Ren'Py - Completed - My First Love [Ep.12] [CeLaVie Group]

I really enjoyed playing through this game, despite the bugs, grind & the ending wasn't exactly a happy one, but all in all, it is what it is & it was still enjoyable (In my opinion)
The models/characters all look great, especially Olivia.

I love the kind of content where you really feel the progress happening. The models are great. Not fond of the 1st chapter but with the wt mod you can skip grindy things. I like the clothing evolutioon too.

In some ways, this game deserves a 5. In others, a 1. So I'm splitting the difference.

The models, the storyline, and most of the dialogue is wonderful.

However, this game is also a complete grindfest - you essentially have to figure out the correct sequence of events and then do that for an entire in-game week. Then repeat for the next week. And the next. And you get the picture. You could literally build a macro to play this game because there is no variation in your actions from week to week. Also, while the models are very nice, they are constantly acting like they are posing for a camera. Like when you wake the LI up in the morning, she will go through an entire issue's worth of poses from Playboy while sitting up in her bed for no reason. And remember how I said the dialogue was mostly good? Yeah, since there are no flags for what scenes you've hit, it leads to some very awkward and unrealistic "Oh no, you can see my boobs! I'm going to act shocked even though I've been walking around topless in front of you for days!" moments.

Such a hard time to give this game accurate rating! The models, story, plot and renders are really good, but the gameplay, progression and mechanics are awful.
You have to keep guessing where the girls are and look for events, once you have progressed through all unique events (which is very tedious) you are taken to next episode, where you have to grind again (aim for specific hours, specific places).
Hopefully developer learns from the mistakes as the writing and renders are really good.

Good story: yes and no, the endings are too convoluted while the overall plot remains credible. We lose emotional intensity in certain situations, but that's the irony of Celavie - a form of humor nonetheless, a twist that seems to have a hidden but obvious message: it's just a game, guys! Slow but stable process - depending on your skills: this should be the case for all sandboxes. It's thanks to this that the characters are endearing, and we're immersed in Bob's daily life. It should never be changed, or else it breaks the essence and meaning of the game. High-resolution images: all the scenes are top-notch, the images are superb, the poses are beautiful, perfect as computer wallpapers. Lot of decisions to make - and tasks to fulfill: yes, even though sometimes it loses coherence. We've seen the girl in the shower a hundred times and touched her vagina, but when we enter her room and see a nipple, she gets offended. That's the price of freedom, I guess, lol. But we can't deny that it's immersive because every character movement is a choice, and that's fantastic because it's rarely the case. As a result, it's easier to identify with the character, which is a good point for the game overall. One spoken sentence - one new image: I'm not entirely sure about that, but there are many, and that's great. Lot of teasing events: yes, a big yes, and it's the game's strength, the best aspect of it. There's talent for teasing, and it provides a real reward that we earned through hard work! 16 time slots per day - 7 days a week: it could be a bit more developed, allowing us to revisit old events. There's a possibility, even though it might require more development time, to have additional side passages in the story, moments not solely meant to progress the plot but to share extra life moments with the girls. Not all hours are fully utilized, but there's a subtle realism in it that I like. Very beautiful girls: they are clearly my favorites. I love all of them, and I'm very attached to Amy from "Room for Rent," maybe because she's the first, but there isn't a single girl I don't like. Even in their design, they have a purpose, a subtlety. The girls in the game place the entire Celavie saga in my top 3, out of more than 50 games I've enjoyed (and creating games is also my real profession in life). "Room for Rent" is perfect except for the end of the scenario, "My First Love" is similar in level but with better gameplay and many corrections; there's an evident experience level-up, and the two seasons of "MBFD" confirm Celavie Group's real talent for AVNs.

The creator is his own worst enemy. His games could be among the top games, but the grind is horrendous. I've given up on both of his previous games because of that, which is sad because I absolutely love the models of the girls and story wasn't too bad. But seeing same scenes over and over again... yeah, not for me.

Sorry Dev, but can't rate this higher than a 2 star.

