EVN Chronicles' NaNoRenO 2019 Highlights, part 1

The second part of the highlights is out now – check them out here!

For more than a decade now the NaNoRenO visual novel jam is the biggest cyclical event organized by the EVN community, every year prompting dozens of hobbyist and aspiring commercial developers to present their work created from scratch within a strict, one-month timetable. Despite being mostly a non-commercial affair, dominated by both complete freeware titles or various demos and prototypes, it delivered many memorable games in the past, many of which are well remembered till this day (Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story and NomnomNami’s Her Tears Were My Light are among the best known and most-appreciated ones, but are only two among dozens of memorable entries worth checking out).

                While with the gradual professionalization (and commercialisation) of the Western visual novel scene, it’s less common to find real gems among the jam’s entries, it’s still a unique opportunity to find interesting, free VNs within various genres and themes. At the same time, NaNoRenO is not a contest that would explicitly choose winners and allows VNs of all sizes and states of completion, so it’s not easy to navigate for an average reader – this year’s edition included the record number of 91 submissions and finding the truly interesting ones can be a challenge. For this reason, I’ve decided to prepare a short series of posts about my personal highlights of the 2019 event – games that I found most impressive and worth recommending. The lists will be obviously influenced by my personal taste and I’ll readily admit that I didn’t read all the entries, focusing on complete projects (i. e. no demos and prototypes) and avoiding some that I was convinced I won’t enjoy, or that were in genres I’m less interested in. I am, however, very much convinced about the merits of the games I’ve decided to feature and I hope you’ll join me on this short journey. Clicking the titles of every entry you’ll be transported straight to its itch.io page, where you’ll be able to download it for free. So, let’s get started!

Mnemonic Devices

My personal favourite of this year’s NaNoRenO is a tale of a person (you can choose the pronoun, although their looks are always rather feminine) who wakes up with amnesia after a car crash, greeted by a man claiming to be their husband. Soon after, they learn that the idyllic marriage with a wealthy lawyer is a sham, and they’re actually a sophisticated android send on a mission to assassinate him. Re-learning their identity and mission, the protagonist stands before a choice: to accept their role as a government-controlled killing machine, or try to rebel, while also possibly exploring their very-much-human emotions towards their husband, or maybe even their handler from the agency, with whom they previously shared a not-fully-professional relationship.

                While the concept is already highly intriguing, what makes Mnemonic Devices truly great is the writing, which brings tons of emotional depth and believability to the characters. It creates situations with no easy answers or black-and-white moral dilemmas – every path will lead to sacrifices and questionable choices, but most of them also manage to be touching, to the point where it was the first VN in a while that genuinely made me shed a few (mostly happy) tears. The two routes supplement each other in interesting ways, giving different perspectives on all of the main characters and the protagonist’s struggles as a sentient being who’s treated like an emotionless killing machine by their employer. The visuals and sound are not amazing, but solid enough to give proper climate and impact to the story. In result, I’d consider Mnemonic Devices something of a hidden gem – it really offers everything I’m usually looking for in short VNs and I can’t recommend playing it strong enough.

 
Rating: Highly Recommended
 

Charles 2.0

Continuing with the amnesia theme, Charles 2.0 is another highly-original and intriguing entry in this year’s NaNoRenO – a short story about a clone of the US president, who wakes up without memories and has to bluff his way through a press conference and sequence of casual interactions, while the “real” POTUS undergoes an emergency treatment after an assassination attempt. Giving you very limited time to gather information, it plays like an investigative puzzle game, where you have to extract all the necessary details, optimize your path and learn how to mimic the president in the most convincing fashion, with both your life and his career being on the line. All of this is spiced up by good visuals, a proper feel of suspense and a good understanding of American political talk – a mix especially appealing for a political geek such as myself, but one that should be enjoyable to pretty much anyone.

                The game also includes two gay sex scenes (the president have both a husband and a lover), which were pretty pointless from my point of view, but didn’t hurt the experience in any real way, and should be a treat to fans of bara hentai. The homosexual angle of the story is also one of its least important parts, with the specifics of the Presidents relationships and policies being much more important than the fact he’s gay – and honestly, that’s exactly how it should be, as the story manages to tackle the theme without unnecessary pandering. It’s a tiny political thriller first and a BL game second, making it easy to recommend regardless on reader’s stance on M/M romance – it’s simply too fresh-feeling and fun to miss out on, even if its brand of h-content is the last thing you’re looking for.

 
Rating: Highly Recommended
 

This Was For You

Grief is another recurring theme in this year’s NaNoRen0, but no other game in the event focused on it quite like This Was For You, a short, experimental game created by jam veterans from Watercress Studios. The story follows a protagonist devastated by the loss of their close online friend, Ji-min, with whom they bonded through a Second Life-style virtual reality game. Paralyzed by depression, they cut themselves from the world, clinging to the virtual space they shared with Ji-min and the artefacts connected to their long-distance friendship. And the only thing disrupting the melancholic serenity of protagonist’s VN refuge is a strange NPC catgirl, hell-bent on interacting with them when they least want it…

                This Was For You does quite an excellent job at portraying the feelings of loss and resignation, but also presents it all in an imaginative and relatively interactive manner – we learn about protagonist’s situation not only through his internal monologues, but also e-mails and VR sessions you manually initiate. While I had some issues with how the aforementioned catgirl was utilized and wondered whether her inclusion even served a significant-enough purpose in the story, I came from of the whole experience impressed with its climate and emotional depth of its writing. Thus, I recommend checking it out, if you’re not scared of experiencing something genuinely sad and rather inconclusive – the 12k words script does quite a lot when it goes to exploring protagonist's breakdown, but doesn’t show an easy way out or pander to the reader with a disingenuously optimistic punchline.

