Review for v0.02
This game is interesting and ambitious, but it fails to make its base gameplay enjoyable so I can't give it a good rating, or even an average rating.
Good Points:
- Interesting Sci-fi/Fantasy setting. Lot of robots that are used in interesting ways.
- The story is interesting and I cared about the MC's childhood friend from the intro... but the bad grammar/translation detracts from this.
- The basic dating sim mechanics seem fine and there's a varriety of girls to pursue already.
Bad Points:
- Bad grammar and spelling. I'm assuming English is the writer's second language. It's good enough to understand what's going on, but there's enough mistakes/awkwardness to make reading it annoying at times.
- There is away too much walking. Rooms/areas are huge and in the intro you have to traverse a lot of screens with almost no payoff. It doesn't make sense for all of the screens to be that big when all you're doing is walking from one side to another.
- On a related note: It's hard to tell which doors you can actually go through and which are just window dressing. Some kind of indicator would be helpful so you don't have to just try every door. Same can be said for when walking to the edge of the screen can take you to a new area.
- The combat requires you to have a lot of items to win. So basically your combat ability is held back by how much money you make. And you don't win back a significant amount of money from combat so you almost always get less money going in than what you have to sink in to win. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if it was easy to make money other ways, but your part time job doesn't pay you that much either.
- The time system goes by too quick and you have no control over it. If you don't know exactly where you're trying to go, you'll find that it gets too late to do whatever you wanted to do and you'll be instantly transported to your bed instead. Then from there they transport you to the classroom where you have to sit through messages saying how little you're paying attention to class, before you're finally given control of the character again. But after that you have to walk through 3 screens where nothing of interesting happens before you can leave the classroom building and get back to where you want to go. This game either needs smaller screens, faster walk/run speeds, or fast-travel options. Or it needs to abandon the day/night cycle automatically progressing and instead tie that progression of time to doing activities.
Overall Impressions:
One of these issues probably would be forgivable by itself. But all of them combined make the game a chore to play. I'm actually interested in seeing where this game would go... but the gameplay is just not fun as it is. You spend too much time walking, and the stat grinding is not enjoyable. The battle is almost typical RPG maker stuff, which I don't hate... but the fact that items are so essential and money is so scarce kind of hurts the experience.
There is the potential for a very interesting game here... but it needs polishing before I would recommend it to anyone. I can say that it fails in interesting ways (which is a complement... better to be uniquely bad than forgetable). I hope the dev continues to work on this as I'm positive with some tweaks (and an English editor) this could be a great game.
This game is interesting and ambitious, but it fails to make its base gameplay enjoyable so I can't give it a good rating, or even an average rating.
Good Points:
- Interesting Sci-fi/Fantasy setting. Lot of robots that are used in interesting ways.
- The story is interesting and I cared about the MC's childhood friend from the intro... but the bad grammar/translation detracts from this.
- The basic dating sim mechanics seem fine and there's a varriety of girls to pursue already.
Bad Points:
- Bad grammar and spelling. I'm assuming English is the writer's second language. It's good enough to understand what's going on, but there's enough mistakes/awkwardness to make reading it annoying at times.
- There is away too much walking. Rooms/areas are huge and in the intro you have to traverse a lot of screens with almost no payoff. It doesn't make sense for all of the screens to be that big when all you're doing is walking from one side to another.
- On a related note: It's hard to tell which doors you can actually go through and which are just window dressing. Some kind of indicator would be helpful so you don't have to just try every door. Same can be said for when walking to the edge of the screen can take you to a new area.
- The combat requires you to have a lot of items to win. So basically your combat ability is held back by how much money you make. And you don't win back a significant amount of money from combat so you almost always get less money going in than what you have to sink in to win. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if it was easy to make money other ways, but your part time job doesn't pay you that much either.
- The time system goes by too quick and you have no control over it. If you don't know exactly where you're trying to go, you'll find that it gets too late to do whatever you wanted to do and you'll be instantly transported to your bed instead. Then from there they transport you to the classroom where you have to sit through messages saying how little you're paying attention to class, before you're finally given control of the character again. But after that you have to walk through 3 screens where nothing of interesting happens before you can leave the classroom building and get back to where you want to go. This game either needs smaller screens, faster walk/run speeds, or fast-travel options. Or it needs to abandon the day/night cycle automatically progressing and instead tie that progression of time to doing activities.
Overall Impressions:
One of these issues probably would be forgivable by itself. But all of them combined make the game a chore to play. I'm actually interested in seeing where this game would go... but the gameplay is just not fun as it is. You spend too much time walking, and the stat grinding is not enjoyable. The battle is almost typical RPG maker stuff, which I don't hate... but the fact that items are so essential and money is so scarce kind of hurts the experience.
There is the potential for a very interesting game here... but it needs polishing before I would recommend it to anyone. I can say that it fails in interesting ways (which is a complement... better to be uniquely bad than forgetable). I hope the dev continues to work on this as I'm positive with some tweaks (and an English editor) this could be a great game.