Crusader – Review by ReviewAnon

By: ReviewAnon (name given by the readers)
Originally posted: 12.02.2016
------------------------------------------------------


PREMISE
Some men are born to fortune, others have fortune thrust upon them.

You (primarily) play Wilhelm Koblenz, son of a relatively unimportant German guy who really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. What does matter is that you have taken your half-brother Hugo to the holy land to seek fortune in the embrace of Christ. Nothing supernatural occurs, and the quest remains very down to earth and gritty as you proceed along, often being kept afloat the tides of fate as they sweep you from fortune to fortune across the holy land, be it Muslim, Irish, German, or any manner of Mediterranean.

The story starts rough, and the ride never gets easier, but you eventually do manage to crawl your way into the most bountiful fortune you could have ever dreamed of... But only if you can handle the crushing weight of the responsibility you must shoulder to keep it.

*Alternate premise:
[spoiler]Replace all instances of the word 'Fortune' with 'Pussy'.[/spoiler]

---

REVIEW pt1

Mechanics.
Get comfortable, because this is going to be a while.

You have four primary stats: War, Leadership, Intelligence, Charisma. Each of these give modifiers to actions taken in relation to them, such as War being an important component to personal combat, but Leadership being more important in commanding. The only way to raise these things are by succeeding at tasks related to them, but there is a very strong aspect of diminishing returns inherent in this system. Someone with 95 War has less of a chance of losing to someone with 90 War than, say, someone with 50 War has of losing to someone with 65.

Those numbers are purely theoretical, but there was a post from the QM saying something to that effect; My exact numbers are probably a little off.

Eventually you reach the point where the only real way to raise your stats is by beating someone above you, meaning it is common to improve quickly and than plateau off into a stand-off typically broken by equipment, which can in turn add modifiers of various types to your stats.

They also effect how your roll is determined! Crusader Quest shifts rapidly between whether you get to roll Best of 3, Average of 3, Worst of 3, or something else that just comes up because "hey, why not", like the most recent Middle of Three for Mathilde's archery. If your stat in something is undeniably strong in something, you roll Bo3. If you're on middling ground with someone of similar skill, it's Ao3, and if someone has you beaten in stats (or you're just bad), it's Wo3.

But other circumstances also seem to affect what you roll, such as how hard or difficult a situation might be, or at times, it seems like it's whether the QM just feels like you should probably lose/win an encounter.

Also this part isn't particularly a mechanic, but unless Fortune* is on the line, don't expect to roll well.

---

REVIEW pt2

Mechanics Cont.
Dueling is its own bag of worms, and comes with its own rules (modified a little by War).

The rules are such that player votes are taken in sequence along with a roll. You have four options to take: Strike, Thrust, Bind, Block. Of these, Strike beats Thrust, Thrust beats Bind, and Bind beats Strike. Block will defeat them all, but won't cause any damage to your opponent. If you tie, then the higher roll (modified by War) will win.

So it's rock-paper-scissors. You don't know how well you'll roll on your choice, and the QM rolls a series of Xd3 to determine what the enemy does. You then compare results, tally off lost health, and resume for another pass where these actions repeat.

After all of this, you also have three actual playable characters introduced slowly across the quest. The first is your "main" PoV, Wilhelm Koblenz. The second you gain is his half-brother/squire, Hugo Koblenz, and the last is their sister Mathilde. Each of these three end up becoming very good at very different things, but they share a common trait amongst them.

Namely, unless Fortune* is in question, they rarely roll worth a damn.

I keep mentioning this, specifically in mechanics, because while it's not something that is enforced or can be helped, I've never seen a single quest's playerbase roll so terribly, so consistently, for so many threads. It may as well be a mechanic of Crusader Quest at this point.

---

REVIEW pt3

Plot.
You start off a man searching for fortune* and the journey you make in pursuit of it leads you to make a lot of friends and enemies... Though the distinction is often unclear and varied. A man who seems distant and aloof will often be your greatest ally, while people you exchange hugs with and speak often of loyalty and good tidings and brotherhood may just as well turn on you. There are few people you can properly trust, of them being your three playable characters and a Nubian you pick up in the first thread who quickly becomes your brother in all but blood.

