MELep1:
CLV Group has made another splendid game, building on the prologue which was also recently released. CLVG’s strong points of great FC’s well-integrated with great backgrounds has been maintained for all the CLV fans. But the game has been maneuvered over to be much more of a traditional sandbox game, and the main screen in a clear indication of how far CLVG has gone. Sandbox fans will like the layout, and KN fans will appreciate that CLVG has added hints to make the sandbox much like a KN.
There are three main FC’s in this game, and like all previous ones, they are all beautiful young girls. No BTBA bimbos in CLVG games! There is a fourth FC, the grocery cashier, who gets some scenes, but she is not yet integrated into the gameplay. IMHO she is the most beautiful one so let’s hope CLVG doesn’t ignore her much longer. One very nice thing about all the CLVG games is that the MC is not a horsecock who gets attention for this ridiculous reason, but instead someone who needs to be played carefully to proceed with the corruption sequence (sexier clothing, voyeurism, permissible groping, rising levels of sex activity) for each of the FC’s. This game does not have the flaw of Season 2 of MBFD where all four FC’s could be treated almost identically.
There are some preliminary items in the game which play no role in the action, and the player should know they can be ignored. For example, the MC can study yoga or photography, but it seems to do nothing to the game. The medium in the game is for the MC to snap pictures of the 3 FC’s, and sell them, thereby paying his share of the household expenses. CLVG makes this easy as a little phone icon pops up in the UL of the screen when it is possible. Do it at any time, as the FC’s stats (shyness, affection, etc.) don’t seem to be affected at all in this first episode,
I was able to proceed on, with a bit too much grinding, to find 68 of the 76 events in less than 3 hours of play, using no tools whatsoever. It would have been considerably less, but I needed to figure out the new play mechanisms. The last 8 events were obscured because of some tricks CLVG has reintroduced into this game: multiple hits needed on one activity, with mostly identical scenes, up to five times needed to get a few events; and one event that you cannot find by hitting on a FC head located in a room (preparing dinner: all events but this one are triggered by clicking on a FC head icon in a room icon on the bottom left of the screen). I missed sufficient repetitions on a few, overlooked one, and the dinner one held up three. Grinding isn’t bad with the CLVG graphics quality; it was actually pretty fun, until I got tired of it of beautiful scenes recurring and took the game apart to find the last 8.
The game takes a half hour or less to disassemble and investigate, provided you a good at python (Everyone should know this. It is good for the brain.) Steps:
1. Download and install the renpy SDK if you haven’t already. Old ones work fine.
2. Dezip the game, any OS, grab the folder labeled game and put it in a new folder in the SDK with nothing else. Name the new folder the same as this game name.
3. I use Atom as a text handler, use whatever you want, but it should be installed within the SDK.
4. Hit the correct button to open the unencrypted parts of the game in Atom, and change the SDK, if you haven’t already, to have the Developer console. Find: renpy/control/00control/config.console (or something) and set it to True. Quicker: Just search with Atom inside the renpy directory to find config.console.
5. Decrypt all the 20 or so files with ending .rpyc using
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into .rpy files [use save as] and stuff them into the game file in Atom.
6. Make a little text file listing EVENTS
.Done {with n from 0 to 76; maybe ten per line} and put it line by line into the Developers Console (open with Shift O inside the game) and you will see a list of what you haven’t punched yet. Then use EVENTS(Missing number).Desc to tell you where to go and when to punch it.
This is the main difference between CLVG sandboxes and other dev’s. CLVG gives you a target of event count to shoot for, and with others, you just keep grinding forever until you realize you can’t find any more events. It is so much more interesting with a target! Yay for CLVG!
There are few low-level errors in the game as the Alpha Team seems to have done their job well. The game never crashed once, despite it being the first significant release in this new style of game. If you look at the code, you will appreciate how well organized CLVG is on coding. That level of organization is what keeps crash errors away, and again: Yay!
There is what might be called a strategic error, as there is a requirement to click Study fifteen times a week to avoid an immediate end of the game, but the MC never goes to school, never logs in to remote classes, never says anything indicating he is still a student. Most games have lots of inconsistencies, and CLVG’s are non-consequential except for this game abort process, which just seems to have been stuck in there for no reason.
The grinding may be objectionable to some people, and it could be optionally eliminated if CLVG put something in to show when a FC icon needed to be triggered again, like maybe a red circle around the FC face icon on top of place icons, and those who like a moderate amount of grinding could turn it off in the beginning until they got tired of it and then they could quickly wrap it all up by turning on this new kind of hint.
The biggest operational problem was that CLVG has eliminated rollback, unlike all their other games, where it was the unchangeable default. This means that now you need to do SAVE/LOAD to check out multiple options on a scene with choices. This is tedious, unlike rollback, and tedious games get less followers. Let’s hope CLVG restores this. It would be great if rollback were not default, but connected to the rollback option in the main menu, because then those who like more of a challenge can turn it off.
All in all, another fine, fine game start. All those with a little money and no surveillance of their expenditures should support the dev so we get to see all 20 planned episodes.
