About the reviewer:
I’m playing or have played over 70 games a few of which have completed. When I first started playing these games (DmD was my first), I simply read the description and if it looked interesting I downloaded it and started blind. As you might imagine, while it worked out well for DmD, that strategy often proved unproductive. Then I stumbled on F95zone and my approach changed.
Now I read the reviews, search through the discussions seeking feed back and have walkthroughs available as a fallback. I generally don’t play games early in their development but I watch for new games and if their reviews are compelling from players whose opinion’s I respect I will play them early. Even if I don’t use a walkthrough, I’ll often skim it to get a better sense of the structure of the game to determine if I think I’ll enjoy playing it.
The information provided by F95zone convinced me that I should mod the game from the outset.
The Review:
Version .15
Time played as recorded in game: 12 hours 57 minutes 52 seconds
Current progress: 18 weeks, 127 days - All main girls at current end of content. All but 3 side girls (1 as yet unmet) at current end of content.
Mods: Lain’s Mod
Cheats used: A single $1000 money boost late in the game which proved unnecessary.
Walkthrough(s) used: Official walkthrough by Jikei & Lain’s walkthrough on gtihub and the mod walkthrough
Bugginess: - No obvious bugs encountered. No exceptions. Very smooth play. However,given the game design, silent bugs blocking content could have gone undetected.
Observations:
Despite my general dislike of sandbox style games, all in this is all a good game well worth playing. I enjoyed it but it does have a few flaws discussed below. I found the girls entertaining and other than Esther generally attractive. Each of the girls had a distinct personality and related to the MC in their own way. There is a massive amount of content in this game and I’ll have to go back and pick up the three side girls I’ve yet to complete due to pre-leveling. (Pre-leveling is discussed below)
When I started the game I expected that either Fanora or Naira would be my favorite. Velle is narrowly my fave with Jade and Nefari tied for a very close 2nd.
Flaws:
A walkthrough is pretty much required:
Several opinions here indicated that a walkthrough was needed to navigate the game and I share that opinion. Until you are familiar with the flow of the game the hint system is far too vague to be very useful. I primarily used Lain’s walkthrough which ends partway through week 7. At that point I was used to the in game hints and I only occasionally used the mod’s walkthrough to help locate a wandering girl. There were a handful of instances where I ended up using Jikei’s walkthrough to figure out why I couldn’t trip an event. Walkthroughs are fine as a method to assist a player in find content easily missed, but shouldn’t be required to navigate the basic game in a reasonable amount of time.
Issues with time management:
Sundays are usually not available for you to use and the late night segment with a couple exceptions can’t be used for general activities. So you get three segments morning, afternoon, and night Monday - Saturday. The hint system will suggest a vague clue to advance each girl and tell you when in the day you need to interact with her. You also have to decide when to work, exercise, fish, run an errand at business or locations that are only open at certain times of the day. Some activities can only be done on certain days as well. Initially this isn’t too difficult because most actions require only one time segment and some activities like working and exercising can both be done in a single segment.
So a reasonable approach is to start each day by checking each girl and seeing how their schedules line up. With initially five girls and eventually several more you have to decide which of the conflicting girls you’ll advance. As the game progresses you encounter the following problem. Some activities required multiple segments and in most cases the hint and prior game interaction doesn’t warn you. So you plan to be with girl A in the morning, girl B in the afternoon, and girl C at night. One of these activities can only be done on this day of the week. You initiate your chosen morning activity only to discover that it took all day and you’ve missed your chance to compete the day’s other activities and in one case have to wait until next week to complete one. Very frustrating. Equally frustrating is when you have an activity limited to say a morning only on Monday and Thursday and as you go to pursue it a girl randomly shows up to offer you an unplanned and in some cases unidentified activity of unknown duration. Do you go with the random event, which may not repeat, or follow your plan?
At a minimum the hint system should tell you how long the activity with the girl will last. In some case it does say something like “spend the day with so and so” but often you only find out after the fact.
Pre-leveling steps:
A pre-level step is something you must do before you can actually make progress with a side girl. For example you might have to give them something or do some related activity or do something with a different girl. In one case you must do something at a specific time of day for a number of consecutive days. Given the disruption to scheduling described above this is a real burden and so far in my experience has proven impossible until I reached end of content with the main girls. So now it’s just a grind to skip time each day until I can complete the pre-leveling and begin to advance the girl in question. This is just a hack to slow content consumption and is very annoying.
The grind (or not):
Many people say that the game isn’t to grindy and I am somewhat in agreement, but solving the above time management issue, which would help with the pre-level issue would dramatically reduce the grind. I mentioned that I used a one time monetary cheat. I thought I’d hit a mandatory high expense item when the disruptions of losing segments made it difficult to work regularly and my funds had gotten a bit low just blew my patience. It turned out that in the play the expense was cut to an affordable price after all, but by then I’d used the cheat. I wanted to play the game cheat free. Had the information as to event duration been available I’m convinced that I could have managed the event vs money generation and avoided the entire issue.
Summary:
Despite the above flaws, this is a pretty enjoyable game. It does get a little tiresome at points especially when you have all the girl’s next event at the same time of day, most of the time you can advance more than one a day. I’ve played for 127 days with Sundays mostly unavailable that’s 108 usable days out of 127 and have advanced the main girls and Jade 173 levels and the side girls 32 levels. Not quite 2 girls per day and there are a couple of levels that require multiple days. So pretty consistent progress, which would have been much slower without the walkthrough at the beginning.
Four stars. High praise from me for a sandbox game.
