RPGM - Completed - Magical Girl Tear Sweet [Final] [Twinkle STARs]

Quick summary:
Download this to READ the story of a magical girl without magic powers.

This has a smidge of RPG gameplay/mechanics, and the tag shouldn't be there. Not gonna argue over classifications, what you have here, is a short story (makings of a VN), with a "gimmick" for combat, and some adult content, that benefitted heavily from my liking for the "Loli tag", and just about any content with, or similar to it. I also like VN's, have read many, but that's not what I'm looking for right now.

Good:
- Loli's (Purely personal, there are lots of heretics on the internet who don't like them, for instance). "Cutesy" aesthetics (Again. Subjective. Art). Partial voice acting (which is better than none, and you guessed it V.A is very important for ME)

Neutral:
- Optional sub-events. Premise (and just the premise, the story is bland). H-events during "combat". Translation is OK. H-scenes do their "job".

Bad:
- Loading times. There's almost no RPG here, (it's just a "gimmick", that passes for combat), it's a short VN. None of the girls, reminds me of a magical girl (never saw one in real life, but I'm confident I can recognize one).

Extra:
There are terrible videogames, disappointing videogames, and "not what i'm looking for" videogames. What do they all have in common? They waste your time, money and patience. This one fits "model nº3". It's not bad, but it reminds you of the importance of accurate tags. (Do note, that the developer notes on this website explain how things work, but absolutes and "technicals" aside, this is still not an RPG, no matter how you slice it, and that's one of the filters I used in the search page)

Score:
4/10, more if you want to read a story about magical girls.

It's got the resource and potential to be the greatest corruption game ever, but instead its feels half-assed.

+ Great and Cute Art
+ Studio Grade Quality
+ English Language (AI) at launch including UI
+ Great characters
+ Simple but challenging

- Very Little Content
- Unsatisfying Voicing
- Very Short Story

The game is kind of shit, you get 2 hours of "content" tops and even then it overstays its welcome. Zero difficulty, just tedium, a barebones battle system and porn that could've been much more.

Presentation
Probably the game's biggest asset, it's made with RPGMaker but it does have some custom battle menus, unique music and sound effects. It generally looks charming at first glance. But beneath all that veneer there's disappointment and a shadow of a game that could've been.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, in an act of utter madness the dev added a three second loading screen to every single map transition. If you remove a specific trigger in the Map files the transition becomes instant

Gameplay
Worse than having no gameplay, this game has illusion of gameplay in a on rails Visual Novel style, it goes like this: You finish the prologue and the game throws you in an empty map with decorative buildings and NPCs that do nothing, there are some self contained side events that you can watch and a few of them have porn scenes (more on that later). Essentially you complete each chapter, watching any sub events that pop up, you go do the main mission which has you talk down to "desire possessed" people, you choose from one out of four talking abilities until you beat the guy, move to the next one, finish chapter, repeat. It's very hard to lose on purpose.

Sound
Nothing too crazy, although it does have a couple of unique tracks it doesn't do much with them and it can get somewhat repetitive. The voice acting is perfunctory at best, it does its job but it doesn't elevate the game in any way since the dialogue is sparse.

Visual Art
I like the art and I'm somewhat impressed. But I'm going to be mean:
At first glance I didn't notice any inconsistencies with the art. Everything looked right and the details were properly placed. However it quickly starts to fall apart when different scenes and angles come into play, all sorts of anatomical and perspective inconsistencies start cropping up which really is a bummer. I'm almost certain this is AI enhanced using a personal LORA, just look up the artist's (干しガラス) portfolio on pixiv, if you go to his earlier works you will notice a very distinctive and amateurish style, not too bad honestly but jump forward 6 years or so and suddenly the art quality skyrockets, coincidentally he makes this resurgence during the advent of generative AI without any works bridging the gap between his new style and the old one. He is a pioneer in this regard but his art is far from perfect, as several scenes look odd (The School friend's only sex scene for example). I would love to be proven wrong on my AI comment so hit me up with any evidence if you can find any.

Writing
Boilerplate magical girl story, MC has no powers despite being a magical girl so she is kind of lame, she sort of convinces people to stop doing bad things. For some it might be endearing but to me it just comes off as insipid and boring, sub events have close to zero weight to them in terms of story and consequence, and any action you take in a previous chapter (losing battles, doing certain events) is never acknowledged, everything in the writing feels hastily cobbled together. The (unedited) AI translation is bad compared to others, if you have rudimentary Japanese vocabulary just go for the original imo.

Porn
Essentially, it's a CG hunter/GOR kind of game, the worst of its type in fact. For example, in one scene the MC gives her bro a handjob, the scene itself is not bad, but nothing else beyond that happens between them, they never acknowledge it, their relationship/interactions never change etc. It's just a one and done deal. Every scene is like this, losing her virginity is completely irrelevant and it can happen at random, every sex scene is self contained and it only serves to pad out time essentially. Also losing on purpose is just annoying, you have to wait until the enemy fills up a bar, and then you get a small CG with some quick transitions, you lose, reload and then do the fight properly to move on, most scenes are just like this. In total there are around 23-26 scenes and some of them reuse CGs, all of them have featureless semi transparent men and a couple of tentacles.

All in all Twinkle STARs (the dev circle) started releasing games since July 7th 2023, all three of their games are of comparable quality. Most highly acclaimed rpgmkaer games take up to 2 years to make on average assuming everything goes well, in half that time this dev has released 3 different games, so you can imagine the amount of corners that he needed to cut to make that happen. The nicest thing that I can say about this game is that it's nicely made shovelware. Grab a full save if you want but frankly I wouldn't bother.

Short, cute, sweet. Nails the feeling of the magical girl theme. Unique "battle" mechanics. Honestly just a feel-good short game in a wholesome kind of way. Even the H-scenes are just hecking cute.