VN - Ren'Py - Give Me a Sun [v0.4.5] [Namco15]

Usually when I cannot decide between 4 stars or 5, I go with 4. In this case I felt like that wasn't quite right, and I should wait for one more update before reviewing, and I'm glad I did.

There are two problems with this game- some bad ESL stuff (using "his" instead of "her" for instance) and the fact that the plot is huge, convoluted, and confusing as fuck.

The first one I decided I could forgive because the author is making a conscious effort to get more proofreading in, and with each release things get better.

The second one ebbed when I realized (a) the game was not SUPPOSED to make sense yet, we only have a little of the picture and (b) it's going to be a multi-playthrough kind of game and that's just all there is to it.

Once I made peace with the idea that fully enjoying this game was going to take a serious commitment I was able to get past my concerns and just really appreciate how fucking *good* the game is. Here's what I like about it:

* The art. Namco15 has been around for a while and has a reputation for amazing 3D work, and this is his best stuff yet. The girls are just..... beautiful. And not in a plastic idol kind of way, he is a master of posing - their body language and expressions make them seem so very real.

* The subject matter. Sci fi world building is great when done well, and this ain't bad. H-wise, it's a lesbian harem -- and *what* a harem. I _like_ the characters, they are amazing, and every one of them is a stunner.

* Intangibles. Namco is just a nice guy, and he runs the community well and is good to his patrons. Sure, it'd be nice if he released more often, but given the massive sizes of the updates and the very high quality of the content, it's overall very good.


Anyway, I figured I owed the game 5 stars when I found myself actually getting emotional at someone that hurt the MC. Not just like "Oh, that sucked", but like really outraged. If a game can suck in someone as jaded as I am, it's pretty fucking good.

Short summary:


Very strange setting, that intrigues with uniqueness, but ends up just disappointing for not being developed well. Writing is bad. Some girl models and some renders are nice. Hard to follow or care for what’s going on.



Good Things

• Some girls are pretty hot
• Some kissing and lewd scenes are hot

Bad points

• Story is fucked up and all over the place
• No believable relationship buildup
• Cartoony character models

This is a really decent game, I prefer adult VN with an actual story to tell, this is one is a really well made, that has a pretty decent plot, the renders, the music has all been put together really nicely, on the plus side that you can play as a lesbian which I prefer, only downside is, the writing, but, as with everything in life, it can be improved over time, but it does not put me off the story or the game, I understand the story, loving the characters, wish nothing but the best for the future of this game.

I love this story line. Might be the best I've encountered (amongst many other great stories) on this website. It's confusing to begin with but starting to take shape with each update. Orchestrated like a good novel. Worth the wait. And yes, the graphics are just as good. Keep up the amazing work!

The story is a mess. What the developer has ended up doing is building a prologue of the story into the middle of this story as one huge confusing flashback. It got so bad that can't make heads or tails out of it at all.

So what you end up with is too many characters with the past of Celeste who did not start out the protagonist but apparently must of become the protagonist and the 2 girls who are Red and was the story is no longer the story.

This is a disaster for any novel and fails miserably as a story.

If you don't mind this nonsense it has great art and scenes so you can just fast forward to see that if you want, but I just want a story that is good and can be followed.

Man, I really like what they are going for. No dicks, matter of fact casual nudity and an incredibly ambitious story... which is where the game falls flat on its face and as a result it unfortunately is just about as sexy as someone faceplanting into a turd. The game starts out with a warning about the western sensibilities and explicitly humor of it's writer and then proceeds to pay homage to straight up copy jokes from manga and anime. (mostly Naruto, from which it seems to lift heavy story inspirations as well) I was way too invested in wondering how that could've possibly been lost on them or which direction they thought they would have to travel to reach Japan from their (likely German) point of origin, to even think about rubbing one out. And yeah, their English is terrible. That even gets acknowledged at some point (I think, it's at the end of the first release), just as they acknowledge the obvious "inspiration" by Naruto. But they also seem to think that their laguage skills are the issue (It's not good, granted), when in fact this convoluted mess of time jumping exposition dumpery would be atrocious in any language. They have something here, but to make it comprehensible, I'd encourage them to give the script to someone impartial or at least try to explain what's going on to someone and take note whenever they say "what?". Most games available here aren't masterpieces of literature, but I can't remember looking at a scene I should find really hot, with the dialogue just killing it dead.

