VN - Ren'Py - JPDE Refrain - Sonata of Fire [v4.6] [JPDE/Meinos Kaen]

To be honest the only reason this game isn't 5 stars is due to the forced poly romance between yourself Evelyn and Penny. I don't find myself particularly attracted to either of them romantically or sexually, I in general hate when player agency is taken away. besides this complaint the game is fantastic. The writing is all around great and feels like a breath of fresh air since i haven't enjoyed the Rwby series in a while. Id definitely recommend giving this game a shot.

Truly outstanding work for a fan game you can truly feel the passion put into this If you're a fan of the idea of rwby but not the actual show (me included) or if you are a fan of the show and just want rwby fan content this is the game for you.Best wishes to the remake!!

I really liked the game overall even not knowing anything of RWBY
The only 2 "problems" i have with the game is:
1- combat didnt feel that much engaged on itand when the Pyrrha battle came i didnt like it very much. Good to know that the Sequel combat es more engaging and more fun
2-Is about the ending, not how it ended i really liked it but the lack of information of other characters but i hope more of it will be addresed on the sequel.
Really good game and totally worth the time

The good: The story is really enjoyable and fun. The characters are all very accurate and very interesting, and the creators have put an interesting spin on the franchise as opposed to the actual plot. It's also very (intentionally) funny, with the characters having great banter and humorous moments.

The bad: I have three main critiques:

First, the combat system is - frankly - appalling. There's no real indicator of your opponent's health (it could really use a health bar at the very least), battles can go on for quite a long time, and the abilities are poorly defined. A possible solution is little pop ups to actually describe what they do, and a health bar for the bosses.

Second, limiting progression events to Saturdays massively limits your ability to enjoy the story or explore multiple routes to their fullest. This should be altered so that more days allow them, or even every day as the player selects them.

Third, the game exists on a noticeable time limit, where many relationship events are time-gated and you eventually reach a point where you can't do anything else. This massively limits the exploration mentioned above.

Overall, the game is very, very good and a brilliant retelling of the RWBY story. However, it does need some work to be as good as it could possibly be. I can't wait to see what the developers add next, or for specific characters (*cough* a certain superstar redhead warrior *cough*) to get a dedicated ending.

Literally the first piece of RWBY related content I ever consumed and It completely spoiled me on the real thing - genuinely, this piece of fan material is better than the original by a far margin IMO.

If you enjoy VNs or are just in the market for a good modern fantasy (with optional sexy stuff) I sincerely recommend you check out JPDE.

I've played through the game twice now the writing is good the story is gripping, but the combat needs to be tuned in my opinion since some fights are bug-nuts difficult, and by far the biggest thing I would recommend you focus on is getting some more closure on the characters you build a relationship with in the ending, it honestly feels hollow to me at the current moment a few lines and that's it, it leaves you feeling empty when you finish it. So yeah I think the combat needs to be tuned maybe even add a difficulty setting that allows you to just play for the story if you want, and I suggest the ending needs to be re-looked at since it feels hollow once you finish.

The game has great character development, an interesting story line to follow and the art style for the cgs (not the lewd ones) is quite unique and pretty art style. It also has quite good humor and a simple but effective combat system.
But definitely the bast part are the characters and how well-developed they are, specially when you follow their routes.

I'm gonna keep this as short as I can, but this has got to be one of my favorite games on this website. It's EXACTLY just like I like it. Has an absurd amount of story and the H-scenes don't feel forced in the slightest, albeit there's only a few of them.
This isn't a "Hentai game with a side of story", this is a "Story oriented game with a side of lewd events", and that's a huge plus in my book.
If you're into the idea of cozying up and go through a well written story, look no further.
The only negative thing about this game is that the art is a tad bit inconsistent. I've seen a lot of people complain about only being able to do events on Saturday but you need to realize that currently, there's 179 days, so there's A LOT of saturdays for you to do all events.

5/5

It's a very large story with a defined plot and a variety of character paths to explore; the biggest complaint is that certain mechanics such as skills don't ever really seem to come up and the "cell phone" has several interactions that are not implemented.

I haven't reviewed any games before but this one has turned out to be an exception. I was surprised to see that not many folks have reviewed this already.
This is for v4.11. I absolutely loved the story, all characters are adorable and have such depth. You might be disappointed if you are looking for a quick fap but for me this was one of those rare finds where you come for a quick look and then end up staying for the story.
It's definitely still incomplete and there are some cut off storylines that I did not find or missed. The lewd content is well placed and it's there to enhance the experience and not just for sake of it. The voice was awesome too, I guess it may not be feasible to fully voice so much content but it was awesome too.
I absolutely recommend this gem to anyone. It took me easily 24hrs+ total to finish the current content. I am looking forward to more.
And dev you are seriously awesome with this creative plot please keep it up!
PS- I had no idea what RWBY is before playing this game.

