Baldr Sky had immense potential. It had a cool premise (VR cyberpunk mecha is incredible), setting and themes, immaculate visuals (both character design and the menu, as well as everything else, this is one of the best-looking VNs ever made) and soundtrack, wonderful vocal tracks by KOTOKO, plus awesome gameplay.
It was disappointing on several levels. For one, the VN doesn't recognise some text as already read text, even though it should be skipped, extremely often. What ends up happening is you have a 98% similar scene to one that you've already read, with one different line, so instead of skipping everything except for that new line, BS decides to make you reread and fish out the new line. This is exacerbated in Reminiscence, which makes you read all the flashback SoL sections that you've seen separately before, but this time in a row, in addition to a couple new scenes. I don't know if they did it because the VN came out split into two halves, but it should've had the option to skip everything except for the new content. It is the biggest disrespect of the reader's time that I've seen in the medium, and maybe in stories in general. Those who have read Muv-Luv and Muv-Luv Alternative could probably see an analogy for if you'd read bits of Extra during Unlimited and Alternative, only to read all of Extra right before the finale of Alt. Also, the non-true endings are usually decided by getting "humiliation scenes" which depend on you losing final boss fights, and they're just pointless to me.
And after all that suffering, the final route was underwhelming as a finale (especially compared to how many other VNs' final/true routes blow everything else out of the water), despite how hyped up it was ever since you saw Dive 2's opening.
That being said, though, besides the positives I've already mentioned, Rain Kirishima is one of the best anime women I've ever seen, so I can't give it a negative score.
It was disappointing on several levels. For one, the VN doesn't recognise some text as already read text, even though it should be skipped, extremely often. What ends up happening is you have a 98% similar scene to one that you've already read, with one different line, so instead of skipping everything except for that new line, BS decides to make you reread and fish out the new line. This is exacerbated in Reminiscence, which makes you read all the flashback SoL sections that you've seen separately before, but this time in a row, in addition to a couple new scenes. I don't know if they did it because the VN came out split into two halves, but it should've had the option to skip everything except for the new content. It is the biggest disrespect of the reader's time that I've seen in the medium, and maybe in stories in general. Those who have read Muv-Luv and Muv-Luv Alternative could probably see an analogy for if you'd read bits of Extra during Unlimited and Alternative, only to read all of Extra right before the finale of Alt. Also, the non-true endings are usually decided by getting "humiliation scenes" which depend on you losing final boss fights, and they're just pointless to me.
And after all that suffering, the final route was underwhelming as a finale (especially compared to how many other VNs' final/true routes blow everything else out of the water), despite how hyped up it was ever since you saw Dive 2's opening.
That being said, though, besides the positives I've already mentioned, Rain Kirishima is one of the best anime women I've ever seen, so I can't give it a negative score.