VN - Others - Completed - Study § Steady [v1.03] [Marmelade]

Study § Steady is more of the same, but it's a positive more of the same. The heroines, the H-scenes, the routes, the humor, everything has been done many times before by other titles, and in some instances, it was better. Even with that in mind, you can't be reading top tier VN's all the time, meaning Study § Steady finds its own place, and should be read when you are in the mood some romance, comedy, fluff, and overall sweetness.

Positives:
- Great visuals, and high quality art. The title was released in 2019, and it's still ahead of many recent VN's. Lots of detail and extras, make for a very appealing presentation.
- A complete focus on cute girls, and romance, except for one route. Technically, this still qualifies as a moege, but it's at a turning point to a more specialized kind of bishoujo game (galge). If you want lots of time (of varying quality) with heroine and protagonist, Study § Steady delivers.
- H-scenes. When they start, they go back-to-back, and it's all vanilla or pure love (meaning nothing "crazy" happens). If you enjoy that, the h-scenes in this VN are very high quality, and you could read Study § Steady for them.
- Many types of comedy. This is the reason, why this still counts as a moege. Study § Steady has a secondary cast "hellbent" on making you laugh. Sometimes they hit the mark, others not so much, I thought the good outweighed the bad.

Negatives:
- Study § Steady is about as generic, as you can possibly imagine generic to be. The quality is there, no question, but would it kill them to at least attempt something different?

Score: Study § Steady is a 7/10, and a very easy title to recommend, when you just want something that is easy to read, and makes you feel good. Difference factor is very important to me, but the moral of the story is: Giving the consumer what it wants works, so I recommend it.

Great art, an endearing and fun story. I couldn't find a lot to complain about when it comes to this one—it ran flawlessly for me, no crashes; and while the live 2d was sometimes jarring, it never really bothered me like it seems to have some others. I definitely recommend it if you're looking for a bite-sized VN about dating, it won't drown you in a million words before you ever get somewhere.

Once you're past the prologue, I found things were paced pretty well. They could have definitely done more with building the relationships, but I enjoyed its short stay.

7 / 10 - It's okay, I guess
TL;DR - That's nice and all, but damn, I came for romance but got a lot of boinking instead.


Art - 9 / 10
The art is great, very. It's not the best but very great, at least for my taste.

Sound - 7 / 10
The sound itself (BGM and SFX) is okay, but often time it drowns the VA vocals that I had to lower them since the voice is already at the end of the slider.

Voice - 7 / 10
The voice acting itself is great actually. But I somehow don't like / not familiar with the name entry system where you can set custom name for our protagonist, and choose over many choice of how the heroines would call him.
I can also feel how the VA is not that accustomed to this system that it often came out awkward.
The worst part is, there's no default (Not unless you think Marma Lade is a name lol).

Sprite - 6 / 10
It could be better. Don't get me wrong here. The live 2d art quality is high, but the motion choice and flow were horrible that it's actually awkward to look at.
For example, when the heroine were suppossed to be sad, they do show a sad face, but only for a moment, then they went back to big smile (a.k.a their default state). It's cute yes, but also awkward.

H-Scenes - 8 / 10
It's also because of how I score the art, the H-Scenes were also great. They're abundant in amount, and also vary in taste / fetish. But because of how much they're, it affect the story too.

Story - 6 / 10
I came for romance when I play this. Did I got it? yes. Is it enough? nope, not even close to enough.
Prologue were great. How our protagonist get to know the girls on his school, spend his time with them, yada yada.
Where it got bad is after the branching.
It's true we were shown how the heroines get to fall in love with our protagonist first, and tried to make him notice.
That's good and all, but after they're a thing (become couple), things takes turn to fuck fest.
I don't feel like the story on how the heroine become that overly in love with our protagonist is enough. They fuck a lot and fell in love more is how they do for this game. Not my cup of tea honestly.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. The visuals looked nice and the characters were fun as well. Unfortunately there is the fact that this game runs very poorly. The live 2dmodels tend to move very slowly and with lag and the game itself is very unstable and is prone with frequent crashes. It eventually got so bad I was simply unable to continue the route I was on any further with encountering a crash with no clear way to fix it. If you play this game and it works for you that's great, but if it doesn't then I would highly suggest waiting for a fix or finding another game to play.

This is a fairly high-budget VN that is overall good, but has some very inconsistent quality that hurts it a lot.

First the good: the art and voice acting are top-notch. The relationships have a nice slow burn before getting capped out with tons of sex scenes with plenty of CGs. A lot of the elements of the writing work well and it generally manages to avoid lazy anime cliches.

What's not so good is the Live2D animation. Sometimes it works and you see what they were going for, but most of the time the motions are jerky, stilted, or otherwise unconvincing. The worst culprits are the kiss scenes where the characters' lips just spaz out since they're using some form of auto lip sync that don't know what to do with the audio. Also in this category is the nickname selection, where you can choose from a huge list of nicknames that the girls will call you when they're close enough. You can probably find something to your liking, but they're not re-recording every line with a nickname in it a hundred times so they're spliced in which is pretty obvious on occasion.

What drags this VN down the most is the writing. It's just such a mixed bag. The main characters generally manage to have their own identities within their respective archetypes and conversations with them are usually funny or interesting. However, the use of background characters is extremely lazy. Every time one speaks, it feels like you're listening to placeholder dialogue as there is zero subtlety or attempt to make it sound like something an actual person would say. Sometime it's just poor wording of something that would make sense, but a lot of the time it's just friend A telling you how awesome and pretty one of the girls is or thug C being a cartoonishly evil plot convenience. Another issue is how pointlessly dramatized some events become.

Overall, I enjoyed Study Steady quite a bit, it just has some overly-ambitious features that it doesn't quite pull off and annoying lapses in writing quality.