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The review is not written on paper

  • Ocean
  • 12/29/2011 09:18 PM
  • 1867 views
The World is Made of Paper -

It was pretty hard for me to review this, as it was a Visual Novel and not an RPG like I'm used to. I didn't mind trying it out though. I went into the game having not heard of it, having not read the description, or seen any screenshots really. So it was all a surprise for me.

Story:
Definitely not the "save the world from the evil that revived from being sealed" type of deal. It takes place in the modern day, starting with you wanting to get away from your boring life and have an actual adventure. It is an adventure, feeling at first like something that could happen to a person, and I rather liked how the mysteries started popping up. "What does this mean?" "Why would he do x?" and questions like that you could ask. I'm not one for this type of genre but I think I enjoyed it fairly well. It's still a demo so I'm sure it can go and answer the questions it brought up at the end (purposeful cliffhanger) but I feel it can also end in a rather obvious way if they decide to write it that way.

There was a mispelling of the word "referring" in "I was mostly reffering to your strange, but seemingly random, experiences..." but other than that, I felt it was written well, no other mispellings that I noticed. Each character was distinct, had their own motivations and actions. I would say it's pretty funny how they call the main a "nice guy" or "good guy" when everything he says is something rude or mean, and has 0 patience for anything. I mean, I don't even mind that he has this personality, it's just funny how they still think he's a nice guy despite showing he's pretty much a jerk.

I would have to add that there are choices to make in the game. A few, not many, but they do lead to different outcomes. Some are game over (or seem like) conditions. Some advance the plot or provide a different view on a scene. There was one time passing one that didn't really seem like a necessary choice because the scenes didn't really do much different but other than that, they seemed distinct enough.

Graphics:
The graphics seem hand made so I'll praise it for that. It worked well for what it was attempting to do. I'm sure if they used moe anime portraits, the feel of the VN would be lost or at least very different. There were various expressions for the characters, and a few backgrounds. I think it did what it had to just fine and set the tone up.

Audio:
Other than that I think the music was appropriate enough and fitting, I don't really remember much in this category. Nothing stood out as being too out of place and again seemed to work well with it. I do not know if these are custom or if they're from somewhere else, but I didn't really have any complaints in this category.

Misc:
Some issues that I did notice. Return is HIDING behind the 10th save slot! I mean, you can always right click the menu to return back to the menu (I noticed this is already known by the creator so I won't take off for that). Speaking of which, you need to right click to enter the menu. I thought VNs usually had a HUD or something to tell you what the buttons did. I didn't know there was a menu because the game didn't tell me about it. It was my friend who told me that I should save before a choice, which got me to even try to figure out how to bring the menu up.

Might be renpy's fault, but I wish you could have a little bit of a pause or something because I click the screen and suddenly I've accidentally made a choice somewhere, since choices are so infrequent and usually it's a lot of dialogue.

Overall:
I enjoyed it enough, despite again not being my type of genre. It's about an hour or so, it's not really very long so it's worth a playthrough at least. I don't think I have much to critique as far as the story goes, so I'd just say to continue on with it and finish it up, after some minor tweaks. They're not even game breaking really. Good job with this!


Rated 4/5

Posts

Pages: 1
Thank you so much for doing this review, even if the game itself wasn't to your usual tastes! It's interesting to see opinions from an angle that I usually wouldn't get them from.

The menu bug was a result of the default menu not taking well to the resizing of the game screen. I've actually already made a custom menu that shouldn't have the problem, seen here: http://rpgmaker.net/games/2954/images/22628/ So, fortunately, the issue is already dealt with for the final version.

As for a pause screen, I might consider putting one in, though I'm a little curious what it could accomplish that just slipping into the menu while not playing couldn't. I suppose to keep people from accidentally clicking on things?
Ocean
Resident foodmonster
11991
Not a pause screen, just something to prevent accidentally clicking a choice when you've been clicking to go past onto the next dialogue for a while. Choices are uncommon so I have accidentally made a choice when I didn't mean to.
Hm, okay. I'll definitely keep that in mind. There must be some way to implement it.

Fortunately, choices are going to be less uncommon in later chapters, so hopefully it won't be as easy to do that then. Even so, you're right that there should probably be something extra to keep that from happening.
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