VN - Unity - Completed - Faulty Apprentice [v1.5.4 + DLCs 1-5] [AGL Studios]

Faulty Apprentice is a point-and-click adventure game with some dating simulator aspects. You control a young man that is conscripted to train in a castle filled with different monster girls. As the day passes, you level up your abilities in combat and advance the story and the relationships. The game has a fantastic art design, AGL Studios knows how to draw with amazing precision and detail. Which makes it even more sad because this game is one of the worst adult games I have ever had the displeasure of wasting my time. It is simply unbelievably boring and when anything resembling gameplay appears, it is below mediocre. The game is nothing near well made to demand certain precision dependent minigames that can get you an instant game over, forcing you to reload and losing progress. A massive mistake in development. You will soon check the no minigame options because they are all terrible and repetitive. The story is boring and very slow. One of the biggest drudges I have ever seen, with everything happening solely in this tiny castle while you go around talking to the same boring visually identical characters, over and over again to grind morale points and relationship points with just a pinch of them to rarely get rewarded with some very bland and pathetic picture. The scenes are very dull, with almost nothing interesting to show and only achievable in a brainless grind of repetitive interaction to increase the score needed. Said score and scenes are not created with a steady progress in depth and diversity of scenes, usually the entire point of a relationship meter. In short, the entire thing misses its purpose. On top of all that, the game has a fixed deadline to the final chapter, an endless sequence of boring events and fights that drags on forever without a new game plus, so you have to do it all over again. I would never recommend Faulty Apprentice, it was one of the worst experiences I ever had in this genre of games.

It really pains me to see a game like this. You can see the amount of effort the devs put into it compared to the multitude of adult games out there. The artstyle is stellar and sometimes even animated, and the story is filled with so many cool ideas that could have lead to interesting plots and development arcs for the characters. But in the end, the package just doesn't come together at all.

The first issue you'll come across quite early is that the gameplay just boils down to a few minigames, similar to what you would see on a mobile game; a ninja-fruit like style mini-game, another one where you have to hit the targets in the right order at the right time and whatnot. But this is a PC game and not a mobile game, and those mini-games are very uninspired and tedious to complete with a mouse, especially after you completed them for the billionth time with barely any variance between the numerous sessions.

On a technical standpoint, I found the game to be surprisingly buggy for that kind of game; not to the point of being unplayable, but there quite a few visual artefacts that keep cropping up from time to time, like some windows not properly opening or closing when you click on a button, or a fade to black not fading in back to the scene, or the skip button being stuck, making you loose massive swathes of dialogues. It's been a while since I last played this game, so my memories are a bit fuzzy, but I distincly recall these bugs forcing me at times to reload the game to get rid of them. I guess this can be attributed to the fact that in Unity, there is no built-in way to implement a VN or those kind of minigames, and so the devs had to implement everything themselves, but I've personally dabbled in those kind of mechanics in Unity, and there isn't really any excuse I can give them, considering they're charging a (quite hefty) price for this product.

For the actual adult content, there is absolutely none. The most you'll see is panty shots or nude variants of some poses for certain girls, and the actual sex "scenes" are just cuts to black with sex sounds in the background to actually imply the sex rather than animating it. From what I've gathered by searching through the game's thread, it seems the devs were opposed to the idea of adding sex in their game, thinking that people would be satisfied with just pinup illustrations and flock to their patreon just for that. I still don't understand why on earth that decision sounded true in their minds, because as soon as they saw the money wasn't coming, they immediately made a new game with actual sex and now they're sitting on a modest monthly sum of money; at least its certainly bigger than what it was when Faulty Apprentice was released. Which is a shame it took them this game to realize it, because when I say the artstyle in this game is stellar, it really is stellar. Although, it kind of suffers from the "mobile game" aesthetic many western VNs have (especially the backgrounds and the UI), and also the fact that most girls in this game have that "bimbo doll" face I'm personnally not a fan of at all.

But the story has to be the biggest dissapointment, as it was pretty heavily marketed to their audience. And on a base level, I really like what the story is going for; it has all the right ideas and notes necessary to tell a really good story: The young, clumsy apprentice going through training to become the hero in times of need; the old, wise but kinda pervy wizard à la Merlin who sets the hero off to his path of adventure; the young but glacial princess with a troubled past and heavy responsabilities that keep her off warming up to others; the dark elf doubting the evil guy's intentions and going through a redemption arc culminating in her betrayal of her old master and joining the good guys, et cetera. On paper, these ideas are really cool and prime material for a sweet fantasy world to be immersed into.

