Review for Fragile Innocence (ver. 0.95)
The developer put a lot of effort and heart blood in this slow-paced corruption fantasy vn. If you like low-fantasy settings, at least ok writing and don’t mind the slow burn, Fragile Innocence can be recommended without a doubt.
But first things first: My biggest complaint about this gem of a VN is the rpgm engine, which makes traveling between different locations/plot scenes somewhat annoying. Newcomers to Fragile Innocence will have a hard time to find their way around in the castle, whose outlay is somewhat confusing. Gladly an in-game map was introduced at some point, which is very much needed to navigate.
I really think, that renpy as engine would have been much more suitable for Fragile Innocence. Although the dev really put a lot of effort into his game by creating unique in-game sprites and graphics for rpgm. It looks nice, but it wasn’t really necessary to begin with (all that beautiful & unique rpgm art was a waste of development time), because FI is more a plot driven multiple choice VN than a game and therefore renpy would have been perfect as engine in my opinion, which would not only have saved some time for the dev, but also for players during their play-through. After all rpgm usually makes the gameplay tedious by the typical design of quests (Go A, go B, talk to X, talk to Y, enjoy cutscene, repeat, …).
Apart from the suboptimal engine choice I can only praise this VN for its beautiful renders, good animations, interesting story and at least not bad writing and dialogues. FI features in-game music, which is fitting to the setting. The dev doesn’t seem to be a native English speaker, so he made some minor grammar and spelling mistakes, but since I’m not a native English speaker, too, it’s not an issue for me.
Decisions of the two main characters matter a lot. Therefore maybe an official walkthrough is needed soon in order to make the impact of those in-game decisions more foreseeable for the player.
There are lots of different characters so far with their own motives and personalities, but most lack content. Anyway I hope that events & side quests with those characters already in the game will be expanded and filled with life, instead of introducing more and more npcs, which then most likely might lack depth.
For the time being there is already a lot of content, but don’t expect too much hardcore, (yet). It’s just the side-characters, who have sex so far, while the main characters are just being more and more teased. (It doesn’t really go further than a bj, kissing and groping concerning the two MCs). I’m really looking forward to the further development of Fragile Innocence and I’m curious about how the story will unfold in the future.
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Edit (game version Ch. IV v0.02): I've reduced one star, because after such a long development time, lots of characters got introduced, but hardly have content. The dev adds even new characters regularly, but this means, previous ones will remain rather shallow lacking content.
Worst of all some very tedious tasks have been included in the CH IV 0.01 version. It almost felt like a bloody farming simulator. Seriously that's not what the player base is here for and the dev doesn't value our time by forcing us to do such shity, time consuming, tedious and redundant tasks like carry 10 crates into the barn or weed several fields, plant and water them in order to harvest crops etc. WTF?!
The many almost empty large maps are also very much annoying to navigate.
Furthermore playing as Philip turns out to be very boring compared to Isabella. Despite the fact, that Philip unfortunately sees more action than Isabella, which is quite unrealistic, after all a beautiful woman will be confronted with way more advances of the opposite sex, than a male. That's just the way it is in reality: men are approaching women way more often and in a more direct way than the other way around, especially if the guy is shy like Philip. As a matter of fact the male protagonist in Fragile Innocence is seeing way more action so far than Isabella, which is a big disappointment (in CH IV v0.02 he has already received 3 blowjobs in the dirty route, while Isabella is still just fantasizing about sex).
Since half of the development time goes into Philip updates, Fragile Innocence is becoming more and more frustrating due to the very long waiting periods for way more interesting Isabella content (to give you an impression: it takes half a year and even longer for an update).
I begin to lose patience with this game.