Nene is my favorite so far with Akane second.
The self control options are probably my favorite part, and I’d like to see more of them like being unable to decline bread or donuts. The way you are unable to decline the coffee or burger is chef’s kiss
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Ok, grab yourself a cold one, because this will take a while. Before I get started, I just want you to know that I didn’t dislike the game, I just found it very easy to pick apart like this, which is understandable for a 0.2 version of a game.
Overall Observations:
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Gameplay gets very repetitive
You keep doing the same actions and having to manually click through them every single time. The variation in events at different points does help, but not enough to avoid becoming tedious very quickly.
Solution: A daily event scheduler will help in the long-term since it will compound as the game… expands. Since there’s only a finite number of time periods, it should be doable, especially since there’s frameworks out there that provide this functionality. Beyond that, there’s not too much you can do with this format other than heavily editing to keep wordcounts down and splitting up textwalls into more readable chunks whenever possible.
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Locations feel clunky and disjointed
Despite featuring a lot more locations than I’d expect at this point of development, none of them feel particularly coherent. You go to university but the only club you can join is volleyball? Friendships groups at uni tend to form around classmates first yet you can’t interact with them, etc. The tanuki being thrown in randomly just screams white anime fanboy and not in a good way, lol.
Solution: Refine each location in the game before adding more, one at a time if necessary. Give the player more things to do at each location or more ways to interact there, or with other people at them (outside named NPCs). What if Akane joined a different club, or multiple clubs? What is she studying? Is there a material impact from attending university regularly or not? I’m focusing on the University as an example because it’s the most obvious, but this can also be applied to the gym (who works at the gym? where is it? how do other gymgoers react to game events?), restaurant (dumpster diving in slob routes, anyone?) and office (what would you say they do there?).
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The tone is all over the place
The pace at which romantic/sexual content emerges feels highly unrealistic and jarring. There’s no hidden depth to most characters and the perspective of Akane is always assumed to be infallible. That lowers the stakes and flattens how the player interacts with NPCs - lesbian relationships are taboo in many places and while hints might be laid out, they’re as unlikely to lead to instant gratification as cis ones.
Solution: Have (both platonic and intimate) relationships, sexual inhibition and and openness about sexuality be something that’s unlocked and tracked independently of weight (inhibition?) and not a boolean dependent on firing a specific scene. The two might be related; slob-adjacent events would likely cross over for example, but it shouldn’t feel inevitable or railroaded. You have a big cast of characters already, may as well let the player decide how to navigate it.
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Pacing is waay off
The rate at which certain stats shift is muddled. It is entirely possible for example, to gain weight quickly while keeping self-control high. This both locks out content and means other events take forever to fire. Weight changes in the volleyball club aren’t tracked directly outside the ‘fatten both’ path causing them to get stunlocked into never completing before the main story. Sometimes, you can have several events all fire one after the other due to prerequisites being wonky.
Solution: Be very careful about the gating for events and change how all core NPC characters are tracked to be uniform with the PC. Having milestones that segment parts of the narrative is ok but require a lot of work to factor in edge cases and avoid excessive and pointless grinding, especially when the requirements for unlocking content is entirely opaque.
Re; the heightswapping bit I’m totally fine with fantasy elements but since most are confined to dream sequences, it makes sense to keep that consistent or have substitute dialogue that leads to the same content. The same could be achieved with Akane spiking Mai’s drinks with growth drugs and offering to help with diet and exercise outside class; perhaps with help from Erika? Those changes would also open up the possibility of other events; does Mai keep dieting after catching up in height? you get the picture.
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Me when i see cheddar putting down a thorough and detailed response to when they review a current build of a game:
Anyway Joke aside, I’ll agree with you there this can get quite repetitive especially in the first few stages!
As for the location issue, i think they are working on that already as seen with the university and diner locations and with the club being the infamous one.
The tone could certainly need some improvement, as i suggested earlier making wg stage 6 and diet stage 2 the part of the story where Akane should develop an actual relationship with one of the characters to give a more branching out effect.
I’ll also agree with you on Pacing but as @bobothesecondtwo mentioned she wanted it to be a story about someone’s will power being chipped away little by little and i would also like to see Akane’s volleyball team react to her weight gain even if both members are slim themselves.
