I appreciate not being a misandrist! If you think its badly written, then that’s your opinion! Writing is hard and I’m still working on improving each day! If you have any criticism, please, tell me what you don’t like about the writing.
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Hey you’re okay man, I’m just trying to make something fun to me (and to the other people that contribute to this game.) If other people enjoy it, that’s awesome! If its not for you, that’s fine and I get it. No hard feelings.
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I think the game has potential. The fault is completely mine for misunderstanding. Please keep up what you’re doing.
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I suppose, but I would prefer something that reflects what I want. (a girl getting fat for her boyfriend) Seeing women doing it with each other just doesn’t do it for me, though I’m clearly in the vast minority here. And that’s perfectly fine. Far be it from me to look down on someone for something like this. After all, we’re all outcasts in the grand scheme of things, right? I’m glad you all have things you can enjoy, even if I can’t. After all, if no one else likes what I like, it’d be unreasonable to expect artists to make art of it. Though I’ve seen a lot of things with two girls, but only one of them is fat. How is that more of what guys would like? How is a skinny girl and a fat girl any different from a skinny guy and a fat girl? I’m genuinely curious. Perhaps in time I’ll become like you, and be able to fully enjoy all of the art out there.
Alrighty.
‘Isekai’ as a collection of tropes is a niche thing, itself within a niche, but the arc of ‘mundane character travels to fantasy world’ is ubiquitous. Hell, you could even say Narnia has an isekai-esque story if you read the last book. So, when I’m analysing this, I’m not gonna limit it to that particular section of japanese media. Going in focusing on a genre rather than on making a story or a game is a needless crutch that greatly constrains what the narrative can do and mostly for the worse.
The core questions I have with the narrative thus far are the lack of a clear idea of what it’s trying to do, a failure to really make the most of the story arc and a setting that really just doesn’t feel compelling or interesting.
Some dialogue suggests there’s an intent to make this a parody, other lines later on seem to be more or less genuine. The trouble with this is that if you keep flipping between sincerity and silliness scene by scene, the tone will be all over the place. Focusing on either is what I would suggest, though if this does focus on parodying isekai works, you’ll be assuming your readers have read a niche (isekai), within a niche (‘anime’) while playing a niche kind of game (vn) with a niche audience (FAs). That’s pretty specific, lol. Besides, anime was a mistake. /s The more knowledge you assume, the less any person without the exact same understanding as you can enjoy it.
Rather than focus on the perspective of the main character, making them a blank slate AND skipping any kind of setup means that we have to fill in the blanks. That basically mandates that most choices early in the narrative will focus on letting us figure out who they are and how they’re reacting to their experiences, rather than introducing multiple characters and leading the story to focus on them instead. I don’t think the story does enough to do that. The net result is a lot of ‘tell’ and not a lot of ‘show’.
For example, we are told these (presumably) love interests think we’re attractive, but that rings hollow if we don’t even know what the mc looks like. We are told that the MC is now in a fantasy world, but the MC fails to react to it in any particularly interesting way. Being transplanted into a magical world is always more or less an allegory for real-world travel experiences, yet we don’t get a chance to go through that, since we’re cooped up with folks we as the MC don’t know.
This is where the first two problems intersect; it’s harder to write about the MC’ experience of culture shock if we haven’t even established what their past life was. If we force the MC to say what it was, it rather than showing it within the game, then it’s inherently going to be less engaging and more reliant of endless exposition and word dumps. If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding, basically.
So, when we ignore all that higher-level stuff, there’s a bunch of nitpicks, mostly in the form of all the dialogue that doesn’t happen.
Why are Aria and Nora trying to recruit a complete stranger that they somehow knew was from a ‘different world’, rather than from somewhere else in their own?
Why would they decide to care for the MC rather than stay away, or act more dignified if they really thought the MC was someone special?
Why would people in a fantasy realm talking about levels be ignored?
Why are is Aria unaware of how the MC was transported when she was the one doing the summoning?
Why is a fantasy character using the internet abbreviation of tl;dr without immediately getting side-eyed?
Why does Nora call us lovely before we even say anything or have in any way?
Why isn’t the MC objecting to the prospect of being immediately plunged into mortal danger right after they already lost their first life and only thinks about it several minutes later in an internal monologue?
Why is the tavern letting a complete stranger enter if everyone is worried about monsters?
Why is the MC not reacting to being inside a game?
How do we ‘make an impression’ on a person without saying or doing anything?
If it’s gonna be a parodic satire, I suggest you commit to the bit, otherwise all the random things thrown into the mix aren’t going to land. If the MC isn’t going to react and simply goes along with everything as if it were normal, then the joke is wasted and we’re playing as someone that’s either a complete idiot or a stupendously boring waste of space and time that has no business getting a second shot or being the MC of a game.
