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Played the Choice of Games Text RPG "Honor Bound" by Harris Powell-Smith and drew my MC (the one hiding his face) and his RO Denario Vecoli. Denarios stubble turned into more of a beard during inking, but it doesn't bother me enough to redow the whole thing.
Thoughts about Game and Playthrough under the cut.
To start this of, I really enjoyed the game. HPS has quickly become one of my favourite CoG authors. I don't usually care for romance or dark academia at all, but I like every single entry of the Westerlind and neighboring countries verse.
Now to the actual game. My MC started of being pretty callous and rebellious. Making it clear to Catarina and Fiore that he will not be their butler and also internally being furious that he got punished for not risking a hostages life.
That changed a bit over the course of the game. He still made it clear to Catarina that he is her bodyguard not her servant, but he also cared for her and wanted her to do well in life and school. They had a great relationship that I enjoyed. Catarina ended up admiring my MC. He also ended up befriending Fiore and got a lot more humane over the course of the game by simply caring about these two.
Initally, I was not sure who I wanted to romance. I thought maybe Korzha. I like emotionally repressed men, being one myself. Or Savarel, since my MC was not religious and I thought there might be some cool interactions with an atheist MC and a Priest RO.
That all flew out the window when Denario unexpectedly showed up. From the first paragraph, I knew this man would have my MC acting unwise. I selected that they had a thing in the past and this lead to a dynamic where my stoic and repressed character would turn into a different person when Denario was around. I'd say mostly for the better. He would burn down the world to keep Denario save and happy, but luckily that was never needed or wanted by Denario. It felt like they were making each other better, which was nice.
Korzha went from not being very impressed with my MC, to being his biggest supporter right behind Denario and Catarina. I helped him do the research and generally was quite loyal to the military. A little too loyal, because in the end he and Korzha stayed true to the mission, which cost him Fiores friendship, Savarel doesn't talk to him anymore and he doesn't even know where Catarina is.
When he got bribed by being made an Elite, I would have liked the option to say "I feel awful and this is clearly a bribe to shut me up, but I'd rather cry in a house with unconditional basic income, than crying in small rented room and no income."
So career wise, my MC hit the jackpot, but emotionally he feels awful about how things went down. But he is too repressed to know what to do about it. So he stayed with the military, because he didn't know what else to do with himself. He didn't want to stay in Ozera because that would have reminded him of Catarina and his guilt.
I actually think I had a bug at the end of the game. Because I asked Denario if he would move with me and he enthusiastically said yes, but in the end he somehow just wasn't and only wrote a letter. He still showed up to the Elite Promotion Party at least.
My thoughts for the future of my MC is, that he will probably work through his guilt at some point. Most likely trying to find out what happened to Fiore and Catarina as the way Avla talked about it made it sound like they were disappeared by the military and that is definatly something that would break the spell of military conditioning on my MC.
I also think Denario would help with that. He understandably doesn't seem to be a fan of the military and how he and my MC got treated. So my HC is that, once my MC got his house for being an Elite, he would have Denario move in and then Denario works on removing the military way of thinking from my MCs mind that makes him think that it's his duty to follow all orders.
I hope in the future he can reconcile with Fiore or at least make it up to Catarina. She was so excited about the school and even won the science competition and she didn't even get to be at the graduation ceremony.
I ended up replaying the ending a few different ways, but I think for my personal canon I will stick with my first one. It is not the best ending for him, but part of the fun is that not everything is perfect. Sometimes you make mistakes and then you have to keep on living with those mistakes.
As a finale note, I liked how this game allowed me to play the multible facettes of repressed emotions, mixed with anger, guilt and not knowhing how to deal with that, because you are used to having to function. Especially when my MC finally got hospitalized, even after doing all his physiotherapy. I can see him doing that a lot in the future. It would seem like he keeps pushing himself to hard out of pride to being seen weak, but I think it would be more out of fear of being seen as lazy and maybe self punishment. Denario should yell at him for it.
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