It's the holy grail of good writing, good art, good coding, and good taste.

This thing is so fucking good!!! Like jfc how can everything be so high quality? I highly recommended, although it's not for the people that just wanna coom immediately. The coomer content isn't front-loaded or 99% of the game like some games. Not that that's bad, but it's a different type of game.

(Review posted as of v4.04)

Wasn't sure going in because I've quite literally zero knowledge on the show this game was based on. Fortunately it's very entertaining and the plot captured my attention despite this. Author seems to be consistently working out the kinks , fixing bugs and typos on a regular basis. This game makes me want to start watching the show. now, I will say that I wish that character events weren't largely tied to Saturdays, because there's a lot of in-between time that goes wasted there. but later on in the game, the dev seems to add more of those moments throughout the week.

Good start that they are slowly expanding out on a monthly basis. I prefer this to the show already and it seems like it'll only get better. Once they work out some of the missing events (near the end) and find a reliable source of lewds, I see this being one of my favorite all times.

It has been a long time since anything i've played has put me in such a fantastic mood as this game has. It had me smiling, it had me laughing, and thoroughly enthralled despite many scenes and routes along the path have yet to be completed (But the main story is 100% done). I'm not much of a review minded person, but this made such an impression on me that I had to weigh in.

There isn't a lot of lewd content in JPDE as of yet, so if that's your primary interest you'll probably leave unsatisfied for the time being. Looks like finding artists is difficult.

I personally can't vouch for the authenticity of the setting. Before this I hadn't seen RWBY and knew very little about it. I think I can safely say that was no barrier to entry however. The quality is damn good that i'd recommend this to anyone fan or not.

The only cons I can muster are few in number and may very well be improved as the project is built upon and polished up. Some of the louder sound effects (notably explosions) get very crackly. And the turn based combat is kinda plain., with an extremely utilitarian UI and lots and very simple combat (Though the difficulty does spike a bit later on.

But everything else is fantastic. The story is fantastic and changes depending on who you build relationships with once you get into the endgame, justifying the time limit you have on how many people you can grow close too and adding replayability. Aside from a few crackly sound effects most of them are very good and there's great music. And while the art quality can vary in places, I'd overall say the visuals range from solid to amazing. Seriously whoever did Neopolitan's event CG's for example (and plenty others), you do some amazing work.

There are more words I could come up with i'm sure, but as I said i'm not used to reviewing things cause I just end up rambling. But when I knew I wanted to review and praise this project before I'd even completed it... well if that and what i've said hasn't convinced you to give it a look, I don't know what else I could say.

JPDE is stuck in my mind and I'd don't think that's going to change any time soon. Maybe it will for you too.

This game is amazing. The story, while a little contrived at times, is well written. The characters themselves are all so well written that i fell in love with all of them. It really feels like Monty Oum's RWBY as opposed to Rooster Teeth's RWBY.

The only reason I rated this 3/5 as opposed to 5/5 is because as amazing as the game is as a Visual Novel, some of the other components are deeply flawed.

Starting with the Combat. The combat is a fun addition and in the first few battles, it was fairly balanced. Because of that and me spending the free time farming money for gifts and dust crystals. When day 105 came along i found myself unprepared for the fight. After the 25th insta-kill, I found out that so long as David is above 0 Aura, the other party members could have -208,000 aura and still fight perfectly fine. After the 38th insta-kill, I broke down and used a save editor to boost my stats and still got insta-killed 5 more times before finally killing it. Unfortunately, this becomes the trend to the exponentially increasing number of battles in the second half of the game. Fights become near impossible even after dumping all my left over free time into training instead money. Fights with grim that i had no trouble with in the first half, now take 5 minutes each to kill. Abilities have no active description, so i have no idea what they do and resort to either responding to dialogue prompts or find out which ones do damage and stick to them.

The game also has various experience but despite most events giving these experience there seems to be no real use for them.

In short, amazing writing but need a lot of work on it's RPG mechanics.



Edit: While the game is Amazing, the Dev has terrible anger issues and personally attacks anyone who criticizes him. Don't support this guy.

