So now everything starting in 2024 is going to be VIP, even sequels. PB’s taken their greed to a whole new level.
Am I surprised? No. Am I disappointed? Very.
Back in 2016 the 2018 era, PB’s greed was at its lowest. Yes, they did have plenty of cash-grabby diamond scenes and outfits, and when Nexon came into the picture, that’s when collectibles became a thing in Choices series.
But not only was the greed pretty low, Choices had genuinely captivating stories with lovable casts of characters. There was innovation. There was real love and passion that went into these stories and characters. There was real character development, real story progression, and real relationship formation between the characters.
Yeah, Choices began to dip during 2019, and it got really bad during 2020 and onwards. Not-so-coincidentally, VIP released on July 21, 2020. It was around this time that the stories stopped being creative and fun, and became more of a chore to read, and in some cases, just mindlessly tap through for diamonds. More on this in a minute.
The lovable friend groups of the old days are gone, having been replaced by either 1-2 “best friends” who are just reused character sprites or simply no friends but the love interest(s) themselves.
Old Choices books gave us a ton of love interests to pursue, many of which had their own unique routes and dialogues. We typically had three, four, five, even six love interests in some cases. But nowadays, we’re lucky if we get two, and even then, they’re typically race and gender customizable, which makes them feel less like actual characters and more like interchangeable parts.
To add insult to injury, we now have mediocre or outright bad stories on top of the uninteresting friends, robotic (and toxic) love interests, and mounds of collectibles and diamond outfits to sift through. Stories that push a forced romantic or sexual narrative to make us spend our diamonds on raunchy scenes with the, again, boring at best and toxic at worst, love interests. Who, not to mention, typically have really ugly or unappealing character designs.
So to sum it all up, we’ve lost innovative stories and characters, and have gained…well, nothing. I don’t want to give up on Choices because plenty of the books they’ve already fully released have been good, and they still come out with gems every now and then. Plus, Choices has gotten me through some very dark times in my life, so I really don’t want to ditch it. But PB is making it very, very hard.
And you know what else? What really stings is that Storyscape (yes, I’m going there again), the only app that could’ve been real competition for Choices, got snatched away from us far too soon.
It really is a “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” situation.
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