Written as of version: 0.3.1
Score: 4,5/5
Tldr: The game is very confusing.

Weak points: very confusing; limited choices.
Neutral: good lesbian scenes; only partially covered by good music and sounds; amount of content; lack of animations; lack of voice acting.
Strongpoints: beautifully looking and interesting, rather chaotic characters, MC included; captivating and chaotic story; mysteries; graphic; performance

Play, if you: want to feel confused/disoriented, think of yourself as an intelligent/wise person, like mysteries/unanswered questions (mostly not directly introduced), like lesbian porn. Possibly sapiosexual people may enjoy it.

Warning: Don’t play, if you tend to overthink, unless you are a masochist with lots of free time.

1. Confusing.

The game could use codex or at least summary. Even some games that didn’t need it, use it. This game needs it very much. I get a feeling that the game is based on dreams that were partially forgotten and glued together by imaginary connections. Chaos everywhere.

Some things that account to chaos:
1) Mostly construction, where we have retrospectives in retrospect, getting back into previous retrospect, and adding new retrospect into it and so on. That’s much more chaotic than One Thousand and One Nights construction. Players sometimes can force MC to not retrospect, but it only causes them to miss lots of content and information (from essential to trivial and miscellaneous). Game could use a chronologically sorted summary after each chapter. At least something like a buildable summary, that is going to be a full summary after all chapters, because dev is jumping on the timeline extensively.

2) What’s more, there are a lot of mysteries and questions and MC is a schemer. And dev isn’t using all opportunities to explain schemes to players, not even only MC’s schemes.
It’s also hard to classify MC’s mind. I’m not even sure if her mind can be judged as “female mind” or “male mind”.

3) Also, English in the game isn’t perfect. There is a visible difference in quality between english till 0.3 and in the 0.3 part, but even in the proofread part I saw at least two cases where “her” and “his” were used incorrectly. At least I hope so, because if characters were referring to some other characters in the conservation with different gender, I had no idea who they referred to (it wasn’t clearly stated in these already confusing conversations).

4) References. Funny thing is that even if you know the references it doesn’t help, but makes everything more muddy, because usually it serves as distractions, not the explanation to anything (at least those that I deciphered).

5) Setting.
Setting should be almost the sole confusing factor and rest should be worked on imo.

2. Choices
They are only used to determine whether the MC is romantically interested in the given character and whether the player wants to see the retrospec.

Probably the most confusing game ever, i have no idea who people are, where they are or even when they are and its not surpring as even the people in this world dont know these things.

Flashbacks/time jumps in flashbacks/time jumps make the game even more confusing especially a dozen or so one after the other, then to make it just a bit more confusing it starts switching to other peoples backstories/flashbacks/time jumps still during flashback/time jumps without any character name, time, or place info.

Figuring out who is talking is also troubling, are they talking to a person in another room, the tv, a robot, over the radio, phone on speaker(sometime several people at once) etc...

You see a woman get killed but with no info at all its hard to care, i dont know her name, relation to any event, relation to any person, job, importance, time, location, etc...

After finishing the game i sit here wondering if i somehow got a corrupted mixture of several games instead of one.

The art while not perfect(girls chest sizes change from scene to scene) is the best part of the game and delivers some great sex scenes.

Story 0/5 (i dont know)
Art 4/5 (very good)
Sex 3/5 (better if i know whos who)
Fetishes 1/5 (lesbian)
Choices 1/5 (see scene or not)
Characters 1/5 (again dont know)

I like this game because of the renders and the models. The story has potental but the writing isn't the best. The teasing scenes were hot, but I still think that the storytelling should be improved.
Also, I'd say that lesbian elves theme is pretty original. The fact that the developer doesn't rush and focus primarily on sexual content feels quite refreshing here. The depiction of Celeste's relationship is really good, but again I think that English should be improved so that the game becomes more immersive. In short,the models are really sexy, the sexual content is there, the effects are there, if the dev would focus just a little bit more of his attention to the quality of the writing, the game would become even better.