Through various Fortunes* you find yourself stumbling across a princess disguised as a sister of the church, and in your glorious pursuit of Fortune*, you end up wrapped up in a massively spanning web of cutthroat medieval politics as you slowly realize you've fallen in love with someone above your station - All of this leading up to your attempt to marshal an army and siege the Fortress City, Ascalon to present it to the queen of Jerusalem in an attempt to earn the right to thrust yourself into the inviting Fortune* of the princess you fell for.

This is far easier said than done, however, as trouble is nothing if not persistent. The actions of each of your three playable characters intertwine subtly, causing problems for someone else even as you resolve a different issue.

Writing.
This will actually be pretty short.

The writing is good. I have little problem saying that this IS one of the best written quests on /tg/. I can't claim it is the best by any means, but it is among the most well written... In the sense of how easy and consistent it is to read. I've mentioned before that questing walks a fine line between telling a story, and playing a game. With no sense of regret or doubt, I can objectively say this is a fantastic story.

That's all I can really say on that matter, at least in an objective sense.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt1

I had heard the term 'Cucksader quest' tossed around before going into this and passed it off as 4chan being 4chan. This was a mistake. There so much sex happening in this quest that a single thread can barely go by without it being alluded to or vaguely described. If you thought my previous Alt.Premise was a joke, I'm telling you now that it wasn't. Everything in this quest, from thread one, has been orchestrated in pursuit of sticking your dick into something. Half the characters you befriend or recruit early on are either partners in pursuit of sex, or a result of you shoving your dick somewhere and then trying to defend it. You fuck a man's wife while guarding her on the way to her husband, you fuck a king's wife after deposing him from a throne, you fuck all of the queen's sisters INCLUDING one who a comrade of yours has long stated his desire to wed, in fact the only person you DON'T fuck is your actual wife.

Someone else presumably fucked her. The son of the king, whose wife you fucked. This same son also evidently fucked every other sister of the queen. Your Nubian brother, Solomon, fucks people without a care. Your half-brother, Hugo, refuses to actually fuck the one person he loves, but doesn't seem to mind fucking literally everyone else. Your spymistress fucks you - Not the other way around - and fucks pretty much everyone else to get information. Entire dissertations could be written on who is fucking who in this quest, and all of it is accompanied by impressively well written softcore erotica (nothing explicitly raunchy)

This ties back directly to my comment on why I said the writing is objectively good, in the sense that it's easy to read and very consistent. There is a theme, probably of historical accuracy, where sticking your dick in everything is seen as fairly normal.

---
PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt2

It's immersive in the sense that you can leave your modern standards at the door and step into a story that doesn't hold its punches in describing boorish combat, rampant elicit sex, religiously driven racism, and antiquated societal customs. The prose isn't overly flowery, but also keeps itself interesting enough to fall flat into stale boredom.

However, Crusader Quest is not for everyone, because objectively good writing technique can only account so far for content. I enjoyed the simplistic and very direct, realistically inclined approach to combat that was taken. The way scars mounted up, and even mundane slashes and strikes were impressive. However, some of the flavour of the writing - while initially interesting - began to grate and chafe as the quest went on, and at times became eye-rollingly exasperating.

Have you just met? Best to think about sex. Is that woman watching you kill a man? Best to describe how it makes her want sex. Are you a man? This woman wants sex. Does that woman not want sex? Give it time, she will want sex. Have you just had sex? Time to describe how it's like dumping every buff in WoW onto the woman so that she literally glows with the contentedness of having gotten dicked.

At one point, picture related happened and just... I had to stop reading for a moment and stare at the screen. What even IS 'womanly yearning'? Was this written with a straight face? There's historical flavour and accuracy, such as the very real fact that women of the time were pretty much cattle to be wed off or used for stress relief, and then there's this kind of thing that leaves me wondering where interesting historical reconstruction ends and 50 Shades of Gray-tier ignorant writing began. Once you start noticing the divide, it begins to pile up. Little things here and there as you're reading, until everything just becomes one frustrating mess dressed in enticing prose.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt3

Perhaps some people enjoy this. I did not. Much of the story was well written and appreciable, but the depiction of women in general eventually just got on my nerves. I want to explicitly state that it isn't the historical depiction which bothered me, because that's simply how it was, but the more the QM began to delve into the female characters personally, the more I just cringed. A similar thing can be said of when the personal thoughts of many of the male characters began to become explored - There's a romanticized divide here that separates 'well written, developed characters' and this... I don't even know the word. Alien? Ignorant? Distorted? Stupid? This deeply seated... aberration of a normal person, and I don't mean this in a good way.

