VN - Ren'Py - Move the Chains [v0.3.5] [MissFortune]

Review: "Move the Chains V0.2"

Move the Chains is essentially an American football enthusiast's wet dream come to life. From start to finish, the narrative is dominated by the intricacies of the game, leaving little room for genuine romantic development.

The core narrative of "Move the Chains" struggles to break free from the shackles of mediocrity, much like a third-string player hoping for a shot at the big leagues. Our protagonist, is supposed to hail from the gritty streets of Inglewood, but his portrayal feels about as authentic as a Hollywood set piece. Instead of embodying the raw energy of his supposed upbringing, the MC comes across as an edgy pretty boy straight out of Echo Park, complete with a wardrobe more suited to a fashion runway than a football field. As for the characters, they're introduced with all the subtlety of a linebacker blitzing the quarterback – expect to be left scratching your head as you try to decipher who's who in this gridiron soap opera. And let's not forget the barrage of American football terminologies and mind-numbing banter that permeate every dialogue exchange; it's enough to make you wonder if the developers mistook this for a playbook instead of a visual novel that's enough to make even the most dedicated sports fan yearn for a timeout.

In the midst of the touchdown dances and intercepted romances, "Move the Chains" does offer a few silver linings. The renders shine brightly, displaying a level of craftsmanship that could rival even the most polished helmets on game day. Likewise, the writing, though often lost in a sea of football terminology, showcases glimpses of genuine talent. It's clear that the developer possesses the necessary skills to craft compelling visual novels; however, "Moving Chains" falls short of reaching its full potential. With a more nuanced approach and a willingness to tackle themes beyond the gridiron, future projects could see this developer emerging as a true MVP in the realm of interactive storytelling

Promising storyline great characters, loved the interactions with diana so far she is my favourite character/Li, i loved the back story of diana and the MC and the scenes with conflicts between them were Top-notch, All the best with your VN will be looking forward to more updates and hope they will be frequent

V0.2

i am over half a century old, a brit and spent nearly two decades in the hospitality trade, 4 years of which was both working and managing a bar and cellar, and as a brit have never tried, served nor ever known anyone to drink warm beer.....except guiness in ireland where it is served in half pints traditionally from the barrel.
from an american writer, i find the lack of knowledge understandable as i have been to the states and tried the fizzy chemical piss they serve so the thought of real beer can seem scary and create false horror stories in imaginations
(at least i made no jibe about the sport)

making a VN one would think that the N is just as important as the V right?
it would seem not. the writing errors throughout are abundant and immersion breaking for me. developers do not check before release what they are releasing, which i translate as 'could care less'.
it's a sloppy practice

there are hints of good characterization for some but not all, but early days i guess. it does go on a bit and at one point the developer loses enough focus that one woman gets two names during one conversation.
the humour fell as flat as the many other game plugs and mentions in the writing and art. curious after the opening warning at game start.

the first thing it does to me, as a reader, is make me then stop reading and start thinking about those other games. hey presto, immersion broken.

the art is good/great (not my forte so hard to tell) as nothing i see looked weird or drew the eye for the wrong reason. no extra fingers or legs bent at strange angles. no odd lighting etc.
the V got all the good attention.

no renpy exceptions and good design choice. if the writing was error free then full immersion would be possible. the choice to go the VN without the clutter of stat screens and the breaks for sandbox/P-A-C styles is a great choice for this middling plot.

with better care this could be an easy 4 out of 5
but with too much outside influence and shoddy quality control i remain swimming the lake looking for the hook

after playing version 0.1
- Excellent story showing what we see in many American films and series, about poor young people who seek, through sport, to get a scholarship to pay for college and be able to help their family.
- Excellent images, with well-designed poses and lighting as well.
- Characters well introduced into the story.

TL/DR: I am an avid hand-egg fan so this title's hook was an easy buy-in for me. The plot is a tad cliche- but it is a nice cliche that is often mirrored in real life and the author is dryly aware of it in their writing. Gal's body types were a bit too homogeneous for my tastes, but there was pretty good variety of personalities. Very healthy amount of content for a 0.2.

v 0.2 Update; Kick it up a star. The addition of stats and UI improvements took it over the top for me. Consistent release to release improvement is a great quality for a game to have.

