review by Emily Short
"Ron Weasley and the Quest for Hermione" is not the kind of IF that tends to get attention from rec.games.int-fiction. First of all, it's
a work of adult IF, with numerous and extended pornographic scenes;
second, it's derivative of a piece of copyright literature, which would exclude it from eligibility in many IF competitions. In fact,
it's more an IF version of Harry Potter fan fiction than it is a
direct adaptation of any of J. K. Rowling's own work: the characters
are flattened and simplified versions, without any of the sly comedy-of-manners dialogue one finds in the original; the relationship plots come to the fore and every other theme is ignored; and I think we are
supposed to understand that time has ratcheted forward so that all
the young people are of legal age and Voldemort is no longer a
threat, which is the sort of dodge one finds in fanfic where the
author wants to use the characters for a bit of smutty business but
is uncomfortable writing what might be construed as child pornography.
The protagonist is a young Ron Weasley, out to win the affections of
Hermione Granger in the way AIF player characters generally win the
affections of women -- by carrying out tedious tasks for them -- but
he's not too picky to seduce every other woman in Hogwarts Castle as
well, if he thinks he can get away with it. (The author seems to have
drawn the line at slashfic: if there's a way to get busy with Draco
or Harry or, heaven help us, Hagrid, I never found it. The male NPCs
mostly exist as impediments, the female characters as goals.)
The game is not very good, on several widely-accepted measures of
craft. It suffers from the usual curses of the ADRIFT parser:
apparently identical commands don't work quite the same way; variant
names of nouns are not always recognized, but the non-recognition is
inconsistent. The puzzles are implemented on the assumption that the
player will encounter them in a specific order, but there's nothing
about the game structure that actually guarantees this. I ran into
many NPCs who referred to things that hadn't happened yet, for
instance, or who assumed I was working on missions that I had never
been given. And to make matters worse, the key NPC, Hermione, object
of Ron's youthful desires, is particularly unresponsive and doesn't
seem to acknowledge partial completion of your goals: at one point I
thought I had possibly gotten stuck in the game due to a bug, when
the truth was that I simply had one more puzzle to solve and the
game's minimal feedback wasn't letting me know this.
I'm not going to critique the sex sequences, either: I generally find
even the most carefully-simulated adult-IF scenes rather mechanical
and tedious, which is one reason why I don't play much of this
subgenre, so I'm not really in the best position to compare the
quality of the porn with other similar porn. I will note merely that
it is possible to skip most of these sequences if they don't appeal,
save only the final interaction with Hermione that is the goal of the
game.
The thing is, though, that in one respect this game is reasonably
successful as an IF adaptation of a static-fiction work: it uses
Rowling's worldbuilding as the basis of all the non-sexual
interaction. The characters and territory are all familiar; score is
kept with frequent reference to house points, though they don't
exactly correlate; the puzzles are based around the player's use of
canonical spells. The author helpfully provides a list of the Harry
Potter spells that are implemented in his game, to spare the player
trying to guess or remember spellings, but there is at least one
puzzle that would probably be difficult to complete unless the player
knows the series: I'm not sure it's fully clued within the game.
A more thorough author could have done a better job of exploring the
ramifications of this worldbuilding. There are quite a few spells
that don't work where you might expect them to. I see no reason, for
instance, that the player shouldn't be able to ACCIO anything he
could ordinarily TAKE: I don't recall the books ever saying that one can't summon objects that are within reach, and it wouldn't even have
been very hard to program this, from an IF perspective. And spells of
destruction and mending work somewhat capriciously where the author
felt like implementing them.
Even so, what is there is pretty fun to play with. There are few
silly easter eggs to be found, things to cast spells on that have no
relevance to the rest of the game. There is a certain pleasure in
navigating territory that one already finds familiar. I didn't have
to explore to know that the Potions classroom would be in the basement.
I found myself comparing the work with several other, more mainstream
IF adaptations that have come out recently: Peter Nepstad's two
adaptations of stories by Lord Dunsany, and Tor Andersson's "Tower of
the Elephant." All three of those games had the texture of the
original prose (often simply by using a lot of it straight up) and replicated the original plot-line, but missed conveying some
essential feeling of the original world: what it would be like to
*be* Conan, or a king in Dunsany's tale. "Ebb and Flow of the Tide",
with its dreamy inactive quality suitable to the corpse PC, is most
successful, but largely because the original story is about not being
able to do anything. "Ron Weasley and the Quest for Hermione" isn't
as well-crafted as any of those; it doesn't try to emulate Rowling's
prose style (which is less distinctive in any case); and it arguably
flubs much of the characterization. But despite its flaws, I found "Ron Weasley" more fun to play, and I derived much of my enjoyment
from a sense of connection with the original work.
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