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Unpredictable and Engaging

Mafiosi: Le Loro Cosa is a kinetic novel which follows the stories of a mafia family from the perspectives of the children of the family. It has a total of 24 chapters, and it took me about 5 hours to finish reading.

First Impressions:

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of kinetic novels as I've always been more of a visual novel guy and enjoyed exploring different choices to find out what sort of outcome will those choices lead to. But when I came across Mafiosi: Le Loro Cosa, I knew I had to give it a try, and I wasn't disappointed in the least. First, this is a VERY difficult genre to tackle as it offers little room for errors when compared to your typical high school romance VNs or the ones in fantasy settings. In that aspect, I believe the writer has done a very good job in bringing out the characters of the story to life. The story is also very unpredictable for most parts, just as it was meant to be. As this part of this series is primarily meant to introduce the reader to the world, the unpredictability aspect will likely be explored further in the following parts of the series.

Writing:

The story unfolds from the perspectives of six children in rotation. This has its own set of merits and drawbacks. The biggest merit is that it allows the reader to understand the perspective of each character, know what they feel about each other, and see the world through their eyes as the story unfolds. What I liked the most is how the writer successfully managed to think from the perspectives of children of different ages, and constantly changed his writing style to represent the way that these kids would think. The only demerit is that it might take some time for the reader to truly get engaged with the characters as the reader gets little time to know either of them in the earlier parts. In my case, it took me about 7-8 chapters before I truly felt connected to either of the characters. But in the long run, it definitely enhanced the engagement for me.
Regarding the writing itself, I found it to be worded nicely and well-written for most parts. However, the presence of typos and minor grammatical errors are not infrequent. Having these errors proofread will definitely enhance the overall quality of the product, as wording is undoubtedly the single most important thing for kinetic novels and visual novels.

Music:

I felt that the choice of music for the various situations was pretty good. The character themes also matched well with their personalities.

Art:

Overall, I would say that I liked the art in this game. I was most impressed by the number of BGs used in this novel for each and every area, and redundancy was at its minimum. I've tried out many visual novels(some of which are commercial) where the developer would reuse the same BG in multiple completely different locations, e.g. "Hey, I've made a living room BG.. Good, let's use it for every different living rooms that we'll introduce in the story."
That certainly is not the case in Mafiosi: Le Loro Cosa.
However, I have mixed feelings when it comes to the character art.
While I liked the art of most of the adult male characters, e.g Xander, Childers etc., I felt that the art of the adult female characters like Molly and Serena did not fit into the environment. While it may be fine for VNs like Clannad and Kanon, I personally felt that the moe stylization of female characters in their 30s and 40s did not go too well with the hardcore Italian mafia setting.
Also in some cases, the white backgrounds outlining the characters were not edited out properly.

Summary:

Overall, I had fun reading this novel, and I would love to try out the next part in the series whenever I get the chance. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys a decent, well written kinetic/visual novel with surprises and plot twists at every corner.

Posts

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Thanks so much for the review, and I'm glad you enjoyed it! I will be fixing up all of your points of criticism for the new editions next year, which will have original art and music as well as edited and additional material. I hope you enjoy the sequels even more :)
Just to let you know that I've tried out parts 2 and 3 and I loved them even more than the first.
While the white line issues are existent in part 2, they seem much better in part 3 and the character art feels much better as well(the overly moe feeling is gone as well). Great job!
Although, some of the characters have the top part of the head abruptly cut off, e.g Armando in part 2 and Anya in part 3.

Good luck in writing part 4, I plan to try it as soon as it's out.
Thanks again! I've been eyeing up your game as well, looks pretty awesome. I will have to try it out.

I did have some help editing the sprites for the third game, as my buddy is a graphic designer. I contemplated having him edit ones from previous games later, but with the new versions coming it didn't seem like there was much of a point. I'll post some previews very soon :)
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