izigame.me

Art: 4/5 stars.
The art style is quite enjoyable. My main gripe with it is that there aren't any real CG's other than one very small picture of your character and your chosen love interest kissing when you get to that point, which shows no more detail than the usual sprites.

Music: 3/5 stars.
Music is unremarkable. It's not something I would chose to listen to outside of the game, but it wasn't annoying after several playthroughs either, which was good.

Voice Acting: 4/5 stars.
There's some pretty big name VAs in this game, which is surprising for an indie title. They certainly shine in this game, and are arguably the best part of it. My only complaint was that Kaiden's voice actor (Joe Zieja) and Michael's voice actor (Alejandro Saab) sounded way too similar in this. Like they way they spoke was exactly the same, only the pitch was a little different, and it was quite disconcerting when one character spoke right after the other. I love both these VAs and they both did a great job but I wanted more variation.

Story: 3.75/5 stars.
The story is certainly enjoyable/entertaining, but it wasn't anything that seriously drew me in. I think the issue for me was that it didn't go very much into depth in any one thing, so it felt a little rushed. I also have many questions about the world and the characters that subsequent playthroughs with different choices did not answer.

Translation/Localization/Writing: 4/5 stars.
Well written in English with no errors (at least I didn't notice any). Not 5 stars simply because I wasn't blown away or seriously touched by what was written or the writing style.

Romance: 2/5 stars.
If you are looking specifically for an otome or amare VN, this is not the game you are looking for. There is not much romance in this game. What is there is cute but there's just not enough of it imo. Additionally, whoever you decide to romance has zero bearing on how the story goes or how it ends. Epilogues stay the same, but you just have the option to tag along with whoever your chosen LI is on whatever their path is after the story. So there aren't any character "routes," just one main route with a few short romantic scenes sprinkled around if you so choose to go for that.

UI: 2/5 stars.
This game is missing a lot of QoL features typically present in VNs. There is no skip read function, which makes multiple playthroughs extremely annoying/tedious. There is a hold to fast forward button, but it skips everything regardless of if you have seen it or not. There is also no way to rewind the text to change your choices, and there are also no quick save/quick load functions, so you would have to manually open the menu, save, make a choice, then manually open the menu, and load after the choice if you want to go back and see what the other options do. I also couldn't find any way to hide the text box so I could see the entire character designs.

Gameplay Mechanics: 2.5/5 stars.
The alchemy minigame was fun the first playthrough. Unfortunately, it got old after that, but there is no option to skip it in subsequent playthroughs. Otherwise this reads as a usual VN (which is a good thing imo). However, there are A LOT of choices to make, but very few of them have any consequence. The others are just for personality flavor. Which normally I'm all for, except in most games with this mechanic, those options ACTUALLY change the MC's personality and how they automatically react to other characters or situations. However in this game, from what I can tell, unless the game tells you specifically if a choice will have an effect on a particular character's path or your personality, most of the choices are completely unneeded. They might slightly change how the other characters react to you for one line or two, but that's it. There are 5 or so choices where the game tells you this choice will change the MC's personality, but all this does is that (and from what I can see only SOME of these supposedly important choices do this) it will add a different kind of personality option to the entirely unneeded and too plentiful other "personality" choices. So instead of being a really fun game mechanic that adds to replayability, it just slows/bogs down the story. Literally every time the MC speaks, the player must make a decision among 3 choices. I would much rather have fewer but more impactful choices.

Overall: 25.25 stars out of a possible 40 stars.
Average rating among all categories of 3.19/5.

This game was enjoyable but I would recommend not trying to play multiple times just to see the different romance options, because it's extremely annoying to do and it will make you dislike the game. I recommend playing it twice to see each different character epilogue and see what the different (actually important) story decisions do, then put it down.