An episode of Familiar Travels: Volume One
After tragedy strikes The Cabal, the town's government begins cracking down on unregulated magic use—and familiars are continuing to disappear. For the first human in Vanaheim, however, life goes on as they spend the rest of their break with their friends.
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This is absolutely fucked
This review contains spoilers
[ I plan to revisit this so I can expand upon its issues—and strengths—here later. Leaving this old review up for posterity. ]
Familiar Travels is an absolute mess of a visual novel with a few interesting ideas—a couple of which it manages to pull off in at least some capacity. Unfortunately, the lack of polish really brings the whole experience down.
Plot points related to The Vanir, the Chrononomicon, and the tragic endings are perhaps the most interesting elements of the story, but feel tacked onto the much more substantial isekai college plot-lines that dominate the game. The headier, mind-trippy material that crops up on occasion doesn't feel properly integrated into the main draw of the game, which would be the shallow, escapist romance fantasy portions. It tries to be more than just another fun little fanservice furry VN, but falls into this weird middle ground where it's not really clear what it wants to be. Unfortunately, this disjointedness is reflected in the mechanics and presentation of the rest of the game.
The open world nature of the game was not properly implemented, which leads players to experiencing dialogue referring to events that haven't happened, sometimes even leading to a main character that behaves very inconsistently. This will even happen when using the developers' official guidelines for route pathing. Some scenes will need to be seen more than once (there's a fast forward button though) because they will contain multiple characters with routes, and all routes need to be completed in a single save in order to get the true ending. A single mistake can doom a route, which wouldn't be so bad if players could have more save states and mistakes weren't punished so heavily. The side content that can be gathered from the optional open world interactions feels shallow, and makes me feel like the game should have gone for a more traditional style in the first place.
The game is rife with typos and missing punctuation marks, words are sometimes mistaken for their homonyms, and dialogue is occasionally attributed to incorrect characters (or sometimes none at all). Most scene transitions are awkward and delayed, sprites are sometimes visible when they shouldn't be, and there is at least one instance in the game where a character is portrayed by the wrong sprite several times. Saving can only be done while browsing the open world map, and there are only five save slots. There are unskippable cutscenes that can't be paused, many of which could have just been regular visual novel sections (and play out as such anyway) and a couple of which are pitchy musical numbers (you will have to see one of them six or seven times). There is never a reason to make a regular part of your visual novel an unskippable cutscene that can't be paused and must be read at a certain pace. During the cutscene portions, the main character is awkwardly referred to as "You" or their default name since the game doesn't have the ability to rename them in the cutscenes. All of this leads to an incredibly frustrating and overly-long experience for what should be a fairly simple, linear VN.
So what is there to like about Familiar Travels, aside from the aforementioned plot points a few sprawling paragraphs ago? Character interactions are usually fairly entertaining, and the game can be genuinely funny when it means to be (anything to do with Po's antics puts a big smile on my face). It's cool that the main character is canonically non-binary. Most of the characters have something likeable about them, though some of them are more off-putting than others.
All in all, if you plan on making a furry visual novel, I highly recommend playing Familiar Travels so you can pick up some pointers on what not to do when developing your own. That sounds pretty harsh, but frankly, it really is the case here. All Familiar Travels really needed to flourish was some polish and a trimming of the excess—sometimes, that's all it takes to make or break your game.
P.S. I know that not every character can have a route, and writing even one route is a massive task, but Doghouse is literally the best character and he doesn't get one even though he's established as totally DTF? Honestly robbed.
Familiar Travels is an absolute mess of a visual novel with a few interesting ideas—a couple of which it manages to pull off in at least some capacity. Unfortunately, the lack of polish really brings the whole experience down.
Plot points related to The Vanir, the Chrononomicon, and the tragic endings are perhaps the most interesting elements of the story, but feel tacked onto the much more substantial isekai college plot-lines that dominate the game. The headier, mind-trippy material that crops up on occasion doesn't feel properly integrated into the main draw of the game, which would be the shallow, escapist romance fantasy portions. It tries to be more than just another fun little fanservice furry VN, but falls into this weird middle ground where it's not really clear what it wants to be. Unfortunately, this disjointedness is reflected in the mechanics and presentation of the rest of the game.
The open world nature of the game was not properly implemented, which leads players to experiencing dialogue referring to events that haven't happened, sometimes even leading to a main character that behaves very inconsistently. This will even happen when using the developers' official guidelines for route pathing. Some scenes will need to be seen more than once (there's a fast forward button though) because they will contain multiple characters with routes, and all routes need to be completed in a single save in order to get the true ending. A single mistake can doom a route, which wouldn't be so bad if players could have more save states and mistakes weren't punished so heavily. The side content that can be gathered from the optional open world interactions feels shallow, and makes me feel like the game should have gone for a more traditional style in the first place.
The game is rife with typos and missing punctuation marks, words are sometimes mistaken for their homonyms, and dialogue is occasionally attributed to incorrect characters (or sometimes none at all). Most scene transitions are awkward and delayed, sprites are sometimes visible when they shouldn't be, and there is at least one instance in the game where a character is portrayed by the wrong sprite several times. Saving can only be done while browsing the open world map, and there are only five save slots. There are unskippable cutscenes that can't be paused, many of which could have just been regular visual novel sections (and play out as such anyway) and a couple of which are pitchy musical numbers (you will have to see one of them six or seven times). There is never a reason to make a regular part of your visual novel an unskippable cutscene that can't be paused and must be read at a certain pace. During the cutscene portions, the main character is awkwardly referred to as "You" or their default name since the game doesn't have the ability to rename them in the cutscenes. All of this leads to an incredibly frustrating and overly-long experience for what should be a fairly simple, linear VN.
So what is there to like about Familiar Travels, aside from the aforementioned plot points a few sprawling paragraphs ago? Character interactions are usually fairly entertaining, and the game can be genuinely funny when it means to be (anything to do with Po's antics puts a big smile on my face). It's cool that the main character is canonically non-binary. Most of the characters have something likeable about them, though some of them are more off-putting than others.
All in all, if you plan on making a furry visual novel, I highly recommend playing Familiar Travels so you can pick up some pointers on what not to do when developing your own. That sounds pretty harsh, but frankly, it really is the case here. All Familiar Travels really needed to flourish was some polish and a trimming of the excess—sometimes, that's all it takes to make or break your game.
P.S. I know that not every character can have a route, and writing even one route is a massive task, but Doghouse is literally the best character and he doesn't get one even though he's established as totally DTF? Honestly robbed.