It’s interesting that this game isn’t one of the “Mention Lord Voldemort and you get banned” ones, because it’s a pretty blatant destitute man’s version of f95’s Numero Uno. It has a lot of the same parts, but they don’t add up the same way.
Mild Spoilers Below
-Like, the MC is at college, but the college part of it isn’t particularly interesting. There are hot girls all over his hall, but they all look mostly the same and all have the same body (almost the exact same faces on several of them- this some Madden shit, y’all).
-Like, there’s a douchey frat (and the leader punches the MC because of course) and there are the (two) di(c)ks who mess with them (the main one is even a spoiled rich kid with a heart of gold/vodka) but there’s no real conflict yet, so it’s not particularly interesting.
-Like, there’s a sorority of HOT hot chicks and the president is an LI, but the vice president may or may not be whoring out the various ladies, so the same conflict occurs where some sluttiness makes some (one) of them uncomfortable, but the MC has no relationship with the rest, so it’s not particularly interesting.
-Like, there’s some white knighting and protecting the girls from each other, from guys, from themselves, but it’s not particularly nuanced, so it’s also not particularly interesting.
-Like, there’s a hot teacher (who is totes 10 years older than us, you guys) who has some issues in her relationship, and then she cries about it to the MC once for no reason and then gets a divorce, so that feels eye-rollingly convenient, which doesn’t make it particularly interesting.
Note to writers: if the conflict gets solved without any input from anyone or anything, the conflict serves no purpose. That off-putting thread runs throughout a lot of this one, so far.
The writing isn’t great, because a lot of the characters mostly feel like they have exactly one note, so calling them two-dimensional is mildly insulting to pictures of squares everywhere. It’s also feels very ESL, but only in some places. Like it’s homework that you stole from SparkNotes, but you ran it through a translator a couple times so that enough of the words got changed around that your professor’s plagiarism checker won’t nail you, but you’re still gonna get a D because the essay doesn’t flow the same way humans write.
This VN is like a cover song that takes out the shredding 70s guitar and replaces it with acoustic riffs that play the same notes but are mostly out of tune and out of time. Because at some point, you’re not doing a cover as much as just playing the same song except it’s worse in every way. The dev is in on it, because a lot of it is tongue in cheek, but the VN doesn’t really stick the landing because it’s not quite clever enough.
THE GAME IS NOT BAD. Which I must say, because I’ve crushed it, kind of a lot. I don’t dislike it; it’s just derivative and worse in every way than what it’s trying to imitate. Shit, that was mean again. It doesn’t suck, I swear. I’m interested to see if this is a Game of Thrones situation, where we catch up to the source material and then it goes all to shit. If the dev works at rounding out his characters so that the MC knows more than 2 things about them and comes up with some new story beats that aren’t 1-to-1 ports, the game will be better off for it.
Final score: Dead Rising 4 and you like it okay but it just makes you want to play the first one again /10
would recommend
