But Keiji and Kanade never do get physical, at least in Volume 1. In fact, even with the bonus 18+ content, he only has sex with Shino and R-ne. But, considering the length of this particular volume and that there will be more to come, that’s not such a bad thing. And here I’d like to talk a bit about the adult content. I do have a couple criticisms about it, but overall I’m a major fan of the work they did here. So first with the criticisms. The first one will be a retread of any other Adult Visual Novel review that I’ve ever done. Mosaics irritate the hell out of me, personally. And I just wish that with an initial release in the US Frontwing would have had the courage to release it without mosaics and without needing to bleep out the word “dick” all the time. Yes, I do know the Japanese laws, but when you are creating it for our audience you shouldn’t feel the need to put that in. Since you are adding those things on top of what you already created, I would rather you just not include those lines of programming text. The second criticism is a bit more minor, it is that the scenes are separate from the story main. They do definitely reference the story, and take place in specific times and places. But they are a separate, possibly alternate story, take that is accessible from the main menu. But this is a minor complaint because they are rather different in tone, so you are still getting the sexy times with your girls but they don’t feel out of place in the story either. Other than that, I am a total fan of the work they did. The adult scenes are well worth seeing and are some of the best you will find in the medium (sans the censorship). One of the things that makes them so great is that 2 out of the 3 scenes are animated, something that is only fairly recent in the visual novel world and quite surprising for a crowd funded one.
The adult scenes are not the only movement that you will see, though. Having not read our feature pieces before experiencing this story I was quite pleasantly surprised at how alive all the characters were. It may not quite be the streaming animation of School Days, but it is quite close. The characters are very expressive and they move around a ton. Not only that, but they move relative to the 2D plane a lot as well. So you can have them get closer or farther and even step in front of other characters. I was impressed with this new VN technology with NEKOPARA, but this one goes even farther. I would be rather shocked if this Visual Novel did not quickly become an anime.
But it’s not just the art and animation quality that would lend itself well to an anime adaptation. The story is quite interesting and very well written. In fact, ironically enough, considering they translated it all in house, this is one of the better Visual Novel translations that I’ve experienced. There were no grammatical or spelling errors, and there were a lot of colloquialisms and even references to other games and popular media. It is a rather short story, clocking in at about 4 hours, and there are no branching paths, but the effort put into translating this so well certainly needs to be applauded. One of my favorite parts of the story was that for as comedic as it often is, when it goes serious it does a very good job at it. And also all the technical jargon is either very accurate or very believable when it’s something where accuracy cannot be achieved. That not only rounds out the world, but it also makes it so much easier to immerse yourself in.
It is a rather bittersweet feeling when you reach the end of Volume 1. Four hours seems like entirely too short of a time to spend with these girls. But that’s not a criticism, for $9.99 on Steam (double that if you want the 18+ version) that is a good price for 4 hours of content. I still don’t like having to pay so much extra for adult content though, but I’d rather have the extra price than to not have it at all. I do have to wonder why 3 adult scenes cost as much as the rest of the game combined, but at least 2 of them are animated and all 3 are well done (sans mosaics).
One last thing that I want to mention is the music and sound design. The music is very good, and the developers wanted to pay it special homage in two ways. One very obvious way is that whenever a song starts playing you will see it’s title displayed in the upper left corner of the screen. So if there are any particular song you love, you can see it’s name. And that’s of value in the second homage, and that is the presence of music playback in the Gallery menu. I’ve liked the recent trend of including music in the galleries, but this one takes it even farther. You can playback whatever tune you want while you are watching previous scenes, and that includes the sex scenes. A cool little addition. The sound design is also very notable because with all the movement of the characters, they actually took the time to have their vocal volume change in relation to how far they are away from you.
So really, top to bottom, this is a very high quality product. It’s rather surprising how much bang they got out of their crowdfunding buck. But this is Frontwing, and they have not disappointed me yet. Now the only issue with jumping on this new Visual Novel series from them so early is how long we are going to have to wait for the next volume. Maybe I need to look into cryogenic freezing technology…
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