+ The SC SFx merged with a dolphin noise after opening the game cracked me up.
+ I like hand-egg
+ The drum-line music at the start screen really suits the theme and it is a nice riff.
+ Nice that the dev gave us some toggles. Though I left everything on, I appreciate a developer that is willing to code extra to give players options.
+ I like the prose. Nice crisp sentences.
+ Did well with the football jargon.
+ Thank god it started with football- there are some sports H games that took years of development to actually focus on the core narrative at all. Yikes for them....good for this title.
+ MC has a clear goal of making it big and getting his family / people he cares about outta poverty. Nice to add extra layers to stuff.
+ Great Musical score
+ MC is not a wimp. He feels amusingly out of place since he is a white corner who looks like an emo, 90s anime protagonist. But he isn't short, and he is handsome, so I'll take him along with that healthy dose of cognitive dissonance.
+ The "landladies" ass deserves its own slot in the "pros" list b/c she is out there looking like a pixar mum. Thx for the fan-servicey camera angles dev-kun.
+ The coaches names with the flipped letters were giggle-worthy.
+Smooth animations
+ Hyperlink in the dialogue to the technical terms is a great touch for anyone not familiar with American football.
+ Additional stats look promising.

Neutrals
~Trans LI. I usually do the routes to see the romance, but it def a downgrade from the XX chromosome characters. Long as it isn't too large of a slice of the pie and is selectively avoidable it's okay- but I'd prefer a different kink to spice the content. They are a sweet character, but I cannot say I enjoyed another potential LI tuggin' the Trans cock without player input when I was just expecting a topping scene. Irrelevant if Renee is exclusive to that path or not a LI- but if she isn't that is a bummer.
~Some clerical errors like uncapitalized words or missing punctuation- but not with enough frequency to detract.
~ I cannot figure out how to get at the script to look at it naked. Sad times. Usually do that for most games. Unren / my own knowledge failed me in this case. :-(

Cons:
- RIP 5 o'clock shadow. Bro was more handsome without the baby-face.
- Teasing Eisly about fucking her dog was not a cool vibe- even if it was just joking. This Mc's brain goes some weird places.
- Some of the sex scenes are not very erotically written / too terse. The MC constantly talking about how close he is to coming after like 10 seconds is a buzzkill, but is mitigated by the fact the man can cum and has like a 0 second refractory period for round 2.
- The protagonist gets too much free shit. I woulda liked to see him earn some of this in game. We've just jumped through hoops at warp speed- and that is boring. Hopefully there will be more challenged in the future for him to overcome b/c there isn't much tension in the plot once the guy actually gets to the school.
- The fourth wall breaking stuff where the MC is like "I'm just like the protagonist in one of those porn games" is pretty fuckin lame . More subtle stuff like a character getting stuck on the f95 was funny though.

Review for V0.1
So first of all, there is really a decent amount of content for a first version, therefore I think the game is reviewable even after one version.

I gave the game three stars, because I see some possible improvement in the way characters are introduced. A lot of very important characters (like Diana, Laura or Deshaun) are introduced very quickly and vague. It takes quite some time before you figure out who these people are. These people are appearantly very important to the MC but I just fail to feel any connection to them. First of all, because of the way there are introduced, so in the beginning you feel a bit confused. Secondly, in the way they act. There are quite some emotional moments, which lack the emotion quite literally.
Furthermore, some interaction feel a bit of and confusing but it is not all bad. The characters and general graphics look quite good and I can really appreciate the attention to background sounds and music to create more immersion. I do think that there was not enough emphasize on the fact that they lived in a very bad neighbourhood. From playing the game you do not exactly get that vibe.

So in general pretty decent but a lot of improvements possible imo. Therefore thee stars right now seem to be reasonable.

0.2: I really liked the first version. But I'm really relieved I didn't support the dev(s) right away. Artistically it all looks really good. It's the reason I'm giving one star above the minimal this time. But the writing needs improving and attention. There's quite a few typos that would be easily corrected with revision.
The biggest BUT is the lazy and unnatural use of the "N" bomb. Makes it really hard not to picture the writer being a white guy that is abusing this excuse to use the word. Tone it down a lot of notches.
I'll come and check 0.3 or whatever comes next hopping to find corrections and substantial improvement before making a more drastic review. Sadly not expecting a lot anymore.

