Thirsty Suitors Review (RQ (Oj))
TL;DR Really good ideas, great soundtrack, Storytelling is lacking and the ending leaves more questions than answers. If you like the anime Food wars or really wanna learn about young adult cultural struggles and figuring our your sexual identity, give it a go.
Usually I don't really leave reviews for games but for this one, I will. I beat the game in just shy of 10 hours playtime and in it's current state I feel it hard to recommend it.
Let's talk positives first
- Artstyle: Probably one of the first things you see about this game, and for good reason: the art is vibrant, the colour pallete and animations are flashy. I enjoyed this aspect of the game a lot.
- Setting and Family drama: The setting is super interesting and I especially enjoyed the tension and relationship with Jala and her Family.
- Mini games: There are multiple mini games in this game, this includes Cooking, dancing and some other mini games. They are mostly fun and the dialogue between the characters in the mini games is witty.
-Soundtrack and SFX. Man what a bop, I was jamming to the music while skating for a good while.
- The Turn-based combat. The main reason i picked this game up was the combat, as it seemed a pretty refreshing take on the turn based RPG genre, which it was.
Now for the negatives:
- The turn-based combat. Yes, I just praised it in the positives, but the combat got really stale, really fast. It's the same quick time events for every move. They repeat a lot. There is never a real threat in combat and some of the combat is just a "I hope you have enough healing items to survive" test.
- Storytelling, specifically the characters. The game throws you into the story as if you have missed something in the beginning, only to then not explain what Jala has actually done wrong. The connection here is missing. Then the problem arises that, despite us as the player not knowing what Jala has actually done wrong, everyone (except Auntie C) absolutely despises us. None of the actual suitors/ exes are actually likeable characters. You try to "fix" your relationship throughout the game with them, but honestly most of them are just rude and I didn't want to make up with them.
- Skateboarding. This is not Tony Hawk and I am thankful that the skateboarding challenges are optional. The skateboarding is clunky at best and unplayable at worst. Jala snaps to locations even though you want to talk to the NPC in front of you, but oh well I guess you are rail grinding now.
- Bugs. Even though there weren't many, especially towards the end I had textures not load in properly, resulting in character models having no eyes or being just straight up textureless.
- The ending is just unsatisfactory. You only meet Paati in the last 30 minutes or so of the game, but as soon as you meet Aruni, the story just takes a nosedive from there. There is no way to actually romance/ make up with any of your exes of the Suitors, leaving you with mode open ends than you left off. But you made up with your family, I guess.