Version 0.30
This is an update to my review on the version 0.22d I did a year ago. While not much content has been added since, I felt the need to reevaluate my judgment towards this game, as there were many qualities and flaws I glossed over and I wish to give a less biased verdict.
For starters, the gameplay is really pushed foward in this VN, even by Japanese VN standards. In the vein of Dungeons and Dragons, there are many character classes to choose from, each with their own gear, stat changes, abilities and upgrades for you to experiment with. It looks pretty vast, but unfortunately, only a few of those are actually useful; most of them are just slight variants of the same set of abilities, or just plain worse versions of some others.
It's not possible to reassign your stats once you've leveled them up either, so if you went for a particular build (melee for example) and wish to switch to a more magical build just to see what it does, you will need to grind a lot to be even remotely completent, or just restart the game all over and pich a different starting background.
The status effects are complicated. They are numerous and varied, and the sheer number makes them difficult to learn. The game helps you by letting you hover the cursor on their icons to see what they do, but most are vague and offer no description available outside combat, forcing the player to go into battle to test each build and see what they do.
For most of them, their effects in a fight are so minor they are easy to neglect and just focus on hitting fast and hard. The only ones that will be somewhat relevant to you are the Stun status that some builds can spam, and Initiative to indicate the attack order of characters.
So yeah, the gameplay has many good ideas, and it feels pretty alright once you get the hand of things. But the developer prbably should have cut back on some of those mechanics and opt for a more straightforward combat system. Plus, it wouldn't have crippled the already glacial development pace of the main story for so long.
Presentation-wise, this is your typical anime style, nothing that sticks out of the crowd. The character sprites during dialogues are pretty alright, and some character designs (like Metatron's) are pretty cute and pretty. The adult illustrations, however, look very amateurish and can vary in quality pretty often, most of that quality flying pretty low, to be honest. That, on top of being the most vanilla shit you could find in that kind of game, which always struck me as odd in MG games, being focused on "freakish" monsters and all that.
But the real problem with the presentation comes from the variety of sprites you can see in combat, where the artstyle of the enemies clashes jarringly with the rest of the game. Divine Dawn is not the only game to have differents artstyles of varying degrees of quality, but it is certainly one of the most egregious examples, and not in a good way.
I've never understood why hentai developers took the habit of hiring different artists with different artstyles for their adult scenes and whatnot, instead of having a single artist, with a consistent artstyle and vision throughout the entire game. Because as it is, the quality for some of those sprites are either nowhere near the standard I'd expect from an adult game nowadays, or so outlandish that it often takes you out of the experience completely. On of the most striking examples of this is you can go fight an disgusting eldritch abomination in a forest late into this version of the game, with serious stakes to the fight and all, and then suddenly a horny fairy girl with huge boobs joins the fight, and you're like "Oh yeah, right, I'm playing a porn game, I forgot."
The developer really should have taken his time to create or commission enough sprites from a single artist to form a more coherent aesthetic with the rest of the game. It would have been at the expense of content, sure, but at least what would be there would be good and wouldn't detract from what the game is going for and doesn't break the immersion.
Now, there's only the story to talk about, and I think this is where Divine Dawn really drops the ball. Specifically, with how the characters talk and interect with each other, and the dialogues.
The first quarter of the game is, honestly, really good, and it really hooks you for what's to come in the future. You get thrown into a weird dimension, you have no idea where you are, why the place is abandoned by its creators, nor why there are monsters running around. You free two succubi from what seems to be a prison, and then an angel who you help fight against an eldritch space monster that threatens to kill you all. You go back to the normal world, and you learn that apparently, the gods and angels have dissapeared, and so you go on a quest to find out what happened.
This part of the game is really good. It successfully instigates mystery and raises many questions about the world the MC lives in. The introductions for every character there is pretty well done; each one of them has a distinct personality and an additional aura of mystery surrounding them, being from the weirs dimension you just escaped. Who are they? why were they locked up there? It's also a good thing the story brings us to the first adult content fairly quickly, content which become very frequent and easy to access past that point in the story, so that's a big plus.
Unfortunately, the game drops the act pretty quickly and gives you the answers to most of those questions fairly early later on. In this case it's excusable because it props up the motivation to go on an adventure, but it's still not very well handled. It breaks a lot of the tension and undermines the aura of importance some of those characters have.
