Elmwood kinda had me on a rollercoaster.
See it has all the makings of a bad game. A billion love interests and general harem route stuff meaning that nobody could possibly be interesting.
But the writing actually somehow makes most of the massive cast pretty intriguing, you get caught up in the drama and it's like watching a teen romcom or something. It's kinda great. Now, because the cast is so massive, 2 or 3 just end up being pretty generic and boring, not much you can do. The rest is impressive though. But you do need to be fine with stereotypes, with the cast being so big everyone does need some sort of cliched archetype or typecast to differentiate.
Funnily enough the dialogue between characters also had me like this. The start isn't great. You can really see the dev was bullshitting out at times to get through stuff, characters felt less like themselves and more like a façade for the dev. But it gets into gear later on and more lifelike. I even found some of the jokes to be somewhat clever which is an impossibility for porn VNs.
The animations and renders could use some work. Standards are ever increasing and people are doing great work in these renpy VNs now. Standard daz crap just doesn't really cut it anymore.
Overall a solid game.
See it has all the makings of a bad game. A billion love interests and general harem route stuff meaning that nobody could possibly be interesting.
But the writing actually somehow makes most of the massive cast pretty intriguing, you get caught up in the drama and it's like watching a teen romcom or something. It's kinda great. Now, because the cast is so massive, 2 or 3 just end up being pretty generic and boring, not much you can do. The rest is impressive though. But you do need to be fine with stereotypes, with the cast being so big everyone does need some sort of cliched archetype or typecast to differentiate.
Funnily enough the dialogue between characters also had me like this. The start isn't great. You can really see the dev was bullshitting out at times to get through stuff, characters felt less like themselves and more like a façade for the dev. But it gets into gear later on and more lifelike. I even found some of the jokes to be somewhat clever which is an impossibility for porn VNs.
The animations and renders could use some work. Standards are ever increasing and people are doing great work in these renpy VNs now. Standard daz crap just doesn't really cut it anymore.
Overall a solid game.