It's just Higurashi for furries.
I've played one route and that's really all I'm willing to give this game. It's not very good. I'm not super familiar with furry culture or media, but the sense that I got from all the main characters is that they're probably popular Archetypes for furry characters -- they're very recognizably written like Archetypes with tweaks. It's a very anime style of writing, and one I generally think is bad, because people (or animals, in the case of this game? not sure on the preferred nominative conventions here) are not just variations on themes, even if we often group ourselves together that way on the internet.
I didn't particularly like any of the main cast, which isn't really a dealbreaker -- you can have a cast of shitty characters and be engaging and entertaining all the same. Unfortunately, I didn't really find the main characters compelling at all either. I don't know why they were so poorly constructed, given that the secondary characters were vastly more interesting -- clearly the authors of this VN are capable of good character writing.
As it so happens, this is not the only indie western VN set in a small town with a quirky and diverse ensemble cast that quickly turns to psychological horror that I've played. Scarlet Hollow does the same thing (admittedly, without the furry romance, so that might be a dealbreaker for the target audience here) far more competently, which is probably why my feelings towards this game are so negative. I know this game could have been great! I've seen another game just like it pull it off!
Despite my disappointment, I'm glad I gave this a shot. It had a couple of legitimately strong bits, one of the songs sounds straight out of 999 (/pos), and it was fairly quick to go through a single route, so I don't feel like my time was substantially wasted.
I've played one route and that's really all I'm willing to give this game. It's not very good. I'm not super familiar with furry culture or media, but the sense that I got from all the main characters is that they're probably popular Archetypes for furry characters -- they're very recognizably written like Archetypes with tweaks. It's a very anime style of writing, and one I generally think is bad, because people (or animals, in the case of this game? not sure on the preferred nominative conventions here) are not just variations on themes, even if we often group ourselves together that way on the internet.
I didn't particularly like any of the main cast, which isn't really a dealbreaker -- you can have a cast of shitty characters and be engaging and entertaining all the same. Unfortunately, I didn't really find the main characters compelling at all either. I don't know why they were so poorly constructed, given that the secondary characters were vastly more interesting -- clearly the authors of this VN are capable of good character writing.
As it so happens, this is not the only indie western VN set in a small town with a quirky and diverse ensemble cast that quickly turns to psychological horror that I've played. Scarlet Hollow does the same thing (admittedly, without the furry romance, so that might be a dealbreaker for the target audience here) far more competently, which is probably why my feelings towards this game are so negative. I know this game could have been great! I've seen another game just like it pull it off!
Despite my disappointment, I'm glad I gave this a shot. It had a couple of legitimately strong bits, one of the songs sounds straight out of 999 (/pos), and it was fairly quick to go through a single route, so I don't feel like my time was substantially wasted.
5 Comments
Decline to answer, thanks! I know how this goes: We currently have a state in which the quality of each route is in something of a superposition, simultaneously capable of being great and awful. As soon as I answer, that superposition collapses -- magically, the one I played becomes the worst and entirely unrepresentative of the game's quality as a whole, and every other route is still great. This plays out the same way regardless of what I may answer. Unfortunately, I reject this implied disparity in quality of routes altogether, because largely my critique is on the quality of the prose and character writing, not just the events that happened in a given route. I do not believe it is likely that this is significantly different between routes, as this has not been the case in any other VN I've ever touched.
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Kinda embarrassing to leave 4 comments in a row furious that someone else doesn’t like the same game as you? I simply do not think the prose was very good. This is not an uncommon opinion of mine when it comes to VNs, as almost every single game out there has middling at best writing. I read a lot of books, and it’s just such an immense quality gap that I can only ever overlook it if there are other sufficiently redeeming qualities. Totally get how someone might love a lot of the things that Echo does enough to give it 5*. I didn’t. In the future, please be reminded that there is no such thing as an objective stance on media, and flaming someone online for not liking the same things as you is childish.
i was moreso interested to know which secondary characters you liked the writing of
and to dispel it, i'll say outfront that i think the only route of a different level of quality to the rest would be carl's, which i think tends to be the consensus
augusttime
7 months ago