Ultimately, I think that if you make everything generic, then there’s nothing really interesting here to work with other than ‘oh hey the person with the horns said skyrim, I know skyrim!’ or ‘the elf called me a pervert, they must be tsundere like my favourite anime, cory in the house’. The whole point of a blank slate character is to fill that slate with something, otherwise it isn’t a story, it’s just an animatronic ride at an amusement park where you move between pandering scenes that aren’t funny enough to ignore how artificial and forced they are.
So basically, the game feel like it’s about to become highschool of the dead but with wizards instead of classmates, monsters instead of zombies and pop culture jokes instead of gore.
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I’ve read over your comments and I appreciate the time you took to make them. Ultimately, however, I just do not think this is the game for you. I doubt you’ll enjoy it, even in its best form, because your view on media and the world seem just radically different than my own. And thats okay! But like, the goal of this is to evoke the feeling of something like, Konosuba, ya know? It dances the line between parody and genuine constantly.
I’m sorry if you didn’t enjoy what you experienced, but I’d appreciate not insulting it either. I’ll accept criticisms, but some of the comments you make feel like more an attack on me as a writer than a comment on the story.
I don’t think this is the game for you, and encourage you to follow the development of another game on this forum, if you have such a radical opposition to the current tone and concept of the game.
Thank you for your time.
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Having a different worldview isn’t a reason to not enjoy something and there’s a bunch of examples against that. If something is interesting or impressive enough, it can transcend almost any opinion gap. After all, I’d highly doubt that every fan of disco elysium is a communist, or that every fan of tom cruise is a scientologist. Having different tastes isn’t that melodramatic. If we all limited ourselves to only reading, seeing or participating in something we agreed with on every level, life would be much harsher and joyless. Getting feedback from someone with a different perspective is inevitable, because no matter how hard you try, any creative work that anyone makes will come into contact with people that see things differently.
A blend of reality and comedy fantasy can work, but straddling the gap is not as easy to pull off well. There’s only one Terry Pratchett for instance (the colour of magic was a great read as a kid) and the way you reconcile fantasy and reality is what determines how it is perceived. I kinda like the approach of say, Dai Mahou Touge, where the comedy is derived from taking the implications of a magical kingdom with reality-warping powers entering the real world at face value.
How choices are designed in a VN is important. If you want the MC to say something deliberately crass but you want to let the player feel like they’re in control, you can let them pick from a selection of responses. After all, what if the MC (or rather, the player that’s self-inserting into the MC) really does like tits (or bellies) over asses? There’s a lot of opportunities to give the MC more depth; you don’t have to use them all, but the more the MC can speak and act rather than saving observations to monologue the better it will be as a VN.
At the end of the day, criticisms of a narrative structure aren’t personal unless you want them to be. The art’s promising and you’ve done a better job of proofreading than most on this site. The fact I am talking about higher-level writing concepts rather than what kingdom without a ‘g’ on the posters might imply is itself a compliment. The intent with that feedback is to challenge you to do more than ‘konosuba, but fats’ and to analyse narrative choices with the reader/player in mind, one that will always have different knowledge and experiences to yours, rather than as the writer.
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I understand what you mean, but it feels kinda insulting to push this idea of shooting for a higher level story and making these grand comparisons when - this is something I and one or two friends have been working on in our spare time, for fun, and with no financial support.
I accept many of the criticisms and know I need to improve, but I’m genuinely intimidated with how high you’re shooting. I’m not trying to create Apostles here. “Konosuba, but fats” is around the level of my goal, unless things change overtime. I’m just trying to make a game that I have fun playing.
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You’re making great stuff. I wouldn’t sweat one dissenting opinion, just because it’s long
If we’re not enjoying the process of creating something, then why are we making it? You’ve got the scope of your project outlined, and that’s enough
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That was cute! The personalities of the girls are well hinted, it can make for some really nice drama.
I like the style of the sprites, speaking of which will there be path Shinigami path? Asking for a friend.
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You know, I’m kinda dumb. I thought this was the old Isekai RPG Maker game. And since I already played it I never downloaded the demo. Color me surprised when I decided to re-download the game for old times sakes and was met with a visual novel I’d never read before 
!
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Yeaaa that was a different project - unfulfilling Isekai Sim if I recall! We came up with our ideas at similar times lol
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Thank you! And yes, I intend to make shinigami as equally important as the party. That’s my goal for right now.
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Is this the same game from all your threads talking about how to code in renpy? Or are those threads related to some sort of future project?
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That thread is for this My Roommate is a Feeder! (WIP Renpy Game)
This thread had an old demo a long while ago and was removed at a point. And has since been updated with the new WIP build.
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Those 2 threads are about a project where I was just, basically trying to learn how to do a life sim code. I was interested in it because of other games I enjoyed, and was at a writers block AND coding roadblock on this game lol.
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This demo is amazing - tell your artist (Jaltz iirc?) to keep it up because this game is off to a great start imo.
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Can the protagonist gain weight in later updates?
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We currently don’t have plans to do so, but I am not hard against the idea