# Review of AV Director Life!
45/50 - Outstanding, enjoyable, must-play with minor flaws.
An exquisite experience - from an expressive voice actress to the variety of the h-scenes that draws you back with its animated charm. It has its flaws: for gameplay (body part development, clothes clipping). Story depth is limited: debt drives tension, money eventually resolves it, and post-game lacks engagement. Developing your relationship with the cast was great, but you eventually max out events/messages. Progression in equipment and energy scales well and is rewarding to the player. It lends itself well for immersion of being an Adult Video Director, from adjusting the brightness/colors of lights to the angles of the camera and duration of clips. Then to actually edit those clips and sell onto the market based on trends. By interweaving the h-scenes as part of the core gameplay mechanic makes it stand out from other games. The amount of voiced h-scenes/positions/plays is what elevates it from forgettable into something remarkable. Give it a try.
It is also Uncensored.
## Issues
- Drive Space: Clips are recorded as-is so the data file size on your computer can grow unless you delete old clips.
- Performance: This game may not be fully optimized, as for me it heavily used my 3080 Ti GPU and PC ran hot.
- The translation / localization can be off. e.g., part development -> body part development; or non-Japanese actor cannot be sold -> can't sell illegal videos of other characters besides Nodoka's (Female Main Character FMC). For the most part, its mostly understandable in English and may need guesswork on some words such as that.
- AI art is just for some things like a poster and card game, not really impactful. Updated with real art in a later patch.
### NTR?
- NTR is avoidable if you choose not to engage in those mechanics, no real loss other than not playing some plays/scenes that include other actors besides you
- There is a statistic in Nodoka's profile (how many other actors she's been with besides you)
- BF adds to this statistic so you can do it once to access more scenes (particularly where you do the NTR and take her back from her BF)
## Scoring
I'll score it on 5 categories, up to 10 points each.
1. Gameplay & Mechanics
2. Theme & Story
3. Design & Presentation
4. Player Experience
5. Innovation & Longevity
## Gameplay 9/10
- Debt is the primary source of tension and challenge, money is the central mechanic to resolve debt.
- The penalty of missing a debt payment is taking half of your current money
- The fail-state is missing debt payments three times (Game Over)
- The rules (for rating a video) can be unclear at first.
- Could have been cleared up with a better English translation, e.g., "part development" really meant body part development. Or "non-Japanese actor cannot be sold" just meant you can only sell videos of the main heroine, no one else.
- However, the rules are consistent, for example the play badges for judging a video from theme, location, and duration are easy to follow as they display badges during editing.
- Engagement was great: You can really immerse yourself as the director, adjusting the brightness/colors of lighting, adjusting the camera angles in 3D, or deciding on the duration of the clips.
- Editing the actual video is the part of the gameplay loop to gain more "play badges" essentially the variety of content, locations, themes, etc. Then adjusting it to match market trends to earn more money. Its quite creative and really does feel like you are an amateur to expert AV director.
- There are also mini-games to break out of the main gameplay loop of recording.
- Replay value is great, can change the outfit, angles, and timings for the scenes
- As for balance, it was well-designed progression of energy system, recording equipment that scales well from the beginning with a low quality smartphone to late game high-end camera.
- Clothes can clip during h-scenes
- Optimal gameplay requires one to simply wait out during one position in the h-scenes to fully max out the body part development and then switch to another position for another body part.
- You can check out the progress of part development in the bottom right during filming, as it maxes out when its red.
- This can be sped up with the purchase of items in the store. Still, this may be the intention of the devs since players may be "busy" during the h-scenes
## Theme & Story 7/10
Theme is debt.
The story is MC becomes an AV Director with FMC as actress to both pay off their debts. in what seems to be modern-day Japan. No deeper world building than that.
- The stakes and tensions (debt) are always present as you have to pay it off every 5 days.
- Through events and text messages you can really immerse yourself with developing a relationship with the characters
## Design & Presentation 10/10
- The game design that integrates and blends the adult scenes into the core gameplay really elevates the experience.
- The anime-esque style visuals are seductive, enough for me to come back to
- The UI is straightforward - there is a exhaustive tips/help system that has some quirks because of translation issues
- Polished enough as almost all text, buttons, etc. were aligned and centered
- What really sold it to me was the extremely apt casting of the voice actress, the FMC. The Nodoka's (FMC), voice actress had remarkable delivery and matched the character so well (college-girl) with enthusiasm and emotion - especially in those h-scenes from lovey-dovey to BDSM play.
## Player Experience 10/10
- Players would find this quite fun being an AV Director for well-designed FMC. I genuinely enjoyed myself as the scenes were tempting.
- The mini-games are a good addition to break out of the main gameplay loop, but still be useful as it earns money. The variety is there from memory recall, clicker, to card games. Players may be divided on the mini-games.
- In terms of satisfaction, players are rewarded well for their efforts. You can really sense your progression - from barely scraping by recording only 20 second clips to being able to record 40 second clips and any expensive location. The passive income you get from videos is quite rewarding.
## Innovation & Longevity 9/10
- Really surprised me that you actually can record and edit videos within the game. Points for creativity there.
- As for depth, once you mastered the play badge video mechanics and passive income gain from videos it reaches a ceiling for mastery.
- Still, for early to mid game was definitely tests the players skills their limited energy to recording videos, part-time jobs (mini-games), editing, market research and exploration (for item gathering and energy restore such as drinks).
- Without a new-game plus mechanic, starting from scratch still allows the player to use their newfound foresight and prescience to finally beat the debt payments. Its quite satisfying doing so.
- No post-game, once the debt is fully cleared and when your money gain is so high there isn't any more tension compelling the player to earning more.
- Will players keep coming back? With a lack of post-game or DLC (hopefully with Yuna), the only factor keeping players back is the delicious h-scenes to replay.