I don't usually play games from here that doesn't have specific lewd categories, but for one reason or another I started to play this game.
The reason I am writing this is to express just how much of an impression this game made on me.
I am only on day 20, but what I have experienced so far is exceptional! Charming characters, mystery, good comedy and an excitement to go forward.
I have had no lewd events so far and no sexual content, so bear this in mind when a pervert like me tells you that this game is excellent in so many other ways that it keeps me playing it.
If you like anime or manga, this is just a great game and one of the few titles that stands on its own merits as a game and story.
I have not watched the anime, but I feel like I get to know the characters by just playing the game (True to the anime or not, I do not know, but they are intriguing in any case).

One thing I wish is for there to be more clear cut instructions on how to progress with characters, especially when there is a timer.
You can of course play the game multiple times, but it is not a short game and despite it being good so far, a story is the best the first time and the developer should recognize that multiple playthroughs require significant change to the story. I think they are working on this though, so it might not be an issue for long.

In the end, the best endorsement I can give, is perhaps that (so far) it has the story of an official production for the anime and it could be a branch of the original (this is without knowing the other official content in this universe).

This is a game with a lot to love but a lot to hate as well.

My main gripe is that the time limit feels way too short, you have 183 days to act freely, but character events can only happen on Saturdays, which means you can only have 26 such events, however, there's over 60 based on the current version of the walkthrough, and because story events are also locked based on the day you're on, you're probably only going to be able to actually max out two or three of the twelve completed characters. For a game as long as this, asking you to play it all over again several times just to see the different story events is insane as, as far as I can tell, the main story doesn't have any considerable change based on this, though I'm sure there are some differences. Even skipping through, it'd take a long time to play through again. That's probably only going to get worse with the combination stuff getting added recently.
A simple solution would be to just untie story progression from the day count and tie it to something else, but considering how many reviews have said what a pain in the ass the day limit is and how it's been totally ignored, I doubt that'll ever happen. Edit: (See the P.S. at the end.)


This game has obviously had a lot of love put into it, the CGs usually look great, the comedic, romantic, dramatic and badass elements usually land well and often hit just right, and the story is huge, complex and interesting. This isn't some pictures of boobs and a few lines of text to go with it.

On the story, the main story line doesn't have the most satisfying of conclusions and is a bit of a WTF moment, but it's clearly setting up for the second game. Several of the villains feel a bit too comic book like, but I enjoyed them for the most part, and the brains of the group makes for a very enigmatic villain who's a lot of fun whenever you see him. The writing is good, and has far fewer mistakes than most such games, though there are some times that story events that haven't happened yet are mentioned in character events despite being locked behind day limits, and character events I haven't done are mentioned in the story events, leading to some confusion at times (mostly stuff with Junior's club for the latter, I'm guessing a Yang event I didn't do).


Most of the characters are great and there's not much more to say than that, I especially liked everything with Ozpin, and while Peach kind of grated on me at first it didn't take long for me to come around to her.


There's not much in the way of actual smut, and what little there is is mostly very wholesome and vanilla. A lot of it unfortunately doesn't actually happen, in a 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' kind of way, though it's handled a bit better than that. That was pretty disappointing as there was some stuff I was looking forward to that I saw when moving the lewd patch over, and it didn't actually have any relationship or story significance. It's pretty crazy to me that at least one character is implied to have sex with the main character and a big deal of it's made both before and after, but there's no actual scene.


The combat is pretty boring, and the actual effects of the semblances you can use in battle aren't explained at all. You can get a good idea of what they do based on the story, but their actual effects on an opponent sometimes seem non-existent. The whole thing feels kind of tacked on, as if a few combat breaks between masses of story would make it more of a game, and I usually just stuck to spamming ranged attacks and using focus to fill everyone back up aside from the fights where that's not an option. So long as you go to the gym rather than going to sleep when there's no events in beacon or the city, you shouldn't have any issues with the combat.

On the matter of city events, the 'free roam' is something else I have a gripe with. There are several locations you can visit, but most of the time you're just looking for one there are events at, and the only way to know is by checking each of them. The Alley is a totally useless location for the first 1/3rd of the game as nothing ever happens there, and Ozpin's Tower never had any event at all that I saw, so it doesn't feel like there's any need to have those unlocked, they're just another thing to check. The mornings also, there's only one choice you can actually make, but for some reason you're allowed to click every other location and see a 'I have to go to class' message. The other locations might as well be locked, or it might as well just take you straight to class. I didn't want to miss any events so I usually checked each location, only for it to prove a total waste of time.


The music and sound effects were enjoyable, I don't have much to say on that front, nothing mind blowing but nothing awful, they improved the scenes by giving them the right feel but nothing crazy.


