[Review concerns 1-12 Steam version]
I wish to fuck I had played the f95 copy before impulse-buying on Steam. I have Sisterly Lust over there sitting on almost 40 hours and five playthroughs so I thought I could trust this dev, and again fifteen bucks isn't enough money to give a crap about. Even so, after enduring this eight hour ordeal it seems like fifteen reasons to never spend another dime on an AVN.
First, the glaring issue is that is set up as a wacky space romp with a huge cast of characters and tons of love interests. It feels like it will be a real "og Star Wars trilogy with tits," or even something like "Conan but in space." This directly evolves into the second massive problem here: it's too fucking long and boring. The pacing is terrible, and from several instances of British English making it through the "editing process" (LMAO) along with clearly at least two and perhaps up to five different people's writing styles I'm pretty sure the entire development process lost the plot somewhere. Literally.
I can't believe I'm saying this is a negative, but yeah it is: there are way too many women to fuck and too many sex scenes. They lose ALL meaning by episode seven-ish, and by episode ten and reading "ribbed tunnel" for the seventieth time I just kept clicking through them all. The entire "Conan in space, but now also just regular Conan" arc is like thirty (no joke) sex scenes with some booooooring shit happening in between. Countless threesomes, foursomes, orgies, saying the phrase "ribbed tunnel," and almost copy-pasted descriptions turned my boredom into actual, physical anger.
And I lost the will to live during episode 12 "a" and "b." Had I been intelligent and played here on f95 I would have shift-deleted the whole folder and forced a few nails into my spine in order to forget. But nah: I bought it with real money, I had to finish the thing. I even reloaded a couple saves to see if any major plot points change, but that would actually require the creativity so utterly lacking in the last 3-4 episodes--the dev/s clearly didn't give a shit anymore and just rushed it all out.
So many things also make zero sense. The game repeatedly mentions there's body modification and yet wanted posters are still a thing? Like dude, just get sculpting. Or, you know, cut that disgusting zoomer pube bush from your head. Makeup maybe? A wig? Anything? It's the same reason I guess all the women have the same pube setup all the way through: making even remote alterations to the body models is effort better spent writing boring dialogue, dull, idiotic characters, and endless orgy scenes with "ribbed tunnels" and where half of all women squirt (which is, of course as we all know, NOT pee).
Of course all that would be fine in a wacky space adventure, but Tales takes itself incredibly seriously 99% of the time. Humor, even lame generic humor, would have made all of my irritations go away. Take away the heavy-handedness and replace it with wit, clever turnarounds, jokes, I mean I'd even take farts. Anything is better than this mess.
I cannot actually believe they're going to make this whole thing three seasons and 36 episodes. Are you fucking serious? You could use this game to euthanize people. If not from boredom then from anger, and if not from that then just from people dying rather than playing this horrid piece of trash any longer.