Really liking the premise and presentation so far; I know there are many who chafe at perceived feelings of powerlessness in IF (which is valid, I suppose), but I’m personally really excited to explore the dynamics of a story where the MC is inherently seen as second best.
Critique-wise, I think my biggest problem so far is a mechanical one—the skill stat distribution seems super imbalanced.
Condensing for readability
There are numerous instances where one option out of several will increase a skill (or several), but none of the others offer an equivalent incentive. The most egregious example is near the beginning, when you choose how you feel about not being the focus of your parents’ attention—you can choose to make largely negligible shifts to your personality stats…or get a free boost to all your skills.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem in and of itself to offer optional opportunities to increase your skills (or, conversely, to allow people to intentionally roleplay impotent MCs, which I notice there are options for). However, I do feel like there needs to be a middle ground, because as it is, there’s often only one right answer if you want to increase your MC’s level competence, which may or may not be consistent with the character you actually want to play.
To go back to my previous example: the only way to get the early skill boost is to roleplay as a character who wants more responsibilities, which my MC doesn’t, necessarily—she does want to develop her talents, though, so in gameplay terms, the utility lost from picking anything but that option is too great for me to feel comfortable doing anything else. There’s also a swordplay boost that you can only get by being enthusiastically friendly to Wilfred when you first meet him, and one you can only get by telling Stan that you aren’t interested in politics, which—in addition to feeling restrictive—both seem a bit silly, since strictly speaking, neither conversation should actually affect your skill with a sword.
Not yet sure how I feel about the RO issue—I do like the idea of making romance a more dynamic and robust system, and can accept limiting the RO count to accommodate this decision, but the two options provided do feel a bit restrictive. Even putting gender/sexuality issues aside, Wilfred and Cyril don’t yet seem that different in terms of their overall role in the story (they’re both seemingly loyal officers in service to the kingdom), so even despite their obvious personality differences, the pool feels somewhat lacking in variety.
