Hellooo everyone and welcome to some more eroge reviewing goodness!
Sadly this article has been greatly delayed due to one unfortunate fact…There’s been nothing worth reviewing! Honestly, in the past few months there has been a depressingly large amount of what I’d call throwaway games released that just didn’t have enough substance to be talked about at any length.
But the new year is almost upon us, and with that milestone looming I’m just going to give up and go with only one review this time! Hopefully next year there’ll be far more games to discuss!
Well now, the first and only game on our plate today is Period from the now (sadly) defunct Littlewitch who previously brought us the spectacular Quartett! As much as I wish it lived up to the standard that game set, it unfortunately does not.
The first problem would be that they moved away from the innovative floating frames director system Quartett! had and used a standard eroge setup with sprites and static CG backgrounds. Its those generic backgrounds that really harm the presentation most to me clashing with Oyari Ashito’s lovely illustrations. I have to wonder why it was Ashito couldn’t have drawn the backgrounds with that trademark warmth that’s sadly only reserved for the CGs. Other than that though the game looks great with a nice clean UI and very large sprites that really show off Ashito’s beautiful artwork.
The other problem is the way the game handles routes, and it is a big problem. It’s hard to really get into without spoiling but the game uses the lovely archaic design of locking out routes until you clear others. This has been done well in other games where it has hidden characters or uses this restriction for narratives purposes where you gain insight by having routes that can only be unlocked after others. This is not one of those games.
Because of this arbitrary lockout combined with a truly bizarre and nonsensical choice flow that easily allows you to get into the completely wrong route, simply getting to the girl of your choice becomes a massive chore if you didn’t look up a walkthrough beforehand. The fact that if you try to use the skip function and alt-tab the window to do something else while its skipping will stop the skip function immediately just adds a lovely bit of annoyance to top the cake.
When you do actually get to the girl of your choices route you sadly won’t be paid off much for the effort expended. All of the girls are extremely lovely, but the routes themselves have very little to say and only a scant few of them actually offered any sort of memorable moments.
As one last middle finger to me the very last girl you can get who requires you clearing all the other girls actually has a glimpse of a really interesting story that drew me in…And then abruptly rushed to a half-assed ending. Gee thanks, Period!
Final Verdict: Pass. Go download the HCG collection which is the best part of the game and save yourself the frustration.
So then with that out of the way, let’s get to the round up of random trash that’s also came out recently.
Boob Wars: A fun little fap game with a few animated scenes, but sadly nothing much more then that. The premise, characters and combat system have the makings of something great similar to Princess Waltz, but its all far too short and stripped down to be worth your time.
Duel Savior: Combat system is ok, but every last one of the main girls is just boring as sin. The story never grabbed hold of me and the main characters was the only mildly good thing about the whole thing.
Tomoyo After: Lacks all of the charm that Clannad had and replaces it with sex. Play it if you like Tomoyo, but if you’re expecting anything other then a game solely made for Tomoyo lovers don’t bother.
Sexy Demon Transformation: Terrible terrible game. Check it out for the utterly awful music and a laugh at some truly bad writing.
Violated Hero: This is actually a vaguely interesting little game if your into lots of monster girls reverse raping the protagonist! The game play is a simple but addictive roguelike-esque experience that I surprisingly found quite a bit of enjoyment in!
And that’s that folks! Hopefully some of these games I have in my backlog right now will provide far more enjoyable experiences then the junk I got stuck with this time round!
I’ll also hopefully get out at least a few figure reviews as I can’t make Chag do ALL the work!
4 replies on “Visual Novel Reviews: Period”
Making me re-post this comment…!
That last game in your list kinda looks a bit interesting, a bit of a Raidy flavor, perhaps. I might have to look into it.
rofl yea I saw the comment notification on the old one after Chag had accidently deleted this article. >_< Yea it made me think of Raidy except I actually enjoyed the gameplay unlike Raidy that just made me rage haha...
The backgrounds do look kind of weird for style. Like they got a random asset from the internet or something haha.
When you mentioned Violated Heroine I thought it was going to be another game with the exact same name, but that one is made in RPG maker. Regardless that title reminds me of Monster Girl Quest, sounds fun.
Yea they got a completely different person to make those which seems like a really bizarre choice.
Ah yea I remember that one only played a bit not really my thing and all but still not the worst thing ever haha.