The renders are really nice, but the story and the characters are all over the place. The pacing is bad and you get these exposition dumps with little explanation to what is actually going on. The game might benefit from text borders considering that characters talk in different colored fonts and some of those fonts get blurred by the game background at times.

Review Ver. 0.3

This novel is by far the best I had the pleasure to read.
This is a story-driven novel and is paced like good movies/books, the plot is slowly revealed and slowly build-up (IMO it makes it more intriguing and interesting). I'm not gonna lie, it can be sometimes hard to understand but overall it's still very comprehensible. Don't worry too much about it though, It's still early in development.

The render are amazing (with no boring static shot and nice panties shot) , all the girls are drop dead gorgeous.
And those h-scenes are something else, I rarely saw VN with scenes as exciting and hot. They are transpiring sensuality, intimacy and passion witch is extremely hard to convey in images form with no voice-over or animations. It's totally impressive coming from a new dev.

I never read those novel with the sound turn on except this one. The second I've recognized Deathstars's Synthetic Generation lyrics I knew I had to start over with the sound

TL;DR :
Awesome story, amazing render, excellent music and overall hot Sapphic-ness

I highly recommend this
thank you Namco15, you rock

Very good stuff so far ( I'm mid 0.3 ). Impressed by overall production.
Are you a team or Lone Rider?
Intrigued by it being more of a mystery puzzle than outright muff diving fest.
It is almost better with the teasing half covered tits, seethrough knickers and almost visible pussies and to keep the tension of the viewer at an almost boiling point ( Dione's sudden arrival put a hold on the "wet sex" ) as cliffhangers.
Storywise it's still a bit confusing to get a grip on where one's at on a timeline as it jumps back and forth in space and time as well as the characters appearance changes a lot from child, teen to adult. I think I'm slowly but surely getting a grip on what's going on.
I, unlike several other male posters, have no problem with this being, so far, a strictly FF novel apart from the fact that there are male characters around ( not many so far ) as fathers. I have to assume that their biology classes in school do not differ too much from our earthling education.
Another reflection: If the Silver eyed Witches are it's own ethnic group then are the males called witches as well?

Very, very beautiful production though some transitions are a bit slow.

The different characters are just that! Different body types and facial forms makes this VN a very nice R&R from the otherwise majority of "super model" VN's around F95.

Excellent fucking brilliant job you've done!!!

English: 2
User Interface: 4
User Experience: 3
Art: 7
Dialogue: 2
Story: 3
Opinion: 3
------------------------------
Avg: 3.43

If you speak English, this is one of the most frustrating reading experiences you'll ever have. I can't imagine this is any better in the Dev's native language, but there's so many issues here I don't know where to begin. Pacing issues, poor dialogue, complete lines that are unnecessary, and just random or useless exposition that give you none of the details you'd need to understand what the fuck is actually going on. And the dev continues to use an hpunch or vpunch to lines like "???" or "!" At the current time of writing, I haven't read other reviews yet, but ALL of them better be "Durr, me rate 5 for pretty models." (Which is still not a good reason to rate anything five stars.) Because the only thing, in terms of story, this has going for it is the premise. Even the names of the two opening characters are unpronounceable, and there's even a line where the loud one's name is completely spelled wrong. "Metxil." And the default names for the girlfriends? "Isilynor" and "Eridani?" Naming characters by slapping your keyboard is not the way, my friend. And I think this is gonna be a long review from me because there is just so much to unpack and just highlight why it's frustratingly bad. That being said, TL;DR: The poor translation added to the poorly emphasized time jumps, "aided" by the laziest excuse for a visual timeline made in MS Paint that doesn't give you decent information, makes this a headache and a half to read. But we all know why most people will "play" this.

