This was one of the worst visual novels that I ever read and I read many.
This is the story of a gutless author who wanted to write a story about a man who fucks teenagers who are like daughters to him but the author doesn't have the guts to defy social norms so they literally destroy society with a lame post-apocalyptic setting for the sole purpose of getting rid of social norms in their story so they are free to write whatever lame erotic story they want, and even under these conditions, they still make sure to make their characters relentlessly repeat that they would never EVER have fucked each other if society didn't conveniently collapse to allow them to fuck whoever they want.
The irony is that the author included this quote from Oscar Wilde into their visual novel:
"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
You would think that the author of this visual novel included this quote into their story because this is a story about characters who choose to live their life the way they are happy with whoever they want and reject the hypocrisy of society, right?
Wrong! This story is about characters who would choose to conform to the hypocrisy of society if society still existed.
The author chose a post-apocalyptic setting to get rid of society so their characters DON'T choose to defy society because there is no more society to defy and they make sure to make their characters relentlessly repeat that, was society still standing, they would have chose to please it rather than themselves and each other.
Therefore quoting Oscar Wilde under these conditions is a JOKE and I say: "If you would rather make society happy than each other then you DON'T deserve each other." and so I couldn't have ANY sympathy for them.
Moreover I couldn't take ANY character seriously anyway because they are supposed to be americans and they all look japanese because the author was dumb enough to use Honey Select for an occidental setting!
And I can't even justify their choice by their need of an affordable characters generator because I keep seeing the same looking characters in many visual novels so I just know that there is definitely an extensive graphics library available for visual novels, nothing could possibly justify that this author chose a cheap japanese characters generator for an occidental setting, this is just one of many evidences of their utter incompetence.
The protagonist wears glasses, there is nothing wrong about that, if he didn't wear them ALL THE FUCKING TIME!
Don't even try to make me believe that he sees shit with his glasses in front of his eyes in a hot shower full of vapor!
The author made the two main female characters 18 years old.
Do you know why 18?
Because this is the legal age of sexual maturity.
If legal majority was 13, they would be 13 years old, because they are the youngest legally possible.
That doesn't help when the author keeps making comments such as "Yum, look at this pretty tight teenage pussy...", how the hell am I not supposed to feel like a disgusting pedophile when I read such disturbing thoughts?!
The author bothered to make the girls legally major but they keep making us think of them as teenagers, implying children!
The main female character is the most insufferably boring of all!
She is so predictable, so annoyingly single-minded, every time she is alone with the protagonist, there is only one single thought in her bland mind: sex!
And all the time she is not alone with him, she laments how she would love so much to be alone with him, annoyingly single-minded I tell you.
She doesn't have any meaningful role in the story beside being a "horny teenager" who wants to screw her "dad" all of the damn time.
From when we quit Grantsboro, I just had grown so fed up with her that every time I was alone with her, I thought "Oh no, not her again...", I just couldn't bear her anymore.
Eventually, I just skipped all of her sex scenes because there are simply too many of them, I made an overdose of Carol!
The author allows polygamy.
HOWEVER, they still try to impose monogamy on us because they make the protagonist treat Carol as his owner and he basically keeps repeating "just say the word and I will throw everyone else in the trash" as if the author wanted to guilty us because we chose to return the feelings of more than one girl, they allowed us polygamy while they kept pestering us with monogamous mindset.
If you choose polygamy, that's because you are into more than one person who also are into you and to be fair to everyone, there is no favorite, no number one, no queen, and you definitely don't offer to reject the others to one of them, you leave that bullshit to monogamy and therefore the way the author treats Carol is frustratingly unfair to the others.
It's funny how the protagonist keeps repeating many times to Carol: "just say the word and I will stop everything with everyone else" but he never says this in the presence of anyone else.
A shame, because I just would love to see how the women who love him would feel if they hear him basically tell Carol "just say a word and I will throw all of these fucktoys in the trash if you want me for yourself alone because I don't care about hurting their feelings, I care only about you"...
And this is one of the many reasons why I couldn't have any sympathy for this hypocrite protagonist because he says to more than one girl that he loves them and right after he says to one of them that he is ready to break everyone's hearts if she has a selfish whim, how could I possibly respect such an uncaring hypocrite?
The sex scenes are voiced.
But the author uses the same 3 voices for all female characters and so the voices make the sex scenes even more repetitive and boring.
The title of this visual novel is "Now & Then", and once you will find out why this name, you will hate it!
Because when you are in the "now", the author keeps breaking the pace of the story with annoying flashbacks of "then".
I don't mind some flashbacks if they are in moderate quantity and interesting.
These are neither.
Because you are reading the story of the current events, on the edge, when the screen suddenly turns black with a big white "THEN..." and a mellow guitar starts playing to tell you a boring past event that you couldn't care less about and it interrupts this way ALL OF THE DAMN TIME, you can never get into the mood because the author keeps breaking it with their genius idea of switching at the worst timings between "Now..." and "Then...".
In conclusion, after having tortured myself to read this visual novel to the end in the vain hope that it would grow better, I warn you it doesn't, there is nothing worth keeping in this utter failure and I now believe that ILS Productions actually stands for Insufferably Lame Stories and Productions.
