Oh God, what do I say?
There's a tonne I like about this VN, but I have to wade through so much shit to get there it's exhausting.
The first offense is character interactions. Characters do one of two things when meeting you: they tell you a long-ass story that ends up sounding like an Aesop fable, or they tell you something deeply private and illuminating about themselves with very little prompting. It's incredibly frustrating, and there is no planet on which this can be termed as me hating because of taste. It is the very first thing you learn not to do in fiction.
The second offense is aimlessness. There's a great video of Trey Parker and Matt Stone giving a talk at a university where they label the current pathetic state of Hollywood as a problem of "and then..." That being that every scene is one of something happening to the main character(s), with little to no interconnectivity to a whole. They posit that the solution to this is to shift the phrase to "therefore..." and if a scene doesn't end with being able to say "therefore" and it isn't the end of the story, then it probably shouldn't exist. MtC is so painfully guilty of the former that it isn't even funny. Take the latest episode. The MC goes to a photo shoot where nothing happens other than a meaningless conversation with a character who is not a love interest. It's just there, holds no dramatic value, and is a completely pointless exercise. The game is full of this. Nothing happens. Don't get me wrong, some of the scenes are enjoyable, but most of them don't feel like they are driving towards anything at all. It's just aimless.
The third offense is the lack of dramatisation. The author has a lot of opinions and likes to inject them into the game. Just like the weirdo hacks in the mainstream game industry though, it is done in a way that is so surface level, and so monumentally dumb, that I just wish he/or she would shut the fuck up. You have an opinion on something, you put it into your story by creating a scenario where that opinion has stakes and conflict. If you are actually good at storytelling, and not a hack who likes to sniff their own farts, you posit different answers to the conflict through characters who have different outlooks. You don't just inject meaningless dialogue so that you can say (through the voice of your character) what your opinion on, say, vaccinations is. Would this event have been better if MC and D had different stances on vaccination protocols and found themselves in some kind of conflict that had stakes (say that one of the team (or a friend) has a respitory illness that puts them in danger). That's a fucking story, not whatever vomit is being randomly spewed.
Offense number four is how many love interests are in the game. You are constantly ping ponging between them, never getting enough time to breathe - never really having any actual story with them - just a bunch of random conversations. There are too many. This isn't a taste thing it is an objective truth that there are so many, that none of them are properly serviced leading to a level of dissatisfaction that I am not sure can be equalled.
Offense number five is that the main character is a Mary Stu. Given the attitudes expressed by the author, I am extremely surprised that this is the case. This mother fucker is a corner back, from a shitty area, with an awful upbringing and an obsession with sports. Why does he sound like a fucking Shakespeare soliloquy with every fucking conversation he has? Why is a character who can lose the plot and beat another man to death in a rage, so measured and reasonable in talking to others? It doesn't make sense. Did he "get better" in prison? Then we needed to fucking see that. You don't do character growth off screen for fuck's sake. It's what makes a story a story. We need to see it happening. And how can this character grow now when he's got an answer for everything? When he is unassailable and utterly capable?
So what did I like?
It looks great. Really, I like the renders in this just as much as I like those in the most praised Daz work.
Yuna and Fame are great love interests and I wish they and Diana were the only three so there was some fucking focus.
And honestly, I just like sports stories. I like the idea of regular competition and the fear of loss and the hope of victory. Although, to be fair, this was achieved just by choosing the subject matter and isn't really a bit of praise the developer should take.
So in summary; I enjoy some of this AVN, but there are a bunch of really fatal issues that, if not either fixed or greatly reduced, will eventually lead to me dropping it - but for now, a couple of the love interests and my general like of the genre will continue to pull me along, even though I hate quite a bit of it.