The story opens up on two sisters that aren't the main character, which I will actually say is a cool way to start a story. It's a shame it opens up with the DUMBEST decision making I've ever seen in my life it's actually laughable. Aysu and Metztli (No, those aren't spelling mistakes just bad names) are struggling to survive a post apocalyptic world and Met trades all her gear FOR A FUCKING SMARTPHONE. On top of EVERYTHING later on, it's "revealed" that Met is deaf. AT NO POINT up until MC points out that she's deaf, does she show signs of it. She even reacts to sound made by the phone that start this whole rabbit hole of a story. But only after one or two of the bad lore dumps in the form of stories about "The Maker" and Silver-Eyed Witches. The maker, more than likely, building up to a city-wide harem for the devs inferiority complex of a self-insert. And it's all made a little messy to look at by the over-used pencil drawing filter. Anyway, Met solves some puzzle on the phone, it makes a loud noise and this demon looking thing attacks and they're saved by MC and another woman.(I also want to highlight that Aysu exclaims "FEAR!" in her mind lol) And MC's introduction is with the tired ass Die Hard reference that makes me roll my eyes painfully hard.

Moving on, MC decides to bring the twins to her city because they're "impressive" but all they've done is make poor life choices and bicker. MC says they show abilities, but at no point can you the player see or pick up on it. Then, they unceremoniously go back to the city,(on her "black mamba" jeez are you kidding me?) There is another lore dump in here, but it's all nondescript words, "The Kingdoms," "The Ancients," "Defective." And there's another blatant lie about getting rid of defective people because MC is maimed later on for having green eyes. A lack of focus here. Back to the plot, MC flirts with them to an annoying degree, and runs away to town just to jump in the first set of flashbacks about her three girlfriends that can thankfully be renamed as, once again, the names in this are still abysmal. And the entire "drama" between Isil, Eri, and MC is because MC didn't want to take a picture with her gfs? If it's anything else, it's flat-out not explained. Then cut to MC getting bullied and maimed by other soldiers after MC was introduced as some badass. So along with pacing, timeline, and lore issues, this suffers from poor tone as well. You go from suffering in the wild, to demons(?) attacking, to Die Hard/Futurama references, melodrama, to bullying, and abuse all at drops of a hat.

After MC gets her arm cut off, it jumps back 12 hours, only to do yet another flashback inside the first one? And there's a choice that says the same nonsense word for both options?! Who is making this? And it's followed by MC spouting a bunch of movie references that somehow causes MC to create a religion somewhere because... reasons? And then Dione shows up and I swear no line of dialogue between MC and Dione has anything to do with the line before it because the conversation makes almost no sense. And then they talk about some random tournament THAT DOES NOT MATTER, and it's literally just a set up for a "joke" that's a reference to Naruto. My god. And it doesn't seem to get back to the present in this update, so in 12 hours MC moved in Dione, performed espionage about... something? Traveled to another continent (and back), reminisce with her twin, and reminisce and have sex with Meg (which creates further plot-holes).

The fact is, nothing about the writing makes any sense. And I'm sorry even my review even feels like it jumps from idea to idea too quickly, but these are all being paraphrased by me fairly chronologically.The only time I fully understand something, is when its a dumb reference to anime, movies, or songs. And when I do notice those (like the drawn out, DATED rip of Life is Beautiful) I just get annoyed or angry. Whoever has proofred any of this, improved nothing. Dev, you need to sit down with someone who ACTUALLY speaks English, tell them the story, and let them go over the dialogue with a fine toothed comb so any of this actually makes sense. As of right now, this is a disjointed mess and needs a serious rework. You can barely tell who's speaking, so many points in the narrative literally have no impact on the overall story, and if it does, the English is so poor it makes no sense. My advice, ONCE AGAIN, WRITE THIS IN YOUR LANGUAGE THEN HIRE A TRANSLATOR, AS NO ONE IS BENEFITTING FROM A VISUAL NOVEL THEY CAN'T READ.

So, in summary, I think I made it pretty clear how I feel about the English. The UI/UX is pretty much default Renpy outside of a few minor changes. The art is good, I mean most of the girls have that "inflated fake boobs" look, but it's a bunch of Daz assets, it's hard to make them look bad. The Dialogue and story you can barely read and I already did my tirade. So my opinion is low.