 
Rating: Recommended
 

Contract Demon

NomnomNami is a yuri game developer that contributed many interesting VNs to NaNoRenO, the highest-rated of which is the previously mentioned Her Tears Were My Light, a tiny, allegoric story about personified Space and Time and their desperate struggle against non-existence. Her games are known for distinct, cute art and mostly lighthearted romance plots, and Contract Demon is not any different – it’s a very short (20-30 mins of reading) tale of an atypically-friendly demon being summoned by an angel, and the strange relationship the two form against their circumstances and common sense. It’s also a continuation of a comic released by Nami in the past, but knowing it is not in any way necessary to enjoy Contract Demon – it works absolutely fine on its own, as a bite-sized piece of yuri fluff. While it does not have the scale or emotional impact of Nami’s best VNs and as a kinetic novel offers no interactivity, none of this can make it any less lovely and fun to read – unless you seriously dislike the theme, there’s no reason to not give it a chance.

 
Rating: Recommended
 

(Don’t) Open Your Eyes

A bit of a youtuber/streamer bait, this short, creepy horror VN involves the unnamed protagonist being visited by a mysterious entity in the middle of the night. Disappearing every time when the main character opens their eyes, the intruder asks them to describe him without looking. Every choice the player makes in this regard is represented in monster’s imagined silhouette gaining new details and is accompanied by long, whispered monologues from him.

                While the whole experience of (Don't) Open Your Eyes doesn’t offer much depth (it has effectively two endings and your choices for the shape of the monster ultimately don’t matter), it’s definitely fun while it lasts. The visual gimmicks and monster’s voice could have quite easily turned out pretentious and off-putting, but ended up being quite effective at creating an unsettling climate. This, in turn, made exploring all the possible variants of the dialogue and monster’s design interesting enough to keep my interest for the full length of the game (about an hour). While probably not what you’re usually looking for in NaNoRenO, it’s still a cool, short distraction, worth experiencing when you’re looking for a brief and genuinely creepy horror game.

 

Rating: Recommended
 

Alloys Over Flowers

One of the few full-blown otome games in this year’s event was another pleasant surprise – a short story of an amnesiac (heh…) woman, Junia, who is suddenly kidnapped from the house she spent last three months in by a person claiming to be her fiancée. The man, a son of a mighty noble family, reveals that she’s the daughter of an incredibly rich merchant and they became betrothed for a political marriage, despite her protests. After a fairly hostile back-and-forth, he agrees to give the protagonist time to decide whether she wants to come back with him, or stay with her new life and the family of blacksmiths that took her in after she lost her memory.

                At first glance Alloys over Flowers looks like a typical otome romance, where the protagonist will ultimately choose between the noble, Owen and Marcus, the son of the blacksmiths that gave her shelter and friendship in her moment of need. However, Owen is the only real love interest in the story and the plot mostly explores his previous relationship with Junia, the secret behind her disappearance and loss of memory, and her struggle to reconcile her past and present selves. What could’ve been utterly generic, is actually a very good piece of storytelling with some enjoyable twists and a few compelling endings, partially related to how close to Owen you get thanks to your choices. Junia herself is also a good protagonist, wholly unimpressed by the genuine prince that showed at her doorsteps and striving to carve her own path through life. While still brief and simple (also visually), it’s the kind of otome I’d very much enjoy seeing more of and a game I’m very confident about recommending, not only to fans of the genre.

 
Rating: Highly Recommended

And this concludes the first part of my NaNoRenO 2019 coverage! The scale of the event means it pretty much always offers some pleasant surprises or exceptionally original games and this time, I think Mnemonic Devices takes the lead in most categories – its production quality and storytelling put it way above most of this year’s submissions and while structurally it’s a fairly standard VN, it manages to be genuinely memorable without use of clever gimmicks. It's a small bit of content that should prove satisfying even to more demanding and "conservative" readers, looking for good reading material above anything else. This, of course, does not take away from my other recommendations, especially Alloys Over Flowers and Charles 2.0, which are also very solid short games in their own rights. There's more coming, however, so be sure to come back in two weeks for the second and final portion of my NaNoRenO 2019 highlights!

How To Date a Magical Girl Review (Dating Sim)

Warning: Heavy spoilers for How To Date a Magical Girl and Doki Doki Literature Club! ahead!

Despite the amazing success of Doki Doki Literature Club! (including a commercial one, if you consider the 1300+ Steam reviews on the $10 Fan Pack DLC), there have been surprisingly few attempts to replicate its formula within the EVN scene, especially among the titles that could be considered of professional quality. While the plethora of mods kept the DDLC fanbase occupied, arguably no major Western VN even attempted to create a similar experience, or utilize some of the characteristic gimmicks used by Dan Salvato to a comparable effect. This, of course, can be seen as a positive development, as uninspired copycat games rarely make for compelling experiences, but elements such as drastic genre shifts, clever fourth wall breaking and weaving an interesting meta-narrative into the experience are far from being overdone in VNs, especially within the English-original niche.

                Or at least, this was the case before the release of How To Date a Magical Girl by Cafe Shiba, a game that openly featured a very similar base structure to DDLC – a cute dating sim exterior hiding a brutal horror story, in which nothing is at it seems at first glance. Showing up on Steam in January 2019, it promised 5 romanceable heroines, nearly 40 CGs and over 10 hours of content – rather impressive statistics, especially for a game that originated from a humble, $4000 Kickstarter campaign, and ones that make it hard to dismiss it as a cynical cash-in trying to exploit DDLC's fanbase. In my opinion, however, it managed to fail quite spectacularly, only in small part due to its mimicry of Dan Salvato's game and much more because everything it added to the table was deeply underwhelming. But where exactly did it go wrong?

