The game is good, but still a little rough around the edges.
First off, it's nice to see a game to focus of a rather niche fetish like this, and doing so in an actually non-amateurish way.
- Ren'Py is very well utilized here and covers such things as additional textboxes for layered conversations, a UI element acting as a Phone that doesn't look like shit and is non-intrusive (if a little underused and obviously unfinished at this time) and character busts in varying positions on the screen. It's clear that the makers of this game can and know how to utilize this engine properly to create a VN that goes beyond a single text box and two character sprites above them.
- Story is fine but nothing groundbreaking, and it doesn't need to be.
It's a story about college girls in a school setting gaining weight and them (for now mostly Alex, the MC) realizing and coming to terms with how they interact with one another and how other people react to them. So rather than a coming-of-age story is more like a "coming-of-weight" one, i guess? Though that sounds really stupid, don't let that be the term for this sort of thing.
Overall very inoffensive story, not great, not terrible but perfectly capable of getting the job done.
- Characters are good.
There's 5 of them (those you see on the banner) + a few supporting ones currently, but there's probably room for more ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) depending on how the story goes along. Those that are all are reasonably interesting so far.
Alex I think is well written, relatable and feel "real", which is naturally quite important for a main character. I'm nowhere near overweight, let alone fat, and could understand her struggles perfectly well.
Other characters aren't being as focused on yet, e.g. we don't get to know much about the purple and blond- haired ones, except that they used to be in a relationship and have a weird gain weight/lose weight interaction with each other, or the brown girl used to be a skinny model but ended up pursuing her dream of owning a bakery. It's not particularly interesting yet, but the building blocks are absolutely there to flesh them out ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) in the future.
- The writing could definitely use some help.
It's not horrible per se, in fact it's pretty good; there are close to no typos (at least as far as i could tell), no broken english, no weird wording making characters look stiff, there's even a bit where one of the characters live-streams and a textbox emulates a a twitch chat and it's preddy damn convincing.
The issues lie less in the way words are used, and more with the writers point of view on the story. When writing a story you always have to keep in mind that as a writer, you always know more than the reader, since you're the one having to have the bigger picture in mind of where the story's headed, how characters are supposed to interact with each other and how conversations can change characters relationships.
But the reader doesn't know any of that. They just read and absorb the story as it goes on. And if a writer doesn't keep that in mind it causes the reader to notice inconsistencies.
Case in point, this game uses time skips every now and then. Nothing wrong about that but there's nothing that indicates these to the reader. You might go to bed one day to end the scene and the next scene is you being on campus in the middle of the day. You naturally assume it's just the next day, but in actuality the story just skipped 2 months(!) ahead. You don't notice that though until either the date comes up in a conversation or you just happen to check the weight-app thing on your phone and check it yourself. All because only a simple fade-to-black transition was used, instead of a little animation (like calendar pages getting ripped of or a simple line of text announcing the date). This happens quite often and is very confusing.
Another issue is that it is sometimes hard do figure out what relation characters have. For example there is a guy that Alex calls on the phone that turns out to be her brother. It's never explicitly stated that he IS prior to this call but the game just rolls with it, leaving you confused as to who the hell this character is. I'm still not sure if the dude the Alex chats with every now and then is also a brother of hers or just a friend.
These are all problems arising from the fact that the writer failed to consider the perspective of "outsiders". I assume the team didn't have proofreaders that otherwise have no involvement with the production of this game.
And it's also not a dealbreaker (yet) since this is only a demo still, but i think it's important to adress these issues because firstly; the other two reviews just haven't mentioned these flaws at all, and secondly; when the game continues to be written this way and gets longer and longer, these things can end up significantly impacting the quality of the reading experience which, needless to say, is deadly to a Visual Novel.
-Porn scenes don't really exist yet.
Which is fine in my book since the focus of this story is not about fat girls having sex, and more about (more or less) skinny girls gaining weight as a sexual fetish of theirs. There are some lewd CGs (like characters in underwear/Bikinis or a naked girl in the shower) but nothing explicitly sexual, plus they seem kinda "flat" and are probably still unfinished.
And while i don't particularly mind that now, I would like (and expect) the story to become more "action-filled" down the road, since currently it's less of a porn game you can fap to but more of a ecchi VN that gives you a boner and leaves you blue-balled.
As an additional note, I think this game should also have more non-pornographic CGs when characters are interacting, like a cafeteria scene where Alex, Rea(purple) and Hannah(blonde) are just talking and eating, with their facial expressions changing like they already do in their standing pictures, and maybe that could be then reused sometime later but now with "updated" bodies depicting their weight gain/loss, just as an example.
Minor stuff like this really makes the characters become alive and the world they live in more realistic and believable, and I wouldn't normally expect something like this from "just another porn VN", but I quite like this one and I feel like it could be way more if there was a little more attention to detail like that; a surprisingly good VN from a place no one expected it from, kind of like Katawa Shoujo, though most likely less popular just based on subject manner alone.
One can only dream.
Also just fyi, the artist's name is Toroboro.