But that's all they stay in this game: Ideas. While the overall story goes through many of that kind of ideas, none of them are given enough time to be properly developed. All characters boil down to a single stereotype and never stray off their intended personality; the bitchy elf is bitchy, the impulsive tomboyish swordswoman is impulsive, and the MC never goes trough any kind of character development in any of the routes you can unlock. All relationships with other characters boil down to a love meter you build up by answering correctly to the questions they propose you, and that's it. You can see they tried to make things darker by the middle of the story with what happens with the goblins and all that, but they clearly either didn't have the time or the skill, or both, to actually properly deliver on that front.

In short, no meaningful gameplay to progress through an immature story to unlock an inexistant adult content. The ideas are there but barely developed, the character desgins are eye-candy but nothing naughty is done with them, and they gameplay might as well not be there and the game would be better; and I know that for sure, because the game lets you disable the minigames at the start of the game, which is telling of how little confidence they had in their game design, which is really sad to see.

That's why it pains me to see the game in this state. It's not horrendous at all to go through, but you see how much they try and fail at conveying their ideas effectively and you're left with a mess of potential that will probably never be fulfilled. It seems the devs are not done with this game's universe, so maybe in the future they will learn from their mistakes and either improve or remove the gameplay altogether to make a straightforward VN, which I think would work much better for the kind of setting they were going for.

Overall, I don't recommend it, but if the artstyle caught your attention and still want to give it a short, feel free to do so, it wasn't a miserable experience. Just don't expect anything special.

Good art married to tedious, boring gameplay and equally boring characters and story, which is a shame as clearly a lot of work went into making this game.

The core of the game is going around to 15+ locations and talking to the 27 different characters, over and over and over again. Each character has 10-17 different conversations, and if you want the good (or evil) ending you'll have to go through at least 90% of the conversations with each of them and answer them correctly (which is usually obvious, but sometimes feels completely random). It's frankly exhausting.

Oh, and you're also grinding to increase your stats, with 7 different stats that go up to 10, and you can get up to 4 points worth of stats a day.

There are minigames for increasing core stats and completing special missions (and occasionally just randomly) that you can thankfully disable because they start out okay but quickly grow incredibly tedious. Cut 30+ logs, Fruit Ninja style, without making a mistake or waiting more than a moment between cuts. Play Simon with 9-direction-long command patterns. Guess at what made up words mean.

All of that would have been fine if the characters and conversations and story were worthwhile, but they're not. Most of the characters are very cliché and wear their tropes on their sleeves, and only a few of the side-characters were even remotely interesting (more interesting than any of the main characters, anyway). Every story arc is painfully predictable. I was hoping that if I stuck it out long enough the characters or story would become interesting, but it never did.

The game promises humor, but I didn't laugh once. Is goblins that talk like Jar-Jar Binks supposed to be funny? Or a character talking like Jaqen H'ghar from Game of Thrones? Or a character not wearing pants? Is the joke that the characters stick so close to their tropes and clichés without adding anything interesting?

As for the sex part, don't get your hopes up. Grinding stats and doing tasks will lead to a few (1-3) scenes of wardrobe malfunctions for the main characters, and if you max out the required stats (and/or other required conditions) you'll be able to enter a relationship with one of the main characters and have a fade-to-black sex scene with some vaguely sex-adjacent noises that are more weird than sexy. For the side characters you're limited to a gallery image that will unlock upon doing a task for them.

In summary, it all feels like a waste of time. You've got good art paired with boring, grinding gameplay, tedious mini-games where the best part is that you can disable them, boring characters, boring story, tons of boring dialog to read through, and some CG scenes of characters in states of undress that are barely sexier than just looking at a screenshot. It's a real shame that so much work went into something that ultimately felt like a complete waste of my time.

Pretty good story even if it's light on lewd content... the dev really put effort and it shows in the character interactions and the slight amount of world building. Each girl has a bit of their character arc except the guards I believe but they do have their own little quests, overall I'd say it's very cute. There are no grand tales or journeys that help understand the deeper intentions of the main character. He is but a blank slate on which we can impress ourselves, it's light hearted fun and a good read though.

Surprisingly good writing and humor. Art is nice, but there's not much 'content' if you get my meaning. As a porn game, it doesn't have much going for it, but as a romcom story game with some adult stuff on the side it's actually pretty good.