Sweet Affection? I can honestly say I felt neither affection nor sweetness here. This game was more like Treat Depression. As in you get to spend all your time trying to rehabilitate many variations of the same dysfunctional trauma victim. Characters with dark pasts of abuse/death that have entirely consumed their personalities and left only crippling male trust issues in its wake. So even if the nature of the trauma varies, it still ultimately results in you having to go through the same emotionally draining story arc ad nauseam. Filled with I'm Sorrys, That's Not Okays and I'm Here For Yous. Then reading diary entries about how you're not quite like Dave/Jeremy/2nd office bully/school blackmailers/abusive brother onlookers, etc. Same story beats every time.
People talk about long and slow with this game, but I LOVE me them slow burns. The issue here isn't just that. It's actually the repetition of this exhausting trope. So instead of having cute dates, sharing laughs and getting naughty with your girlfriends, you're constantly stuck tiptoeing, comforting and crying with your patients. Leaving you with the dreadful feeling you get when you need to get ready to visit a friend at a cancer ward every time you click on their event.
Not every character needs to be a full tragedy stricken repair job. Constantly hitting that one sob story note may work for some chick flicks to get a quick cry out of 2 hours. But it certainly doesn't work for long drawn out erotic VNs.
Another issue the story runs into is that it keeps its characters' storylines entirely separate. In theory this sounds like it could make things easier, in practice however you quickly realize why no one does this. All the storylines end up feeling disjointed and are entirely inconsistent with each other. As if every character exists in their own separate universe. This game goes out of its way to avoid harem themes, but sadly without it you end up in a strange situation where MC is dating a dozen characters but no one really acknowledges each other's existence. Not even MC when he's talking to the wrong person.
The art is just your standard Honey Select and the animations are serviceable enough, assuming you have the saintly patience to reach them. The UI on the other hand is rather sloppy and strange to navigate. There's even buttons that when you hover over them just say they don't do anything anymore. And with the gigantic file size, all in all this is just not a game I can recommend to anyone.
People talk about long and slow with this game, but I LOVE me them slow burns. The issue here isn't just that. It's actually the repetition of this exhausting trope. So instead of having cute dates, sharing laughs and getting naughty with your girlfriends, you're constantly stuck tiptoeing, comforting and crying with your patients. Leaving you with the dreadful feeling you get when you need to get ready to visit a friend at a cancer ward every time you click on their event.
Not every character needs to be a full tragedy stricken repair job. Constantly hitting that one sob story note may work for some chick flicks to get a quick cry out of 2 hours. But it certainly doesn't work for long drawn out erotic VNs.
Another issue the story runs into is that it keeps its characters' storylines entirely separate. In theory this sounds like it could make things easier, in practice however you quickly realize why no one does this. All the storylines end up feeling disjointed and are entirely inconsistent with each other. As if every character exists in their own separate universe. This game goes out of its way to avoid harem themes, but sadly without it you end up in a strange situation where MC is dating a dozen characters but no one really acknowledges each other's existence. Not even MC when he's talking to the wrong person.
The art is just your standard Honey Select and the animations are serviceable enough, assuming you have the saintly patience to reach them. The UI on the other hand is rather sloppy and strange to navigate. There's even buttons that when you hover over them just say they don't do anything anymore. And with the gigantic file size, all in all this is just not a game I can recommend to anyone.