Swirling through the gutters of yet another fantasy town's visage, I find myself washing up against yet another adventurer's guild wondering what new drunkard blew in for a job.
Whether the ale they have there is good or not is up for debate, but, from the sips I've taken, so far the ride's been good.
Any biases I have of note before getting on with this review is that I did do the lite version of the game in not playing through the grindy version of it, more so choosing the VN/Semi-sandbox mode instead (which for sandbox lovers it opens up at some point, it's not strictly linear and does feature repeatable scenes).
Anywho, as always I'll try and be as honest as possible, onto the review.
You play as a guy that pretty much finds out he's got that inner power that feels slightly Gary Stu-ish that many mangas, animes, and YA fiction books feature in which you have a dormant beast mode in you that you never knew about which allows you to truly kick ass when needed. In universe it is explained with said trigger for it, and perhaps even nudges towards why a lot of ladies start falling for you (which is pretty easy to figure out). And even though it is a chosen-one-esque power, it does do a good job in not letting it get too in the way of being an asspull, just some nice pizazz on the MC overall.
You and your fam discover this through a certain event that happens when you try to move from your humble village out towards the kingdom, and later down the line you find yourself getting drafted by said kingdom. And instead of dying on the eastern front ala witcher (or well, WW2), you instead skimp out by joining the adventurer's guild, which in many ways is just as bad but doesn't send you off to some god awful corner of the world. Instead, it just sends you to the god awful corners of the kingdom, through that, you realize that without your beast mode you're pretty much just another guy. You can't even swing a sword right, and well, there is a reason why you are called Pan hero which I won't spoil.
That's pretty much the synopsis of the setting, as for the other part, it plays like your standard sandbox affair. If you go the route of no-grind mode, it's pretty nice. The build up and quests to get into that lewd still holds a nice burn in, and things don't get hot and heavy too quickly. You can see a lot of characters struggle in wondering why they're falling way too quickly for you (or even at all to begin with), but again, no jumping the shark for content. On top of that, many of the characters you do meet are fairly realized as well, the dialogue is top notch and pretty funny, everyone feels distinct in who they are and don't feel tropey at all (or at least if they do they quickly build themselves out of that role).
On top of that, beyond slightly grinding (more so progressing through a character quest), you pretty much just zoom throughout the world forwarding quests, meeting new girls, or furthering your quests with ones you already met. There are a lot of LI's which brings some concern on scope bloat, but so far the content for many of them is building up to something pretty prominent.
The only thing I can only critique so far that other reviews have brought up is that there is confusion as to how much content there is for characters. There's no real indicator saying that you're at the end of content for girls, just, a sudden stop that leaves you guessing as to whether you're at the end or not. Which isn't further helped that when clicking accept quest launches the quest onto a separate journal screen from the original quest selection screen (hence erasing the quest from the original selection menu), not a terrible element per se, just nitpicking at this point.
Overall, there isn't a ton of content (in terms of lewd), but for the story proportion, I'm surprised at how long the prologue was to get into the main part of the game. And I mention that in a good way, it's one those intro's that makes you think that this actually isn't an interactive sandbox, but at some point it does open up and show promise as to what this game will shape up to be. In the end this game has charm and I decided with that, whether foolishly or not, that it currently sits at a nice 5/5 for now. I mainly give it this as I feel as though the way it handles characters and it's setting, there is nuance, and once there's more meat on what bones it's got now (which are healthy) then it'll easily attain what I give it currently. Can't wait for more!