Wolf Tails Review (English Original Visual Novel)

This review was originally published on Fuwanovel Forums on May 11th 2018.

Visual novels with the possibility to choose the protagonist’s gender are fairly rare, and genre's focus on storytelling and romance makes such a gimmick especially hard to pull off properly. Creating games like Loren: The Amazon Princess, with an option to choose between two full-fledged leads, one male and one female, each with their own personality and a set of romance options, takes a lot of work and only fits certain kinds of stories. On the other hand, VNs in which gender choice only changes minor details in the dialogue and the overall storyline struggle to make the narrative convincing – especially in the female version, which more often than not comes as an afterthought, created by slightly modifying the default, male scenario.

            Razzart Visual, the author behind highly-regarded yuri VNs Love Ribbon and Starlight Vega, is also the person responsible for two much less critically-acclaimed ecchi games, both of which featured female love interests and the ability to choose protagonist’s gender, making them in a way both classical romance VNs and yuriges. On May 4th 2018, Razzart's third game in this formula, Wolf Tails, was released on Steam, featuring romance scenario with a rarely-seen kemonomimi variant, that is wolfgirls, and a new artstyle. How does it compare to Razz’s previous projects and does it succeed in working both as a traditional eroge, and as a yuri game?

The gender-specific cut-ins and dialogue fragments are actually well done, although it’s still easy to notice which variant of the story was the original one

 

The aforementioned, earlier ecchi titles by Razz, Catch Canvas and Happy Camper, did a fairly atypical thing, adding the possibility to play as a female to a very standard, Wing Cloud-esque structure of (mostly) male-oriented ecchi VN. As a fan of yuri, I rather enjoyed that option in Catch Canvas, as not only was it fairly well implemented (with references to the protagonist being a woman in places where you would logically expect them) but also slightly changed the tone of what was originally a pretty trashy fanservice VN – some interactions, which would be clearly sexual and borderline-creepy with a male lead, became a bit more ambigous when the protafonist was a woman.  Happy Campers, however, failed to deliver even to that extent – while the option to play as a female was theoretically there, its effect on the story was pretty much non-existent. What’s even worse, some scenes and situations were obviously written with a male MC in mind, shattering the already paper-thin yurige fantasy.

            Thankfully, Wolf Tails not only didn't repeat Happy Campers' mistakes, but also went a few steps further than both of those earlier projects when implementing the gender choice feature – apart from the gender-specific dialogue lines and some elaboration on f/f romance, it adds CGs in which the protagonist is partially visible. It’s still hard to consider it a fully-fledged yuri – the fact of the male protagonist being the default option and the other one added by modifying it afterwards is pretty visible and the game sometimes struggles to implement the female version in a logical manner. Playing as a woman is, however, a fully viable way of experiencing the story, especially if you consistently choose the same gender between playthroughs and are not aware of the workarounds that made the yuri version possible.

The romance and slice-of-life moments of the game are solid, but also generic to the point they wouldn’t be out of place in a Sakura game

 

Wolf Tails is also more of an actual romance story than Catch Canvas or Happy Campers. The moment a near-frozen-to-death wolfgirl appear in your remote mountain cabin, disturbing your consciously-chosen solitude, the game starts developing a fairly serious and touching, romantic storyline. Even though it’s very short, taking up to 5 hours to 100% and not more than 2,5 hour for a single playthrough, it doesn't feel incomplete or particularly rushed. The heroines – the kind, well-mannered Mirari and fierce, classic tsundere Fuyu – could probably receive a bit more development, but the writing manages to make them appealing enough, and their backstories and endings (the branching is minor enough that it’s hard to really talk about separate “routes”) have quite a lot of emotional impact.

            The downside of the short storyline is that because of how relatively shallow and simple it has to be, beyond the interesting visual designs and the brief feeling of novelty from the unusual heroines, it comes out as very generic (with the corny concluding moments only strengthening that effect). My experiences with Razz’s previous work probably made this problem even deeper – knowing well both the kind of scenarios she creates and the style of Zetsubou, the writer she consistently works with, I knew very well what to expect, all the way to the wording and scenarios in the erotic scenes. For most readers, it shouldn’t be a huge problem though, as the game more or less delivers on its main promises – being a cute, fun romance story with a decent portion of “sexy” elements (including the fully-fledged 18+ CGs unlockable through a free patch – although the "all-ages" version is spicy in its own right and uses only minor, visual censorship, not cutting out any of the story content).

Although for the first time under the Razzart label the art was not drawn by Razz herself, the visual quality of the game is as solid as ever

 

What definitely helps the sexiness and cuteness in becoming potential selling points of the game is the fairly unique and gorgeous art by Naso4. Being a bit of an opposite of Razz’s style, with its sharp outlines and slightly extravagant designs, it was something that took me a few moments to get used to, but the actual quality of sprites of CGs was impossible to dispute. As in all of Razz’s games, the rest of production qualities were also high, with some very nice-looking, climatic backgrounds and an aesthetically-pleasing, functional UI. My personal plight of not noticing the music in most OELVNs, however, wasn’t broken here and, as usual, I will interpret it as the soundtrack being serviceable enough to neither stand out nor get in the way of experiencing the story.

            So, in the end, is Wolf Tails worth your time? In my opinion, it’s definitely a well-made, enjoyable little romance VN and I absolutely don’t regret my time with it. If you’re into love stories and/or are looking for slightly different visual style and different themes than in most romance OELVNs, it should definitely deliver. With how short it is, however, it might be debatable if it will be worth the full asking price of 10$ to every reader – if you’re not sure whether you’ll truly enjoy it, wait for it to go on sale. That way you really shouldn’t regret giving it a chance.

 
Final score: 3/5
 
Pros:
+ High-quality art
+ Not overbearing fanservice and erotic scenes
 
Cons:
- Very short
- Cliched story


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Buy Wolf Tails on Steam or Itch.io