A Foretold Affair Reviews

Tl;dr watch a romance unfold through the eyes of someone who acts like a middle schooler having their first crush while simultaneously being on NG+, with all the (over)confidence of knowing how their story ends. An intriguing and largely light-hearted read with a happy ending, though not without a few darker moments. The amount of work that has gone into the character writing is outstanding. The trio of love interests, as well as Buffalo Seer themself, are allowed to have both flaws and endearing moments, even when you're not romancing them. While in conflict at first, the ordeal they endure together allows them to become closer in a way that feels genuine. Even Kea, who irritated me at first, eventually grew on me. If a romantic read is what you're looking for, this story might not be the right fit. Amorous interactions are on the tamer side, from hand-holding, naive declarations of love, to pet names. The romance was not spicy or full of drama, with most of the tension arising from misunderstandings and the mission at hand. However, if you like stories of a ragtag bunch becoming friends, it succeeds in delivering on that premise. The prose (including dialogue and descriptions) was competently written. It's not particularly vivid or poetic, but it does have a keen eye for minute details in character interactions that would usually go unnoticed in other stories. I noticed only a few typos, many of them towards the end. There's a strong tendency of showing over telling when it comes to the cast and plot. You are thrown into the narrative right away with little in the way of setups or exposition dumps. It expects you to draw conclusions yourself and not have to be explicitly told everything, which I personally appreciated. The music was pleasant to listen to, though there aren't many tracks so the experience felt repetitive after a time. I think it could have been used more sparingly to emphasise emotional beats instead of playing all the time. The art is also mostly good, though you'll notice that backgrounds are not rendered with the same amount of detail as the characters. It would've been nice to get some artwork for the gadabout since I don't recall getting a detailed description about it. Note about the sprites: the palms of darker-skinned characters should be lighter than the rest of their body. Regarding the worldbuilding, using Normal/Abnormal as terms was rather heavy-handed. It felt a little generic dystopian YA to me. Why wouldn't the Abnormals have their own endonym? These concepts do have some interesting developments, with each having their own culture and norms. Still, I would have liked to see the subject be treated with more gravitas, given the many parallels to real-world issues that the treatment of Abnormals draws from. I was actually a little sad about the story ending where it did; I would have liked to see the reunion/wedding of Buffalo Seer and their partner. Also, there was no closure about whether the police manages to catch whoever [spoiler]put the bounty on January's head. Who was it, and what do they want? Felicity said he would be taken to someplace in Ellon. The only other time that place was mentioned was to point out that January's father came from there.[/spoiler] That was too significant a plot point to not wrap up properly, in my opinion.