TO THE DEV: Hopefully you read this first, if you haven't already read the rest of this and are fuming at me. Hire someone to translate this for you. And I mean HIRE someone. Not a fan that says "Oh sure, I speak English" I mean someone that will actually make this a legible story. And if things change later I'll happily come back and change my review. Like I said before, the premise is interesting, "Post apocalyptic world with a race of people that are trying to save a dying planet." But it's suffering from everything else. Best of luck.

This game doesn't have many bad aspects at all. Good renders, good music, cool setting (very unsubtle references to Claymore lmao).

However the one thing it does bad, it does so in a very jarring and disrupting way. The main issue is, as others pointed it out, the storytelling. While the story itself seems very interesting and unique, the act of conveying it to the player really isn't going quite as planned.

First and foremost, the pacing is for one pretty confusing, but most of all inconsistent. Sometimes story events will be chained very quickly, while sometimes dialogue will be stretched out for some reason. The delivery of plot points in dialogues is also extremely vague. I'm all for a story that relies on the player's interpretation, but the problem here is that the other components of the storytelling don't follow suit to this design choice.

Second, the programming itself seems kind of janky. Sometimes during dialogues, some characters will say something that obviously should've been said by the locutor instead. It does happen quite a few times, but all it takes is for it to happen just once to spread doubt in the mind of the player. As soon as one realizes there hasn't been much proofreading, the player finds themselves doubting each and every line of dialogue, wondering if something should've been said by another person. This obviously makes keeping up with the vague storytelling even harder.

Final but not least, what annoyed me the most is that the story sometimes seem to establish unspoken rules, just to totally disregard them later. For example, a character may act some way in a scene, and then act totally different in another scene. This makes any sort of comprehension way harder than it needs to be, because any social cue, character trait, plot point or anything else the player picks up by reading between the lines becomes totally unreliable.

In short, while the setting seems very interesting, the game as a whole is very not interpretation-friendly, despite this being the main way of delivering the plot.

There is an incredible amount of untapped potential in this one, so I'll stick around due to the game still being early in development. Regardless, the game is still very hard to play for anyone at the moment, so just keep this in mind if anyone reading this gives it a go.

I really like this story, keeps me looking for more

renders are great, characters are all compelling on their own

the only thing I can say that is not perfect is the story can be hard to keep up with, the memories/flashbacks can be .... unsure of what is going on

BUT ..... after playing through it again (to refresh my memory those same flaws now make sense, we are getting some back story and it is great

looking forward to more from this game, and wish the Dev all the best

Tldr; this VN deserves a much higher rating. It should definitely be a 2nd page VN, and I welcome it on the first page when all translation issues are fixed.

Why would you look at a dude's pecs when you can look at another set of tits that thinks, and is practical, like a dude?

If you are put off by the "female protagonist" tag, don't be. In the middle of her watching the news, she comments, "I want to lick those perfect tits", well my thoughts exactly! Or "Now the corny talk is over, let's fuck"

Yes, she is still a girl, which works great as she looks stunning in every scene, but she can also have meaningful and flavorful conversations with the LI's instead.
(It also makes it one of the few VN's where you get and want to see the MC.)

Regarding other reviews about story and lore:
This is a story-driven VN and is paced like good movies and games. You only get some of the information at the start, jump right into the action, and learn bits and pieces along the way, so you get the satisfaction of figuring it out yourself. After update 0.3 I have enough bits and pieces to get essentially what is going on and see the story patterns emerge. But perhaps it does not work with this format where updates takes time and that not all lore questions were answered within an update which upsets people.

The story itself is unique and good (even more spectacular since being a harem AVN), and I don't get why people are so harsh about it. I recommend NOT (looking at you humanstickobserver) rewriting any of it.


Regarding poor translation:
I have to admit it WAS an issue but the dev is doing a lot to make it better, and in update 0.3, much of it was solved and not enough anymore to deduct a star for it.