For a football fan (american football) like me, this is an amazing game. Love the original story, the character quality, renders, good looking and original looking girls and great future potential. The writing is great as well, as you can truely see the progressive character building of the MC, dealing with the aftermath of his past.

Really cool how the dev made the MC a 'corner back' and not a chad 'quarterback' like you'd expect with a football story.
Really show's an original take to a common 'start athlete' genre.
I really love games that show the dev's knowledge in that particular theme, you can see that in some of the top rated games on here, and this game is nothing short of that, with the dev's knowledge of the game, makes the MC being a 'star athlete' move believable.

Glad to see that the dev will be adding a glossary into the game in the next update about american football terms/ references, because it would be very very confusing to someone who doesn't know anything about American Football.

I can see future struggles with the large amount of LI's (interested to see how this is handled), but so far the one's introduced have some nice character building, except for Diana, which I expected more from, and to me needs more one-on-one scenes like the skate park, to show how close her and the MC are, although I expect more to come with how v0.1 ended

There are some bits of the story that are confusing, especially with the amount of characters there are in this world and the MC referencing them without any visual or written context, untill way later into v0.1 (perhaps a character reference feature would be cool as well).
Plus a few cringy MC dialogs.

It's a 5 from me because it has loads of potential, great renders, good looking LI's and great story telling , and happens to be about a sport that I love.

Nice job dev!, excited for the future!

I'll keep it short and simple.

Pro:

• Beautiful renders
• Different types of LIs keep it interesting
• Football aspects are pretty cool, and I kind of like that the dude is cocky, it fits
• The harem feels much less forced than I've seen in other sports-based harem games.
• Great first release and I hope the dev keeps it up

Cons:

• Overly dramatic. I really liked it at the beginning but it feels like every conversation MC has is very deep, and over dramatic. It gets really tiring. Sometimes things need to have some lightness too.
• Preaching - Right along side all of the drama is a lot of preaching. At first, it fit, from the coach, and from the guy at the gym. But then everyone was putting their two cents in and it got very tedious.
• Culture War BS - Having a different point of view is fine, having a bit of it being part of the character arc is also fine, but forcing your players to have to read "their" MC spouting some of this non-sense is actively distracting and a complete put off. It was even worse when Maya, the semi-stoic attorney drops some 4-chan style shit. It just took the fun out game...because this is a game for fun, right? I actually downloaded the "snowflake patch" to see what the dialog changes were and they were much better. The Dev was forced to actually write adult dialog that still got his message across loud and clear without bringing Kyle fucking Rittenhouse into the picture. Seriously? Why even try and divide your audience like that? Moving on...
• The constant flubbing of real-life names and words. It got to be too much. I get that Dev doesn't want to get sued, but at some point all of the fake words took away from the story. My advice to the dev would be to find a way to avoid having to use those words.

Overall I find that this game has a lot of great potential. The Gary Stu-ness is not too high, the renders are great, but the drama needs to turn down a little bit.

Been watching this one for a while. Pretty solid start.

Story - Seems to be coming along nicely. Darker/more adult version of Friday Night Lights or One Tree Hill. Not as dramatic thankfully. The switch between scenes was sometimes jarring could use some work to make it flow better.

Graphics - Renders are very high quality if some of them lack a bit of inspiration. Overall very good.

Animations - Could be better, the sex scenes were kinda robotic and boring to me.

Dialogue - Maybe tries a bit too hard. Can be long-winded at times. The long monologues are a bit offputting.

Characters - Well the dev certainly has a type! Could use more variation imo. 90% of the girls are long dark haired and half of them are tattooed to the gills. Probably introduced too many at once, only just finished playing and barely remember a few of their names. None of them really stand out that much.

Overall a good game with potential to be great.

This game is excellent in every aspect (story, rendering, model, animation, atmosphere, MC, etc.)

But it has a big weakness, the characters don't have physiology! That is, the total number of different facial expressions of a person is not more than 2, this makes the characters very soulless

I give it a score of 3. If this problem is solved in the future, I will raise the score to 5

TLDR, writing is solid, characters are well-built: they behave as you would expect given the circumstances. There's a lot of drama and the story is quite serious. Renders are a masterpiece, the 3D art of MTC is very solid. A lot of care, attention to detail and love has been put into this game.

