VN - Unity - Completed - The Future Radio and the Artificial Pigeons [Final] [Laplacian]

A somewhat "modest" VN, in the sense that while reading it, I wasn't really thinking that X was good or Y was bad, "face value" was doing the trick most of the time. It's something that I could read just fine, but not in the same league as "Cyanotype" (same dev, reason for trying this). I believe that sums up my stance it pretty well, even so there's also appealing points worth a mention in "Future Radio", many stemming from premise/setting, and uniqueness. How much were they able to achieve from this immanent good? Enough.

Positive:
- Melancholic quality - The biggest selling point, in my opinion. There was some sort of global event that changed everything, but it's not tragedy or desolation that capture your attention (humans live without much trouble). It's the loss of connections between people, and the stifling of the human spirit/possibilities. The premise is powerful, in a way that what's on the line, is hardly important in the grand scheme of things, and nothing less than crucial in terms of human (personal) growth.

- Little Sister - The "penis and virgin jokes", don't tick me the wrong way. What's interesting about her is different speech patterns according to situation/character, and range of allowed behaviours being higher than the other characters. She is a "manic hipster" of sorts. Thing is, the TL doesn't have the (full) means to convey nuance and understanding to the reader, when it comes to sudden dialect/pattern changes, and derived humor/character quirks. Inconsistency, could be an easy counter to all of that, "Imouto" archetype being slightly annoying and energetic works for me.

- Actual setting - I already liked it in "Cyanotype", probably because it mixes futuristic with contemporary. It's a clever way of imposing some limits to your story, while being able to show some originality in devices. The fact that you can regard happenings in more emotional fashion for longs periods of time (characters and adversity), while still retaining the sense of wonder associated with science fiction, seems like a "universal win" to me (translation: 2 types of reward combined).

Negative:
- Nothing (that I would call) important - H-scenes are less than ideal (duration, build-up, placement...); Romance is forced from virtually nothing; 3 heroine routes put together, have literally only 1 segment that contributes (strongly) to the main story (you could remove them, and lose little); Pseudo-science being used for everything. I was already "twitching" at the conditions of a particular medical intervention, let alone accepting "time leaping" without mentioning coordinates/adjustments or explaining transposition of memories to a physical medium (it's personal though).

Characters and simple (lack in) number of quirks. It's why the sister stands out (limited cast); Reversal of cause and effect, and its effects on reader interest (not in the scope of the review); Plot devices that mess with memory (another personal distaste in large quantities); Main heroine and protagonist connection needed more time "in the oven" (I can overlook the other 3, not this one); And I could go on.

These are mainly footnotes though, the "pseudo-science" bit is the only "offender" (proper negative).

Score: 6/10. Emotionally speaking it was alright, and it's an entertaining read. Don't want to sell it or bring it down, try reading it before "Cyanotype", that might improve your experience. If you are new to VNs, this seems like a good option, because it's not that long, and you could collect different forms of value from it. Recommended from that perspective.

The game is boring and inconsistent.

The art is nice, of course if you ignore visual artifacts like Kaguya's monster vagina that either looks like an alien abalone or extends to eat the protagonist's dick, which itself looks stolen from a BBC sub-genre flick for some reason.

The voice acting is mediocre at best. There are times when I wanted to turn off some voices in the options, which is rare for me despite playing a lot of VNs.

The story and world-building are full of gaping holes. I know that many tearjerkers like this are expecting you to turn off your higher brain processing in order to enjoy them, but this game tries to appear clever and breaks that convention by engaging the same thing it needs you to suppress.

And who in their right mind displays white text on a nearly-white background, that's visual terrorism I tell you.

The game is ok but sadly not as special as you expect it to be, i kept playing thinking there would be a twist that would explain everything but what came was weak and is exacty what you would have probably guessed way before it was reavled.

There are choices in the game but most have to be done in a set order or you wont get to finish the main story and the rest are do you want to see this girls short side ending or not.



Personally the worst thing about the game is that two of the heroines really love the MC and its actually sad to turn them down especially in the lame way this game works(single choice) instead ofeither choosing to get to know them or not thus creating love between them, as it is they already love the MC before the choice you just pick it.

The endings for each girl are short and exactly what you expect, most have almost nothing to do with the main story, each includes two sex scenes in the base story none of which are anything special.

Very enjoyable VN if you don't focus too much on the details.

Interesting VN that's able to balance a light-hearted and serious story. It has nice art, good VA's, and characters with distinct personalities. This is one of the few VN's where I really enjoyed listening to the character's banter, some of the jokes hit right and legit made me laugh out loud.

I think a more realistic version of this story would have had an organization quickly swoop in confiscating all tools and data including the characters. Would've been a pretty short story though, so I guess it's probably for the best.

I would describe this vn first and foremost as a self-contained world. what I mean is the characters you see in game are the only people present in that world. otherwise you will be marred with so many questions that the vn will never try to answer. like:

where are the people re-introducing wired connection
where are the hobbyists doing a "pigeon season"
or the hobbyists that are into old stuff
or heck, how does the artificial pigeons exactly "breed"
or where is the government in all this

so yeah, you'll just gonna have to ignore that and only focus on the characters present. common route was decent, watching the group reaching the point of "oh shit we're actually onto something" hits good but again, other people (that are into that field) would have done that years ago. so then comes forced drama, forced chara interactions which are decent enough but you'll definitely have better examples in your past games.

the routes centers mostly based on their past traumas or the like. but at the end of the day, I'd probably not recommend it. there are betters out there. when rance 9 got released I immediately dropped this. its pretty predictable. how predictable? let's just say that almost throughout the game i was fapping the enter key like mad.