ename144
Engaged Member
- Sep 20, 2018
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That's more or less how I felt after playing Acting Lessons; DPC has a genuine gift for creating compelling characters - ones with the potential to truly move us as players - but he is irresponsible with the power that gives him. Leveraging that sort of emotional investment is certainly a classic trope, but it requires a delicate touch. Don Bluth pretty much made his career by stopping just short of scarring my childhood for life!
I'm not sure DPC knows when to stop. As I said before, I'm confident we can have happy endings with a LI of our choice, but I'm not sure what each of those endings will do to the other characters. It's my real fear about this game.
That said, I think I enjoyed this episode a lot more than you because I was already worried about all that and thus I could focus on the small things it does well with the various characters.. That, and I'm a lot more accepting of the fact that we WILL have to turn down some of the girls. To me, the concern isn't that we will be cut off from, say, Jill if we choose M&J, it's how cruel that rejection will be to Jill and what our relationship with Jill will be like after.
On that front, I think there are some mild positive signs in this episode. Calling Sage is mandatory for MC who are her fuck buddy, but was not mandatory for MCs who were just friends with her. That means my Jill-centric run through didn't have to turn down the second date to tend to Sage because he never knew she needed someone to tend to her. Similarly, that same MC could turn down Bella's offer to help clean up his room and thus avoid a lewd scene with her; I would have preferred to be able to accept her help and just let her go home for the evening, but I'll take what I can get.
Similarly, my main M&J run never had the second date with Jill, apparently because she picked up on the fact he just wasn't that into her. So for all the talk about how awkward it was seeing Jill and Josy at the library, there really wasn't much problem.
That said, I don't like how Jill handled the blackmail thing at all. The idea is valid, but the execution was lazy. It forced Jill into the stereotypical, naive debutante role she had so successfully avoided until now. I harbor serious concerns about how all of this will eventually unfold, and I'm hoping this was just a minor slip-up that will be corrected in Episode 7. So I don't want to complain overmuch about a character derailment that hasn't actually happened yet.
Anyway, my point is that all of this suggests to me there is at least some hope that unchosen girls might make it through the story in decent shape. That's a net win in my book, though obviously a trivially small one and we should all take to heart Josy's advice to take things slow emotionally.