It's inconceivable to me that a game that's been in progress for 4 years doesn't have completed character events for the main characters, the focus on side characters is mind boggling to me considering how important your teammates are, but it is what it is. I would have certainly appreciated being able to see more of them alongside the main story. Interactions with Jack are particularly lacking and disappointing. Why can't a guy get with his cute tomboy leader?

Similarly disappointing are some of the decisions of the main character, he fucks up in big ways that you can do nothing about enough to get annoying, which is unfortunate as most of the time he's perfectly fine as a character even if people refer to you by the surname the game forces on you rather than the name you give the character waaaaaaay too often. Strong, but not OP, even if there is a bit too much 'power of friendship' for my tastes, he's a better MC than you'd find in most games.


That's a lot of complaints. Like I said, a lot to love, but a lot to dislike. The game's not perfect by a long shot, but I enjoyed it greatly despite its issues. I was originally going to give it a lower score, but after playing it to the end I was far too into the whole thing to give a lower score in good conscience.

It's a 4 year labour of love by the developer, and it certainly shows.

Thanks for the game!


P.S.
The developer actually responded to my main complaint in the thread:
'Regarding the time to do dates in-game, the more recent ones have been non-saturday tied and the aim is to eventually be able to do them all during the week too.'

As I only picked it up recently I wasn't aware of the former and the latter is great to hear! Thanks for keeping us informed!

The game sits in a slightly awkward spot, to be quite honest. Much like RWBY it hits a very specific niche, and a few people, myself included, are so happy with its pros that the cons don't matter. Objectively, the game has a few flaws that might be polished out down the line, the combat being by far the worst offender.
It is slow and reltionship focused, the porn parts are merely afterthoughts for now. If you come at it like you would the bog standard tittygame, you WILL be disappointed. For me that is a net positive, for others thats an absolute no-go.
As a result of the focus on relationships, you will have to replay it since the game will not let you "catch em all" in one go. I like this, because I am frankly a little tired of harem collect-a-thons like Love and Sex and such. If I want a harem-ish sort of game that doesnt feel like titty pokemon, I'll play Long Live the Princess by Belle (Simp Simp, Plug Plug. Play it!)
I personally enjoy this more as an interactive piece of romantic fanfiction, and I like that. I reiterate, your mileage might vary. Play it and find out. You can sink hours into it, but you will know within 30 mins tops whether it is your kind of game or not. There are no stupid twists and turns to put you off after the first half.
So yeah, this game is a 5/5 or 2/5 with very little inbetween.

I was enjoying this game, reminded me a lot of the persona series which I enjoy a ton but unfortunately it's too like persona in the worst possible way. 183 days to play the game... Time limits are anti fun, forcing you to rush through in fear of losing the game. Shame because it was shaping up to be a nice wholesome experience too. I've given it one star just to make the point clear. Time limits, can't enjoy the game if I'm worrying about losing out. This game intrigued me, then my intrigued sank when the time limit popped up. I'm not sure if the dev reads these reviews but if they by chance do, I'm not coming down on you just, drop the time limit and maybe a little more dialogue control in your future projects maybe.

The best description I can give of this game is that it's exactly like RWBY, with every positive and negative connotation that carries.

The characters feel like they do in the show, even more fleshed out at times, and the overall melodrama and plot honestly wouldn't feel too out of place in RWBY... But that's the problem. RWBY is not a well written show. It has good ideas and potential, but the melodrama, awkward comedy, and moments of "wtf why is this happening" make it suffer in execution. This game is the same, with good promise starting out, but incredibly cringy and awkward attempts at comedy, weird character moments where you're asking why the fuck characters are doing something, and every other complaint you could make about the original RWBY. Maybe I'm just dead inside, but out of every attempt at comedy in this game (there are a lot) I laughed a single time.

The other issue I have with it is the fact that you are 100% forced into being in a polygamous relationship with girls you may not want to date, nor do you get any real indication this is going to happen until you're pretty far along. For example, you are forced to date at least two members of your team (from when I last played), with no feedback on if the player wants to or not. I personally rather disliked the one who wasn't Penny, so imagine my joy when I'm forced to date her despite every other aspect of the game acting like a traditional dating sim where you get to choose your romantic partner. That also led to a whole bunch of melodrama I was totally invested in and not frustrated by (cough sarcasm cough).

Overall if you're fine with being forced multiple romantic partners in a dating simulator who you may or may not like and enjoy RWBY then you will like this game, probably even love it. If you're not okay with that or don't enjoy RWBY's particular brand of humor then stay far away from this game.