It's good, but... long. And long in a bad way: It keeps tense moments for too much time, with too much frequency. While the story writing is solid, the constant plot twists even let you know that any given fight scene won't end until at least two twists are deployed. And that takes time.
The writing is solid. The music is good. They use well most writing tricks, and a lot of variety... Although given the sheer length of this work, at some point it goes from use to abuse and you start measuring as "the protagonist wasn't beaten to a pulp yet, so this action scene cannot finish" or "expectations were turned exactly once, the scene cannot finish until they turn my expectations around again".
Even if they avoid repeating the same trick too much (some tricks, like "sheer luck" and "time manipulation" are only used exactly once; even villains and heroes try to vary their repertorie of tricks to try to keep things interesting), you always know a scene is not yet ending if they still haven't shown you their next trick yet.
By the way, they kill almost a whole page worth (in sound settings) of characters. They work well with their side characters, and the main cast has an epilogue, but some of the other secondary kinda of... disappear. (What happened to Yumi, anyway?). Those whom got killed ended up having a more satisfactory character development than some of those whom weren't explicitly killed by the authors.
Characters usually shine... although as others said, Haruto is overshadowed by Senri (who's just much more interesting overall) and the final villain is so... cartoon~ishly evil, up to and including to traditional final villain's gloating, while still basically scoring a victory on everything which matters until the very end (and not due to protagonists incompetence). It was weird seeing someone so intelligent, able to outsmart the extremely smart and capable cast, to be at cartoon levels of evilness.
So I feel this was good, but they overdid it in several things.
This is ultimately a kinetic novel, where story is the most important factor, with art and music giving support to it. Which they do well, but still a support role so not really worth of mention. Hence a 4/5... rounded up, I would be leaning towards 3.5/5 otherwise.
And yes, if you want to fap, go look elsewhere. This one will take a dozen hours for a couple scenes, then another dozen hours for another single scene, then a handful hours for the epilogue where the other 12 out of 15 H scenes are at and can be seen in under a hour. However, there's some fan service in some scenes during the game. Which brings me to the last point:
The fact Ageha is a pure tease (as only the main cast has H scenes) is... well, I originally didn't expect it to affect negatively the work but here we are.
Thing is, given how meticulous the story writers are, you would expect her teasing to have some justification or growth, but it has neither, and is kept as a comic relief even in Noah's epilogue ─ and she doesn't even really show up there. So it felt lacking, not because there's no scene with Ageha, but because you expect something from the story writers ─ be it a scene, a justification, or just growth in her character ─ which never happens. Every character had a chance to display some character growth, Ageha included... But in the end of the game she doesn't grow at all, and remains as the not-really-comic relief.
The writing is solid. The music is good. They use well most writing tricks, and a lot of variety... Although given the sheer length of this work, at some point it goes from use to abuse and you start measuring as "the protagonist wasn't beaten to a pulp yet, so this action scene cannot finish" or "expectations were turned exactly once, the scene cannot finish until they turn my expectations around again".
Even if they avoid repeating the same trick too much (some tricks, like "sheer luck" and "time manipulation" are only used exactly once; even villains and heroes try to vary their repertorie of tricks to try to keep things interesting), you always know a scene is not yet ending if they still haven't shown you their next trick yet.
By the way, they kill almost a whole page worth (in sound settings) of characters. They work well with their side characters, and the main cast has an epilogue, but some of the other secondary kinda of... disappear. (What happened to Yumi, anyway?). Those whom got killed ended up having a more satisfactory character development than some of those whom weren't explicitly killed by the authors.
Characters usually shine... although as others said, Haruto is overshadowed by Senri (who's just much more interesting overall) and the final villain is so... cartoon~ishly evil, up to and including to traditional final villain's gloating, while still basically scoring a victory on everything which matters until the very end (and not due to protagonists incompetence). It was weird seeing someone so intelligent, able to outsmart the extremely smart and capable cast, to be at cartoon levels of evilness.
So I feel this was good, but they overdid it in several things.
This is ultimately a kinetic novel, where story is the most important factor, with art and music giving support to it. Which they do well, but still a support role so not really worth of mention. Hence a 4/5... rounded up, I would be leaning towards 3.5/5 otherwise.
And yes, if you want to fap, go look elsewhere. This one will take a dozen hours for a couple scenes, then another dozen hours for another single scene, then a handful hours for the epilogue where the other 12 out of 15 H scenes are at and can be seen in under a hour. However, there's some fan service in some scenes during the game. Which brings me to the last point:
The fact Ageha is a pure tease (as only the main cast has H scenes) is... well, I originally didn't expect it to affect negatively the work but here we are.
Thing is, given how meticulous the story writers are, you would expect her teasing to have some justification or growth, but it has neither, and is kept as a comic relief even in Noah's epilogue ─ and she doesn't even really show up there. So it felt lacking, not because there's no scene with Ageha, but because you expect something from the story writers ─ be it a scene, a justification, or just growth in her character ─ which never happens. Every character had a chance to display some character growth, Ageha included... But in the end of the game she doesn't grow at all, and remains as the not-really-comic relief.