I'm not a fan of Football. TBH I've never watched a single game from start to end.And here I am, writing a 5-star review. So even if you're no football fan either, just give it a try.

I will not be surprised if this game will reach the big leagues in no time.


WHAT I LIKED:

The story is deep, and as other people has said, feels real. Characters speak to eachother as if they were real people. The dialogs have lots of background that you will uncover as the story progress. It's not like one of those netflix mass-consuming productions that everything is chewed up... you may need to use a few braincells to follow up certain parts, and be patient until things unravel. This is something I appreciated a lot.

The girls are, most of the times, gorgeous, and their bodies are believable. Other games tend to have clones, or body that seem to appeal more the player than the real narrative of the game.

The 3D is top-notch. I have not seen many games with such quality. You can appreciate the hard work behind it. All scenes use very interesting camera-shots and DoF. The animations are also well-made. Hot and enjoyable.

THINGS I'M NOT FAN:

Some pictures look dark. I think it's because the scenes don't have any fake ilumination (If there's a dim light in the scene, that's what you get. I didn't notice extra lights to stand out the charcters). This is most likely due to the style of the developer.

I'm a comedy person. This game is as real as life itself, and that creates a lot of dramatic situations. I'm not that much into drama.

Disclaimer: I had the pleasure of exchanging a few messages with the developer, MissFortune, and he's one of the good ones. Very responsive and approachable.

I don't like this game, the story is boring, the same as the personalities of the game characters, nothing there except's renders did not impress me, and, ...
The renders are great quality, but they were too dark and you can barely see anything. How can one enjoy that, when you can barely see what is actually happening?

TL;DR: Tremendous production value dragged down by poor dialogue and lack of meaningful choices.

There are some great moments. Perhaps the peak of this game is that little scene with Lael. His regrets and doubts about everything he did for the community, wishing he could've done more, wondering what will happen if he stops. That all felt pretty fucking real to me. Then, as true as a man who spent his life doing good and helping others, he shows his wisdom through really good advice for the MC.

I appreciated that one preaching, but oh god, there's a lot of that in this game and not all of it is good advice. The one with Lael was done well because it tied into his own lifestyle and his work for the community, but the rest? Not so much. Unsolicited advice almost always comes off as pretentious and condescending, it's even worse when the advice is pure cookie cutter bullshit. I'm talking about the after-sex talk with the teacher, god that was awful. I was there reading wondering what's next, they beat the bad villain with the power of friendship?

I swear, every new character does some preaching. Lael, the teacher, the mom, his friends, that girl Kara. Somehow this is alright, but the MC has to eat shit the one time he does it. It's like regular societal rules only apply to the MC in this game. Aside from that, the repulsion this dev has against "cancel culture" is pretty obvious and I don't disagree with everything, but this is not how you push your ideals through writing. I know many not like it when an author tells you how to live, but that's what a story is, an author telling you how you should live your life. Whether you agree or not is irrelevant. The thing is, it's usually done seamlessly, with subtle hints, subtext and leaving you to put the pieces together.

For example, the movie Scream is about sensationalism and how the media can ruin lives, but it doesn't keep telling you all about it in every single line of dialogue, it's the journey that tells you what the author believes. This game is like that infamous line almost at the end of Interstellar that tells you exactly what the movie is about, except that line is spoken repeatedly throughout the game.

Now, more importantly, this is an AVN and AVNs are known for writing your own journey by making choices, but this one will go the way the author wants it to go. It's pretty clear you won't be able to reject some girls, such as Yuna. Choices are always a plus, but they seem irrelevant.

EDIT: I was informed that you will be able to reject the girls. Not enough to increase my score, but maybe in the future.

For being 0.1 it has quite a bit of content. I give it a 5 because I think is worth to try out. And because you cant rate 4.5, so 5 it is.
Interesting "origin story", nice and non-absurd models, and the scenes are very well set up( the poses and all that). So in short, it is of the higher quality sort.

Played through 0.1 and while it was interesting, I'm not sure this game is going to be good. The best I can describe it is an edgier, darker version of Friday Night Lights, tonally like a prime time soap opera, edgy and adult like Melrose Place and Mad Men, but full of teen drama like One Tree Hill or Dawson's Creek. How you feel about the game will depend on your affinity for such melodrama.