The mediocre quality of the game’s sprites and background art give the whole experience a rather cheap feel and contrast with the genuinely pretty CGs

 

How To Date a Magical Girl starts with our protagonist (you can choose both their name and gender, but the difference between playing as a male and a female is nearly non-existent), a painfully-average person with no idea what to do with their future, being enrolled by their best friend, Hikari, to an academy for magical girls. While having nearly no powers (their latent magic only activated once in the past, in a somewhat random and uncontrollable outburst), our lead decides to accept the offer and starts their new life of studying magic, quickly meeting a bunch of highly-dateable and surprisingly willing girls. Sadly, the seemingly-idyllic scenario is quickly disturbed with a tragedy – a murder of a student. From there, things pretty much only go downhill, with every new tragedy affecting the protagonist in a more direct manner and turning the whole scenario into a living nightmare, the meaning of which stays hidden under multiple layers of mystery.

                From the technical standpoint, the story is told through some rather robust dating sim mechanics, in which you grind four main stats (magic, alchemy, perception and expertise), engage in creating potions and earn money, all in order to effectively court the girls. As you spend time with them, give them gifts and raise affection, you unlock unique romance scenes, up to the slightly-fanservice’y culmination near the end of the story, while the main plotline progresses automatically at its own pace. The game gives you quite a lot of time to work with and various opportunities to optimize your playstyle (like skill training having a double effect on rainy days), so it’s not out of question to maximize affection of a few girls and max out your attributes on a single playthrough, making it reasonably easy to experience most of the content without replaying the game. Even though the plot-related events often come in the way of your stat-rising and dates, taking out time slots unexpectedly or skipping whole days, if you play competently you’ll never be under enough pressure for that to be a real problem. Dialogue choices, while present, are mostly meaningless, really starting to matter only in the very last moments of the game, where you can branch into three different endings (with slight variations to one of them, depending on which girl you romanced – if you finished the game without a girlfriend, it simply won't be available).

There are fun aspects to the game’s magical girl theme, but all of it falls apart due to the setting and everything you do in it acting essentially as a distraction

 

The giant problem of this whole setup is that the dating sim mechanics and the setting the game builds are basically one giant red herring and are turned mostly meaningless by the final reveal of the story. Not only all the girls, including the one you romanced get killed off (in an admittedly disturbing final sequence, where the protagonist’s sanity simply breaks from the overexposure to violence and losing everyone he cared about), but the world itself is revealed to be a simulation, created to assist with waking the protagonist from an accident-induced coma. Also, the protagonist’s homeroom teacher, Satomi, is revealed to be the perpetrator behind everyone’s misfortunes – an AI, that was meant to help him recover and still claim to be doing that, but actually went rogue and started working on her own, somewhat unclear goals (one of the endings suggests that her ambition was claiming the protagonist's body for herself, but her actions are hardly consistent between the alternative scenarios). This premise does a pretty poor job of explaining everything that happened earlier, but most importantly undermines everything the player worked for up to that point. DDLC’s game mechanics worked well specifically because they were brief and unusual, never making you feel like you were wasting your time and producing interesting feedback, even if the romance plots of the first act were obviously all dead ends. Here, the gameplay far overstays its welcome and while the final horror twist uses the dating sim mechanics as a build-up, it’s hardly good enough to justify all the effort on player’s part. Seeing the whole cast of the story you’ve spent many hours reading as mutilated corpses is surely unsettling, but the shock value here was mostly a goal in itself, rather than leading to some interesting plot developments.

                You could argue that even with a twist ending, experiencing the heroine arcs themselves could be a reward in itself, even if they were labelled fake and nullified later on. However, this is another aspect of How To Date a Magical Girl that turns out seriously disappointing. While the setting itself and the way the game uses the magical girl tropes is rather fun, with girls' transformations and powers playing a real role in the story, their personalities and backstories are basic at best. Also, while the unlockable “dates” give some slight spins to each of them, they are simply too short to add something really important and especially the heroines that play lesser parts in the main plot (the deredere childhood friend Hikari, shy Yui and school celebrity Miyu are clearly the most important characters here) feel heavily underdeveloped. This also means the game never really manages to create an emotional connection that would make the later development of killing off the whole cast that meaningful. The SoL content is never very compelling by itself, with writing being consistently very average and humour rather uninspired – Hoshi, Hikari’s magical dog familiar she dumps on the protagonist, is a prime example of that, as a comic relief character that barely does anything genuinely funny or interesting throughout the whole game.

The game’s excessive violence does not completely lose its shock value, especially when it extends to the main heroines, but still feels heavily overdone

 

Presentation is also something I have a major problem with, although it’s not on a particularly low level – it just underperforms in areas that I rarely see quasi-professional VNs having problems with. While the CG art is for the most part quite good, even if generic, character sprites look flat and unappealing. Same goes for background art, which lacks personality and detail. It’s pretty much a full reversal of the situation typical of EVNs, where good basic assets are often coupled with very few, or underwhelming CGs and honestly, as you spend most of your time with How to Date… on stat grinding and short dialogue sequences, better character and background art could do wonders for the overall enjoyment factor of the game. In the later parts of the story, the game introduces visual and sound gimmicks representing the protagonist’s waning sanity and glitches within the VR setting, quite reminiscent of some tricks used by DDLC. However, most of them consist of rather basic colour filters and changing the ways of displaying text and while writing accompanying them can be decently disturbing, these are the moments when the VN really does feel like a poor imitation. Also, some stylistic choices, like the “real form” of Satomi, are rather laughable and undermines the game’s climate even more.

                How To Date a Magical Girl is a strange game, as it doesn’t look terrible when you look at its production quality or various parts of the story, but somehow it manages to consistently undermine itself and turn out as less than the sum of its parts. Decent stat management mechanics are wasted by being made irrelevant through the twist ending. The heroines are proclaimed figments of the protagonist’s imagination and then unceremoniously killed off after hours of investment from the player. It wastes its setting and emotional buildup through a set of underwhelming endings. Playing through it is not without its share of fun, but in the end, it mostly just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. For all these reasons, I can’t really recommend buying this VN, but I hope the developers can learn from these mistakes and create something more memorable in the future – considering the technical competence shown in How To Date a Magical Girl, they're clearly capable of doing so.

