[ver. v0.14.5 review]
I am very confused about the high rating on this game.
Before I start, for the love of god, skip the prologue. There is nothing good, interesting, or even redeeming about the prologue. It actually effected my (already limited) enjoyment of the game.
Characters are boring and dry in terms of their design and personality. That's if you're lucky, some of the characters are just plain annoying. H-scenes match the theming since it's all vanilla Koikatsu. Their scenes are not only time-gated, but also extremely limited. You'll go to a girl, have a single conversation with her lasting a couple of seconds, then have to wait like 15 days to talk to her again. The developer also states in game that you don't need to grind money, except you totally DO need to grind money. You might need to drop thousands of dollars to even talk to a character, and until you can speak to this character, you'll be locked out of like 5 other girl's routes. Sometimes you'll need to have money on hand during events with no warning ahead of time.
The story and scenarios are just as dumb as the characters. I tend to be more forgiving on the main narrative in these games, since the girls are the focus, but man, it was hard to read through this one.
This game narrowly misses being a 1/5, simply because there is a high volume of girls and a lot of effort was put in to place for this. It just comes at the cost of literally everything else.
Addendum:
I wanted to keep this review short but I got a strange DM from the developer and guess I need to make a few additional points from it.
- I'm told the game gets better, and honestly I believe it, but my experience was bad enough where I seriously don't even want to start the game back up anymore, so it's kind of hard for me to just deal with a couple more hours of it to get to the "good part".
- I'm told the timegating for character scenes are for a reason that's shown later on in the game. Frankly, I don't care, it's still terrible design. The best part about open world games compared to a kinetic novel is doing things at your own pace. I like to stick to one character to see a large portion of her story all at once before moving on to someone else. Force me to jump around like I have ADHD and it's much harder for me to care about anything.
- The timegating also seems to be designed so that I would visit as many girls as possible, but you didn't need to timegate scenes to do that, I would have just naturally explored whenever I felt like it. On the note of visiting as many girls as possible, the process for doing so is god awful. I have to jump through the relationship screen with all of the girls to find who I'm even allowed to encounter in the first place.
- The developer is clearly proud of their work, telling me just how successful and big this game is. To be honest, no sarcasm, I'm happy for the developer. They're living the dream, doing what they want to do in life, making something a lot of people clearly like, making a living off of it, and not hurting anybody in the process. But that has no effect on how I feel about the game and have no idea why it was mentioned other than to flex?
Conclusion: Yeah, I dropped the game before it "got good". Insert never give up guy digging for diamonds meme here. Forgive me if I give up halfway through when I have to spend a couple of hours digging through a septic tank to get to diamonds that I can get somewhere else.
In the end, the developer threw big numbers at me, showing me how big and amazing the the soon-to-be final update for the game would be. Maybe I'll revisit it then, but for now, I ain't goin' back in there, boss.
I am very confused about the high rating on this game.
Before I start, for the love of god, skip the prologue. There is nothing good, interesting, or even redeeming about the prologue. It actually effected my (already limited) enjoyment of the game.
Characters are boring and dry in terms of their design and personality. That's if you're lucky, some of the characters are just plain annoying. H-scenes match the theming since it's all vanilla Koikatsu. Their scenes are not only time-gated, but also extremely limited. You'll go to a girl, have a single conversation with her lasting a couple of seconds, then have to wait like 15 days to talk to her again. The developer also states in game that you don't need to grind money, except you totally DO need to grind money. You might need to drop thousands of dollars to even talk to a character, and until you can speak to this character, you'll be locked out of like 5 other girl's routes. Sometimes you'll need to have money on hand during events with no warning ahead of time.
The story and scenarios are just as dumb as the characters. I tend to be more forgiving on the main narrative in these games, since the girls are the focus, but man, it was hard to read through this one.
This game narrowly misses being a 1/5, simply because there is a high volume of girls and a lot of effort was put in to place for this. It just comes at the cost of literally everything else.
Addendum:
I wanted to keep this review short but I got a strange DM from the developer and guess I need to make a few additional points from it.
- I'm told the game gets better, and honestly I believe it, but my experience was bad enough where I seriously don't even want to start the game back up anymore, so it's kind of hard for me to just deal with a couple more hours of it to get to the "good part".
- I'm told the timegating for character scenes are for a reason that's shown later on in the game. Frankly, I don't care, it's still terrible design. The best part about open world games compared to a kinetic novel is doing things at your own pace. I like to stick to one character to see a large portion of her story all at once before moving on to someone else. Force me to jump around like I have ADHD and it's much harder for me to care about anything.
- The timegating also seems to be designed so that I would visit as many girls as possible, but you didn't need to timegate scenes to do that, I would have just naturally explored whenever I felt like it. On the note of visiting as many girls as possible, the process for doing so is god awful. I have to jump through the relationship screen with all of the girls to find who I'm even allowed to encounter in the first place.
- The developer is clearly proud of their work, telling me just how successful and big this game is. To be honest, no sarcasm, I'm happy for the developer. They're living the dream, doing what they want to do in life, making something a lot of people clearly like, making a living off of it, and not hurting anybody in the process. But that has no effect on how I feel about the game and have no idea why it was mentioned other than to flex?
Conclusion: Yeah, I dropped the game before it "got good". Insert never give up guy digging for diamonds meme here. Forgive me if I give up halfway through when I have to spend a couple of hours digging through a septic tank to get to diamonds that I can get somewhere else.
In the end, the developer threw big numbers at me, showing me how big and amazing the the soon-to-be final update for the game would be. Maybe I'll revisit it then, but for now, I ain't goin' back in there, boss.