You've got the Sean McVay / Eric Taylor, young wunderkind "everything for the team, football moulds young men" coach and your sleazy used-car-salesman-style Buddy Garrity booster. The MC is some combination of murderer-Landry, criminal Santiago, all-talented Vince. We saw our entitled blonde woman yelling in the Dean's Office (?), hard-luck Asian girl whose father is dying, stuck-up dancer who prejudges the MC, and her rich douche boyfriend, crassly gay foul-mouthed entrepreneur, clutzy Japanese fashion designer, inscrutable lawyer lady, neighbour single mother teacher widow with a young son who loves football, the gym owner with a heart of gold who tells the MC to get out of the ghetto and never look back, the (gay?) aggro teammate who is mad about the MC's freelancing on the field...

It's altogether a fairly interesting, diverse set of characters. The problem is that they're all turned up to 11. I played through the game without getting offended, but even still, I was considering the snowflake patch just to make the characters less abrasive. Many of the characters you'll see on screen for less than 5 minutes and by the end of those 5 minutes, you'll be asking, who talks like that to people they just met? A former teacher, in her 11th line of dialogue, is talking about "extremist agenda"s and "LGBT propaganda." (And then you bang, of course.) Gay entrepreneur, in his 9th line of dialogue, is offering to "blow you to heaven" and then talking about how he likes them "small, submissive, and breedable." Asian fashion designer, in her 9th line of dialogue, is talking about "soft westies" and the "Rona-Rona." (She also falls down, twice, upon entry and demands to know the size of your junk, using racial stereotypes as measurements.) Half the characters in the game seem to have come straight from The Wolf of Wall Street set.

It's not just the dialogue and lack of filter that is turned up to 11 either. A trans character who outs herself to the MC within 2 minutes of appearing on screen (and then you bang, of course). A father figure dying of cancer. Our MC has tattoos from a legend in the tattooing community. Even the in-game option to creampie a character in a sex scene has the text, "Stuff The Thanksgiving Turkey." This game comes at you hard and fast and never relents.

Along with the edginess, there are also a bunch of obvious heart-of-gold characters. We've got the stepmom who drives a beater because she sacrificed everything for the MC, a stepsis who never gave up on MC (and is probably secretly in love with him), the neighbor widow, the sweetly self-doubting tattoo artist, the outwardly brassy LI with a soft sensitive inside, and her dying father who makes MC promise to take her away to somewhere better. Between the edgy characters and the sappy characters, there is little middle ground, and the game can feel like it's jerking you back and forth between those two polar extremes between scenes, though for now much of the sappiness seems just set up for later.

More than any other game on this site, this game and its characters are exhausting. Even games with organized crime, genocidal aliens, twisted time travel loops, runaway AIs, family incest secrets, and government conspiracies won't feel as dramatic as this game is from minute-to-minute. Is the game going to keep up this non-stop high drama for 10+ chapters or will it settle into something more mellow and breathable? Will the characters get fleshed out and better grounded? Will everybody continue to have all their conversations at sunset and will they be able to afford to properly light their homes and offices? We shall see.


Addendum: To touch on some other reviewers' comments, it's not actually that clear to me what the developers' political position is. It seems more that they are just pushing every button they can find to provoke a response. In one sense, the writing is "mature," in that it touches on mature topics... in another, it is very immature, in that it attempts to briefly touch every mature topic it can without actually saying anything substantive. Like a parody missing wit or satire, for now, one can only ask what the point of all that was? E.g. a couple of throwaway lines about the coronavirus and masking and "soft westies" from an Asian-American (?) tertiary (?) character, who also happens to be the only character in the game to be seen wearing a mask: What was the point of all of that? Was the developer even trying to make a point? Is the point to come? Was the point just to make people uncomfortable? Would anything of value have been lost had those lines just been cut?

Review for version 0.1

First of all, thank you dev for so much gameplay on the first release!

Ok, necessary premise: here we have a top tier project, there is no doubt about that.

Yet I don't feel like giving it 5 full stars.

I thought a lot about why I kept feeling like something was missing during my game.

I think what's missing is a little bit of personality. Something that would really define this game as unique.

It is clear that the author is a fan of AVNs and has played quite a few and in fact he takes so many positive aspects and influences of other works and masterfully transposes them into his story.

I think what is missing is just a pinch of originality in writing, a little more "pathos" (not necessary but probably appreciated would also be a significant branching).