This all reads more dramatically than I probably mean it to, but the simple summation is that I feel like a line was blurred between modern writing which values individual characterization, and more ancient writing which just wanted to tell you that this guy was really awesome and everyone wanted his dick. The writing eventually comes to heavily remind me of greek/roman stories, where in you are told tales of heroic feats, brutal injury, hot dickings making maidens swoon, and those hot dickings screwing someone over later.

And I guess that's really what I'm getting at. Under the modern prose, the quest is basically one of those classical tales with a modicum more effort put into characterizations.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt4

Writing aside, finally we get to the implication earlier about how the quest was a good Story. While some will disagree, I feel quests are a mixture between a game and a story. Either side can produce enjoyment, but quests walk the fine line down the middle, and a failure on one half will affect the whole. This is relevant to Crusader because quite honestly I found it to be a terrible 'game'. If you look back at the mechanics, you see all of this frustrating, convoluted RNG in everything you do, and it eventually ends up such that you start finding it difficult to care about trying things simply because...

What control did you even have? What influence do you actually have? Your duelling system is literally RNG * RNG; One to see if you won RPS, then one to see if you rolled high enough if you tied. What even is the purpose of blocking, practically? You have no way of knowing what you need to block, when you need to block, or anything else. Why is it an option? It's worth noting that a lot of players seemed to have similar problems with the system, but when given the choice to NOT use it... Decided to use it anyway.

And on the note of control and agency, I would feel remiss making a review about Crusader Quest without mentioning what is inarguably the single most iconic thing about it. We've got the rape of Zoe, a greek trap character that was only very briefly introduced into the story before the players were pushed into a situation they couldn't affect, where their choices didn't matter, and were forced to sit there and watch this NPC they had pledged to help get raped in front of them (described as detailed and vividly as any other sex scene, at that), but getting carried off.

This is actually a really divisive issue on its OWN, which I'll look at in the next post, because it deserves its own little section.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt5

Now, there is context around the rape that needs to be understood.

Zoe as a character had a plotline which was running parallel to the main cast. Due to choices made by the players, they only met this character as her plotline was coming to an end. Because of this, the reasoning is that the players did not have the time to change the outcome she was approaching - That is to say, her capture and subsequent rape. I believe this sounds reasonable on the surface, and in certain mediums (visual novels, for example).

She's the kind of character who you just don't save, or even really meet, on your first play through. Or an outright game like Ar Tonelico/Tactics Ogre where you can choose different routes and meet different characters along the way. Tactics Ogre: LUCT in particular has the recruitable character Ravness who will actually die off screen if you don't keep her in mind and read specific supplementary clues, then make a detour during a time sensitive mission to go save her, and thus finally recruit her.

All of these have something very important in common: They're games meant to be played more than once. Where you can go back to change your decisions later, or in most cases, you are given adequate information and clues ahead of time to anticipate what route you are walking down. These are GAMES, and the mechanics inherent in them allow the story to take certain liberties. Games are meant to give control to the player, to navigate the plot; A story removes agency and control from the reader, only allowing them to experience the plot.

In the case of Zoe, the explanation of "you could have saved her if you met her earlier" falls flat when you understand that the playerbase was given no way of knowing she even existed to be met earlier. No hint or supplemental that this character even existed. Suddenly she was introduced, and as you may have guessed, the Fortune* seeking MC immediately wanted to help.

Wow, this gets two posts.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt6

So at this point, the QM could have adapted her purpose in the story; After all, the players don't know anything about her, she just appeared- Wait, no, the QM refuses to axe story lines. Okay, well you don't need to remove it, just adapt it to be suitable given the circumstances it was introduced- No? Okay, well I guess there's still a really, really thin chance the players might be able to avoid this dead end they don't know is coming. Why not warn them?

