Recent reviews by pokekevin

good enough. welcome back yume nikki

another meta abuse "what if... all in le head..." pseudo-denpa entry into the canon of doki doki (totono (eversion)) clones that grow increasingly less and less interesting overtime. whoever wrote this game could've not have came up with a lazier explanation for the creepypasta ♥♥♥♥: it's a heckin wholesome 100 scifi simulation dream machine thing .
the production values are otherwise really high and the OST is fantastic, but this title is otherwise so utterly devoid of any creative merit its difficult to say its worth checking out beyond watching a lets play of it on youtube. massive disappointment considering TERNOX's previous title, STONKS-9800, was extremely fun and somehow had more nuance within the writing without even trying

yaay

I love this game :)

copium

it's not fair

♥♥♥♥♥

too short

Edit: I have completed 3 routes and I stand by everything I said below; don't worry about the Steam time because I refunded it and just "bought" the Seven Sea's version instead. :^)

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It's like... a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6 person cast generic romcom manga, I guess?
For the 27 USD that you need to buy this game at a 10% discount, considering that games that were published by even Nekonyan like Sanoba Witch at 30 USD and Aokana at 35 USD it's not even close to being worth your price.

Pros
- Translation isn't by Sakuragame
- Half the character designs are very good
- Art is relatively good
- R18 patch is free to download
- The background art is very good
- Hooksoft uncovered the ancient lost technology of resolution downscaling so the game is actually playable on fullscreen at 1440p and 1080p
- Some of the jokes are pretty funny

That's pretty much everything there is to praise the game for. Of course though, at the end of the day, good art and hot waifus can only take you so far when the game is 20 hours long and mostly just a book with pictures.

As a story in an "anime medium" that has a more or less worthless plot, the characters are of course the main focus here. It's not a bad thing and it's a pretty normal practice for stories to focus exclusively on the characters in the grand culture of otaku-whatever but for a story that should mostly be about characters, it seems to fail in every aspect except the art.
There's an old saying that goes something like: "Tropes are used because they work", but when "countertropes" start to become tropes themselves, this logic mostly falls out. The reason I bring this up is because IxSHE Tell is filled to the brim with ♥♥♥♥ that "goes against the norm" for seemingly no reason and fails to cohere to even the most standard of pacing principles.

The first hour or so of the game is an absolute mess; I'd recommend watching at least the first hour of gameplay to see what I mean if you haven't played the game already. All 5 main heroines not only confess to the main protagonist but some major events are also brought up that supposedly happened in the past that we never seem to be able to see. It's not an uncommon practice to pull something like this; in fact, people do it all the time, examples being something like the Monogatari series and having Kizumonogatari come after Bakemonogatari or whatever, but the lifting of the ban on romance doesn't just seem to be a "dark and mysterious past" where you're just supposed to go "ok" to, but instead comes fresh off the press and affecting the characters in ways that we're unable to really comprehend.
Yui's love with Ninomiya is justified as basically just "I fell in love with him over a period of time due to generic reasons", Yoshino's is justified with "I spent time around him and he was my type", Yuuki's seems to be "just because he's popular", and both Shiori and Kasumi bring up events in the distant past that justifies them getting the "Osananajimi" tag on their VNDB pages.
Are any of these character motivation justifications shown in the game? Of course they aren't! Why would they be? It's not important that our characters have proper reasons to do what they want to do, after all! They're hot! They have tits and ass and cute tareme eyes! Isn't that all we need in the end of the day when we're reading something that's going to take away more than 20-30 hours of our lives?

While stuff like this is sometimes shown later on in the story, when all 5 of the heroines have the same issue I doubt they've really bothered justifying it more so than just "it sounds good on paper". The larger issue, however, is that almost every single scene in the first 2 hours seems to hold the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "I love the MC!" foundation where everybody's <at the time> character motivations boil down to little more than "my ♥♥♥♥♥ is raining down acid rain and I must sate my evergrowing need to breed". This doesn't just apply to the main heroines mind you, apart from the MC and Shiori's little brother, literally every single character seems to be horny out of their minds and has nothing but love and sex on their minds at any given time; whether it's shown through the 5 direct confessions or the numerous stans chasing after the big fat Danchou ♥♥♥♥. This leads to a near suffocating pacing style where it almost feels like you, as the reader, has zero time to rest and are bombarded every single second with endless amounts of "oh my god her tits are pressing against my arm!!1" without rest. This probably seems like something that'll be less of an issue later on in the story as it, presumably, gets a bit more serious, but I don't have balls big enough to keep reading after the first two hours.

An issue with visual novels in general is that the timesink is massive for a lot of them. The average playtime for eroge of this kind of production quality is around 30~ish hours for a 100% completion playthrough, and as a developer, you really need to make sure that the 30 hours isn't going to waste. A lot of visual novels often ship with 1 or 2 routes that seem a little bit "faulty" in some aspects, but not often does the common route become so incredibly poorly written. As, once again, I have not played past the first two hours, I commentate about the entirety of the game, but from what little I've seen, it really does feel like the game doesn't take itself seriously, like, at all.
The problem with "comedy visual novels" is that a lot of them just suck, like, they're just downright terrible. This is largely because of how long VNs are. If you look at another one of Nekonyan's translated visual novels, Sankaku Renai, it's also clear how "unseriously" it takes itself to the point where an entire route was just pure comedy all the way through. Sankaku, however, knew where the boundaries had to be drawn with it's own game, and while the boundaries for that game didn't exist, this game obvious does seem to try to draw into the more serious side of storytelling. The problem is, these serious bits of story are also either immediately following or continued immediately by "comedy bits" where the protagonist slips up and falls into the backrooms or whatever, and more or less destroys any sort of serious tone the story seemed to have carried even just a few seconds prior. It's almost... insulting? Acting like the audience is 12 years old and can't handle grownup moments or whatever.

It also really doesn't help that the MC is not only a self-insert, but also incredibly obnoxious. If you've ever read Kanojo Okarimasu/Rental Girlfriend, it's basically just like Kazuya saying ♥♥♥♥ all the time about how cute and pretty the girls are except this time around Kazuya is super popular and he doesn't have erectile dysfunction. You can't go a single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scene with the Ninomiya and a heroine in the room without him internal dialouging about how massive Koshimizu's milkers are or whatever, and it's just such a huge pain in the ass to read.

This visual novel is tainted with ♥♥♥♥ and ball torture and I do not recommend anybody to buy this unless they are mentally impaired, is looking for some mindless fun that'll be subpar to buying a normal video game, or has never seen any a single work in the "anime mediums" before in their lives. Though, again, I haven't played past the first two hours, so if anybody wants to come and tell me that 10 hours in it turns into the greatest ♥♥♥♥ ever made and has become the Kamige of our times showing Subahibi that it didn't deserve any sales in the first place, then please inform me.

I've hit the character limit, so this my warning to all of the poor, loss souls out there in the wilderness that see what I presume will be "Very Positive" on the All Reviews part of the steam page because I guess people on steam hivemind positive vote whatever little VNs they can get their hands on considering Valve has banished half of them to the shadow realms: Spend your money on something else.

It's just like... landlord?
There's really not too much to say about it.

Pros
- The CGs are pretty hot
- The programming is good enough for it not to be just shovelware

Cons
- Story is worthless, and for a singleplayer game it's really not up to par
- The English translation sucks ♥♥♥♥
- The difficulty scaling is retarded, or more accurately, non-existent

If you want to touch your weewee but don't like reading doujins and watching animated hentai, just go read a visual novel or buy the other game Efflorescence of Lust which is half the price with the same CGs.