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No there is no weight difference in that scene, Nene only has a 2nd stage in the final scene of the game if you have gotten everyone to fatten her up
Probably, but it is worth emphasis. I see it as the sort of simple thing people really want when they say stuff like ‘immersion’; little details that make it easier to maintain the suspension of belief by making places feel more ‘alive’ - that what the PC does has consequences. Perhaps the first time you visit the club you have a look around the interior and later get to choose what section of the club to visit. Do you spend your time chilling, dancing, glued to the bar? Does behaving like a slob risk getting kicked out or banned? Do the types of people you have flings with change alongside your appearance? For the restaurant, perhaps there’s a different location if you visit at a different time of day or you can get (increasingly unhealthy) choices of cuisine that are unlocked over time.
There’s a lot to elaborate on here but I’m trying to keep it to broad critiques since it’s already a lot of words, lol.
Not a bad suggestion. I think it makes sense for most relationship progression to be tied to interactions rather than stages, save for the most intimate.
Player choices should impact this; if you behave like an asshole after dieting, then that should alter your relationships with people that don’t like it. Maybe certain characters would actually sabotage you, similar to how you might sabotage them. It felt funny how a few points of difference separated all stations to blobhood and magical eternal thinness.
Becoming a slob should be dependent on choices (and/or a character’s personality) not an inevitability. The reason I mentioned gaining weight without losing all willpower is that I think that can be a powerful pathway and tested its impact on the game as is. Gaining weight with intent and wilfully rather than by accident or denial. You can gain weight without your brain involuntarily turning into mush.
It’s something you can see in the gaining community a lot tbh; some might actually keep to a careful diet while gaining based on what they like and might be healthier in the long run, others may be more extreme or brazen with their choices. Both have consequences and might even affect weight distribution in subtle ways.
It can’t outright change your bodytype, but has a noticeable difference as does stuff like visceral fat vs subcutaneous look very different on someone’s frame and with enough calorie intake the body will deposit fat in less typical places to keep up etc it’s complicated… tl;dr you are what you eat so it’d be fun to have that part of the core mechanics, especially if willpower and desire will be emphasised.
Absolutely. The more you or the other teammates can both gain or lose weight (and see its effects), the more it feels like a dynamic part of the game and less like a linear do x action several times to unlock y.
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Is it possible for erika to gain weight?
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Casual reminder: this is a fetish dating sim first, you really don’t need to go so deep into real-world crisises, even for emotional drama. Pandering yuri fiction is fine, you know.
Do agree with the other complaints, especially tone and lack of depth. The game is so wide, but ultimately deep as a puddle and have no real interaction, especially with the “Breakpoint” based design with its weight gain.
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Yes it’s possible. The easiest way, although not the only one, is to get Erika to eat ten of Yui’s cupcakes.
In order to do this you need to have unlocked the restaurant (ideally before you hit stage three). Once you reach stage three you need to visit it to meet Yui. You accept her deal about Erika and give her the cupcake. When going to the gym you can now get a cupcake from Yui. Do this ten times and give them to Erika. At the beginning of stage four you will have an event that Chika mentions that you’re getting fat. It will have some options pick “I’ve had my fun. Time to lose the weight.”
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What can I do left when ive taken the weight loss route? I dont know who can still gain weight
Respectfully, as a college student myself, 50% of my friends are gay and, at least on-campus, where the game takes place, there is basically no taboo to homosexuality depending on the area. I don’t think every wlw should HAVE to deal with taboos and discomfort around sexuality - it CAN, but it doesn’t HAVE to be harder than a hetero relationship just because!
I get the feeling you spent a lot of time in the volleyball area - the area that is absolutely bare bones and the worst bit of the game rn imo lol. I tend not to mess with it much in my dozens of playthroughs, because its basically a proof of concept area to me, at least.
I understand your criticisms for most things, but I really do feel like you’re both A) too critical of many things and B) pushing for things that would dramatically change the pacing of the game and its development, possibly for the worse. It doesn’t need to be a life sim with club choices and classmates, and the struggles of a queer relationship in a bigoted area.
