I try to immerse and lose myself in each game. Melody kept kicking me out, fighting me every step of the way. These games often require some suspension of disbelief - usually accepting that the MC is a super-stud with a refractory period measured in seconds. Melody (v1.00 Extras) challenged my suspension of disbelief at every moment.
First there's the premise: musician gives up his career and relocates to teach a college student music for 1 hour a week. Teaching for 1 hour a week isn't a career, it's a hobby. But that also makes everything around it unbelievable too. Melody complains that her summer is ruined and she won't have time to do anything fun? You have 1 hour of lessons a week, what are you complaining about! MC says he's too busy? Doing what? You need to de-stress at the end of the week from your grueling 1-3 hours of teaching?
Then there's the lessons themselves. A college student and music major who plays guitar is asked to identify a French horn, a kazoo, and a bassoon? Is asked to try playing the flute and cello to expose her to new instruments? Is this elementary school?
Then there's the writing, which is frequently poor. Grammar mistakes all over the place, occasional typos or wrong words, and terrible, stilted, artificial dialog everywhere. Here's some examples I came across most recently (not the worst, but still pretty awkward):
MC - "I don't want anything in return, just having your company is more than enough."
Girl - "As do I."
or
"Oh that's cool, I'll make sure to have a feed before I see you."
or
MC - "What's the matter?
Girl - "It's nothing except... I really want to take you up to my bedroom. But if I were to do that, I'd do so knowing that we can't have sex. You know, because of what I said this afternoon?" [The afternoon issue was not having a condom. It's now late evening, hours later.]
MC - (I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell her what I have on me...)
MC - "Yeah that's a tough one. However, what if I were to tell you that I may have solved that particular problem?"
Girl - "What? How?" [Yes, however can one solve the problem of not having a condom, given mere hours of time in which to solve it?]
MC - holds up condom.
Girl - "Oh my god!! Where and when did you get that??" [Yes, wherever could one get a condom from...? Their apartment? A drug store? A grocery store? A convenience store? A vending machine in a movie theater bathroom?]
MC - "I hope you won't think I got it just to try to force something to happen between us tonight. But when I went to the bathroom at the movie theatre... There was a vending machine in there. I figured that I should probably have one on me, just in case you know?" [Ah, movie theater bathroom vending machine it is. Mystery solved.]
Girl - "Oh, well that makes sense I guess." [Does it??? Does it really? Because this is not how humans talk and behave. Is there going to be a plot twist that reveals that you're actually all aliens from another planet, masquerading as humans? Because that would actually make more sense.]
I'm guessing the writer is not a native English speaker - and, if so, I give him a lot of credit for writing as well as he did - but as a native English speaker it just made all the characters seem very artificial.
Good writing is supposed to show instead of tell. Melody's writing can't stop telling, and telling, and telling. It's constantly in the characters' heads, telling you how they feel, leaving no room for uncertainty or imagination. "Should I tell her about this? And what I was thinking of at the time? No, I don't think I could talk to her about that right now."
The inner monologues can be exhausting, particularly when they go off on minutiae. "My phone is ringing. Who could it be? I guess I better answer it." "I need to get ready for bed. I should go to the bathroom to pee. I can brush my teeth while I'm there."
Sometimes the writing is unintentionally hilarious. One scene complementing the room decorations had me laughing as the background showed a white room with white curtains, completely devoid of decorations.
Then there's the gameplay. You're constantly interrupted by meaningless single non-choices. Your phone is ringing? You have to click, "Answer the phone." A knock on the door? You have to click, "Open the door." These are not choices, you have to click the one and only option to proceed. It's effectively a "Click to continue playing" message that pops up all the time.
On the flip side, things that I'd think are choices, like agreeing to go to dinner with someone, are often not choices - your character just agrees to it because that's what the dev wrote.
Then there's the Melody score counter always on the screen, tabulating your progress and making you feel like every choice that doesn't increment the score is the wrong one. There's a meaningless "Main Goal" listed for each progress level which has nothing to do with the actual game (I passed the "Be honest with her" level without ever having to actually be honest with her). I usually play without a guide for the initial playthrough, preferring to let my choices naturally lead me to an outcome, but gave up on that early on once I realized that the choices you have to make to progress are sometimes completely arbitrary.
For a game about music, the early weeks are surprisingly devoid of music. For the first 4 weeks you just have one or two generic background tracks on repeat - it's not until the end of week 4 that you get something that isn't generic background music. If my friend hadn't told me that the music gets better, I would have muted it long ago and missed everything. The music starts to improve in week 5, but it's still plagued by having one background track on repeat forever. With how long and slow each week is, the 1-2 background tracks just aren't enough - if I could disable the background music without losing the lesson music I would.
Then there's the length and pace - the game feels way too long, and way too slow. I made it to the start of week 6, and feel exhausted. I don't know that I can slog through 9 more weeks of this. It almost feels like the other women were included to distract you from the realization that the main path with Melody is agonizingly slow.
Since I've so far focused on the negative, let me highlight some of the positives.
Some of the music is legitimately really pretty. I particularly liked the piano piece at the end of week 4, and the "Sheet 1" guitar piece in week 5. The music starts to improve in week 5, though there's still a lot of repetitive background music - I would grow to hate each week's background track.
The renders are also really well done - though sometimes oil is applied, and that throws the characters right into the uncanny valley. Overall the game looks really good. The animations are less well done - sometimes they're good, and sometimes they look like robots or sex machines jackhammering away. It's particularly incongruous when the text says one thing and the animation is something quite different, such as "Nice and slow. We [we?] don't want to frighten her..." being accompanied by an animation that is anything but slow.
Lastly, we turn to the
elephant Melody in the room. For being the main love interest with the most screen time, I found it really hard to care about her. Practically everyone else - all the characters the game dismissively labels "Other Girls" - are more interesting. It probably didn't help that Melody's model looks 16 at most, which with the much older MC gave me creepy pedo vibes throughout.