While the renders and story are "fine" for the most part the progress breaking bugs in the first half of the game made it a chore to play. Ended up having to use the cheat mod to skip chapters and some events wouldn't trigger or LI was not in the required place a required time.

This is just another review that is going to mirror most of the negative sentiments getting shared here.

TL;DR: Unless you are a masochist, skip this game

This game's singular strength is that it's a slow burn corruption game. That part is the driving force of the game. The renders aren't bad, though I personally hate the stop motion like nature of how scenes often play out

The bad part is vast. Where to begin? The buggy code? The complete lack of any kind of system to guide you through the next objective? The fact this sandbox's progression is **linear** (why even make this a sandbox)? The fact the Skip To Episode X feature is basically required to successfully play this game? Some really generic and not thought out dialog?

I go so stuck in episode 3 and episode 4, I started to look through the code of the game. And what I found there is a crime against programming. For a game marked [Completed], there could at least be comments in the code to assist players in un-breaking their play through

Some sexy renders won't save this game. You can get renders better than this elsewhere. This is a game for masochists. It's so painful to play. Trying to play the game the way the developer says to, "you can't just click and watch. You need to read the dialogs and follow the small hints in the dialogs" --Uh yeah, what hints? Many progression points DO NOT HAVE A HINT in the dialog. This game is so lazy, I came out of being a long time F95Zone lurker, just to review this game

I've played some jank sandbox games, but this one is, by far, the worst one I've tried

If it were possible, I'd give this game a negative 2 out of 5 stars and put up a flashing neon sign to warn newcomers of what kind of pain they're considering trying

Interesting game. It's fairly long and there's a lot of decent content, but it's also surprisingly user-hostile. As others have said, the game desperately needs a hint system - far from it being as simple as "read the actual text" like the author implies, oftentimes progress means guessing that you have to click on the exact right sandbox location at the exact right time, and given that you often need to see every scene to advance to the next episode this invariably leads to just a lot of clicking around randomly hoping things work. Also as others have mentioned the game is buggy though I was able to get around this by editing savefiles as necessary.

The girls themselves are okay, but fairly generic and interchangeable (in fact they often share the exact same lines..) The plot is your standard slow sandbox ramp, where you spend the first half of the game trying to get the girls to loosen up enough to show off their ankles and then the last half is just a series of increasingly-wild sex scenes. The plot is half-assed and perhaps even meant to be subversive... for the first half the MC is just a creeper/groomer who's trying to get girls to "model" for him, and in the second half it turns out almost all the adult characters are part of a sex trafficking ring and you're the hero who's liberating girls into his harem (which is totally not trafficking because you're not ugly and they want your dick.) And the ending twist(s)... wtf? I'm trying to avoid spoilers here but I'll just say that I think the author was just messing around at that point (to be fair, I guess this game is a prequel so maybe it's needed to tie in to the other games.)

Overall, there's a lot of decent content here and it isn't too grindy intrinsically - the problem is the lack of hints and overabundance of bugs, the fact that the game basically devolves into a series of VN-style sex scenes later on (as others have mentioned I guess it would've been better as a VN?), and the plot veers somewhere between flippant and insulting.

Pro-tip: There is a feature built-in that lets you skip to a certain episode if you get stuck at like 95%+ completion at a given one, which happened frequently for me. So I guess this is a way that the developer addressed the user-hostile features but if the author had time to generate 10k+ images for this series then he also should have found time to improve the basic playability...

This game could be awesome. If it had any kind of hints.

The dev warning is fair....unfortunately the game is not. There are 0 proper hints on what to do. There are soooo many non-progressing events in first few episodes it's not even funny.

It's like someone made an alpha, fixed few things for beta and called it a day so they can move on.

Easy 4/5 star game if it worked properly and had ANY kind of hint system when you get to last 1-2 missing events. Getting to 88/89 or 93/94 events and trying million combinations with nothing working is not fun, is not challenging, is not entertaining, it's idiotic waste of time.