Final Score: 2/5

Pros:
+ Good CG art
+ Fun use of magical girl tropes
+ Well-crafted and reasonably fun dating sim mechanics
 
Cons:
- Dating sim elements are ultimately meaningless
- Shallow heroines and romance arcs
- Mediocre character and background art
- Unconvincing main intrigue


VNDB Page
Buy How To Date a Magical Girl on Steam

Plk Lesiak’s Shovelware Adventures: Beach Bounce series

Wondering what this series is about? What's with the "crappy" rating system? Find out all about it here!

Beach Bounce was the second title introduced by AJ Tilley, the creator of Dharker Studio, just a few months after his debut with the infamous Sword of Asumi. It stood out from his other work in a slightly paradoxical way – while Tilley’s other projects dealt with different breeds of fantasy or experimented with unusual plot elements (ex. Highschool Romance’s gender-bending), Beach Bounce was meant to be a much more standard nukige, placing our average male protagonist in a summer resort with a substantial number of scantily-clad, horny women and no competition in sight (to the point one might think the rest of the male kind was wiped out by some global cataclysm, but the story at least doesn’t mention any such event taking place). The game initially followed an episodic formula, with the first part released in August 2015 and the second one two months later. However, with the termination of AJTilley.com label, under which it was originally published, it disappeared for a while and then re-emerged in a new form, as a full, “Remastered” release by Dharker Studio – this final version of the game went live in late February 2019.

                That’s the simplified version at least, as the confusing network of Dharker’s sister companies created and terminated by AJ Tilley over the years, including Brightly Studios, BurstRay Games and StudioX, among others, is hardly worth deciphering at this point. Still, whatever label is attached to a Beach Bounce game, it’s always Dharker Studio hiding underneath and that’s pretty much the only part of the puzzle that is genuinely worth knowing. Going back to our main topic, while the “Remastered” label might’ve been quite a stretch for a game that never before saw a full release, it doesn’t mean things didn’t change – the overall plot, the characters and their relationships were rewritten in rather significant ways and the complete story now included seven different love interests, with multiple h-scenes for most of them. This meant quite a lot of anime smut in a time when porn VNs weren’t available in such as abundance as they are today, especially on Steam. Thanks to all this, while not necessarily a critically-acclaimed title, Beach Bounce proved successful enough to warrant two sequels, Beauty Bounce and Bunny Bounce, released literally two weeks apart from each other, in February and March 2017. Setting aside the question of what went wrong with those development cycles, I’ll focus today on taking the closer look at the Beach Bounce trilogy and find out whether they deserve the dubious honour of being some of the lowest-rated VNs on VNDB.

Beach Bounce

Beach Bounce starts with our unassuming protag-kun, Tomoyo, being summoned to a hospital by his ill grandmother, the owner of the titular summer resort. Not being able to perform her managerial duties, she asks Tomoyo to help her staff with handling the everyday affairs on the property – a dream come through for a guy who just dropped out from a law school and was thrown out for it by his apodictic father. To no one’s surprise, all the employees on the resort happened to be beautiful, young women and while at first some of them were rather apprehensive towards the protagonist, seeing him as a loser who only got involved with the company because of his family ties, they’re all soon enough ready to jump into his pants at his every word. And as we’re dealing with 4 primary heroines and three secondary, “wild card” love interests, after the short introduction sex scenes are hiding literally around every corner, and as most of them are tied to choices, there’s quite a lot of unique paths through the game’s minimalistic story.

                Be wary of indulging yourself too much, however, as Beach Bounce is one of those rare nukige which constantly reminds you that sex has consequences (it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of condoms or any other kind of contraceptives through). Fooling around with too many girls at once can not only earn you a cheating-related game over, but even being identified as a dick-brained bum you are and deemed unworthy of inheriting the resort. The plethora of bad endings that get in the way of having fun, in a porn game that has no right to treat itself this seriously is a recurring theme in Dharker titles (it should be very familiar, for example, to fans of the original Negligee) and it apparently originated right here in Beach Bounce. There are also some strange bugs within the games, with story paths being sometimes erroneously flagged and your choices leading to illogical results, adding to the frustration the unnecessary dead-ends can generate.

                If you control yourself enough to approach just one girl on each playthrough and your game doesn't bug out, you’re rewarded with h-scenes that are only decent visually (the art is done by Julia Kruse who also illustrated Sword of Asumi – expect shading being consistently a bit off and sprites variations not always fitting each other) and mostly portray just the girls, with the protag playing the role of The Invisible Man with The Invisible Dick. The game at least compensates for this fact quite decently with the quantity and variety of h-content, making for arguably a better value proposition than many later nukige I’ve seen both from Dharker and other EVN companies. As you can imagine, there’s not much space for the story between the sex scenes here, so whenever the characters are not making sex, the game mostly focuses on establishing the heroines. Those are all… Serviceable, even if little more than that. My personal favourite is probably the business-minded, but ultimately friendly Yuuki (also because I’m a huge fan of women in glasses), but both the main and side heroines all have their appeal points and, for the most parts, hold some minor surprises or fun gimmicks, good enough to make exploring their routes reasonably fun.

          In the end, I could hardly call Beach Bounce a good game, but I think the “Remastered” version doesn't really deserve the abysmal 4.43 VNDB rating, which makes it possibly the lowest-rated VN on the site with over 100 votes. It’s a very simple nukige, but it also doesn’t pretend to be anything beyond that and has some genuinely-amusing moments. Whether it’s worth playing, or especially giving money for nowadays… Probably not. But if you even get an opportunity to grab it really cheap, it might still work as a decent-enough distraction for an evening or two – and it’s definitely not the worst Dharker’s title you can pick up.