Having said that, I reiterate that we are dealing with a very well done project and which, I am sure, will leave something in all of us players.

Review for v0.1

This is one of those games that you can just tell from the very first few moments of playing that it's going to be solid. A lot of effort has very clearly gone into making Move the Chains, and it really seems to have paid off. This was a great first version, one of the best I've played in recent memory. This is a game with potential.

The games writing, in a sense, feels reel. It's not afraid to touch on and delve into some more... lets say touchy topics. It's pretty heavy on the sad backstories, gritty moments, and general drama. But its also got those more light hearted and fun moments mixed in that keeps it from feeling too exhausting. I'm invested. Characters feel natural as well, and it's especially impressive considering the game already has a pretty big cast that I'm sure will only grow.

And speaking of characters, god damn. The dev has nailed the character models. Personal preferences aside, some of the most unique I've seen in Daz. It really is refreshing. And if it wasn't immediately obvious, the games renders are stellar. Sex scenes have been fine so far if a bit short, nothing to complain about animation wise. I can be very put off by scenes that happen quickly with characters we barely know, but the ones present so far feel more natural in how they happen.

Protagonists are often one of the biggest sore spots for me. Glad to say I'm enjoying this one. Has the occasional corny joke or cringe moment, but overall I'm liking him. Sure beats playing as the college pervert with half a brain.

I do have criticisms. First one I'm going to borrow from another review because they put it perfectly: "What takes me out of it is that periodically, the characters visibly become mouthpieces for a couple of axes that the author has to grind." and I completely agree. There's a couple random lines that just feel directly like the author speaking to make some weird joke or something. Regardless of intention, they were just strange to read more than anything.

Second, I wish we were given more choices in how to respond to people. There's a couple moments where you're given options to essentially either be a dick or a nice guy, and I wish we had more of them. There were a few moments where I was like man this guy (MC) is kind of a dick, wish I has an option to change that like the other times. Not a huge deal though.

TLDR - Extremely good first release. If the quality keeps up, I have very little doubt this game will take off and be considered among the top tier. You do not get AVNs with this level of effort and care often. If it caught your interest, don't sleep on it.

This is a well-written VN with a solid sense of style, good character work, and a talent for cinematically arranged scenes and images. It can even be touching; the conversation in the hospital's particularly well done, if melodramatic.

What takes me out of it is that periodically, the characters visibly become mouthpieces for a couple of axes that the author has to grind.

Your character's old high school teacher abruptly rants about other teachers spreading "LGBT propaganda," and now that I'm thinking about it, the first episode's about escaping to Texas from (a shitty part of) California.

Most importantly, a big part of the first episode is about how your character's been "canceled," and how that's causing issues for him and his loved ones.

The point's clearly to put the MC in a position where he's on the back foot and his reputation's been dragged through the mud, so he's got something to prove, but then you spend the entirety of episode one talking to all of one person to whom it matters.

Further, when people do talk about it, they don't talk like normal people. Somebody even hits the r/onejoke attack helicopter line. It comes off as an excuse for the author to rant through their characters about their perceived political opponents.

I don't generally care about politics in my porn unless they're truly repellent (The Hard Way), but Move the Chains works them in with the subtlety of a brick through a window.

It ends up as about 65% story of this guy trying to overcome a bad childhood and worse temper to protect his loved ones and move on, 25% porn, and 10% center-right polemic. The 90% is good, even great, but it's a real shame about the 10%.

So this is a thing review 0.1.
Played it through and for a first release there is sooo much going on, it has at least 1 hour content allready if reading through it.
What this game does deliver is awesome renders, a good amount of characters that have their own personality, and the girls are pretty all the way.
I think the dev really made a daring move with making Ivy a first love option as being a trans girl fully packed so to speak but hey I'm all for that
The animations...well despite an earlier review...I thought it was pretty decent, not your 2 frame back and forth, but was smooth all the way.
And the writing is also decent, there is actually a story behind it all, and sure we can debate about how good or bad it is, IMO it is pretty good.
And I'm not that great with focusing on story telling in a porn game, but I did not use the "text skip" option once.....trust me that is saying something.
I hope this will get more updates, the start has more content than some games which are sort of half way.
I'm really surprised in a good way with this game, and I would suggest to at least give it a shot.