A bog-standard VN with remarkably solid writing. Overall it's mainly carried by the quality execution, the MC being relatable and only a little generic, and the various girls all being reasonably realistic. Those are the main ways it stands out from the crowd and the main reasons to recommend it. Anybody looking for further frills either as a story or as a game will be disappointed.
Pros:
Coherent narrative prose and dialogue, humor sprinkled throughout.
Avoids some of the more cringey tropes common to indie VNs on this site.
The love interests are actually distinct people, both in personality and looks.
Cons:
No animations, voicing, sound of any kind, or other technical niceties like a gallery or save organization.
AFAICT, the flow of the story is relatively linear although the individual character relationships vary heavily. So the "VN-ness" isn't particularly complex even though it is well-done. I will say I haven't explored all of the available routes, so take this point with a grain of salt.
EDIT:
So, my original review of FiN was posted on 1/1/2023. I'm leaving it unchanged above. Now as of 5/31/2024, with a couple more updates under its belt, I feel like there's a bit more to add.
The continued lack of any technical feature adds is really unfortunate. They generally shouldn't take precedence over adding content, if it comes down to one or the other. On the other hand, not having any audio, animations, gallery, save organizer (and no, save naming is basically worthless on its own), etc., really leaves a lot on the table.
However, the far more pressing issue is the story structure and increasing cast size. So far, the story has continued as mostly-linear, with a few events behind branching choices, and mostly independent routes for each character. This is fine when both the cast size and story scope are small enough. In my opinion, Friends in Need has already crossed that line, if only barely, and it looks like there's more characters still. This is problematic enough for a fixed story, but FiN is a VN that clearly wants to have at least 2 paths for each LI and additional story-impacting choices... It's simply not realistic to develop every character well, provide the player with quality choices, not confuse/lose the reader (or author!) among independent/interleaved storylines, etc., all at the same time.
So my criticism/advice would be as follows: the cast size and story, as of now, are still reasonable, but are clearly trending in an unsustainable direction. The dev needs to focus on progressing what is already there, rather than expanding and expanding. Moreover, the structure of the story going forward needs to be more refined - jumping between 10 different subplots, with the occasional crossing of two of them, is going to get incredibly confusing and take far too long to write.
All that said, the recent developments in Risa's story are ambitious in the right way. The quality of the writing has kept up, although the nature of the story is still the same, so fundamentally there's a lot of underlying savior complex going on.
Pros:
Coherent narrative prose and dialogue, humor sprinkled throughout.
Avoids some of the more cringey tropes common to indie VNs on this site.
The love interests are actually distinct people, both in personality and looks.
Cons:
No animations, voicing, sound of any kind, or other technical niceties like a gallery or save organization.
AFAICT, the flow of the story is relatively linear although the individual character relationships vary heavily. So the "VN-ness" isn't particularly complex even though it is well-done. I will say I haven't explored all of the available routes, so take this point with a grain of salt.
EDIT:
So, my original review of FiN was posted on 1/1/2023. I'm leaving it unchanged above. Now as of 5/31/2024, with a couple more updates under its belt, I feel like there's a bit more to add.
The continued lack of any technical feature adds is really unfortunate. They generally shouldn't take precedence over adding content, if it comes down to one or the other. On the other hand, not having any audio, animations, gallery, save organizer (and no, save naming is basically worthless on its own), etc., really leaves a lot on the table.
However, the far more pressing issue is the story structure and increasing cast size. So far, the story has continued as mostly-linear, with a few events behind branching choices, and mostly independent routes for each character. This is fine when both the cast size and story scope are small enough. In my opinion, Friends in Need has already crossed that line, if only barely, and it looks like there's more characters still. This is problematic enough for a fixed story, but FiN is a VN that clearly wants to have at least 2 paths for each LI and additional story-impacting choices... It's simply not realistic to develop every character well, provide the player with quality choices, not confuse/lose the reader (or author!) among independent/interleaved storylines, etc., all at the same time.
So my criticism/advice would be as follows: the cast size and story, as of now, are still reasonable, but are clearly trending in an unsustainable direction. The dev needs to focus on progressing what is already there, rather than expanding and expanding. Moreover, the structure of the story going forward needs to be more refined - jumping between 10 different subplots, with the occasional crossing of two of them, is going to get incredibly confusing and take far too long to write.
All that said, the recent developments in Risa's story are ambitious in the right way. The quality of the writing has kept up, although the nature of the story is still the same, so fundamentally there's a lot of underlying savior complex going on.