Final Rating: Rabbit Poo 

Beauty Bounce

If the first game ended with Tomoyo being pretty much the king of life, the sequel had to invent some kind of drama to keep the plot, as minimal as it was, going – in this case, the new source of low-key drama is a highly-dubious bank loan given to the protagonist’s grandmother, now being renegotiated by the bank after her death and threatening to sink the whole resort. Tomoyo’s goal as the new owner is both to appease the man-eating, female bank agent handling his case (preferably with his dick, but optionally just by being nice to her and looking competent), while also making Beach Bounce’s annual beauty pageant successful enough to make the new management not look like a bunch of clueless hacks (thus the “Beauty” part of the title). Two of the original “primary” girls, Rei and Mineko, quit their jobs, while two of the side heroines, Minami and Nymph, are nowhere to be seen – all those were switched for the already mentioned bank agent, a guest nominee for the pageant, Emiko and a fresh employee, Chiasa, as new heroines. Sadly, the former two manage to have even less personality or genuine appeal then the girls they replaced (especially Emiko is purely just h-scene fodder), with only the shy Chiasa having a little bit of charm – that's probably the reason she's the only one that reappears in the final game. Also, considering how comically short the sequel is, there was no chance for any of them to get any kind of real character development, while the already-established girls at least had the advantage of the basic-level characterisation they've received in the original Beach Bounce.

             The game also, disappointingly enough, offers just a single sex scene per route (determined by which of the girls you support during the beauty contest), which further underlines how lazy and uninspired the whole experience feels. Probably the only interesting touch is the ability to suggest what the girl you’re currently pursuing should do and wear for the beauty contest, which results in different CGs for each choice, but I have a feeling this was not exactly what people who liked the first game were looking for. There’s also no direct continuation from the romance routes from Beach Bounce, making the second game one of those sequels that both acknowledge the original story and invent a neutral, non-romantic conclusion for it that never really existed. At least, there is a proper harem ending included this time around and it, more or less, seem like its "true" conclusion, leading directly into the third game. Still, while I thought that Beach Bounce had its moment, this sequel is a really tough sell – approach it only if you’re seriously determined to finish the whole series, as there’s simply not much to see (or read) here.

Final Rating: Smelly Poo

Bunny Bounce

With Tomoyo successfully inheriting the resort and dealing with the threat of the toxic bank loan, there was a need for something drastic to keep the story pointlessly dramatic – and what can serve this role better than a car crash? Thankfully, our protagonist is pushed out of the way by a heroic (female) rando, but still manages to hit his head pretty harshly and wakes up in a hospital. What comes after that can only be described as the Severe Concussion Simulator, where Tomoyo hallucinates every female around him being dressed in sexy animal costumes and hitting on him relentlessly (the latter part was already happening in the last two games, probably making the whole situation even more confusing for our brain-damaged lead). The player’s goal is to guide him through this new reality of never-ending migraines and sexual delusions in a way that won’t lead him to becoming a vegetable, while also preferably not ruining his relationships with all of the girls.

             The game ditched the useless bank employee and guest pageant contestant, introducing an attractive doctor and the girl that pushed Tomoyo away from the incoming car as new heroines. The story this time is significantly more linear, giving you a single opportunity to have sex with each girl in the cast, but also does something way more counter-intuitive – at the end, it established Yuuki as the main heroine of the story and determines the ending by how you treated her during the story and whether you were faithful to her. While I personally really don’t mind this resolution, as she was already my pick since the first game, it’s a really weird way to approach concluding a nukige series, once more, punishing you for doing what the game was more or less designed for and possibly not even letting you hook up with your favourite heroine. Thus, my rating of the final Beach Bounce game is: for the fans of Yuuki only, or those that for some reason like the whole series too much to skip on its final chapter. It’s also arguably better than Beauty Bounce, at least trying to do something interesting and including a bit more humour, but that’s already a very low bar...

Final Rating: Rabbit Poo (if you’re a fellow Yuuki fan) 

Beach Bounce is in a way a quintessential early Dharker Studio title – so uninspired, clunky and generic you might question the reasons for its existence, but at the same having just enough peculiar, trashy charm to not be completely pointless and forgettable. Even though the whole trilogy is arguably just as bad as people make it out to be, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than cheesy porn game series and in this category, I think it's far from being the worst or most offensive. At the same time, these games showcase one of the arguably cool features of Dharker – sticking to its franchises and characters, even if the effects are not always the greatest. Keeping the games connected and reusing characters from them between the games might sound like a lazy tactic, but in reality, it builds connection to their brand and creates opportunities for enjoyable call-backs – I would surely be much less interested in the upcoming Basketball Girls if not for the inclusion of characters such as Beach Bounce’s Yuuki and Negligee’s Karen, that I already enjoyed in their original titles and feel some slight connection to. For this reason, I don’t regret my time with this series, although I could hardly recommend buying any of them full-price or devoting much time to them. Unless you’re looking for fapping material specifically, watching a playthrough, just to see where certain recurrent characters and themes in Dharker games came from, feels much more reasonable.

                And for now, this is it when it goes to the early history of Dharker Studio. Next time we visit this developer, it’ll quite likely be for one of the few games of theirs that deserve a “serious” review (and as I've already tackled Highschool Romance: Magi Trials last week, Army Gals is the primary candidate to get featured in the coming months). And where the Shovelware Adventures will lead us next? Who knows! For now, I thank you all for joining me on this silly journey. Have a great weekend everyone!

