AlwaysFan is a linear VN that follows the story of Emilie and MC after they have a chance encounter due to financial difficulties. After opening an AF account and doing photo shoots, they find new friends, girlfriends and enemies throughout their journey as they slowly uncover the shady business behind the industry.
Story & Writing:
The story is unique and concise, getting straight to the point without running in circles as many other VNs do. The dialogues are well-written despite some grammatical errors here and there, so the reading experience is smooth. The story manages to make you feel a wide range of emotions as you read, both good and bad, but mostly bad. From a purely creative standpoint, the game is well-written.
That being said, the pacing is awful and some narrative decisions are even worse.
First of all, I absolutely despise the premise of this game. You meet Emilie after years of not seeing each other, and you're presented with two options: Declare your undying love for this girl you barely know, or rape her. The next day you'll talk to her about money problems and immediately coerce this girl you barely know into selling photos of her body online. Depending on your choices, the next day you can start whoring her out to gangbang parties. Oh, and did I mention that you barely know this girl?
No matter how you slice it, the opening is atrocious and does a great job at painting the MC as a selfish, low-testosterone menace who is very quick to exploit a girl he barely talked to in high school and just suddenly turned up at his door. I understand the reasoning of resorting to AF (because it's literally in the title), but you're given very little wiggle room to even decide how you want to play. The only "freedom" you have is if you want to post nudes or not, but that's exclusive to the Love route and you're still forced to do OF regardless.
There are three routes: Love, Domination and NTR. The Dom and NTR routes overlap, so it's technically only two routes. You either go full vanilla or full psycho, no in-between. The only way to "love" Emilie while still dominating her in bed is to rape her on day 1 and then make her your girlfriend a few days later. This is just sloppy writing through and through. I've seen some people giving wild ideas on how to fix the opening, but the solution is so simple, man. Just create a third variable called "love_sub" that gives you a different scene where you seduce Emilie with domination while still saying you love her. That still wouldn't fix how rushed the opening is, but it's a start. It would also give you the option to avoid posting nudes without being locked in the Love route.
After doing photo shoots with Emilie, you meet other girls and... do photo shoots for them. Look, I get it, it's in the title, but every single girl you meet will open an AF account. This makes them shallow and means you won't see any difference in their storylines beyond superficial flavor text. Meet girl, take photos, fuck. Most of the girls are very uninteresting as well, making me wonder why they're even included. Besides Emilie, I only really liked Cassandra and maybe Natacha. Abby is nice but should've been introduced on day 1, not day 39.
Furthermore, all the girls are portrayed as poor little angels struggling to make money in a society plagued by unemployment, and their only choice is AF. I love debauchery in the fictional media I consume, but this game feels oddly preachy with its subject matter. It even gives you an incredibly out-of-place scene with some religious people protesting against AF and calling Emilie a slut, before Emilie and MC retort with some bullshit about empowerment. This portrayal of OF models as innocent sweethearts being unfairly hated by the evil prudish society is awfully preachy and disconnected from reality.
A story with flimsy writing and superficial characters should at least make you feel good as you read it, but for some reason, AlwaysFan's overall "vibe" is weirdly bleak. You're immediately thrown into a conspiracy related to prostitution, rape and human trafficking. That sets the tone for the entirety of the game, with minimum breaks. The set-up of sex scenes does little to lighten the atmosphere, as every sex scene starts and ends the same way with zero build-up. Even Emilie, the main girl, gets no leisure time with the MC until the MMO thing is introduced, and even then we barely play it. All these things result in a weirdly dark game, both figuratively and literally.
Art & Sexual Content:
One good thing about the art is that the cast is very diverse. Body shape, height, skin tone and sexual features are varied, giving you plenty of flavors to choose from. That being said, some of the girls look incredibly bland and uninspired. Even the girls at the convention look nicer than some of our cast, but that's subjective.
Other than that, standard Honey Select through and through. The animations are decent, some very good, but overall nothing to write home about. The dialogue during sex scenes is also bland and repetitive. Facial expressions are just standard Honey Select slop, very uninteresting and lacking in emotion.
As for the sexual content in general, literally all the fetish content is locked behind the NTR route. As other have said, even if you want to see the sex scenes in the NTR path, the steps you need to take in order to reach them are enough to put a lot of people off. If you want to play as an even slightly decent protagonist, you'll be locked in the Love route, and the Love route is very vanilla. Seriously, even the exhibitionism content only appears twice in two very short and uninteresting scenes. Swinging is also locked behind the NTR route, which is locked behind Robert's gangbangs. And the only real swinging only happens once with Jason and twice with Nicolas. Everything else is just you pimping Emilie and the others out.
The domination route was the only one I had some fun with, but the love route is the only one that makes sense, which is why it disappointed me. I really wanted to enjoy the love harem, but the lack of chemistry between the characters and the absence of variety in sex scenes was just awful. Even the domination route is literally the same story but with different flavor text, like calling the MC "Master" instead of "Darling." Other than that, there are almost no differences in sex scenes between the two routes.
The lack of kinks wouldn't even be an issue if the sex scenes were at least good and rewarding, but there's no passion, no emotion, no nuances, nothing. I like Emilie, which is why it sucks having to choose between abusing a character that I like or pretending like I love her when our relationship has no chemistry and sex scenes don't feel intimate. The only time that the sex scenes are kinda nice is towards the very end, after finishing the main plot and taking some days to relax with Emilie. The NTR path is probably decent if you really like that type of content, but everything else is just shallow despite the dev claiming that you won't be short-changed for choosing a non-NTR route.
The photo shoots are also completely dry and boring, as expected. There's literally nothing hot about seeing photo shoots in a porn game. The real action happens outside of the photo shoots, making me wonder what's even the point of the premise. This could've been an actually decent game if the same characters were introduced in a different setting.
Gameplay & Technical Aspects:
Standard VN gameplay. Surprisingly good BGM and sex sounds. Other than that, the game is well-coded and I didn't get any bugs or error screens.
I could talk about the terrible route system here, but I'd be repeating myself.
Final Thoughts:
I honestly can't think of a reason to recommend this game unless you like the premise (for some reason) and don't mind any of the things I criticized, like the botched writing, uninspired characters, repetitive sex scenes, etc. Actually, you might enjoy this game if you're very into NTR and just want something new to play. Otherwise, I don't think it's worth it.
After previously dropping this game twice, I finally understand why it has good ratings. A lot of people dropped it on the first ten minutes because of the introduction, so it's almost like a filter. The only ones who played past the introduction are the ones who were already following the development and didn't mind the setting. I, on the other hand, recently played a phenomenal VN that raised some bars for me, so I can't give a higher rating despite really liking Emilie and a few of the other girls. This could've been a great game in a different setting and with more care put into the characters and sex scenes. Hell, if the whole game felt like it did in the final scenes (and didn't force us into the OF bullshit), it would've been a great experience. But as it stands, Emilie deserved better. Everyone deserved better.
