Great VN, lots of fun would be the tl;dr of it all.
The Breakdown:
The Animation/Visuals/Sex Appeal:
- There's not much to say regarding the visuals as it uses an engine and a set of models used by a lot of other VNs. They look good and look polished, but I don't hold it against the devs of Ripples that the models sometimes looks a little stiff or awkward.
- Where the visuals shine are during the animation loops during the sex scenes. The action seemed fluid and also felt kinetic, and the looping was seamless. There were times when I found myself thinking I was watching a really long scene, but really the action was on loop and I never even noticed.
- The direction and choreography was also top-notch as you almost always got to see the action you would want to see.
The Writing:
I honestly think this is where this VN really shines. The writing was the driving force behind my interest in this game, and kept me hooked right up to the end of episode 5.
While the
threw me for a bit of a loop early on, I thought it was honestly as well done as that trope could ever be, and I'm saying that as someone who
hates that trope. There were times when I felt the
storyline got in the way of the main one, or vice versa, but the writing always managed to bring it back around to that connective narrative tissue.
The other thing about the writing that I really liked was the fact that each of the characters seemed to have their own distinct 'voice', so to speak. The common stereotypes you see in other media had a bit of a twist on them, and each of the major characters/love interests all had tantalizing threads you wanted to keep pulling on. There wasn't really a moment in the game when I felt that one character overlapped egregiously with another, or that a character did not provide anything meaningful to the overall narrative
.
Overall, really nicely done. The humor was really good, while the drama was captivating.