I don't get the overwhelming hype behind this one. The story and characters are good, but still fairly stock. Rough translation and grammar hurts it slightly, but overall I would say this game is good (but not great) as a narrative experience.
The visuals are my biggest issue. In fairness there are loads of animations and they are fairly high quality. If you weigh animations highly then this is a big deal, but I can take or leave them. The actual renders are detailed, but really grainy. Like distractingly so. Better care should have been put into the polish of these images because it undercuts the really detailed environments on display. I never feel emersed because I am constantly thinking "Oh, this image didn't go through enough iterations. That's a shame."
Outside of the environments everything else is either average visually or slightly below overage. The girls are ok but are clearly using older Genesis models. In particular the hair on most of them looks kinda bad. Posing is ok, but sometimes stiff. Lighting is hit or miss. Sometimes notably good, sometimes mediocre.
The sex has its moments. The writing is often at its strongest when portraying sexual tension and desire and that helps a lot. The scenarios are typically quite vanilla and dull but there are a few wider exceptions. Its the kind of game where I think you need to be really invested in the characters and situation for the scenes to really hit hard. That is usually hard to do for me in such a mechanically light VN; this is where gameplay intergration helps. Overall the sex is north of dead average for sure, but nothing truly great.
The technical polish also feels lacking. Like the gallery is buggy and doesn't automatically end the replay at the end. It just keeps playing the game from that point. A very odd bug that I cannot wrap my head around.
So yeah. Mediocre visuals, good but not great writing, good but not great sex. And not an ounce of gameplay or mechanical depth to be seen. I could see myself bumping this to a 4 at some stage, but right now I am just too underwhelmed to get myself there. Why is this game currently being lauded as one of the best on the site? It falls well short of that for me.
The visuals are my biggest issue. In fairness there are loads of animations and they are fairly high quality. If you weigh animations highly then this is a big deal, but I can take or leave them. The actual renders are detailed, but really grainy. Like distractingly so. Better care should have been put into the polish of these images because it undercuts the really detailed environments on display. I never feel emersed because I am constantly thinking "Oh, this image didn't go through enough iterations. That's a shame."
Outside of the environments everything else is either average visually or slightly below overage. The girls are ok but are clearly using older Genesis models. In particular the hair on most of them looks kinda bad. Posing is ok, but sometimes stiff. Lighting is hit or miss. Sometimes notably good, sometimes mediocre.
The sex has its moments. The writing is often at its strongest when portraying sexual tension and desire and that helps a lot. The scenarios are typically quite vanilla and dull but there are a few wider exceptions. Its the kind of game where I think you need to be really invested in the characters and situation for the scenes to really hit hard. That is usually hard to do for me in such a mechanically light VN; this is where gameplay intergration helps. Overall the sex is north of dead average for sure, but nothing truly great.
The technical polish also feels lacking. Like the gallery is buggy and doesn't automatically end the replay at the end. It just keeps playing the game from that point. A very odd bug that I cannot wrap my head around.
So yeah. Mediocre visuals, good but not great writing, good but not great sex. And not an ounce of gameplay or mechanical depth to be seen. I could see myself bumping this to a 4 at some stage, but right now I am just too underwhelmed to get myself there. Why is this game currently being lauded as one of the best on the site? It falls well short of that for me.