To be fair, you get warned briefly. The warning sums up to your advisor slave girl saying that Zoe will be trouble, and then shrugging when you don't necessarily agree, because why would a Fortune* seeking MC even remotely not want to seek the Fortune* of this greek trap? The warning didn't involve anything remotely close to "the Bad End approaches rapidly and is nigh unavoidable if you don't bust your ass putting her above everything else", and is even presented in a casual atmosphere. Everything about the atmosphere even leading up to the rape is just this very relaxed, casual thing with no sense of impending disaster.

Hell, when the PC tells Zoe they'll help her, she even outright says she "lost the people chasing her some towns back". This falls squarely in purview of unreliable narratorship, but is literally the only information the players had to go on.

The day leading up to the rape had the final chances to avoid it, and this final chance takes the cake. The PC is completely unaware that a Roman galley (or more?) has just parked itself in the harbor. This is never mentioned, nor discussed. The only way we could have known it was there, and then escaped with Zoe to prevent the immediate rape, would have been to go see the town Lord immediately in the morning... So he could tell us about a ship of foreigners in the harbor in time for us to run back and get Zoe.

Time for post 3, holy shit.

---

PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt7

So, in summation:

We could have avoided this if we had met a character we didn't know existed, by making choices we didn't know would lead us to her. Or, we could have avoided the scene by breaking the Fortune* seeking personality of the character played the entire quest based on a vague and passing warning from our advisor. Failing that, the players could have still saved her if they ignored all of their responsibilities in town and ran away from an enemy they were told IC was likely far off and not a terribly pressing immediate concern. Failing even that, there was still a chance to avoid this Bad End if the players, for some reason, had decided to go see the town Lord first thing in the morning so the town Lord, of ALL PEOPLE, could give us the random information about what kind of ships were in his harbor.

So on one hand: Wow, look at all these chances the QM gave the players to not fail!
On the other: None of these chances even remotely make sense, and half of them were literally impossible to know about.

This is single event, which as I understand it caused a huge shitstorm, is a culmination of every possible piece of logic and action to NOT take as a QM. It is a very direct, very personal loss the players suffered through little to no actual fault of their own. It was merely "bad luck" which led to this - Not even dice luck, which would be excusable, but completely unmarked, uninformed decisions that no one could possibly know connected to this moment's culmination. I'm all for loss and struggle in a quest, but it HAS to be as a result of player agency, something they've brought upon themselves.

This was just... What the hell?

While this is the most iconic, and absolute WORST example of this kind of behaviour, it is also hardly the first (or last) of obtuse railroading to occur for the sake of 'story'.

---

CLOSING

I would easily recommend Crusader Quest to anyone looking to read a good story, or observe a very effective style of writing. People who enjoy classical mythological stories would feel very much at home in its threads. I would NOT recommend this quest to anyone who wanted to feel as if their choices genuinely mattered.

The story is... Mostly Immutable, and it reads more like a Visual Novel than anything else. Minor choices are made, and they change little. Once you go back through the threads, you start noticing more and more little details where 'narrative freedom' was taken a little too far, and caused things like Hugo's broken arm, or Hugo having to be saved by Raymond because everytime he stepped outside of a building in all of Jerusalem, this one guard - the SAME guard - inevitably found him, and would just keep chasing him until he failed and it presumably transitioned to Raymond just showing up to save him.

In the end, I feel it's safe to say that Crusader Quest succeeds masterfully at being a 'story', but fails painfully at being a 'game'. As a quest walks the line between those two, this isn't something that can be just brushed out of the way, and the longer the threads go on, the more you start to see the discontent this dichotomy causes. For some this is a matter of taste, as to whether you prefer quests for the story or the agency of having a game to play through, but I personally found it frustrating as time went on.

I feel the QM needs to be more flexible in how they write and adapt some of their plotlines, or at the very least, gain a more complete understanding of where their story and scripted events should end, in relation to the choices and desires of the players. There is a balance to be had, and right now it is sorely lacking. Struggling is good, suffering and loss builds character, but none of it matters if it is arbitrarily lopped onto someone.

The only thing that can build is a steadily budding resentment.