Played the game for a bit; waffled a bit about whether to give my impressions or not - I will, but try not to take them to personally,'cause unfortunately I haven't got much positive to say.
It's a porn game and porn game setups especially with this sort of protagonist tends to be kinda lazy, but this one takes the cake. Does he have some deep connection to the moon? Perhaps an astronomy fan that for years observed and obsessed with it? Is there some karmic payment for a past deed? Some wacky situation he accidentally gets involved in? No, absolutely nothing, it's just "oh, I'm vaguely tired so I'll just, uh, be in the middle of this lawn here and suddenly gain superpowers". And that's the exciting opening to a world of magic ...
And of course conveniently there's a girl around that right away starts helping out; leaving aside his childhood friend being infinitely supportive (despite him being a creepy perv, of course). But, okay, it's just setting up the story, maybe once it gets going a bit ... ? Naw, again, nothing. All the female characters are just waiting to be helpful little sex friends for the protagonist, none of them require any sort of effort on his part ("oh you're vaguely nice and only want me to model for free for you, how could I not absolutely love you?"); let alone does it have anything much to do with his superpowers. I mean, one early point is literally "this girl has a secret she's thinking about right now!" - which the plot doesn't resolve via, I don't know, perhaps using the MC's literal mind reading ability? Naw, just go to her friend who readily blurts out her roommate's biggest secret to some guy she vaguely knows because she thinks that's a great idea. Instead the mind reading ability is used for amazingly deep insights like "she's sunning by the pool so maybe I should bring some sunscreen".
Sandbox started out very narrow, then got a little bit better as time gets on, but doesn't seem to keep developing that way. It's largely linear so for the most part feels like a waste of time. It's just going around triggering the next event; there's no deeper mechanics or much of additional non-story content you can visit or that's there for any immersive purpose or that'd otherwise justify the sandbox environment. Not having to ie grind stats and automatically earning money per week I applaud, but this might as well have been a VN.
Visuals I thought were okay though nothing that stands out (difficult to do that, granted, I think this level is fine, generally speaking). Prose per se is okay too; sometimes a bit too rushed but compared to some other games at least it feels like actual people talking to each other (most of the time anyway) and isn't riddled with a thousand grammar and proofreading mistakes.
That's about it. I guess I should have taken a closer look at the reviews because despite a decent rating it seems these observations aren't exactly new. Oh well. I think I'll go a little bit further just to see, but doubt it's going to change much overall.
TheImage