The Renders are amazing, full of little details and even Jokes. So much so that I started to play this one (for the first time since starting to play AVNs) on "auto", as it would make me look longer at scenes to take it all in.

The MC and LI's are beautiful, unique and cute, and their behaviour brings them alive.

In summary, this VN deserves a much higher rating. It should definitely be a 2nd page VN, and I welcome it on the first page when all translation issues are fixed.

I recommend it on renders alone.
I recommend it even more if you like story-driven VN's.
I recommend it even even more if you like to watch lesbian porn, as you get double the good stuff .

I wish NAMCO15 best of luck!

Girls are stunning. Renders are amazing.

Poor translation notwithstanding, the story is utterly incomprehensible.

Too much is happening too fast, with jumps back and forth in time, but nothing is defined. Who are we playing as? What races or people are in this world/ Who or what are the clans? What, in god's name, is anything that is happening?

Creating your own world and lore is fantastic. Writing your story so that it takes prior knowledge of that world or lore for literally ANYTHING happening or being said to make sense, and it doesn't matter how deep or well thought out your lore is. It is just a mess when presented to us, because we are given no framework, no context, and no solid footing to approach things from. Everything just... fucking happens.

I'm sorry, I REALLY wanted to get into this and enjoy it. Sadly it is as I've already said, incomprehensible.

Unless the dev makes some Earth-shattering changes in how the story is told (and I do not mean in future chapters, I mean doing a complete re-write of EVERYTHING released so far) none of the story, or dialog, is worth trying to work your way through to achieve even a minimal understanding.

The ABSOLUTE BEST thing you can do with this game is to turn on skip, and skip through everything until you find scenes you want to fap to.

I have no idea why people are dinging the language; perhaps the feedback is on prior versions. This is no ESL game.

The art is familiar (Daz?) but nice, the characters are endearing (although there are a lot of them), and there seems to be groundwork for an interesting story here (medieval plus fantasy plus sci-fi plus post-apocalyptic plus space plus ????).

Which brings me to the biggest problem here. I have NO idea what's happening. There are like ten plots all interwoven with constant jumps in time and place. By the end, of 0.2, the VN is was starting to feel like a demo reel of many very short vignettes, none of them circling back to each other. This would be challenging to follow even if all chapters of the VN were released at once, but having this come out in chapters that could be separated by weeks/months makes this feel like a deal-breaker.

I've often wished that VNs/games would be released in layers, rather than in chapters. For example, release a short story about one character with basic art and no choices (a VN); then add choices and more art in the next release; then add a subplot with a new MC for the next release; etc. It would be a lot easier to keep up with games like this over the months/years. This VN would be a perfect game for it. Tell Celeste's story start to finish (no time cuts/etc.), then layer in more characters and flashbacks and player choices over future releases.

If this was truly an intro then there was a ton of content. Good job to the dev for making this story interesting.
PROS
Renders are good
Characters are attractive and have depth
Story is interesting
CONS
Writing needs some help, but only a little bit
The flash backs there
Summary
Although this is a good VN with a sloid story, the writing needs some attention. Not a lot mind you, but it is noticeable in some spots. With a quick clean up this could be fixed.
Characters have depth in their development and I can see them getting better as the story continues.
I recommend this VN. It is interesting, and the models are sexy.
Good luck to Namco15 with further success on this project.

I played for maybe half an hour and then had to stop because the English language and the quality of the dialogue are just not good enough. You can clearly see that GmaS wants to create a diverse world, with its own mythology and history, in which the "Witches" play a central role. But many dialogues simply seem infantile. This is partly due to the fact that the English language is very badly used, both in terms of the choice of words and grammar. I think if the developer were to run the texts through DeepL, it would immediately be a leap in quality. On the other hand, the style of the conversations seems very "childish", not how adults would converse.

And that really hurts both the atmosphere and pacing of the game. So much so that I only mention in an aside that the renders are really impressive, I like the transitions and fight scenes are well staged. There really could be a lot to be said for GmaS, but the linguistic shortcomings dramatically push the experience down.