Highschool Romance: Magi Trials Review (Yuri/Gender-Bending Visual Novel)

I’ve spent a lot, if not the majority of my time writing the blog covering yuri games and while I enjoy the theme in pretty much all of its variants (outside of plain porn, at least), I quite rarely stumble upon an EVN that surprises me with its approach to lesbian romance or does something very unusual when setting up such a story. Thus, I was more than just a little intrigued when I’ve learned about Dharker Studio’s Highschool Romance: Magi Trials, a sequel to a “trap protagonist” romance VN, this time featuring magic and gender-bending of a much more thorough and permanent nature than simple cross-dressing, along with exclusively-female love interests. This yuri-and-not-yuri setup, coupled with cute, cartoonish art and non-pornographic approach to gender-bending, pretty much unique to the Highschool Romance series held a lot of promise – something I was very eager to verify.

                As I’ve mentioned in one of my recent posts on Dharker Studio, while the team has a very shaky record, especially when it goes to its early titles, the original Highschool Romance, released in late 2015, was a bit of a positive outlier, featuring charming art and a simple, but fun romance storytelling. Despite basing the plot on the idea of a male protagonist crossdressing to attend an all-girls school, it played with this theme in a cute and surprisingly non-offensive manner – the main character is not a pervert (or especially a sexual predator), but just a person forced to hide his true identity due to unusual circumstances, and the heroine arcs are, for the most part, very wholesome, with mild fanservice and teacher-student romance being the most “risqué” elements in them. Despite being a bit too short and basic, Highschool Romance made for a pleasant experience that I ultimately appreciated, and the sequel, transporting the same formula and artstyle into a fantasy setting, sounded seriously appealing. However, going through the Magi Trials, released on Steam in November 2016, reminded me that there’s more required than some interesting ideas and nice-looking art assets to make a genuinely good VN…

The original Highschool Romance surprised with its wholesome approach to the “cross-dressing protagonist in all-girls school” trope, making for a rather cute, short love story

 

Magi Trials starts with our protagonist, an aspiring mage named Shaun, trying to perform a complex ritual to empower himself before an upcoming entry trial at a magic academy – institution studying in which was always his greatest dream. As he lacked formal training most other initiates possessed, coming from a poor family in the countryside, he decided that this kind of trick is his best way to pass the tests – however, the spell goes haywire, and he wakes up confused and tired the next morning, only to discover he was transformed into a female. After rushing to his her trial and failing miserably, Shaun is accepted as an apprentice by magi Shira, who saw potential in him her after learning about the powerful spell he she was able to perform, even if it didn’t go the intended way. Taking the new identity as Sophie, our protagonist has to deal with awkwardness of her new gender, unsure whether she’ll ever be able to turn back, while also chasing her dream of entering the academy and eventually becoming a sorcerer – a rank exclusive to the highest class of mages, only obtainable through deadly trials that claim the lives of most that attempt them.

                One of my initial worries with this setup was how the game will treat Shaun’s/Sophie’s transformation and identity – at the beginning, she is very reluctant to treat the new body and gender as her own and there are many moments of awkwardness and tension connected to that fact. This is especially prevalent in Sophie’s interactions with Charlie – a fellow female apprentice who, unlike Shira, is unaware of the sex-swapping incident (and because the magic used in that ritual is strictly forbidden, both Sophie and Shira are well-motivated to keep it secret). The routes and endings, however, are full on yuri – the two primary love interests are either lesbian or bisexual, with Sophie never going back to her old form and one of the heroines even stating directly, that she has to stay “the way she is now” if their relationship is to continue. This makes the gender-bending a lot more than a gimmick it was in the first game, even if the game could’ve done a lot more to explore it.

While the first Highschool Romance was purely light-hearted, with no dead-end paths or bad endings, Magi Trials tells a dark story, with even the best possible conclusions being somewhat bitter-sweet

 

“It could’ve done more” is probably a good summary of Magi Trials' story in general, because while its setup is really good, the game’s extremely short nature (around 2 hours of content in total) and average writing leave a lot to be desired – this is especially frustrating as the characters here and ideas behind crucial plot developments are probably the best I’ve seen in Dharker Studio’s VNs. Both Charlie and Shira are very interesting heroines and have great moments in their respective routes, but there’s simply not enough time to explore them properly and develop the romance at a reasonable pace. This was, to be fair, also a problem in the first Highschool Romance, but that game focused on the heroines and SoL content completely, while here we also have significant elements of mystery, and even mild action with multiple, nicely-illustrated confrontations between mages. The same overarching plot, with proper pacing and build-up, could’ve been excellent but in Magi Trials it never managed to be as compelling as it tried to be. The frequent writing and scripting errors, such as messed-up grammar and misattributed dialogue line make it even harder to truly immerse yourself in the story.

                What also has to be said about this VN is that its tone is surprisingly dark, with the “Fun Tongue in Cheek Storyline” promised by the Steam page pretty much nowhere to be found. Out of all 8 endings, six of them are bad ones (usually horribly so) and only one could really be described as positive and romantic in the conventional sense. This is pretty much the polar opposite of what the first game did, as there it was nearly impossible to get a negative conclusion. Here, dead ends are plentiful, which is sometimes understandable, but sometimes just plain disheartening – even the third heroine, succubus named Eris who’s summoned by mistake by Sophie and Charlie in the middle of the game (her sex-obsessed dialogue is quite hilarious BTW), is only involved in one of the negative conclusions. Dharker’s affinity towards edgy bad ends and drastic plot developments is nothing new and this is not its not egregious iteration, but I’d still prefer something slightly more varied and balanced.

The game’s art is plentiful and very stylish, but the writing does only a passable job at utilizing it

 

The game’s character art continues the unusual stylistic of the first Highschool Romance and for such a short game, includes quite an impressive amount of assets. There are two issues with it though: first, the somewhat cartoonish artstyle, while very much to my liking, fits the gloom story of Magi Trials way less than it did the first game’s cute romance plot. There’s also a pretty frequent disconnect between the CGs and the writing accompanying them, as if the writers didn’t bother to communicate properly with the artist or modify the scenes to fit the art they received. This was highly frustrating to observe, because with how good some of the drawings were and how solid the background art was, all those simply deserved being utilized in a better way. Even the music, while standard, was quite solid, further adding to the feeling of wasted potential that underlined my whole experience with this game.

