Fantastic little story, absolutely loved it!
Though I would remove some of the images here. The first 5 are fine, but the rest are very spoilery :)
laputa
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I've been waiting for this release and just finished the game. First of all, congrats! I enjoyed it :) I do have some feedback, if you don't mind:
- Hannah's route is largely great. She's cool and witty. Could have used some more build up but it works well. I didn't like that Christine's "issue" (won't spoil it here) doesn't happen in one of the endings though. It should have nothing to do with their relationship, so it should have happened regardless. Still, Hanna is lovely and I enjoyed her route very much :)
- The other route is... difficult. Marlon's behaviour was an instant turn-off from the very beginning, but no matter how hard I tried to reject her, the game railroaded me into her. I couldn't see any way of expressing interest in Liz alone, and Christine kept talking about how into Marlon she was, which was incongruent with the choices I made (how is she into Marlon when I made negative choices every single time?). In my playthrough, the first time Christine has had sex with Marlon was during their "breakup", which felt out of place, especially as Christine calls her "my lover" and mentions how this "isn't another round". What round?? It's your first time with her!
Now, the bits after the break up (Liz groving a spine etc) work perfectly well and I loved the rest, all the way to the ending.
But the fact remains that the game assumes you would be into Marlon, as well as Liz. That would be fine as a creative choice (which I respect!) but you give ample choices to stop/reject Marlon, which... the game just ignores. It breaks the narrative and you end up with nonsensical scenes as above.
Anyway, thanks for a very enjoyable game and I do hope my feedback comes across how I intended - constructive.
First of all, congratulations on releasing the demo! It was certainly interesting.
After reading the notes section, I must admit I'm left a bit frustrated. It is clear that you have all put your hearts and souls into this - and that's to be admired - but I'm afraid I just didn't feel the love between characters. You say the idea was to endear them to the reader, but the demo was entirely too short for that. By the time I was getting around to remembering everyone's name, it was over. There was the "mom", the little star (boy? girl?), that sailor girl who was in love with the mom (why? how? when did they meet? why do I care? give me a reason to care!) and that purple haired girl who was... evil, for some reason.
As for the mystery, I'm quite curious about who this Leannan is and what happened to them and why they died. That chapter was a nice bit of writing and I'm looking forward to the full release to find out more.
Looking beyond the story, I really enjoyed the soundtrack - it fits the mood very well. On the art front, the sprites look very fancy and polished, nice work! If I have any complaints about the visuals, it's that the game feels entirely too busy, too cluttered. The backgrounds and sprites are all very colorful (perhaps too colorful) and they draw the reader's attention away from the main content, the text. At least switching to adventure novel mode helps a bit by getting rid of the fancy looking frames from the text boxes. For the demo's short duration it was tolerable; I forced myself to focus on the text and ended up mostly enjoying the story. But if this was a full length VN I know I would have given up long before the end. Most visual novels tend to focus too much on the novel and too little on the visuals; it felt like you have taken it too far in the other direction.
Still I did enjoy my time with it and I really am looking forward to the full release. Keep us posted please :)