Humble Hot Date Bundle
Aug. 19th, 2019 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThis is specifically a collection of visual novel/dating sim games.
Ladykiller in a Bind - The winner of the bundle. A VERY well-done take on Twelfth Night, if Shakespeare had been able to present BDSM-inclined lesbians. Your hero is standing in for her brother (“The Prince”) at his private school’s end-of-year cruise, and must successfully gather enough votes to win “the game” without garnering enough suspicion to get her found out and thrown into the hold. Follows the harem style of Visual Novel but with more western stereotypes and better gender politics, and it is HELLA QUEER. Extra points because it warns you if your choices will lock paths, garner suspicion, or win votes.
Highway Blossoms - Straightforward visual novel about two women (the cynic and the ditz) falling in love while search for buried treasure in the desert. Meh?
Just Deserts – A dating sim using a visual novel engine with a tacked-on turn-based RPG fighting system. I think my issue here is that I like the idea of the dating sim merged with a jrpg (see also: Persona 3), but the rpg elements are slow, clunky and not particularly fun. I think I’d be more forgiving of the ridiculous plot (one man joins an elite all-woman team of alien-fighting soldiers with stock anime personalities, eventually gets them to all fall in love with him while defeating the alien threat) if the game itself was more fun to play.
Sunrider Academy - A dating sim with resource management elements; you play the vice-president of the student council, tasked with saving three failing clubs (kendo, swimming and science) and able to romance each of the three club leaders. You need to balance upgrading the clubs with managing your grades and your stress level, which is a cool idea in concept, and in practice the game is too damn long. Ten 50-day months just drag by as you click through various stat +/- scenes waiting for things to happen. (I ended up using the dev console, which is apparently enabled by default, to view scenes rather than try to play through the entire game.)
Creature Romances: Kokonoe Kokoro - An incredibly generic visual novel about a boy falling in love with his childhood best friend, who is brilliant and buxom but shy and a terrible cook. The big twist being that she’s a grasshopper-creature (and everyone except the boy are also weird monsters, including the stereotypical best friend, mean teacher and bratty know-it-all younger sister). It takes half an hour to play the five chapters, where there is exactly one choice: Determine if you end up in love with Kokoro, or if she murders you.
Purrfect Date - You’re the first of a string of researchers Dr. Pawpurr brings to his mysterious island to assist in his research—finding a cure for the “catification” you’re almost immediately infected with. And you get to romance the cats who are already on the island under the guise of “learning more about them”, before you fail and someone else has to take over. Intriguing, but I found the interface clunky and wasn’t interested enough in the mechanics to spend the time on it. (Apparently 100% completion requires at least four runs, and there’s no skip button. Yeesh.)
Genital Jousting - This is an arena-fighting game starring disembodied pensises. And yes, it’s exactly as dumb as you’d think, with the added bonus of having clunky controls. The one-player mode is a “do ordinary tasks with terrible controls” game, starring a penis. This was clearly not to my taste.
Sunrider: Liberation Day - So...this is a sequel, though nothing about it indicates that and the first game apparently wasn’t included in this bundle. In order to start this game, you either need to import data or click which event flags you would have picked in the first game, even if that makes no sense to you. So, jumping into a plot halfway through with no catch-up, that’s just great. But on top of that, we have another round of “secondary game system tacked-into a visual novel engine”, in this case a terrible space battle system that moves very slowly, doesn’t give you any useful sense of what anything does, has no tutorial and dumps you right into a battle against significant odds. That’s some bullshit, right there.
By the time I reached G-senjou no Maou - The Devil on G-String Voiced Edition, I had lost interest in the “stereotypical” anime visual novel, which it promises to be.
Overall: This was a moderately-entertaining exposure to a genre I don’t usually play, with one game that I genuinely enjoyed and several others I found briefly interesting. And it sparked some other musings on interactive fiction that I’ll likely write up at some other point.
Ladykiller in a Bind - The winner of the bundle. A VERY well-done take on Twelfth Night, if Shakespeare had been able to present BDSM-inclined lesbians. Your hero is standing in for her brother (“The Prince”) at his private school’s end-of-year cruise, and must successfully gather enough votes to win “the game” without garnering enough suspicion to get her found out and thrown into the hold. Follows the harem style of Visual Novel but with more western stereotypes and better gender politics, and it is HELLA QUEER. Extra points because it warns you if your choices will lock paths, garner suspicion, or win votes.
Highway Blossoms - Straightforward visual novel about two women (the cynic and the ditz) falling in love while search for buried treasure in the desert. Meh?
Just Deserts – A dating sim using a visual novel engine with a tacked-on turn-based RPG fighting system. I think my issue here is that I like the idea of the dating sim merged with a jrpg (see also: Persona 3), but the rpg elements are slow, clunky and not particularly fun. I think I’d be more forgiving of the ridiculous plot (one man joins an elite all-woman team of alien-fighting soldiers with stock anime personalities, eventually gets them to all fall in love with him while defeating the alien threat) if the game itself was more fun to play.
Sunrider Academy - A dating sim with resource management elements; you play the vice-president of the student council, tasked with saving three failing clubs (kendo, swimming and science) and able to romance each of the three club leaders. You need to balance upgrading the clubs with managing your grades and your stress level, which is a cool idea in concept, and in practice the game is too damn long. Ten 50-day months just drag by as you click through various stat +/- scenes waiting for things to happen. (I ended up using the dev console, which is apparently enabled by default, to view scenes rather than try to play through the entire game.)
Creature Romances: Kokonoe Kokoro - An incredibly generic visual novel about a boy falling in love with his childhood best friend, who is brilliant and buxom but shy and a terrible cook. The big twist being that she’s a grasshopper-creature (and everyone except the boy are also weird monsters, including the stereotypical best friend, mean teacher and bratty know-it-all younger sister). It takes half an hour to play the five chapters, where there is exactly one choice: Determine if you end up in love with Kokoro, or if she murders you.
Purrfect Date - You’re the first of a string of researchers Dr. Pawpurr brings to his mysterious island to assist in his research—finding a cure for the “catification” you’re almost immediately infected with. And you get to romance the cats who are already on the island under the guise of “learning more about them”, before you fail and someone else has to take over. Intriguing, but I found the interface clunky and wasn’t interested enough in the mechanics to spend the time on it. (Apparently 100% completion requires at least four runs, and there’s no skip button. Yeesh.)
Genital Jousting - This is an arena-fighting game starring disembodied pensises. And yes, it’s exactly as dumb as you’d think, with the added bonus of having clunky controls. The one-player mode is a “do ordinary tasks with terrible controls” game, starring a penis. This was clearly not to my taste.
Sunrider: Liberation Day - So...this is a sequel, though nothing about it indicates that and the first game apparently wasn’t included in this bundle. In order to start this game, you either need to import data or click which event flags you would have picked in the first game, even if that makes no sense to you. So, jumping into a plot halfway through with no catch-up, that’s just great. But on top of that, we have another round of “secondary game system tacked-into a visual novel engine”, in this case a terrible space battle system that moves very slowly, doesn’t give you any useful sense of what anything does, has no tutorial and dumps you right into a battle against significant odds. That’s some bullshit, right there.
By the time I reached G-senjou no Maou - The Devil on G-String Voiced Edition, I had lost interest in the “stereotypical” anime visual novel, which it promises to be.
Overall: This was a moderately-entertaining exposure to a genre I don’t usually play, with one game that I genuinely enjoyed and several others I found briefly interesting. And it sparked some other musings on interactive fiction that I’ll likely write up at some other point.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-21 06:22 am (UTC)