commonplace) and it wouldn’t have bothered me. I’m not much of a stickler for that sort of thing, I can roll with most anything I’m given.
I did rather enjoy that, if you played a certain species, certain skill checks came tailored to that species, specifically: A drunk racist tries to pick a fight with you. You can either:
A. Express very Human apathy at them until they go away
B. Scare them into sitting the hell down by simply being a Stone Troll
C. Blatantly commit Wizard crimes by weaving suggestive magic into your words to subtly screw with their minds
All of these will instantly succeed the skill check, no skill required. It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to just slap an “I Win” button from time to time in these kinds of stories.
So yeah, that’s my take on it. Story good, would read again.
