The Dragon and the Djinn

A readable CYOA with a setting that I really liked but incredibly narrow in its scope which is kind of surprising considering its price and wordcount. Is there any practical reason why the love interests are gender locked? Why your sister has to be your sister and not a brother? Aside from some physical description crumbs here and there, as far as I could tell (I didn't finish it), there's no reason as they all more or less act and speak the same anyway. There is only one heterosexual male love interest in the entire thing? Could be the rich guy, could be the rude warrior, who knows, neither is appealing either way. A lot of the time these games suffer from vague options but this suffers the opposite problem where the options are incredibly opaque, to the extent you can see the limited routes in your mind's eye immediately. These limited choices are made more "palatable" by the writer by making everyone equally terrible, not even particularly morally ambiguous. I assume the idea being you won't feel bad for picking B instead of A or C. All of this is made worse by how severe the stat checks are. If you are not constantly picking the same sort of skill and only that one, you will f…

I suppose the premise was entertaining but at no point did I ever encounter an interesting character and the dialogue between these uninteresting characters did very little to draw me into the story. The ending I got was very brief and anti-climactic. I am unable to find a single redeeming quality that would allow me to recommend this title to anyone.

Poor writing, plot holes everywhere, continuity of the story is often broken between paragraphs, impossible confusing names, an imbecile protagonist who always acts the most stupidly possible, and a useless Djinni. It's a no, especially considering the price. There are cheaper better stories than this one.

This could have been a really, really, great game with its magic sword, an exotic setting in a country where magic is normal, anyone who is anybody owns a djinn, and you've met a bunch of powerful people who you can befriend, romance or betray. But somehow it doesn't quite make it. I've given it a thumbs up because its simply not that bad, but its somewhat mediocre at best. Perhaps the CoG formula forces the game-maker to pack too much into it so that there is not enough of anything to give the story line any definition beyond the MC dashing around like a headless chook, as if they are always two minutes late for the main event, while the player feels railroaded into situations they have little or no agency over. The limitations of the CoG format seems to give many imaginative storytellers problems as they try to fit in everything they want to tell into too few chapters and words, and I suspect this is exactly what has happened here. There is not time nor space enough to fully flesh out the characters or fully explain what is going on, though that does help place the player in the shoes of an MC who seems to be trying very hard to catch up on what is happening in the world around…

Very well written story, i loved everything about the setting. I especially love the way magic works in this universe. So many stories tend to just go "it's magic, it just works! Don't think about it." but here they actually try to apply some logic to it and they were able to do so in a way that works and has things make sense but also without ruining the fun that magic is supposed to be. I also absolutely loved the characters, they all had interesting personalities and I especially loved Khalid (Or Kholoud) I am not good with words but i thought they were a very fun and fascinating character and i really enjoyed getting to know them. If i were to add or alter anything, i'd simply want there to be more of an epilogue. Overall, i'm actually quite happy with what's already there, i don't think anything should be changed... buuuuuuut also i absolutely love this world and characters and i'd just want the story to never end :'D

Weird, but good