The game is good, the models are beautiful and the story is consistent between the different games. A beautiful job, almost without bugs, despite a rating not up to the job done. I eagerly await the sequel. Thanks.

Terrible design. Not only is there pointless repetition of scenes (grind), it's possible to pick a "wrong" choice and get caught in an infinite loop rather than an instant game over (e.g, if you don't let her have pizza the first time she asks). Stay away from this.

One of my fav games, girls are really cute, nice renders. nice pace.
Good option to jump to a different chapter.
I hope you will start a new game soon.
Please use similar models.

Keep up the good work.

Tough game for me to review overall, my sentiments pretty much mirror Drooskati's a few posts down.

Artwork is solid, looks better than the images as advertised on the game page. I don't really go for the whole "doll body-bighead" aesthetic on the characters (to put it diplomatically), but the textures and faces are appealing enough I got over it.

Animations are almost non-existent other than stop-motion sequences of many renders, but they look decent from a static perspective at least.

Dialogue was kinda meh, translations weren't that bad, but for me personably the mc was massively unlikeable, and there's really no choice in the options given despite the appearance of such - one choice progresses the story, the other does nothing. It's a shame because the groundwork is completely in place for potential branching stories - i.e. All of those suggestions would take very few additional renders and lines to implement, and break the 1-dimensional flow of game. As it is now, its just
Gameplay mechanics- Not good. I've fine with the time-based-grinding style game, one of my favorites which will go unmentioned is extremely similar to this - but for these kind of games to work, the event sequencing and checking code needs to be extremely crisp, and in this game it's not, AND, there needs to be indicators through dialogue so the player can understand what they need to be working on next without a walkthrough. At least in the midgame, there is none, and it because a depressing experience of clicking rooms at different times of the day over and over and over again.

To its credit, it gets much more focused and clear the last few episodes, and if I were rating this only on episodes 9 thru 11, it'd probably be 4 or 5 stars overall. If I were rating it just on 3-4, it'd be 1 star.

Overall, worth a playthrough, but do know ahead of time some chapters will NOT transition properly, so as soon as you feel things starting to slow down, either check a walkthrough or the event completion guide in this thread otherwise youll start screaming in frustration.

For those who don't want to read the entire thing, stay away from this game. It's painfully bad in every way, except the models. Not worth playing through.

Now for those looking for a bit more detail, this game is bad in many different ways for no real benefit to the player. It's one of the grindiest games I've ever played. With no real direction either, you'll find yourself repeating the same minor scenes over and over again hoping to figure out where to go next or what to do. The place where the game takes place has around 8 or so rooms. Events are triggered by visiting one of those rooms, during a specific time of day. As I said, without direction on what room, or what time, you end up having to click on every room, during every time of the day, until something happens, then repeat.

Now I can handle a bit of grind in the game, but what you get in return is pitiful at best. All that time spent trying to find multiple events, leads to a very bland and one dimensional sex scene. The time it takes to get to that sex scene ruins the entire experience.

The story for the game isn't exactly bad, per say, but something that I've noticed from playing games created by this Creator, is that every game has the same woman as the girl you are persuing. It makes no real sense, truthfully. The ages of the characters you are getting involved with is somewhat sketchy too, with the girl starting the game around the age of 16.

The models for the game are fairly well done. It's just a shame those amazing models are slapped onto an otherwise boring and grindy game experience.

At the end of the day, if you do intend to play this, find some way to avoid the grind and skip to the good parts of the game. Download someone's save file. Mod the game to remove the grind or find a walkthrough to follow. Without these, it's just not worth the time.

As it is right now the game is unplayable without a mod or propper hints,everything bad that you could find in a poor implemented sandbox game you guessed it you can find in this one.Horrible grind,poor dialogue,little to no reward for the endless grind,bugs all over the place that stop you from taking the game to the next level (guess that's why the ''skip to the next chapter'' was implemented).Some people just dont learn from their previous mistakes..I mean seriously you already have 2 bad games under your belt where people complained about this stuff and you take nothing in consideration and decide to do a 3rd one with the exact same flaws.The renderes are nice but that alone does not deserve a star since the game is unplayable.Its a dumpster fire folks dont even bother with it unless you have like a week to spare and have nothing to do.

