What are your thoughts on narratives that have a game like "System"?
That includes all variants of this trope even if it's a subversion.
It used to be a neat concept to me. And I see it as one of many types of the generic superpower there can be, like super strength, invisibility, levitation, etc.
However I have issues with systems when they hijack characters motivations.
For example, MC can obtain money/status/power by loving their partner.
Or, MC must confess their feelings to the she-devil, even if there's no romantic feelings to begin with, or else the system will transform the MC into an ant.
Or, ding! By random chance MC just so happens to Gotcha the exact deus ex machina to solve the problem at hand from the system.
Such brute force kind of incentivising feels like lazy writing. Although sometimes they are fun to read in the short term, they'd ultimately leave me feeling the story as being empty or even meaningless. This is especially the case of slice of life stories.
Reading a protagonist who's behavior revolves entirely based on whatever a system arbitrarily commands them to do simply by the system forcing the incentives makes the whole story feels empty.
MC doesn't love their partner because it's their partner; MC love them because the system pays MC to do it.
MC doesn't take on certain mission because "it's the right thing to do" or even because they want to, but simply because the system only rewards MC for doing said mission, or punish if otherwise.
MC goes on to argue with the top professors who graded their nationals exam that the score should be changed from a 100% to a 97% because that's the exact percentage the system gives the reward of infinite school knowledge for the next exam.
With the system, all those motivations of MC technically make sense. But when I take a step back and consider if there were no system, the characters then would appear ridiculous, as in: "what the fuck are any of them doing with their lives?" Kind of ridiculousness.
This is why I write my story with System, but I don't read them.
My story has a system because the story is about reincarnating into videogame world with videogame powers. So I gave the character the game's UI, like the inventory slot and armor slots etc, and call that a system. (Also I feel like Systems are a meme in writing by now)
But I don't read the system stories anymore, mostly because the story of that type popular enough for me to encounter randomly are all of those that use systems to brute force character motivation and plot progression.
It numbs my brain.