VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Melody [v1.00 Extras] [MrDots Games]

Excellent composition, Mr.Dot! (obvious pun is obvious). It felt like the character renders here were more expressive than in Sunshine Love, but this predates it, no? In any case, my only constructive criticisms are that I'd love to see more expression in character faces, and to get rid of the single choice options in future projects (they are pointless and kind of annoying).

Ideally, I'd give it a soft 9/10. But since this is out of 5, I round up and use this as a benchmark for a 5/5.
Melody is not ground-breaking by any means. It tells a sweet simple story, and it does it well. It also gets bonus marks for actually being completed without feeling ridiculously rushed, which is unfortunately all too common.
The adult VN genre has progressed so quickly in such a short time frame that people playing it now might perceive the renders to be undeserving of a 5, but I think it's unfair to penalise an older game for looking older. Melody nails all the fundamentals for a good adult VN.

"Melody" is too long, dull and sugar-coated... Quality of writing, which is poor and monotonous does not justify the length of this VN. Novelty of music industry setting soon wears off and all you're left with is love prattle between the protagonists, interesting as reading a telephone book. Melody, as the only meaningful love interest, is forced upon us, and cus I wanted to end up with Becca, more mature and lush psychology student, I couldn't bring myself to read another line after she broke our relationship... At least I got goodbye sex Recommended only to connoisseurs of saccharine, lovey-dovey, watery eyed love novels... For me it was stomach churning and cramp inducing as I drink my coffee über black

+ Good slowburn about romance
+ Sweet nice main LI, perhaps too sweet

- main route becomes boring like hell after some time
- "things" with side girls can't be called "routes"
- "Best" ending is (99.9%) impossible without cheating/walkthrough
- shitty made points/choises system killing all interest

Overall nice slowburn game about some vanilla romance, Melody is very sweet girl, side girls are also interesting... but not much 'bout them here tbh, and main route long boring path to nowhere, I lost interest in main LI a bit before first sex with her, then start skipping dialogs, after all loyal "White knight style" running around her, evading creampies, never cheating or even flirting with other girls, even being unrealistic 95% ideal slave for her... game ended with standard "good ending" cause you must be 100% ideal or her career fuck up, but I don't even looked that ending cause it was not even interesting for Me at that point

Game intended for playing with walkthrough... meh, author made some very stupid strange things here and killed potencially amazing game, Just feeling disappointed and frustrated

Edit: changed from 2/5 to 3/5 cause maybe a bit overreacted at first

very nice game about girl who becomes famous singer (as of intended path but there are other paths too) with help of older guy who has some experience on music industry.

while game doesn't have newest graphic arts it still looks good, story is realistic (mostly but can't make fully realistic adult game) and has enough sexscenes to satisfy most players.

overall good game where player guides young girl to stardom despite some obstacles (again on intended path, player can choose other girls or women to end up with but then misses big part of game).

Mellody, another one from MrDots, some good stuff right here, a simple tale and some testing of my musical knowledge xd, a fun time with some good cast. That was a pretty nice experience with some fitting endings.

play v1.00 with french trad (which explains my poor written English, sorry)

First of all, I would like to point out that I have played it for a while now and that I have just restarted it to write this review, so my opinion may include somewhat distorted assessments.

story: 5/5 It was for me the strong point of the game, it is a very successful love story!

characters: 4/5 There too, it's rather a success, we totally become our MC, and the characters are quite endearing, but I think that many are a little too "yucky love stuff"

sex scene: 3/5 I remember having sometimes flirted with the "fast forward" which is not a good sign for the frequency, but besides that I also remember that the scenes were still very well written and very erotic .

renders: 3/5 On this the game has clearly aged, I think if you start with this kind of game it's fine, but comparing it with many new games it seems quite poor in "diversity" and very "frozen".

animation: 2/5 Even more so than for the renderings, they have aged very badly, the fps are a little nonsense (often too fast) and the "loops" are very far from fluid. But we can still note that there is a good quantity.

sound: I believe there is no empty moment

gameplay: 4/5 The number of choices is very satisfying.