But then, those characters tag along with you on your journey, and that's where the problems really start: The dialogues.
The characters themselves are all pretty nice, distinct in their personalities, qualities and flaws, troubles and development. Some are more developed than others, and I doubt the usefulness of some of them in the plot, like Aspasia or Maya, but on the whole, all are relatively likeable, even the MC. The game gets rid of the femdom and rape clichés that have plagued MG games for a very long time, and opts instead for a more wholesome, consensual approach, which takes longer to establish a relationship between the characters before going through with the deed, which creates a bond with the player and makes these characters more likeable.
The problem comes with the way their traits are presented to the player: Via bland, extremely long and winded dialogues and monologues that tell more than they show.
The dialogues and monologues are long. For one line of dialogue, there can be 2, 3, 4 or 5 blocks of text of a monologue from the MC describing the characters' facial expressions, elements of the setting, useless lore that only serves to justify a meager stat change or new ability, what they might be thinking or just to tell jokes that aren't funny. All this text could easily have been replaced by more succinct descriptions, or replaced outright by illustrations or better use of sprite changes to indicate a change of mood or whatever.
What's more, many of these dialogues and monologues serve only to repeat over and over again things already said in other characters' dialogues, or even in previous dialogues with the same character. I understand that this is because the dev couldn't predict which characters the player would want to interact with, or in which order, and so he was forced to fit it into all the routes to make sure the player didn't miss these events, but he overdid it. Seriously, take a shot every time the MC say “Goddess”, or that “they're still just teens”, and that they “will figure it out as time goes on”. It's unbearable.
This is particularly annoying for scenes building up the romantic tension between characters. Since these dialogues are designed to promote consensual relationships, there are plenty of moments where the MC aggressively insists on making sure the girls want to sleep with him, like “You're sure about that? I don't want to ruin our relationship. I'll only do it if you want to do it, are you absolutely sure? Send me the confirmation by email and enter your password so I'm sure it's what you want”.
My fucking god, is the MC flirting with her or defusing a bomb? The developer goes to great lengths to make PP as non-offensive as possible, to the point of being annoying at times. It completely nukes the erotic tension of these scenes by having the MC attempting to cockblock himself every two seconds.
Please stop. In understand you want to establish wholesome, consensual sex scenes, but this is taking it way too far.
Worst of all, these dialogues have a negative impact on story progression, as all these useless dialogues could have been converted into plot-advancing text, with new places to explore and new characters to meet and recruit. There is progression, but it's slow, the developer preferring to add new dialogues for characters already present rather than advance the story, and I don't understand why, as you already know pretty much everything there is to know about these characters, so what's even the point ? There isn't even any adult scene at the end to compensate, either.
Another problem stemming from piling dialogues on some characters and the lack of story content: The characters talk as if they'd lived through the Vietnam war. They're constantly talking about trauma, war and that sort of thing, but apart from the succubi's pasts and the angel, none of that happened in the story. Sure, there was the episode in the temple and in the forest, but that's still too early in the plot to talk about that sort of thing.
From the player's POV, not much has happened to merit this development. These extra dialogues seem to exist as if the player had progressed at least 5 chapters from where we are at the moment. It's a really bizarre decision coming from the dev.
There's also the story with Sam and Celica, a friendship that the player apparently ruined, but the game never explains what happened, and never makes the MC, Sam or Celica confront each other about it. At best, the game says the two girls don't get along, and makes some unfunny jokes about it, but that's it. The girls quickly say they don't hold a grudge against the MC, then adult scene. It's really bad in this instance.
In the end, I started skipping most of these dialogues and monologues, since most of them are just inconsequential lore that doesn't advance the plot or develop the characters, or nonsense and uninteresting jokes and descriptions. There are cool ideas and character arcs here, but very little of those is executed properly.
Overall Divine Dawn is still a very nice package, albeit a pretty bland one past its first quarter. The combat is fun and some plot points are pretty interesting. The first quarter is really good and worth playing the game just for that. But after that, it seems the dev lost track of the story he wanted to tell. The dialogues became more and more bloated, and the artstyle more inconsistent. The dev really needs to focus on progressing the story and hire a singular artist to to the work for him. Then it would need to fix the dialogues that are already there, and it would become something pretty cool.
