Yeah... I tried reading it and while I can't say it is bad per se, it is very... hopeless for me. MC can't do anything except hope they win some dude's heart so he can save her (if she is lucky). Can't imagine reading more of that more than once. She has no agency on her own and it is not fun to read.
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Stories that left you disappointed for a reason
- Thread starter Sant
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I think the dark romance trend from books (and mainly booktok) started seeping into the IFs like toxic waste. Tbh what irks me the most is that a) ROs in such games always fall into two categories: stoic with an emotional depth of a spoon or b) childish tsundere. Of course, 99.9% of them are male.
Tbh same. And I especially hate when IF authors who write sad damsel Fem!MC seem to like making snide remarks along the lines of 'oh, I don't want to write Yet Another Strong Woman Character'. Girl, where are all those strong female MC games you are talking about??
I think there's good 'big strong is falling apart' type (e.g. Exile and Fallen Hero where you can at least inch MC forward to being well-adjusted), and then there's just misery pron...
The romance -> NSFW -> dark/kink NSFW pipeline basically
I still remember the era of otomes, when people complained about there being too many weak, naïve, damsel female MCs. Now lo and behold, suddenly it's the opposite.
(hello Amnesia where to get a good ending with one of the characters MC had to thank him for keeping her in a dog cage)
Fair enough, I'm just tired of every other MC out there spiraling like a snowflake to the ground. Let me spiral upwards dammit.
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Whole world's going to the sh*tter and these mofos choose to write dark depressing stories like we don't get enough misery irl
To make matters worse, they treat these heavy elements with little respect, rushing to conclusion in one page like, one paragraph MC's completely shattered then the next they're healed and a-okay and making friends... yey...
Itfo, The Exile, and Fallen Hero are good examples of broken MC done right — in my opinion. They don't feel fetishy or too much like edgelords (Remember You Will Die is a try-hard definitely, and don't start with author's very clear favoritism towards certain characters *cough* Orla *cough*)
Even slice of life IFs aren't exempt from these wet-cat MCs; Apartment 505, Paved in Ashes (the author herself labelled this one as slice of life, but like b*tch where), Love and Leases, etc. Sure there are personality choices for these IFs but if I'm being honest I don't feel it, there's just not enough attention to details to make significant difference between one personality to another because in the end the base is the same — unfortunate wet-cat, just one cat is smiling, one cat is constantly crying, and so on and so forth
Imma cut my rambling short cause this is getting out of hand
Really? I haven't played it lately, but a look on Tumblr and all I'm seeing are Jax posts and asks (don't know what people see in him, he looked like an *** to me)
Got his hookup scene on the last update and yeah, mega a$$.
(and the way MC behaved in that scene was so ew to me)
The way you described it makes me want to read it out of morbid curiosity
. I just found RYWD to be so boring when I first read it that I dropped it and haven't read it since. It's not a bad story, it's mostly just a me problem. I lose interest when it comes to ifs with set MCs, besides Fallen Hero.
To be fair, I think that's a very rom-com trope: the whole thing starts with MC experiencing something awful, then moping, and then
with the power of love MC gets better. So mopey MCs in the beginning of slice-of-life don't surprise me all that much. Tbh my biggest gripe with Apt 505 isn't even MC being pathetic but the fact that we basically can decide EVERYTHING about MC, e.g. style, job, whether they are bold or shy, pick a career and even get career-specific things but for some reason the family dynamic is set? Like what if I don't want my MC to be obligatory middle child or be chummy with their parents? *tabs my sign that says 'please don't force meaningful relationships upon your non-set MCs, dear IF writers'*.I honestly don't remember which genderlocked fem!MC author wrote it, but I remember one person saying that 'she is too not-usamerican' to write an assertive MC. Like, very adorable of you to think that america invented tough women, but you don't have to know of feminism (e.g. women in historical settings) or live in a western country to be a woman with a backbone
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It's definitely Orla and Jax (and all her OCs, really) and wouldn't you know it Jax is an Orla simp. Not even kidding, people on her Tumblr talks about how Orla is "a girl's girl" when girl is out there pimping other unfortunate girls and sleeping around with her employees
And no matter what your merc does, remember Orla is so much better and cooler! In chapter 6 disloyal merc can finally be "free" of queen-girl-boss over here, but it's treated as she benched/kicked out the merc and not the merc just deciding to leave her. Like why even give the choice to be disloyal, if the MC ends up crying over her like a kicked puppy anyway? And the author likes to say loyalty-this loyalty-that b*tch no this is codependency
But atp the author's clearly a b*tch (just peep at her Tumblr pages and her recent band IF Can't Save Your Love From Dying)
Also notice that lots of new IF authors are fresh out of highschool teenage girls. No wonder most won't get finished
I think it's pretty obvious that's what it is
And since the author plays along, you get what you get
I mean, if the author herself (?) says that the solution to MC's problems is someone giving her a good ****... lol (and I get it might have been a joke, but an author's words DO set the mood)
Sometimes I read people's complaints about games in here, and it makes me want to play those games more... Some of them I didn't really get into the writing style or setting within the first half hour of playing so I started something else and eventually just uninstalled the game... And then people complain about the story going in a direction that interests me ..
Damn, I just found that one last night and started the first few pages, thought the whole possessing other bodies to do mercenary work was a cool concept but was disappointed by the first death scene... I was hoping that last bit would improve but based on what you've said I've begun to doubt that is the case
That sentence is so ****ed up in so many levels
No lie I watched someone ask a new author do you accept NSFW asks? And once they got the green light stuff got weirder and weirder for things that are irrelevant to the story. Like why does it truly matter the weird random stuff they ask?
Thats not the only thing tho, the fact that the authors have specifically spent time to think about how this character ****s, what kinks they have and how big their this and that is. This is not an AVN and tbh I don't think even AVN authors entertain questions like that.
Also I’m not trying to kink shame or anything , but there’s a time and place for everything. I have no problems if it’s a smut IF or even asking slight questions that push the edge. Like some questions I give a pass maybe it helps them visualize better. Some pointless fun questions to pass the time asking how would they react to xyz, some are just weird and just makes me shake my head.
Nothing is left up to the imagination anymore, everything is explained in explicitly uncomfortable details that really don't add to anything since CS IFs are fully in written form!
With VNs and other mediums, reader's interpretation of certain elements are still limited by the fixed visuals.
But in Choice Script Games? We're all free to imagine.
Because that's the point. It's an easier, faster, cheaper option (one person can create a choice script game relatively easily) than to stuff like Choices Stories You Play or Arcana.