I'm playing the ep8 version. There are some bugs in the Android version, but you can avoid it by using back. Also, the fault tolerance rate is a bit low. Sometimes I get stuck, and I can't get past the first or third level, but fortunately, the game provides a level-jumping option, thanks to Calaviegroup.
By the way, I hope the author can change the cover to a better-looking CG. I feel that many CGs in the game are better than the cover, which may attract more players.

The game process is a bit long, and it is very interesting to play it according to the plot (people who don't want to toss can also skip to the back) The edible degree is very high, the black-skinned blonde girl is still very suitable for my taste, although it is not a dynamic CG, but there are too many CGs , which is close to dynamic.

I don't know why others gave it a very low score (maybe they are impatient), the cg drawn by Calaviegroup is very beautiful. I like this game very much, and I am looking forward to other excellent works by Calaviegroup. I will continue to support it.

This is the second game by this dev I've looked at. Both have many of the same qualities, but this one suffers a major problem that has been addressed in their other game (My Best Friend's Daughter). It has potential to be a fun game, but the mechanics ruin it. Is it playable? Yes. Is it frustrating and annoying? Yes.

Graphics/Art: The girls are pretty enough for what it is. There's plenty of eye candy from essentially all of them. The environments are quite basic, nothing special. Considering you're going to see the same 7 environments roughly 3,000 times each, it would be nice if they evolved in some form over time. But they don't. Oh well.

Audio: None. Absolutely none. Zero. People who tend to mute games will be happy about this. Those of us who enjoy curated music and sound will lose out.

Story and writing: The story is fairly run of the mill. Taking care of the daughter of an old friend who is stuck in the hospital for an unknown amount of time. During this time, you're able to slowly corrupt this young woman who prior to knowing you was a very reserved and innocent girl. The writing has some typos and grammatical issues. I get the idea that the dev isn't English native, so it's probably understandable. You shouldn't have any problems with it though.

Gameplay: This is where the game falls apart, and this game is a perfect example of why so many people hate the "sandbox" tag. There is absolutely no indication as to what you should be doing or when it should be done. In the first 5 minutes of the game, you can legitimately get locked into a loop that is literally impossible to break out of, forcing you to restart the game. You'll often end up skipping the ends of each chapter, as the last few "bookmarks" are impossible to get due to these shortcomings. The game would easily be 4 star material if not for this.

Final thoughts: The dev needs to fix the bookmark issue. They did so with their other game, telling the player what triggers the scenes and how to make it happen. Why not do it here as well? It makes no sense. If they fix this one issue, I'd recommend the game. But until that time, I can only recommend it if you enjoy pain.

Last game didnt pan out so well so I guess reusing most renders and the horrendous grind seems to be their recipe for yet another disastrous game overall low effort and most seems to be rehashes from previous titles

This is the third CeLaVie game I've played, and somehow they just keep getting worse.

MFL is just.... so.... painfully.... slow. You'll repeat the same actions with the same dull conversation text hundreds of times. There are ~8 rooms in your house. Most of the events are triggered by visiting a certain room at a certain time of day. This forces you to revisit rooms over and over. It's obnoxiously tedious. For example, you'll visit the office a thousand times and absolutely nothing will happen. Then one day you randomly visit the office at exactly 10:55 and it triggers an event.

As if all of the grinding wasn't bad enough, the rewards are pitiful. You'll grind for literal days, 24+ hours of mindless clicking without experiencing a single sex scene.

The story isn't bad, but it could be a lot better. The fact that the girl starts the story at age 16 is a bit sketchy though. Is this even legal? This CeLaVie guy has made 3 or 4 games now and the female in all of them looks EXACTLY the same.

All of that being said - the artwork is pretty nice, but not nearly nice enough to warrant playing this dreadful game. Do yourself a favor: download a save file and skip to the good scenes.