Hello my name is Siderophilia and I have played Fountain of Mana (February 4 release) by Nerion.
Fountain of Mana is a RPGM game with a fantasy setting about an innocent young mage girl (very) slowly being corrupted. Unfortunately a few strange design decisions make the experience less enjoyable than it has potential to be.
The core issue with this game is that despite keeping combat to a few reasonable battles it manages to drag on forever between scenes. This happens in part due to unnecessarily large empty maps between the locations of interest (why is there for instance a road through an empty grassland between the castle and the town?), but most of all due to how events are scripted. Only a few events in this game are linearly scripted so that you can progress through them at a pace of your own choice, talk to a character you like, possibly sleep and come back the next day and progress through that route. No, for some reason the developer opted for having multiple prerequisites and making almost every event in the game be randomly available, meaning that you have to check upon most characters daily to see if you can progress through that route on that day. One of the most obnoxious examples of this is the character Ela literally telling you "I'll bring my swimsuit tomorrow", but tomorrow actually means whenever the RNG god causes her to show up at the same place next time. This means that while the game has a mechanism for quick travel available from the MC's room which could be useful, most days you'll want to start out from her room and move outwards to see if there is any new content for the other characters. The walkthrough included in the downloads helps a little with this despite just being a huge image with arrows stretching back and forth in a confusing manner, but it far from solves the problems.
The art is pretty average for the Without boys version. For the with boys version it ranges from shitty to pretty average. (I'd probably recommend the version Without Boys, which is literally the same game with a couple of particularly bad character portraits removed.) There was also a pretty funny moment early on in the game where one of the boys' fantasies was displayed in the form of a crude drawing of the MC and I couldn't figure out whether it was intended to be taken seriously or not. Other than that I think I noticed a few clipping errors and I believe there are a few instances where the MC is supposed to have facial features but they aren't loaded correctly. But hey, at least it's uncensored.
Gameplay is also pretty buggy and confusing, while this may be acceptable for an early build when you consider how long this has been in development it doesn't bode very well. A lot of the time it has you questioning whether you have just encountered a gamebreaking bug or if what you're seeing is in fact intended design. The lack of things like a quest log or phase of day in the game menu makes it hard to figure out what you should do next, but even if the game had those I'm not sure what they would tell you as the game also regularly seems to lose track of the time of day or the clothes on the MC's body. While the extensive system for equipping different items of clothing looks good on paper, it doesn't have quite the intended effect when the only reason the MC shows up naked at an even seemingly is that the game lost track of what she's wearing and the dialogue asks her to remove the dress she's not wearing in the CG.
The writing is probably the one thing here which might be considered as a redeeming quality. The language is mostly proper and rather than the typical corruption oriented game where the MC is abused this game for the most part paints a portrait of a young woman slowly discovering her sexuality. Things such as the MC curiously watching a boy masturbating to the thought of her are pretty nicely done. The language is proper although the writing is far from flawless and it often feels lacking in depth. Despite the slow pace relationships between the characters feel rushed and not particularly believable. There are many points where I'd like to see a bit more emphasis on the internal conflict between the MC's lust and her prudish upbringing. It's hard to put a finger on, but something in the writing makes it come across as a bit immature. Still this the single quality that is actually interesting enough that somebody might get something out of this experience.
Taken together, this game has some interesting qualities but as of now it's very frustrating because it's a huge time sink to run around and check if random events are available or not. There are a lot of far better similar games out there. 3/5.
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