Reviewing Season 1(SPOILERS AHEAD)
TL;DR: If you manage to turn off your braincells, the game is almost good, i couldn't, the absurdity of certain scenes broke my "sense of wonder"(or whatever keeps you interested in a story rather than criticize it)
Pros
- The graphic is good, not the peak of HoneySelect 1 but possibly top5
- Ignoring for a few moments some mental gymnastic, the plot can be considered decent enough to be pleasant if i would give a vote to it, it would be a solid 3stars(out of 5 of course)
- Some characters are likeable, but not the ones you may think
Cons
- Before we talk about the plot, i want to make a premise, from what i understood Lyanna embodies an old cartoon funny moment (no names go find it) where a character in said cartoon says "Fifty NOs and a Yes, means Yes" <- This is Lyanna, she says NO to people several times until at some point she gives a tired Yes, she doesn't get convinced by good arguments, you win her over by exhausting her into agreeing into something (usually into getting naked and do something daring) and then get teased for not-so-secretly liking what she was forced to do.
- Now the plot, is how everything starts that annoys me: How Lyanna gets naked accidentally a couple of times and a clerk asks to STEAL some stolen documents(the clerk's ID or Passport or her Green Card/VISA, i don't recall) that are in the manager of the store's safe, and Lyanna must achieve such feat WHILE NAKED (Lyanna asked if the clerk could dry her wet clothes, and said Clerk demanded Lyanna's help) and later we learn that half of the "high society" of the city (including that manager) is involved in sex-trafficking of young (potentially underage) students and some of them are Lyanna's new classmates. If your mind is exploding for the amount of info, you're not the only one. It's kinda good, like i said, is how this whole thing begins that annoys me, which brings to the main problem of this game: Things don't work or happen because they make sense, but because the dev want them to happen that way; It's a bit vague but i hope that i'll explain the issue with my next point.
- Some characters are unbelievably unlikeable, like the loli, sorry but she is a poison in this story, you'll meet her while she is shaming and humiliating a pervert but goes too far and Lyanna tries to spare him a little and from that starts a one-on-one war where the "tsundere" blackmails Lyanna non-stop but apparently it's her way to be noticed because she has a crush on Lyanna since she stood up against her, but of course tsunderes are absolutely against their own happiness, and would rather live inside the mind of a person and be remembered as someone to avoid, rather than either be ignored, or be nice and become someone's partner/soulmate, of course we got the "she loves MC all along" but so late in the first season that it sounds more like an excuse, something like "i want to see them fuck together but i made the loli so unlikeable that i must invent some lazy excuse so that i can get away with it"
- The humour is weird and most of it is about Lyanna getting in trouble (like a dare going wrong) and then a nameless NPC is talking about that same situation but in a hypothetical way and how Lyanna could have solved, right in front of her. Sorry after the second time it's not funny anymore, it simply expresses either laziness in the dev's writing or his implied desire to be part of the novel, because the situations can only be solved by a miracle or planets aligning(read as: Dev's writing a solution that goes against every possible odds, and against common sense and possibly against logic itself). Back to the humour, like i said it's not funny, because it makes Lyanna look stupid or incredibly naive, and yet she is described to be quite smart (we got no evidence of it, and being good at sneaking around naked isn't a proof of being smart), i mean she wants to be a journalist! Seriously, at the hotel there is a moment where Lyanna is succumbing from Tsundere's new blackmail and she is naked the hotel's pool are and two nameless NPCs call her out for being naked while she could have pretended to be naked or do another thing(that they explain but i don't recall) and she would have got away with it! I would be more forgiving or ignore this issue is if it was done once MAYBE twice but nope, it's a recurring thing, i can say that 80% of the game is like this. Sorry but if it wasn't funny the first time, how the dev can believe that it will be the fifth or sixth time?
Conclusion
You know a game is bad when the most likeable characters in a LESBIAN game are two males who act like simps but ultimately are nice guys, never insulted or mocked Lyanna, always available and willing to help. Some may say, "but Lyanna doesn't owe them anything!" Considering how helpful they are, if i was Lyanna i would give them a few sexual favours, which there are scenes of some good MF-content but quantity-wise they pale in comparison to the cheap lesbian-content that often happens under ridiculous and "dismissed-as-jokes-but-otherwise-they-would-be-toxic" situations (like being blackmailed by "her friends").
