I think people are going to get a rushed ending regardless. Too many unanswered questions and ton of lore that hasn't been expanded upon. That's why i always said this would of been better if it was a book series instead of a game.
Well you do have a point in that there is just ton of Lore there. It is not necessary to explain the beginning of the world to tell a story, though. In fact, from a first person view, it actually make sense that many of the things going on are unknown and remain unknown to the player. You are not a god, after all.
But it needs not be a bad thing. First, suppose this story is over and many questions remain unsolved. Then, Hopes can write another story in the same setting explaining more.
Second, in the limit, visual novels are just the evolution of books. Everything you can do in a book you can do it in a visual novel, but not the other way around. Why? well, a book is just a visual novel with only text. A visual novel has text, images, sound, effects and potentially choices.
Back to the unknown stuff, a visual novel sometimes allows a way out for that thing about unknown motives by allowing several routes. For example, in the first route, you aligned with princess x, so you have no idea why princess y is trying to kill princess x. In the other route, you align with princess y and the motives are explained. So you have more freedom and potentially can tell better stories.
The greatest benefit of the book would be a faster resolution, as writing only is needed. But we would lose on the amazing renders, the flashes of gunshots, the emotion that music can delivered when playing at the right time. For example, a simple render of two persons and the right music can convey love, anger, hatred, solitude, without any text whatsoever. That is a benefit visual novels have that book don't.
At least not until you're really on the home stretch, I agree. There is so much that can go wrong, from botched climaxes to completely out of character rushed finishes. There's also always the chance that somebody realizes the forced boring 5 minute mini games weren't such a good idea after all and suddenly the game is fun. I'd argue that in games like Parental Love or Dating My Daughter, which are technically not finished yet, you're safe to go.
But agreed, for me the DeLucas are not rate-able yet. Three star games with ups and downs can be rated earlier than those vying for the five.
Yes, precisely. I kind of had this discussion before at Love and submission, so let arrogantly quote myself.
I think very few people are actually able to give an objective and valuable review for work in progress projects. Many times people fail to understand that any story can totally change in the last minute and sometimes totally awesome/terrible stories became terrible/awesome just in the last page (The novel, not the movie, I am legend is a great example in my opinion of a barely passable novel written just to make a fantastic ending).
Rating and reviewing implies a more detailed analysis and implies usually a comparison to other examples (the star number is irrelevant if there are no other games to compare to). But usually, those other games are in different states of production, so it is like comparing oranges and bananas. UNLESS the game is finished. But I guess that as long as the reviewer and readers are aware that those are the state of affairs up to X version is fine (and that different developers may focus of things on different order).
