VN - Ren'Py - Nomadic Journey [Ch.4] [Disguised Dino]

Review for Ch.4

I love lighthearted stuff and the premise of the game sounded like it would fit pretty well for that. It's a shame this doesn't really explore that premise, or much of anything really. It's a game unfortunately filled with very basic characters, shallow writing, and flat dialogue that all serve as the engine to shove boring sex scenes in your face.

The game starts with a pretty non-descriptive summary of the MC making his millions. He adopts a grind mindset early, leaves home after being at odds with his mom, find a job at a coffee shop, the owner takes him into her home, fast forward some years and he's the owner of a successful company and very rich. I get that the idea is more about the journey of self discovery after having your material desires fulfilled and thus how he got here isn't as important, but the problem then comes when the game really starts to focus on that journey. If you could really even call it "focusing."

Traveling about the world does sound like it could be fresh and exciting, but then the game skips over most of it. Strange. In actuality, the plot is mostly focused around jumping to tropey scenarios with different girls one after another. Since the MC has money, he basically tows all the love interests around with him. Lots of shots lounging at the pool, bikini shopping, oh no we only booked one bed guess we gotta sleep together, more pool scenes, maybe a sauna, some fancy dinners, you get the idea. Then every once in awhile the MC has some crisis about who he is, but truthfully I stopped paying much attention to much of this by that point.

It's not even necessarily that those types of events are boring themselves, but the writing just has noooo depth to it to add any flavor to any of it. The game jumps around a ton and lacks good transitions. Renders often suffer from either the background having a bunch of motion blur or the camera being annoyingly close to characters at weird angles. Sex dialogue felt robotic. It's just not a very compelling experience.

I will say I think Rose's model is pretty hot, but I think that was the only thing keeping me going by the end of playing this.

VERSION: CH.2
SUMMARY: Not bad, bit cheesy but not bad. 3.5 stars if I could.

PROS:

1. Gorgeous models and MC thats also good looking, masculine.
2. Renders are good and animations are pretty nice
3. Writing is solid and story is not bad, simple enough yet not used too much or dull.
4. Pacing is fine, not too slow either

CONS:

1. MC does cock block himself sometimes, not sure about the rest of the guys out there, but if a chick that hot wants to jump your bone, you usually opt with the small head more than the big one. The MC does not need to be a white knight or be completely altruistic.
2. Sometimes the scenes and models lack the right amount of shading and models look awfully pale as a result, like a blank facial expression.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

1. Decent enough game with a good amount of potential, it all depends also where the dev wants to take this game but you could have some naughty fun with it. Though the reserved nature of the MC makes me feel we can expect a relatively vanilla game.
2. Per above point, the MC seems to be indecisive and the dev will use his non-committal nature to justify the harem. This is not bad, but it does make the MC a bit frustratingly "nice"

Nomadic Journey chapter 2 - My impressions so far

TL;DR: Its a novel about traveling failing to deliver on traveling and sightseeing, characters are mostly likeable and look good (including the MC), writing is decent, mid sex scenes.

Alright, lets get this out of the way first - this is a KINETIC NOVEL but the dev for some reason refuses to ackownledge it. There are currently 2 "choices" in the game:
1. Are you 18 years old? (yes/no)
2. Do you want to see a dream about lesbian sex? (yes/no)
In my opinion this does not warrant the lack of kinetic novel tag. I assume the author is planning to add the choices in the future, however current lack of them should still be mentioned.

Now the main issue - for a game thats supposed to be about a journey around the world there sure as hell arent a lot of travelling/exploring/sightseeing or rather, all of it happens offscreen.
The aspect of traveling the world and actully exploring the countries is what made me interested in the game in the first place. I thought it would be something uniqe, something that hasnt been done in a novel before. How dissapointed I was to find out that the famous places in France I as a player have seen were: a hotel, a beach and a restaurant... I sincerely hope it'll get better in the upcoming chapters.

Another thing I was going complain about is the borderline headache inducing blur in the first chapter (and possibly in a bit of chapter 2?) but thankfully it got fixed later on.

Dialogues are mostly good aside from this one thing I've noticed - there's a couple of instances where a character repeats sentences word for word in the span of one conversation which imo sounds weird and a bit unnatural. Could be easily fixed by using a different wording.

Character models are great, I have nothing to complain about in this departament. Actually, as someone who has played a fair bit of VNs, I was rather surprised to find out MC isnt an ugly/unrealistic looking bastard for a change. Personality wise most characters are likeable and dont feel like soulless robots.

Sex scenes...are there, just painfully mediocre.

Give you a five-star review for the models alone, great job with their design, and the main character looks handsome but not over the top bulky, I think I would prefer him to be a little skinnier but that's just personal preference.

One thing that I believe would elevate and suck more people into the story is a customizable first name. Not having this isn't enough to knock the game down a star but I would love to have that feature, to add some personalization to everyone's story.

You also have several points that look like they will lead to choices. such as the scene in the office and at your home before your trip, where you decide for the players what will happen. Either change this or mark this as a kinetic novel.