                And as the final note, Magi Trials shares an issue common to Dhaker Studio’s titles – very questionable pricing. It’s simply not, by any reasonable measure, a $12 game and that’s how much it costs on Steam to this day. Considering its length and lack of polish, it’s a $5 one at best. Thus, I can only recommend buying it on deep sale, but if you’re able to grab it like that, it can be a really nice yuri-esque experience to fill a single, slow evening with. And ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Final Score: 2,5/5

Pros:
+ Unique artstyle
+ Interesting characters
+ Large number of CGs
 
Cons:
- Very short
- Tons of scripting and writing mistakes


VNDB Page
Buy Highschool Romance: Magi Trials on Steam

Plk Lesiak’s Shovelware Adventures: AJTilley.com Ecchi VNs & The Beginnings of Dharker Studio

Wondering what this series is about? What's with the "crappy" rating system? Find out all about it here​​​​​​​!

Before Dharker Studio became the semi-competent producer of smut we know and (occasionally) love today, its founder, AJ Tilley, made a name for himself through his personal VN publishing brand, AJTilley.com. Throughout 2015 there has been an impressive number of decently-sized games released under that label, the whole endeavour fuelled by a never-ending stream of crowdfunding campaigns, making Tilley one of the most notable creators on the fledgeling EVN scene. At the same time, his activities were spawning increasing controversies, mostly over the appalling quality of some of the games in question and overuse of Kickstarter. In April 2016, after just a year and a half of presence within the EVN scene, the infamy around the label became intense enough that Tilley himself decided to terminate it, removing all of its online presence and transferring all the rights to his company’s “development arm”, Dharker Studio. The "restructured" company then both continued working on the franchises introduced by AJTilley.com and created new ones, including highly successful ecchi VNs such as Negligee or Army Gals, while its creator’s name was conveniently hidden from the public’s eye.

                Despite the horror stories circulating around these “dark beginnings” of Dharker Studio, the games from that period always interested me quite a lot, both because of my usual, morbid curiosity and the significant role they played in the history of EVNs. While it’s easy to argue that titles like Sword of Asumi or Divine Slice of Life did a lot to reinforce the general impression of EVNs being cheap, awkward imitations of their Japanese predecessors, I wanted to find out whether they’re really as bad as people make them out to be. In today’s episode, I’ll cover four of those pre-Dharker projects – outside of the two mentioned above, I’ll be including Highschool Romance and Highschool Possession, which, amusingly enough, have exactly nothing to do with each other, utilizing drastically different artstyles and telling stories that could hardly be further away from each other, at least apart from the obligatory high school setting. The one game I’ll skip, for the time being, is Beach Bounce, initial episodes of which were published during this time, but which was later heavily reworked and fully released as a “proper” Dharker Studio title, Beach Bounce Remastered. After that, it even spawned its own little franchise – this series, with three VNs in total, deserves a separate look and will be the next topic for Shovelware Adventures.

                So, going back to our main issue, are the AJTilley.com VNs really that bad? The answer is: no. Because in reality, if you treat them seriously to any extent, they’re even worse than I've expected – at least outside of one, notable exception.

Sword of Asumi

Imagine a game featuring a female assassin in an alternative-history Japan, where shogunate won the late XIX-century civil war and what in our world was the Meiji restoration followed a different path. The samurai class never lost its dominance, preserving its ethos and prestige till the modern day, while the militaristic government relies on secret police and agents such as our lead, Asumi, to keep people in check. At the same time, a new terrorist group rises, aiming to violently oppose the established order. Sounds pretty cool, right? Only in theory, as the reality of Sword of Asumi is one of the most amazing trainwrecks I’ve seen during my involvement with EVNs, rivalling Winged Cloud’s Legends of Talia with how absurdly stupid and tone-deaf it is.

                The first thing you might notice after launching the game is that Asumi is possibly the dumbest assassin in the world, spewing edgy one-liners and engaging in small talk with her victims instead of focusing on getting the job done. A moment later, when a member of the Edo's (this universe’s Japan) secret police, a Justicar, shows in the house of Asumi’s latest hit and start discussing extremely delicate details of her next assignment in the middle of the murder scene, you know you’re up for a ride. And be sure, the stream of utter stupidity and inexplicable writing fu**ups never truly ends (like Asumi causally approaching other characters in her assassin’s clothes, while being undercover – I can understand that kind of mistake in writing, but when you can literally see it happening on the screen???). The somewhat-decent romance options, both male and female, help things a tiny bit, but can’t change the overall dreadful quality of the experience.

The absurd fanservice (it seems assassins have a strong taste for overly-elaborate, sexy lingerie, especially when preparing for a mission) and the fact how seriously the game treats itself are pretty much the final nails to its coffin. While the likes of Sakura games are after dumb and trashy, they’re self-aware and try to have fun with the formula. In Sword of Asumi, the only fun you can have is the kind fully unintended by its authors: the high from how astonishingly bad and absurd it is. And unless that’s what you’re looking for, there’s really no reason to read it. Sorry Kaori, even you couldn’t save this one…

 

Final Rating: Smelly Poo

Divine Slice of Life

I’ve learned about Divine Slice of Life, AJTilley.com’s second release, through a rather brutal review by Tyrael, published back in the day on Fuwanovel. However, despite the 1/5 score, I’m not sure that post gave justice to just how much of a worthy successor to Sword of Asumi this game is. In its story, our average high schooler protagonist, represented by a creepy, faceless character portrait, is suddenly confronted by two female demigods (holding the spirits of Ancient Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Athena) and recognized as the reincarnation of Zeus. To claim his godly powers and rightful place as king of the Pantheon, he has to choose one of those beautiful, horny deities as his wife – but, his generic school crush and the deredere childhood friend won’t give up on him easily and if he dares to fall in love with a mortal, his godhood will be lost forever. Thus starts the awfully short, divine slice-of-life harem scenario, spices up by junky animation, cringy voice-acting and an assortment of mediocre hentai scenes.

