Ren'Py - Welcome to the Friendship Club! [v0.8p2] [ZorniteB]

I don't mind 18+ VN's that are more heavy on the VN than the 18+ part. As long as it's keeps me hooked on the writing.
Glad to say this is a well written VN. The characters are unique and interesting. The dialogue is funny, and the characters have unique looks.
It is clear as the scenes progress the Dev gets better at lighting and staging, so it certainly looked prettier near the end of my playthrough.

The 'Sandbox' part is just like many other games of this genre. A menu to pick places to see characters, it's nothing groundbreaking. It's very much in line with a few other games in that regard. Menu/Scene replay/ segmented character events, you know the drill. Still, it's unique enough in other areas that I let it pass.

There is some editing that needs to be done in terms of grammar and spelling, but nothing too noticeable for me to get annoyed about.

Overall, I've had a lot of fun playing this game, and I look forward to the next updates.

And, uh, Sae sex when?

I tried liking this game, I really did but it's just too much talking without much of any action. Like I get there's a thing as slow burn games, but man they're really stingy on H scenes. there's only 1 scene that involves actual penetration of a girl riding you and it's a a dream scene so it didn't happen so I can't enjoy it. The rest of the H scenes are just oral or handjobs or just seeing a girls tits and nothing more and out of all of them I only enjoyed hazels eating out scene because you could actually see her tits and not have it be a dream. Speaking of which FAVOR HAZELS SIDE in the friendship quiz, she actually gives you an H scene, I looked at maria's events and the only thing she uses her favor for is to chuck more balls at you, nothing more.

Like I feel hazel is the only thing keeping me playing this because I like her body and model, sae being my 2nd favorite and there hasn't been any actual lewd content of her unless you count seeing her briefly naked in the beach dream. That and sometimes there's some funny dialogue occasionally. But there is just SO much pointless exposition and oooo spooky scenes because apparently school koikatsu games need something unsettling to stand out, though I will give it it's no where as bad as lessons in love in trying to be edgy for the sake of it.

Also there is the fact that they try to make it a sandbox, but oops still have to go through EVERYONES events, the illusion of choice and all that, you can't just pick your favorites, you gotta find everyones events before moving on unless I'm missing something, only thing you change is what order you see a certain group of events in. Just make it linear at this point, stop lying about it being a sandbox.

TLDR: Don't bother touching this game if you want good H scenes, there's barely any after so much time and the ones you do get are so lack luster.

This isn't going to be my usual novel of a review as I can't be bothered to waste more time on this game than this game has already put me through. I'm so tired of all the games that are made this way. Whoever started this, or is teaching people to make sandboxes this way is a blight on game development everywhere. This version of a sandbox is made to be as menial and tedious as possible. It's as if it's trying to milk you for play time like some crap mobile game. Which makes no sense. You click on an area and HOPE there's an event that will trigger, but they never do. You're missing some unspoken, arbitrary number of empty interactions with some unrelated character, you're not allowed to advance the story because fuck you that's why. Not only that, but to see the events and stuff, you have to open the pause menu. You have to actively stop playing instead of adding a screen to just see what you might need to do next. It's infuriating. On top of that it's THE SAME STORY AS THE OTHER GAMES THAT ARE MADE THIS EXACT SAME WAY.

"MC mysteriously goes to a college of mostly females and is suddenly in charge. You interact with them once a day to get one updoot of love points until an event happens. The story is everyone's sad/depressed/isolated it's up to MC's dick to solve the problems. Only... What's that? Existential dread or a poorly made KK jumpscare that pops up mid conversations because subversion of expectations!~"

Stop remaking this game. There are at LEAST 5 other games doing the exact same thing and, spoiler alert, none of them are any good. There is exactly one decent character in this and the rest are tropey and boring. I know for a fact someone will say "You just didn't get to their exposition" and to that I say "I KNOW! I can't because there's no rhyme or reason as to how I'm supposed to see events." And it's not like seeing a freeze frame of MC and the girl talking as it cuts to black to say "You interacted with [XXX]. It was fun, you really shoulda been there!" is fun. That's not compelling gameplay or conducive to storytelling or, god forbid, immersion. By the time I get to the next events my eyes have glazed over and I forgot who the characters even were.

This needs serious refactoring. Outside of the 15 people that like playing this same game over and over, no one will enjoy this. I'm sorry. The in-between scenes need to be more than "Time passed and you gained a point" There needs to be some sort of direction given to the player. Not just "Here's a default renpy menu, click an option to have a throwaway interaction and MAYBE you'll see an event." And I'm dead tired of: MC is so depressed and everyone's depressed and they're all so tortured and this choice won't even tell you what it's for good luck! Unless your fetish is crippling depression, specialization to the point of autism, and/or clicking the same 4 renpy menus over and over and over and over and over again, this is not for you.

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 grammatical errors and typos 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.

EDIT: adjusted for clarity. Also thanks ZorniteB for the steady 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.