A visual novel, so, as is usual in this genre, the claims about how you can make these choices with huge consequences are mostly not true, as the story is more or less linear with crucial points that will be reached / happen regardless of what choices you make.
The art style is okay, it's pixel art and it's decent, but there are pixel art games with way better quality. Considering thisA visual novel, so, as is usual in this genre, the claims about how you can make these choices with huge consequences are mostly not true, as the story is more or less linear with crucial points that will be reached / happen regardless of what choices you make.
The art style is okay, it's pixel art and it's decent, but there are pixel art games with way better quality. Considering this is a visual novel with a very restricted set of locations, I'd expect more effort to be put into them.
Sound is okay, music is great, but the score is a bit limited, which is a shame.
Controls are clunky, and there is a double-clicking bug that happens sometimes.
The "kingdom manager" side of the game is as simplistic as it is unbalanced (for example, building a huge tavern costs less than what one single peasant requested as help with his one single field, and rejecting him has huge impact on the happiness of the whole kingdom - etc.). Honestly, is feels like playing your average maths textbook, where your average person on average trip to a shop buys 175 watermelons and 571 balloons - basically devoid of any logic and completely torn from reality. It feels like the devs made an actually working management system, but it was not quite reaching the point where it would force you to make some tough decisions, so they turned up the prices and punishments by about 5-10 times and then didn't playtest it. I'm all for making a management system where you just can't tick all the boxes, but there has to be some logic behind it, and the choices you make have to be informed and with realistic consequences. The system in this game is just arbitrary values stacked up to f-ck you over with no logical reason what so ever. Furthermore, there are bugs in it - or at least I hope these are bugs and not intentional, because that would make it even worse - you receive a complaint from peasants about a man doing some stupid stuff, you call him to court, you tell him to stop, he stops, and the peasants hate you for it. Because you did what they asked for. What the f-ck?
The story is okay, it's not quite up there with the best in the genre, but it's also not outright bad. It has some interesting parts, some less so, some twists which you can see from a mile away, and it suffers from the common issue of visual novels - the badly hidden linearity, where you generally have 2-3 choices of how to proceed which lead to pretty much the same outcome. Sometimes, the characters seem supremely stupid because of this, because you see a completely different way to go about it, but you cannot, because despite the lofty claims of non-linear story and choices that matter, the path is - sometimes clearly, sometimes not - laid out. For example, out of your control, your character makes some promises. When time comes to go ahead with what was promised, the only way is to be a backstabbing a-hole, the only limited choices you have is what resources you will focus on in your quest to not have to be true to your word. There's no choice to just go through with it. There's no choice to try and negotiate and perhaps get into a better position that way. Nah, the writer decided you do X, so you do X.
There's nothing wrong with a linear or semi-linear story. There is everything wrong with claiming it's non-linear with a plethora of impactful choices with far reaching consequences. It's simply not true in case of this game.
Anyways, it's a damn shame, especially the borked kingdom management part, which makes the game damn near unplayable, unless you long for elementary school mathematics with some shady casino RNG thrown into the mix. The visual novel sphere is dominated by weeb stuff, this game could be distinct just by not being one of those, instead it's just a frustrating mess.… Expand
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