I'm planning to give this game 4.5 but I went to 5 since it's impossible here.

Melody is one female characters that have a remarkable personality. It's impossible not to fall for her because of her sweetness and caring attitude. I really love the slow burn romance between the MC and Melody which is really convincing and somehow realistic.

The lewd scenes are also hot but I think they are just bonus to the game. The story is enough to keep me invested in this game.

I really believe that slow burn romance and building up the tension is Mr Dots forte. The slow burn in Melody is what helped me decide to consider this as one of the my favorite games.

My only issue with this game is the usual weakness of Dots and that is the dialogue. Some sentences can be made shorter or less wordy. Sometimes the dialogues are too long which make them tiring to read.

Furthermore, the later part of the game feels weaker than the first part. The repetitive dates between MC and Melody feels like a chore and has no point. There's also little to no conflict in the story (except the Bethany one) which makes me less interested as the game reach its end.

But Melody , for me, is still a heart-warming and good game with nice animation and story. It is one of the classic here so you must try it!

Game is very enjoyable, hovewer it feels empty at times for reasons such as:
-Not enough choices / meaningless choices that do not influence timeline, it would heighten interaction and immersion in the game

-Low amount of side characters like bartenders etc. / it would be a lot of work but it would also increase immersion

Wonderful game! Super comfy, feel-good story especially with the 'Perfect ending'. Almost all aspects are well done: animations, renders, sound, story, etc. The custom tracks were a really nice touch, only downside I found is that you don't really get to hear them unless you stop and wait, I initially missed some of the vocals because I finished reading text before the track had finished its intro.

MY BONER FALL OFF
This game is just incredible, whether it's the scenario, the characters. Every action you do matters! It's just great and opens up so many different endings. The fact that it's different endings with Melody is already great but so is the fact that the other characters. Just WOW.
Perfect/5 .

This game is such a masterpiece!!! I just couldn't help myself from playing it all over again!!!
It's impossible not to fall in love with the character(s), especially with Melody. The story is well written with many possible endings.
It's a 10/10 for me!

Melody... oh Melody... sweet, innocent, just perfectly drawn and described personality... Impossible not to fall in love. The author/dev is a genius. Perfect romance VN. Played it twice and probably that is not the limit. 100/100

Just straight to the point MELODY is a game that "sexual content" is just a sidekick from what you gonna get inside the game so the animation is just there not a problem for me but for many other it's can be bad . the game itself have multiple endings, there's some. 5 different ending, 5 different outcome, 5 different wholesome. (i didn't play to every ending, it might have more than 5 endings.)
the story itself it's quite good. pretty typical and touchy. nothing out of the box but i can accept it. first time playing from MrDots games. looking forward to the other.

Well I enjoyed this game very much. It's very story oriented game, so the story was obviously what I paid most of my attention to, but couple other things could've been handled better. Animations looks stiff and background models at some places should've been better. Also without the walkthrough it would have been much harder to reach the 'perfect ending', as I had no idea what exaclty effected that. I'm rather harem fan, than single romance, so was a bit annoyed by the fact that every bit romance besides Melody basically ruled the best ending, but the author wrote it as he liked, so I guess no point in complaining about it.

BUT if I was to really complain about something, that would be one text bug. Sometimes, if there was a long statement (by long I mean longer than full four lines), any text below fourth line was also below the game screen, so rest of the words was totally unreadable. And I couldn't make it visible by stretching window, or doing anything else. As this game is purely story focused, when things like those happen, that I am unable to see some parts of the story, this makes me enjoy the whole game much less, so it would be best if this annoying thing would be fixed.

