As you may have noticed there’s a normal among fans of various games. If 90% like Bob J Smith but Bob rubs your life the wrong way. Well prepare for a mauling. So here you can vent your criticisms and grievances of games and nobody will judge you if someone disagrees with you they will just post what they dislike or bothers them or like from another game. This way we can help figure out how to make things better for other writers and help find games you might enjoy more. Or maybe just a friend to vent to.
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While many people have grievences with the Heroes Rise series, my biggest grievence is that between the Legend system and the reality show plot, the game ended up spending a lot of time telling me my preferred character archetype was dull and uninteresting. Most specifically both parts punished me for being “inconsistent” when I tried to do things like defend and then counterstrike when I saw an opening. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my “canon” playthrough was as Misaka Mikoto, title character of A Certain Scientific Railgun, who will often in the same battle whip up a crackling aura of lightning around herself that magnetically deflects bullets and even ceramics, throw lightning spears, use a steel arcade coin for her classic Railgun, manipulate iron sand into a vibrosword, and when all of these fail her she gets As in gym including mandatory self-defense so she’ll just win hand-to-hand fights with a large percentage of people.
It’s not precisely that I demand games support her or any of the other characters I recreate, it’s that does that sound like someone who wouldn’t be in the Heroes Rise setting or who would leave the audience unhappy because she lacks a clear tactical theme? Her theme is Electromagnetism trending towards lightning and her tactical preference is whatever’s most useful right now. The game literally told me that probably my favorite energy manipulator in the broad genre of superheroish settings was boring audiences.
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Rex just wanted you to think the audience found her boring because he’s a giant douchenozzle the game was rigged from the start.
No, no, beyond that overall, playing Riser like her hurts Legend and at certain checkpoints when it evaluated the general Reality Show tactics stuff it told me I was doing poorly because I wasn’t focused enough in any of the categories.
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The game was rigged from the start. The entire series was rigged from the start by ZS to enforce a certain style of play. But HR gets enough flak so in the interest of keeping it somewhat different
I have a severe dislike for the Versus series, but I can’t quite pin what I dislike about it, it just feels… off
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Me too! It’s like i’m playing it but everything just feels so… disconnected. Like i’m stuck in a bad dream lol.
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Well, same author as Heroes Rise, same general thing. Beyond my specific previous complaint, generally both series feel like there’s really a canon storyline with a canon character and then give options to try to play a different character but doesn’t like it when you try. The most specific instance there is the dream travel thingy, where you can try to play a wide variety of characters but all of them pick subjects in the same order. Most particularly when you go for whoever you’ve opted to feed to the Unthing; while there’s a wide variety of people you can theoretically play you can’t say “ah, screw it, they’re 100% dead so I’ll just check everyone else and if that’s a bad call I just hang out in the Elite Court and wait for the resurrection.” And you can’t actually make a serious push to feed the Blob Empress to the Unthing on the theory that you hate her and also want the Unthing to die so win-win even though these are theoretically potentially your defining motivations. Like as a show of good faith the advisor specifically sends her in against not the Unthing and takes her off the list of people who could be fed to the Unthing next round.
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Said my say bout HR and why it feels off here:
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Controversial opinions of IF Games are fine, but if this thread becomes a general or specific trashing of games/authors, I will shut the thread down.
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So basically, our choices don’t matter 
The video on her Patreon explains the controversy that surrounded her at one point in time, as well as the thought process that went into creating Depression Quest.
This may be a controversial comment (I hope it’s not; it shouldn’t be), but I think it’s cool to see her working on new stuff.
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I think a lot of games include romance options because it’s expected of them and not because they actually benefit from romance options.
A romance should develop organically or not at all.
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Controversial opinion on IF…? If I may say even though it focused on writing and the narrative content, the cover illustration of IF titles also play important part on giving good first impression. Sometimes I feel like the covers don’t do justice in portraying what the story is 
I have some favorite illustration cover of CoG titles (avatar of the wolf, eagle’s heir, the hero unmasked) and they’re really great and memorable! But in a few cases, the cover really make me goes ‘hmm?’ ‘Why is the composition like that?’ Or ‘why is this particular scene/character being chosen to represent this story?’
I tend not to mind too much about HG covers since I know the authors have to provide their own illustration and prefer to use free resources (correct me if I’m wrong) but I don’t really know how’s the process of making illustrations for official CoG titles (are there staffs handling the illustration? Or the author commission an artist to do it?) and I think it would be interesting to know the thought process of the artist designing it 
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Golden endings are bullshit.
And choosing to forego having a romantic partner shouldn’t be a punishable offense.
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I think it’s more specifically that the character creation phase isn’t in genre with Versus itself; the character creation is a brutal total war, then Versus is a reality show Of Death. So in Versus, after I completed that first step and then got the lay of the land my first character’s goals were as follows, in order:
- Find legendary galactic hero, send back to galactic heroing
- Kill arch-nemesis of entire species
- Kill Unthing to reduce attrition rate of people I don’t specifically want dead
- I want to leave at some point probably, but 1 and 2 are higher priority and in direct conflict so I’m not going to try to progress towards leaving until they’re satisfied.
