(0.3.41)
Before the review starts, a small remark: Don't get scared by the game title picture or screenshots. Most characters are already redrawn in a prettier artstyle.
This game is just great, that's an easy way to put it.
While being a fetish VN, it's still trying to tell a deep story to a player. Thanks to devs hard work there is already a lore of this universe to get involved in. My opinion might be subjective, because i'm not a VN connoisseur or anything, and didn't play much of them in my life, but it's generally very good. It nicely utilizes it's fetishes, which is the most important thing. Characers are not blank, they have their advantages and disatvantages, they don't act like cliche heroes, who will always do "the right thing".
The game has hours of content on the main story + a handful of side stories, that were created with the direct help of high level supporters and may or may not be related to the lore (some of them are quite bad and short though, but it's not really something to complain about)
The game still has its issues:
1) The fact that most of the characters and scenes were redrawn, but not all of them, gets caught in the eye, especially at the starting scene.
2) Some storylines have a big amount of typos, logical inconsistencies in dialogues and other technical issues.
3) This might be very subjective, but i noticed that the word "to nod" is overused. Characters keep nodding even when they don't really need to. Same goes for the amount of apologies given between mc and other characters. It is, of course, makes sense at the "good" line of the story, but damn, sometimes it is so uncalled for, that starts to be annoying.
4) Some people might be dissapointed that, despite the fact that the game already has about 5 major storylines to go through, which then divide by even more depending on your choices, none of them are finished yet. And it gets worse when the story ends on a cliffhanger instead of a transition between the events (at least one does, but i will not spoil). This con is of course temporary, since the game isn't abandoned.
5) 90% of characters have, if I may say, a "perfect shape": big boobs, butts, wide hips, narrow waists and of course very revealing clothes. It's not like I would prefer an ugly character instead, it undermines the whole concept of a fetish game after all, but seeing porn stars everywhere feels like, I don't know, a lack of variety? Also the fact that most of them are drawn from the bottom perspective makes it even worse, because sometimes all you can see is a walking butt when character is turned back at you.
6) That's probably subjective, but another problem that I see is a character archetypes exaggeration: There are absolute sadists, there are naive, prideless and way too gentle characters that will forgive you literally anything (except for your death, I suppose), way too lewd and "playful" ones, and only 2 or 3 that are sort of in between those sides. Maybe this was intended, since it's a fetish VN, but for me the amount of gentleness or sadism is so much that it just breaks the character. This mostly applies to gentleness of course, it's much easier to explain cruelty and violence, when someone is simply bigger and stronger than you, but when it comes to "kindness", you start feeling that this 15 meter (or whatever, I didn't measure) girl in front of you acts like she does not because that's her personality, but because she is some sort of a babysitter for MC and is forced to tolerate anything you do. These characters are never upset, never angry at you, which devalues their temper. You know they will tolerate anything the game allows you to do, you know you won't be punished even a little bit, and that really sucks. Characters can be kind and gentle, but at the same time they should have at least some of self-esteem.
7) Despite the fact that a tremendous amount of work was done when it comes to an art, ther's still some picture patterns that are really needed in the game. For example: there is no pose of a character, when you are behind them and they are not looking at you. I'm pretty sure they need to see where they're going at least sometimes. It gets even worse when, according to the text, they are literally looking somewhere else, and the text goes something like: "You are walking behind [a character] that is looking at [an object]", but on the screen you see how she stares right at you.
Same goes to moments when you, for example, are held by someone. It just zooms in the center of torso. Sometimes you simply get lost and don't understand what is going on in the scene.
I also noticed a lack of face variations too, which makes some characters to always smile or look sad (when it's not intended of course), or change their mood way too fast, like when a character is shocked or mad or whatever, but in milisecond it starts smiling again like it forgot what just happened. To be fair, that's pretty uncommon, so it's not as bad as it sounds.
8) Animations, if you can even call them that, are... let's say: They're not particularly bad, but it won't be any worse without them. It's always just a screen movement, and i'm not talking about scenes where it's actually needed, like when you gaze at something too large for an eyesight, but about action scenes. It feels like: "Yes, game, I already get what you are trying to show, you're just overdoing it". The realization itself is just too clunky in it's concept. It's not needed in my opinion.
To sum up. "Giant Guardians" has it's problems, but if the "Size Difference", femdom and other fetishes included in this game are your thing, then it's definetly worth playing.