Must play game tbh, DMD went to the garbage bin after ch2 basically but this was good all the way through. Lets hope sunshine love also holds up till the end. (UPDATE: Surprise surprise Yuki was turned into a whore that by age of 18 has had sexual relations with several men. Disgusting. Negative reviews complaining about NTR on DMDs and sunshine loves page are removed completely. Mods most likely in cahoots with the dev. Wouldnt surprise me one bit. )

No harem option though keeping in mind so if you want that you aint gonna get it. More romance focused

Quite a nice story with decent writing, but the characters still feel a bit shallow despite this being somewhat of a story driven games.

While the character models are decent, the jankiness of the animations really detracts from the overall experience, and suffers a bit from overzealous use of sliders, although not nearly as egregious as some other games.

The animation scenes are jarringly bad (very fast animation speeds, poor graphics for MC) but it is an amazing love story and romancing Melody is special as her character is well developed and she looks great. I don't think the game has much replay value because the first half will seem tedious as it is a very slow burn.

Now this is a masterpiece. It has one of the best writing for an adult game combine with gorgeous characters design. In additional, the character development feel so real and natural which make this game became one of my favourite so far. 10/10 would love to play it again in near future

[Disclaimer: I wanted to just give this five stars and be done with it, but a review is required in order to do that, so here goes.]

First off, the fact that this is a long game with an actual ending (multiple endings, in fact) is a huge plus. I've only know about these VN's for a year or so, but in that time have seen a ton that are either incredibly short or just not finished. So it's always nice to find one with closure.

Secondly, the escapism factor can be nice, and while there is the occasional dramatic moment, this game is fairly light in tone. YMMV as to whether this is a good or bad thing. Hopefully the visuals and music are enough to let you know the tone this game is going for. It's not gritty or stark realism by any stretch.

That said, the game gives you plenty of opportunities to screw up. Sometimes it's fairly immediate, and others it's a long time coming. As this usually involves the other love interests in the game besides Melody, this can generally be averted by using the Relationship settings options. In fact, I'm not even sure if I could have gotten the "perfect" ending without going in there and just locking out all the other relationships in the game, making it that much easier to focus on Melody. (Indeed, it seems if you entertain the slightest interest in any of the others, whether Melody knows about it or not, or is fine with it or not, it will lock you out of the longer, "best" ending. And the difference between the two is substantial and is not just about points, though that's also a factor.)

Full disclosure, I did the cheat where I played multiple paths somewhat simultaneously just to see where things stood, which meant seeing some of the much shorter endings along the way (typically involving the other women.) Since the game is called "Melody" I guess it should be no surprise that focusing on anyone other than her will lead to fewer story beats.

(And while this may be a bit of a spoiler, Melody's success is directly tied to how romantically involved you are with her. AFAIK there's no option for her to have a successful career where you're just friends, though I could be mistaken. I'm not sure how many endings there actually are.)

My only real complaint with the game, though not enough to lower its score (since it's probably one of my favorite games of its type that I've played thus far) is that some of the decisions seem arbitrary, the results of which aren't readily aparrent, so you'll really want to hold onto save points at even some seemingly arbitrary decision points, in case you need to backtrack. But again, I don't hold that against the game, necessarily, since I've seen plenty of other games do likewise, often more egregiously and with wider repercussions.

I do suggest listening to the audio at times if possible; the music sometimes informs the scene (though not always; some of the tracks are definitely of the "I've heard this jingle before" variety.) The actual songs performed by Melody are pretty good for what they are (considering this is just an indie game and not an actual music album). I enjoyed the voice of whoever they got to sing as Melody, though I would say the voice sounds slightly older than 18/19. I only wish they had actually sung the song in the Perfect Ending portion (instead it's just the lyrics over an instrumental track that doesn't seem to match up.)

Overall it was a fun game and I'm glad I gave it a chance. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're not look for something uber-raunchy* or violent and don't mind a somewhat slow burn (w/ Melody) early on, then I'd say it's worth checking out.

(* - There's plenty of sex, but it doesn't check a lot of the boxes that I've seen in several other games. But other games have that covered.)