Okay. This is my first post in this thread and (more important) in the Zone, so ehm.. hi members/fans? ^^ (and hi staff.. I guess? if I understood correctly, newbies need their three first posts to be checked)
Just completed the first season of this game (after playing through Acting Lessons, which was really great btw) and felt I needed to share some of my thoughs with y'all. Like most people must have said through the 4000+ pages (!) of this thread already, I was genuinely impressed by the writing of these games. Never played through any Ren'py/VN games, so yeah, I was kinda going into uncharted territory. But still, I was really surprised of myself being
that involved with the story and the characters. For the record, I am not someone that is easily moved by a movie or a song or anything, so GJ to the author because.. wow! AL and BAD S1 were quite an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed my ass off during the fun/comedic parts and genuinely felt like sh*t during the dramatic/sad moments. The use of music, combined with the great renders of the characters (facial expressions and stuff) and the overall good writing really did the trick for me. I didn't even have the feeling of playing an adult game, I was just... genuinely experiencing a compelling story in which I surprisingly found a lot of myself in. Sure Being A DIK kinda goes all over the place from times to times and tends to exagerate certain (most?) situations to reinforce the drama and/or the comedy, but in the end, it's still fun and captivating, and that's kinda why I was in for in the first place.
I enjoy a lot BAD so far, and I absolutely love the characters. The only thing I didn't really like is the whole Maya/Josy being in a relationship. The twist was okay but, in another hand, I kinda felt it was not that well executed. I felt it was something that was added on the way, and not imagined from the beginning. I really liked Maya being on her own and not being related to another girl/main character. But in the end I understand why the author made that choice (it helped a lot in the character development and Josy now have a lot more importance to the story). And speaking of choices, I really enjoyed the DIK/CHICK duality system. It adds a lot to the "actions have their consequences" thingy and really involves the player deeply into the story.
Can't wait to get into Episode 5 (and the future episodes after that), for now I'm going all-in with Maya and Jill, with a little bit of Sage from times to times (gonna be hard when we'll have to decide lol).
Also, nothing to do with the above, but I was wondering if the full savefiles that you can download just unlock the missing renders/scenes or if they also change the paths/choices you made during the initial playthrough. I'm asking because I kinda lost a lot of extras because of the game constantly crashing on me every 5 minutes or so (dunno what's the issue exactly but I'm working on it, seems to be hardware related but I'm not completely sure). The thing is, when the game crashes, even if you did a quick save just before it does, you somehow lose the renders and the scenes you unlocked (only way I found to keep them was save and then quit the game myself before it crashes).