I must say, I was pleasantly surprised with Sunshine Love. I am still not completely sold on the sister/childhood friend model. Her hair looks too 1960s throwback, and something about her face seems off to me, but she is growing on me as I get to know her better.
The content is amazing for a first release. I know Mr. Dots has resources few devs can match with a multi-member team working on the game, but it looks like a years worth of content already.
I do wish that Mr. Dots would do something about the breast conforming clothing issue. I know this is a problem in Daz modeling, but for developers with Mr. Dots resources, he could take the time to post-process the images, or at least select clothing where it is less obvious. Having t-shirts and other tops stick to the skin like shrink-wrap breaks the immersion in my opinion. I can forgive this for small devs who don't have the time or expertise to fix this, but if one man devs like
RomanHume can do it, I am sure Mr. Dots could hire someone with the skill to fix this.
Plus, this is kind of a pet peeve of mine with VNs here, but why do none of the women ever wear a bra unless they are shirtless? Is it too much work to pose and render? I think the only character that wore a bra with a top is Stacey during the surfing scene, oddly enough since she is the one character who could most likely get away with not wearing one. I am not a woman, but in my experience nearly all woman except perhaps a few with small breasts who can get away with it with layers, wear bras nearly all the time, except for sleeping or hanging casually around the house. Plus, it's sexy! I've seen a few devs around here that do a good job with this, but it seems like they are in the minority.
For some reason the relationship between the MC and his sister didn't seem quite realistic to me at times. The MC in particular seems to have surprisingly little patience with his sister's situation. She was raised by a flighty single mother, basically abandoned to run a hotel on her own without any notice, and the MC keeps blowing up at her over seemingly small reasons. I know if it were my sister in a similar jam, especially if I haven't seen her for 10 years, I would cut her a lot more slack.
Much worse, his reaction to Ashley is totally baffling. I hope the writer fixes this in a later update, but it is totally not believable that his step-mom takes his step-sister away from her with about 1 hours notice, barely lets him say goodbye, and then keeps him from having any contact with the step-sister he loves for 10 years, not to mention keeping his own dad from having any relationship with his own daughter. And all he says when he meets her, is "Let's not talk about the past". I mean what human being would act like that. At least he should act cold toward her for awhile, blow up at her, or at the very minimum say that she really hurt him and his Dad and would like an explanation. Maybe this will come later, but it has to be addressed for the story to have any believably where Ashley is concerned.
I really like the scenes with Nicole. I know there relationship isn't perfect, which helps the story progress, but she is actually a genuinely pleasant character. I thought she would be horrible to the MC once he didn't get the promotion to give him an excuse to cheat, but she was actually realistically disappointed, but not overbearing about it. Great job for the writer with her character. It does make it a little harder to romance the other characters, but it's only a game, so I am sure I can manage
. It does make the story more believable, which I appreciate.
I think the ending scene is unnecessary, but I guess the devs want to end on a cliff hanger.
Overall, a very good effort by Mr. Dots, and has the potential to surpass his previous two games. DmD was quite entertaining until D and the MC's relationship developed into a full on sexual relationship, and then the story just got boring to me. Nothing much really happens other than going out on dates with the same characters, and the same repetitive photo shoots. Melody, while having a better story and much more believable, relatable, and intelligent characters, suffered from this same problem of not knowing what to do with the story once Melody and the MC's relationship became a fully sexual one. Both stories pretty much dragged on after that.
I don't know if the solution is just to keep everything on the teasing, touching level until the very end, at least with the sister, or come up with some sort of twist or conflict in the story afterwards to keep the players interested in what is going to happen next.
All in all, despite the few issues I noticed, a very good effort.
