I enjoyed so much about this game, but some of the writing problems took away from my overall enjoyment.
First, the positives. The loop from fishing to restaurant management was a time suck. The fishing controls were appropriately tricky to master and the restaurant brought the kind of adrenaline I haven't felt since playing Diner dash. Those two elements are only the start of all the content in this game, which is both blessing and curse.
The benefit of so much content is that the game is bursting with ways to express yourself as a player. Want to invest in farming? In restaurant staff? In minigames? All of it is here and so much more that would be a spoiler to discuss. On the other hand, there is so much content that I felt like I barely had a moment to breathe. I often wanted a button I could push that would push deadlines for special events back a couple of days, not because they weren't interesting, but because I wanted to chill with this game rather than rush.
The problems in the writing is where I got stuck. Dave is an atypical protagonist as a fat, middle-aged man who is not macho. I loved that about this game from the start. However, the writers see him as a joke. At least, that's how it feels. Every character has to comment on his weight and emasculate him for being a relatively timid fat man. At first, I assumed that the side characters who mocked Dave would learn that they were wrong, and that this non-traditional game protagonist would be respected. This never happened. He was consistently the butt of the joke.
The other criticism of the writing that I personally have is how the few female characters are written. I noticed that every woman are characterized as nagging or foolish, with perhaps the exception of the recruiter, who still has to learn a lesson. All major sympathetic characters are men.
After a dozen or so hours (I got to chapter 6), these flaws got to me, and I shelved the game for the time being. It's a fun and generous game, but I wish it was more generous with its women and with Dave himself.
First, the positives. The loop from fishing to restaurant management was a time suck. The fishing controls were appropriately tricky to master and the restaurant brought the kind of adrenaline I haven't felt since playing Diner dash. Those two elements are only the start of all the content in this game, which is both blessing and curse.
The benefit of so much content is that the game is bursting with ways to express yourself as a player. Want to invest in farming? In restaurant staff? In minigames? All of it is here and so much more that would be a spoiler to discuss. On the other hand, there is so much content that I felt like I barely had a moment to breathe. I often wanted a button I could push that would push deadlines for special events back a couple of days, not because they weren't interesting, but because I wanted to chill with this game rather than rush.
The problems in the writing is where I got stuck. Dave is an atypical protagonist as a fat, middle-aged man who is not macho. I loved that about this game from the start. However, the writers see him as a joke. At least, that's how it feels. Every character has to comment on his weight and emasculate him for being a relatively timid fat man. At first, I assumed that the side characters who mocked Dave would learn that they were wrong, and that this non-traditional game protagonist would be respected. This never happened. He was consistently the butt of the joke.
The other criticism of the writing that I personally have is how the few female characters are written. I noticed that every woman are characterized as nagging or foolish, with perhaps the exception of the recruiter, who still has to learn a lesson. All major sympathetic characters are men.
After a dozen or so hours (I got to chapter 6), these flaws got to me, and I shelved the game for the time being. It's a fun and generous game, but I wish it was more generous with its women and with Dave himself.