Sorry if this is coming off confrontational, I was just interested, but frustrated, by your review post
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Every other major character can, basically
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The ‘Western World’ has come a long way to allowing spaces where non-cishet identities and sexuality are trivial, normal things (at least, outside the most conservative areas) when you set a game in for example Japan that hasn’t come as far on the topic, it gets a little awkward. Despite rapid change over the last two decades, there’s still a lot of issues such as blocked access to IVF or adoption, an outstanding ban on same-sex marriage, enforced transmedicalism and anti-discrimination protection laws only really exist in Tokyo. Just the facts. I’m of the belief that all games are political (to imply that being LGBT+ et al is inherently political is a whole other fun topic) and it can be worth thinking about such themes when it’s relevant to the setting, but it’s not necessary to have these things thought about to be a good game. I think that such things can be hinted at subtly without ever making it important or drawing attention.
And that’s as far as I’m willing to entertain the topic on a server that isn’t about political debate and in fact has a ban on it. It was offhandedly mentioned as an example of how you can take elements of the game plot and develop them further if (and preferably only if) it is useful to the overall narrative.
There are plenty of dating sims that have things like schedules and more interactive locations without being a ‘life sim’, including some of the very early examples. Sex lives are part of our everyday lives and short of a world where you can afford to bang all day, life is gonna intrude one way or the other. Nothing says bad life sim like mindlessly pressing buttons to raise an invisible stat to unlock content and the intent is to suggest how the amount of clicking can be brought to a bare minimum, allowing them to read the bulk of the game’s content ie; as a VN and not avoid areas simply because they’re more frustrating than others to navigate.
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To add on to what @Muffintopmanor1 said. The weight loss route now progresses from you working out enough through the other stages. All content is fine to do you just mainly need to avoid Akane making gluttonous decisions that will ruin her diet. The general theme here now is Akane is the feeder instead of the feedee. So you want to avoid overindulging and instead push food on the other girls. The route will mainly focus on Erika, Chika, and Nene (currently) as you play through the stages.
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- It’s an indie fetish game. Chill.
- Tokimeki Memorial, aside from having some of the most highest profile game developers like Hideo Kojima working on it at the time and NOT one dude with Blender and Ren’py, IS a life sim. Dating sims are a natural fork of the life sim genre, TM is much about replicating the ideal Japanese high school life as it is fucking the pink hair bitch.
I’m a harsh mistress when it comes to games made around here, but even I know asking them to do more than what is feasible is not fair. This game is ultimately not about making a full fledged RPG life experience. It’s ultimately not much different compared to the other WG VNs around here. Again, chill.
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I know the dev said the next update planned is fleshing out older scenes, but I do really hope to see a continuation of fattest Akane, just to see some more poses of that size.
Also, maybe changing clothes as a system? Akane is so damn cute but there’s really only like 4 outfits total she wears to anywhere outside of the store
Would love to support them and the hard work being put into this, but patreon doesn’t want my money.
Agreed, I ain’t playing this game for some deep story and it shouldn’t have one really.
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I mean this is a fantasy game. Why add uncomfortable real world issues into it if they don’t add to the fantasy? This isn’t a game about being true to yourself in the face of adversity (or at least not that kind) or about fighting against systematic oppression. It’s a game about some girls getting fat. The weight gain is the focus and about 99% of the games content ties into that with only one or two degrees of separation.
I’m all for developing story lines and giving the characters some more depth but the game is wide as heck and the current development direction has been great. I would much rather it continue growing naturally and then flesh some more stuff out when we have a better ‘end’ point.
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If there wasn’t a simple plugin already made for Ren’Py for this precise function (as I linked alongside the suggestion), I wouldn’t have made the suggestion. Having already-written code you can implement is something the Ren’Py developer community is actually pretty generous with. Having a day planner module doesn’t turn a game into ‘full-fledged rpg life experience’. You’re tossing out strawman arguments then asking me to chill, lol.
I think it depends on how easy it is to add in the additional renders for each scene where Akane might wear a different item of clothing, it’s one of the limitations of DAZ-esque 3D models, especially if you try to shoehorn in more outfits after already doing renders - other games have already found trouble with implementing outfit choices, though of course, it was also a lot of work for a 2D drawn game like Forks to do the initial work to allow outfit variety.
There are no DAZ-models in the game
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