Tria: Kingdom of Aurial, the first instalment of the Tria otome game series. When games like these have big competitions it is usually tough for startup or newcomer companies to gain popularity, except Tria didn't have this problem. They went all out with their marketing as if they had an endless pit of money, not leaving a single stone unturned. Revealing snippets of their upcoming game running on the latest engine, triple A standard but free, while also releasing gameplay footage, advertisements on YouTube and Instagram, all the way down to merchandise.
Tria wasn't just a simple otome game. It was a full open world fantasy RPG, and when the initial information dropped, the gaming community was divided almost immediately.
The developers had made a bold call. Instead of targeting a specific demographic they went wide, blending romance routes and narrative driven otome mechanics with a deep lore heavy world, a fully fleshed out combat system and an open world scale that had no business being in the same genre. The kind of ambition that either defines a studio or buries it.
The forums did not hold back.
Posts were everywhere calling it an overreach. Otome players did not want complex combat. Action RPG players were not going to touch a romance game. The world building looked impressive on paper but ambitious lore without proper execution was just glorified padding. Streamers picked it up as easy content, dissecting every trailer and developer note, some mocking the combat previews, others convinced the romance routes would be shallow filler sandwiched between mechanics that did not belong together.
The general consensus from a loud portion of the community was that it would collapse within a week of release under the weight of its own ambition.
What nobody accounted for was that the developers seemed entirely unbothered. No defensive posts. No clarifications. They just kept dropping content. Lore entries. Combat footage. World details that suggested the map was larger than anything in the genre had attempted before.
Which only made people more curious despite themselves.
On the day the game dropped the hate only grew, but the reason was completely different.
The romance quests were absolute hell.
Clearing the first event alone filtered out a significant portion of the player base. Only thirty percent of players managed to get through it without their favourability dropping into the negatives, and that was considered an achievement worth posting about. The affection system had no tolerance for error. A single wrong action choice, something as minor as the wrong greeting or the right words said at the wrong moment, was enough to send the total affection bar into a freefall that was nearly impossible to recover from.
Most players assumed a new save would fix it. Go in with the knowledge of what not to do and simply avoid the mistakes the first time around.
Wrong.
The developers had anticipated exactly that. Every new save reshuffled the options entirely. The choices that saved your run the first time meant nothing the second time because they simply were not there anymore. The correct answers were not locked in, they were rotating, context sensitive and deliberately designed to punish players who thought they had figured the system out. Muscle memory was useless. Guides became outdated almost immediately. The community could not even compile a reliable answer sheet because no two saves played out the same way.
It was the kind of design that made players furious but at the same time hungry for the challenge, unable to put it down.
Roswald was one of those players, but for the combat aspect.
-break-
Inside a white tent held up by a single worn log, Oryn sat cross legged, a clay bowl balanced in his hands. The soup inside bubbled sluggishly, catching the light in a way that was almost impressive for something that smelled that bad.
Amazing. Just amazing. I know I didn't wish for a five star but even a zero point five star meal would have been better than this.
While Oryn sat grumpily a figure beside him brushed his hair gently. "What's wrong Oryn, don't feel like eating?"
His gaze shifted to the figure. "O-oh, no mother it's just, it's..." Oryn stuttered nervously, his eyes darting around the way an introvert's do. "It's just..."
His mother breathed a quiet chuckle. "The food today doesn't look appetizing does it."
Oryn smiled sheepishly. "Yeah."
Sitting to his right she continued to brush his hair and Oryn didn't refuse. He wasn't sure if it was his own feeling or something left behind by the previous Oryn, but either way he didn't mind it as much as he probably should have.
"You were always a picky eater you know, even as a baby you refused to."
"Okay mother, I know," Oryn cut in, cheeks flushed. "You really don't have to go into detail."
Oryn's eyes fell back to the sludge sitting in his bowl. His thoughts were split between how safe it actually was to eat and the very loud opinion his stomach was forming on the matter. Right now it felt like a whole circus of rats had taken up residence inside him.
He glanced over at Allen for a moment.
Even he looks more appetizing than this.
Still, he decided against cannibalism. At least not yet.
Oryn took a spoonful and put it in his mouth the way a child forces medicine down their throat, bracing for impact. His expression twisted.
How does something taste this disgusting and this fulfilling at the same time.
His hunger won. Without fully realizing it he found himself working through the bowl faster than he intended, disgust losing ground with every spoonful until the bowl was almost empty.