While the goddesses spend most of their time spewing obnoxious mythological references and expressing their disdain for regular mortals, and the school beauty tries to make the protagonist jealous by going out with the biggest asshole around, the childhood friend, Taka Shinobi (those names…) is pretty much the only ray of light – she actually has a bit of personality and charm, while the other heroines are either completely one dimensional or heavily off-putting (or both). There’s also the mischievous class representative, Akame, who… Does her own thing, to not spoil anything, but the total of five scenes in which she's featured in could hardly make her into a compelling character. To not be unfair, the general aesthetic of the game is not bad and it doesn’t treat itself seriously, playing with the absurd premise especially in the harem endings (there’s a threesome one with both goddesses and a “divine harem” with all five girls), but the awful writing and inexplicable technical issues, like the lack of basic quality-of-life features and the frequently bugging-out audio, make it an extremely hard sell, even by the 2015 standards. And nowadays… It’s simply to be avoided by all cost. 

 

Final Rating: Smelly Poo
 

Highschool Romance

After what the earlier AJ Tilley’s games had on offer, I can only describe Highschool Romance as a major, positive surprise. Despite the literally most generic title possible, this VN is notable at least for two reasons. The first unusual thing about it is that it’s a rare “trap protagonist” EVN, that uses the “guy cross-dressing to get into an all-girls boarding school” setup for mild ecchi and romance, and not full-on hentai. The second way in which it stands out is the unusual, cartoonish artstyle that will probably not be to everyone’s taste, but which I personally liked a lot and which matched the tone of the story very well. Outside of that, it’s a very basic romantic VN, pretty much devoid of any serious drama or genuine surprises, but still managing to be rather pleasant to read and… Wholesome, in a way that very Dharker titles, and possibly no other trap game ever managed to be. While out of the three routes the principal one includes a few layers of “inappropriate”, mostly due to the heroine obviously being into her sole male student from the moment she met him, even it can hardly be considered vulgar or overly pervy.

The general cuteness and simple, but competent writing made it hard for me to believe that it’s a game by the same team that came up with Sword of Asumi just 10 months earlier. Obviously, the extreme contrast doesn’t mean that Highschool Romance is a particularly good VN. Its short and basic plot, low number of CGs and limited expressions on the sprites place it in a similar category as the higher-end Sakura games – still borderline trash, but competent enough to be genuinely enjoyable. And, as some of you might know, this is exactly the standard this series is aiming for – pointing out to the rare, edible fish in the stale, polluted pond of ecchi and eroge EVNs. Thus, Highschool Romance receives this episode’s sole positive recommendation – if you’re looking for something brief and lighthearted, it might be genuinely worth your time.

 

Final Rating: Golden Poo!

Highschool Possession

After the sole positive accent in this post, let’s delve into the weirdest and possibly most disturbing game I had the displeasure of playing in order to make it. Highschool Possession starts in a fairly unassuming manner, showing our generic protagonist, Hikaru, interacting briefly with his two high-school crushes, the friendly school beauty Akiko and the shy Kasumi, a fellow member of the school’s swimming team. The next day, Hikaru inexplicably wakes up in Akiko’s body and… Masturbates furiously, after being turned on by her reflection in the mirror. After this classy piece of hentai, he proceeds to wake up as either Akiko or Kasumi (obligatory masturbation scene here too) every morning, learn about their personal problems and starts messing with their lives, assuming that “making things right” for them is the reason he was made to enter their bodies.

The tone of the story is just as poorly-communicated as it is grim. The switches between highly-questionable sexual content and overly-serious drama never really stop, culminating in which was probably the most uncomfortable sex scene I’ve seen in a visual novel – and this comes from a person that quite recently completed euphoria. Around the midpoint of the game, Hikaru, while possessing Akiko, is coerced into sex by her abusive boyfriend – considering all the implications, this was neither something I’d ever expect to see in a non-Clock Up eroge, nor something I’d ever want to see. There’s also very little that could redeem the game beyond that point, as the plot and the ending are serviceable at best and the visuals, by the same artist as in Sword of Asumi, is nowhere close to being brilliant enough to compensate for that. So unless you’re looking for a VN that’ll make you feel bad for all the wrong reason, skip this one. In my opinion, it’s worth avoiding even more than all the other AJTilley.com titles.

 

Final Rating: Smelly Poo 

And this would be about it, when it goes to the AJTilley.com era of Dharker Studio – somewhat embarrassing beginnings that nonetheless laid the foundation of one of the longest-active and most productive ecchi EVN developers. For all the bad things I’ve heard about these games, I don’t think I was ready for how absolutely dreadful some of there were, but it was also very interesting to see how much the studio grew over the years – despite it being mostly a producer of silly hentai games, it managed to significantly improve quality and tone down the questionable practices, such as excessive reliance on crowdfunding, which made the AJ Tilley brand toxic. And also, unlike many games by Winged Cloud, for example, I don’t believe the less fortunate titles by AJ Tilley and Dharker were this poor due to lack of effort – they always included interesting ideas and strived to be original, but simply suffered from atrocious execution. And in the end, the fact we got games such as Negligee, Army Gals and the Highschool Romance: Magi Trails later down the line might be a decent-enough compensation for that slight PTSD Highschool Possession gave me...
            In a few weeks, the Shovelware Adventures will be back, investigating the last missing pieces of AJTilley.com legacy – that is the summer resort themed Beach Bounce (the "Remastered" edition) and its two sequels, Beauty Bounce and Bunny Bounce. And for now, I hope you enjoyed this little retrospective from the early, dark era of ecchi EVNs. Have a great weekend everyone!