Ren'Py - Welcome to the Friendship Club! [v0.4p2] [ZorniteB]

A solid foundation. what's currently here is entertaining and worthwhile to play, whilst the story and characters are interesting enough for me to stick around and see how it develops. a far step above the majority of the trash that gets uploaded to this website.

This is a nice visual novel. There's a distinct focus on story content and the visuals and audio are also pretty solid.

The writing is ambitious but well thought out especially when measured against similar games. However there's quite a bit of errors that leads me to believe it could do with a quick pass of editing. It delivers the story but it could be better. I feel like some of the BGM tracks could loop better but the sound track is at least there. The UI is pretty basic but functional, which is important. I'll take bland but reliable over eye catching but experimental any day.

The characters are quirky the content is quite pleasant but it's a little rough. I hope as it progresses the author will get settled into a comfortable dev cycle and improvements will happen.

If you're into existential dread mixed with some humor and cute girls it's off to a good start.

Tentative 4 star for delivering a fully functioning (though rough) visual novel. Looking forward to more updates.

There is no way this game would have come out just a few years ago.

This is not a compliment saying that technology finally allowed this dev to tell their story its a statement of fact that this is a "guy goes to new school/has memory loss, INEXPLICABLY is an authority figure for a handful of tropes (sporty girl, nerd girl, and various deres), you do events that's overall impact is minimized because they have to be able to be played in any order (sandbox)

I could not even make it to the first animation as the writing was that hard for me to get through however some of the preview pics show that the animations could be much worse.
However the writing could not be much worse while still being competent English. The entire week I played every single event played out the exact same, and when the MC isn't having cookie cutter dialog he is often making very long unfunny jokes that can take multiple clicks to read......in his own head to nobody......

From what little bit of the "story" I encountered the premise is very rote at this point, and the overall mystery seems to be the butt of jokes more than an actual mystery (MC often saying he'll figure it out sooooon enough) as for the character stories I never did not make it far enough in any to see anything beyond the copy and paste intro but the fact that all their events are the same and the overall quality of the set up I doubt they would be anything not seen in other games.

Another issue that pushes towards the idea that this game "falls short" is that every single choice/interaction is done via a renpy menu. No map, no free roam, no seeing characters in various locations you get a few choices with words like (library, gym, etc) and I hope you can remember where people are across updates because there is no indication made in the choice menu you are forced to use.

I believe the previous points show how this game is below average (overall and in its "subgenre" but my final point will be that as of the third update this game has very little to do with "friendship" and instead is just your cookie cutter "weirdo gets student harem but spooooky sometimes". If you changed the name of the club from friendship (love/wholesome/romance) to skinship club (lust/horny/just sex) very little would need to change in game which means it's pretty irrelevant to the plot despite being the "titular pull"

It's very early stages. A lot of potential in that the writing and renders are quite excellent. I do worry about the plot since it frontloads a lot of meandering introspection out of the gate long before I have any real attachment to the world being set up.

+ Writing
+ Renders
+ Sex

- Gameplay
- Plot (so far)

The intro is far too long with too much explanation for the premise being as standard as it is.

Guy is, through luck, introduced to a situation where he has to spend time with a lot of new girls, meanwhile there's the usual meta, 4th wall rocking mystery with the MC. We've seen it before. Not to say the game wont go anywhere interesting with it, and like I said the writing is very good, but it's not unique enough to spend as much time as it does meandering before we really know any of the characters.

It's also very disappointing considering how good the game looks that it's just a location click grinder. I wish these games would just ignore a relationship point system entirely (or have just one repeatable event placeholder between events) and just let you see a new event every time you make a choice of where to spend time. I get that it would seem really short, but that's a preferable alternative to an arbitrarily long grind where there is no actual gameplay in between. Did you click a certain location enough times? Great.

Anyways this does get a 4 instead of a 3 because the potential is there and the good elements do outweigh the bad. I will definitely check out future updates to see where it goes and how much it can improve.

The game is good game and it is well made with good renders and interesting girls, so far I like this game. I can't wait to see how the story plays out as the game becomes better it has a lot of potential.