Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

The Lost Heir 2 is probably the "easiest" game in the series in that it is difficult to get an unambiguously bad ending or die for real. (Spoiler - click to show)In fact, "losing" the final battle is the only way to save a certain character. Most character builds that did well in the first game will work well here.

I like the sense of progression in the game: you go from being an exiled heir, to taking over a city through politicking, and then leading an army on a quest to retake your kingdom. There are management mechanics in the city and army portions of the game; you can either increase the citizens' respect or their fear, and in the army portion you have to balance the army's size, strength, food supplies, and delays. In addition, there are still the choices of which party member to support in their conflicts. There are interesting trade-offs to be made here. However, there is somewhat of a conflict between min-maxing and role-playing; since there are no benefits to increasing relationships above 100, it is always advantageous to support the character with the lower relationship, even if the other character is your love interest or is actually correct in the conflict.

As before, the plot here is a somewhat typical high fantasy story: you are still the titular "lost heir" and your goal is to re-conquer your kingdom. The world is a bit more fleshed out; there is the requisite high fantasy "gathering the races" segment which introduces the friendly non-human species, and there are some indications of why the people who usurped the protagonist are bad (besides the fact that they usurped the protagonist). There is a new romance option introduced, and some opportunities to develop previously constructed relationships. Personally I really enjoyed the story despite it not being extremely unique; I managed to become invested in the characters and relationships.

(Spoiler - click to show)In the end, however, it basically doesn't matter how your army performed in the final battle or all the battles leading up to it; all that matters is your skill in the final climactic fight. The final fight is against a former party member who was captured brainwashed in the first game. If you lose that fight, your army is defeated but the party member survives. If you win, the party member dies but your army is victorious. This choice kind of left a bad taste, even though everything leading up to it was good.

Dragon Age: The Last Court is a tie-in for the Dragon Age series of role-playing games from Bioware, taking place in an obscure part of Thedas ("the Dragon Age setting") shortly before Inquisition, the third Dragon Age game. In this game you play as the ruler of Serault, a small backwater town in a fantasy-medieval-France-like country, and deal with an upcoming visit from the Divine (the fantasy-Catholic pope basically). It follows the StoryNexus format, which involves drawing cards from a deck and picking actions within those cards which have random outcomes based on stat checks.

Overall, the tone of the game is very different from the other Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins was a heroic fantasy, DA2 was a character-driven drama, and Inquisition was largely about high politics and history. All of these games involve making moral choices, which of course become flashpoints for fandom discourse. The Last Court is not like this. The central thematic element seems to be that things are weird and dangerous in this corner of Thedas, with an emphasis on the "weird". There are magic cults, creepy deep woods, a mysterious forest spirit, and so on, plus more mundane struggles like labor disputes and the "Great Game" of espionage and social sabotage. Personally, I'm not really a fan of the writing style which this game shares with Fallen London (is it considered to be "weird fiction"?) and found myself just glancing over the writing. But a lot of people like the writing of Fallen London so whatever.

There is a *lot* of repetition in this game. The ultimate goal is to build up resources for the Divine's visit in order to give as gifts, and the optimal paths involve basically grinding certain cards in a cycle. Actually some level of grinding is inevitable, as there are only so many cards, and they will repeat a lot through draws. Combined with the 20-action limit and 20-minute recharge time (which is totally pointless in 2020 as the game is no longer even monetized), it often feels like this game has a higher grind-to-new-story ratio than the Dragon Age RPGs themselves.

There is narrative payoff though. The most interesting parts of the story are when more of the mysteries surrounding Serault are revealed. There are also some interesting character moments, but not much in the way of development even when one of the characters is taken as a companion or lover (yes, this is a Bioware game). (Spoiler - click to show)I took the Wayward Bard as a lover but I think there was only one change with his card, and little change in the text. The Horned Knight was my favorite character overall, while the Well-Read Pig Farmer was my favorite companion. Many of the mysteries do not have a final resolution, which perhaps leaves room for future Dragon Age games. However, much of the interesting parts of the narrative, the individual mysteries and such, seem to be front-loaded and can be done in a few days, leaving the last few days for total grinding. And the ending feast itself is one of the weaker parts of the game.

The Wayhaven Chronicles games are two of the most popular games in the Hosted Games catalog, based on review and download counts. I was kind of surprised to see that this game didn't have an entry here. Overall, I think the game deserves its popularity: it is a very well-written and constructed game with an engaging plot and character development, but I personally had some issues with the choice structure.

The author of this game comes from a visual novel/otome game background, and it shows. The structure of this game mixes Choice of Games and otome game conventions. Like the latter, the primary source of branching in the game is which love interest to pursue (or to pursue a love triangle option), which is an explicit choice in the middle of the story. Like the former, the protagonist has numerous options to change their personality stats or use their skills. A large number of choices are personality-setting choices, which provide a choice of what you do, and why you're doing it. I wasn't a fan of these choices because I could never figure out which choice was supposed to correspond to which personality stat, and often none of the personality choices were appealing. Perhaps fortunately, these choices and their associated stats appear to have little impact on the broader story progression (but I haven't re-played the game enough to really find out).

One of the main reasons behind the popularity is the characters. The four main romance interests (who are a team of gender-flippable immortal mostly-benevolent vampires assigned by a secretive Agency to help the protagonist) are very well realized, with their own distinct personalities and detailed descriptions of their appearances. The protagonist's relationship with their mother is also portrayed well, but I could never get past the fact that the protagonist always calls their mother by her first name.

Beyond the romance, the main plot of the game is a supernatural mystery: there is a supernatural serial killer in town and you have to bring him to justice with the help of your companions. However, the killer is revealed through perspective shifts early on; the only question is how they catch him.