That particular instance stuck in my mind because it was being offered as a bribe and I genuinely did not understand why anyone would expect my character to put any particular value on it. I mean, all I actually get is that no one I know dies that particular round; she’s a huge terrifying death monster so everyone knows upfront she’s gonna beat whatever “not the Unthing” the destructives send this round.
To abstract this into useful general advice, it’s your character creation where you can force choices and no one questions that, so if you need to force facts to be true for the story to work do it there. What counts as character creation is obviously kind of nebulous, but generally I consider it to end when the situation you’re in on the first screen of the game has been completed, plus any flashback to define your childhood.
Also, I will say that the “reality show” portions of both did indeed feel like decent reality show stories. If the author made just a pure reality show story where you want the million dollar final prize and don’t have any higher priority goals with the same general narrative structure I’d probably feel satisfied with its quality as a reality show game. Dunno that I’d buy it, because I don’t actually watch those shows, but if I did I’d feel I had gotten what I wanted from the summary. I liked Redemption Season better than The Hero Project in large part because it tied in my defining character motivation into progressing in the show more directly, but it’d probably have worked even better if Loa Shift’s demands obligated you to win rather than just stay in a certain number of rounds.
I respect what you’re saying about potentially harmful games/things. However, ultimately I think that it’s up to the publisher, rating authority (ESRB, etc.), or even governmental authority, to decide whether or not any particular work (in this case game) needs to be either limited to a certain audience, or prohibited altogether. Just my opinion though, I don’t claim to be right. 
Oops, I just saw that you just deleted your post as I was typing!
Yeah no probs. Decided to delete it as I really don’t want to get involved in any other stuff that seems to be involved in that case that I wasn’t aware of. Hated Depression Quest as a program without knowing any of the controversy associated with it, and being released as a “game” I doubt there’d be regulation against the particular content it contained. I honestly think it’s potentially quite harmful though and would personally never suggest it to someone I know is suffering from depression or wanted to know more about it. A lot of things that end up on the internet that are incorrect or can be easily misinterpreted are potentially harmful, while still being legal. It really should have a "this is one person’s individual account… not meant to replace professional advice… not meant to represent all cases etc disclaimer included on it at least.
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Dont know if these are controversial, but I could use a good vent: I kinda hate when games give you pacifistic options and don’t screw you over on occasion for taking them. Like “spare the criminal and he’ll rob you later no matter how good your persuade skill is” type deals. As it stands, because I can say with unquestionable certainty that passing that charisma check will reform literally anyone, it becomes “wrong” to me to kill him on a run, because I know he’ll become a loyal member of my team.
Also games that put in an RO and give me like, one half assed scene with them because you wanted romance readers without actually writing a romance. Take the sales hit or do the work.
And lastly (and leastly because this is a pet peeve): games that ask how I feel about Character on the first page in which they appear. I don’t know who they are, you told me they have red hair and are speaking at me.
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This is going to be really controversial. But I really really hate really hate that they advertise all these variations of genders and sexualities instead of giving us a Define find character to play as. And let me stay I’m not against characters of different genders characters are transitioning or any of the sexual orientations that exist. What I am frustrated by is how they are nine times out of ten implemented are very haphazardly and Incredibly shallow because you cater with these Blank Slate characters and just Frank power fantasies that it’s rarely fulfilling when I play any of these games. Because our character gender a s their sexuality especially if it takes place in some historical period of time or feel it has relevance to the plot has much as our RL gender and sexual orientation matter. And honestly Choice games that have the define characters to me personally I find much better because you can see them grow you can see character arcs you can see them develop through your choices within their realm of possibility. I love The Walking Dead series I love the different characters and let me play as and let me react the choices that they make that are organic and natural to them while showing different Paths of development for said character. Instead we get of 9 times out of 10 we Bland Bland power fantasy.
Some writer can be wondefulinsane like Paul/@Cataphrak its first two games on some ways an incredibly in depth character creation process and development for the main game in Lords. And what he does it takes the archetype of both the real life Hidalgo so the characters are Force within all the restraints of the fictional and real life social class and see how you interact and develop with those restraints and if it’s broken it’s natural and organic to the storyline.
Now I understand why it’s advertised on here it’s for inclusiveness and I get it many people can not play games that genuinely represent them. At the same time they’re still arbitrarily executed and it’s so forced to be added on instead of something thawed out it just comes off Hollow and shallow and replaceable an interchangeable as a Ford part. Instead of something genuinely part of the character and intricate to the narrative.
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I’m not sure how controversial this is, but I really dislike it when IF games (particularly choicescript) give you a super detailed physical character creation process. I like having some control over how my character looks, but just general things like ‘build, skin color, hair color, eye color, height’ would be FINE. If you ask me ad nauseum if my characters have specific features on their faces etc that are never, ever mentioned again, it annoys me and I don’t find it particularly useful in imagining my character. That is to say, I prefer having a general description and filling in the blanks with the unlimited power of my imagination rather than doing a character creation sliders game in TEXT.
It’s not a deal breaker, but still.
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