Sitting to his left, Allen nudged his shoulder without a word, gesturing pointedly to his own empty bowl.
Oryn exhaled through his nose.
"Just don't tell your dad," he muttered under his breath. With the two mothers deep in their own conversation he reached over and scraped the last remnants from his bowl into Allen's.
"Oryn." The voice came sharp and immediate. "What do you think you are doing. You might not like it but you still have to eat, you need to survive." A pause, then directed elsewhere. "Jeez Gilda, you really are too soft on that boy."
"No, no, this is," Oryn fumbled, then straightened. "I made a bet with Allen and lost."
Rosa turned to Allen with the particular look that mothers reserve for when they already know the answer. "Really."
Allen held her gaze, his expression caught somewhere between firm and terrified. "Yes," he said, a little too forcefully. "It's true. It's mine and I'm not sharing."
"Brat, do you need a spanking or what? Learn how to speak to your mother," Rosa scolded, grabbing Allen by the ear and pulling it firmly.
Gilda chuckled.
The mood felt warm. The kind of warm that settles into the shoulders and makes you forget, even briefly, where you are and what you have lost. But sometimes warmth can be a poison to an iced heart.
Drip.
Drip.
Oryn was the first to notice. His eyes drifted to her face and something in his chest went still.
"Mother?"
Rosa looked over. "Gilda."
She only said her name. She didn't ask what was wrong. It wasn't the first time and they both knew it. Instead she let the silence breathe for a moment before asking softly, "Do you want to say something?"
Gilda opened her mouth. Closed it. Then tried again.
"I just." She stopped. Swallowed. "I am afraid."
The words came out smaller than she intended, like something she had been holding at arm's length for a long time and had finally let get too close.
"It has only been two months and I know, for Oryn's sake, I know I have to move on." Her voice caught. "But moving on means accepting that I lost them both."
"I am afraid of forgetting this pain. Of waking up one day and moving forward like nothing happened." She pressed her lips together. "I am scared of."
She exhaled.
"I am scared to feel happy again."
-break-
Oryn sat on a pile of rocks, staring into the red clouded sky. Beneath the bright sun he reminded himself just how absurd his situation was. Not only had he been transmigrated to another world but into the body of a slave, and right now he wasnt even in the human world but the demon world, Goetia.
His eyes were solemn as his thoughts drifted back to what had happened. Rosa told us both to go to Gram for a while. I guess she didn't want me to see mother like that.
Her eyes had cried two rivers, each drop carrying a weight of loss and pain. That was what Oryn felt looking at his mother's face in that moment.
Sigh..
"I should take a look at my status, hope I got at least a two to three percent more xp."
-=— [Oryn Greer] —=-
Heroine : Zadia Serath
Gift : Temporal Breach
Profession : Slave
Level : 5 [0%—[15%]———————100%] XP
Mana Core : White [Mana capacity : 500/500]
Blessings Possessed : 180
Element : Aero
Titles : [The Knight Who Condemns Luck]
Items (2/5) : [Armour of Tyche] , [Blade of Beginning]
-==-
Oryn smiled while he stared at the screen for a moment then dismissed it with a quiet exhale. From eleven to fifteen percent. Better than what he had hoped for.
"Oryn." Allen's voice came soft and careful. "Are you okay?"
Oryn looked over at him. The concern on Allen's face was so unguarded it was almost hard to look at directly. He couldn't help but smile.
Allen was only eleven, about to turn twelve in May. A kid by every measure. But Oryn was a grown man on the inside, and even so, pride had a funny way of making itself known regardless.
He got up from the rock pile and jumped down to Allen's level, flicking him square on the forehead.
"That's big bro Oryn to you. And you're too young to be worrying about me."
Surprised, Allen grabbed his forehead with both hands. "Ugh, why?"
"Come on, let's go find your fa—" Oryn stopped mid sentence.
Up ahead a crowd of humans and dwarves had gathered, tighter than usual, voices dropped low and uneasy. Shoulders were drawn in, eyes darting. A few of the older miners had gone very still in the way people go still when they are trying not to react to something that already has them scared.
Oryn caught a few words drifting over.
"Did you hear, he's coming back for the monthly inspection."
A bead of sweat ran down the side of one man's jaw despite the fact that he hadn't been working. His eyes stayed fixed on the ground.
"The camp's warden." Someone else confirmed, voice barely above a breath. "Two days."
A brief silence fell over the cluster of bodies before the voice finished what it started.
"He's coming in two days."