This is one of those games that does not stand the test of time. Admittedly, I heard it had a good story which is why I checked it out. It is an RPG Maker game and I've played plenty. What really destroys this game is its horrible gameplay. In most RPG Maker games, you can actually run. Here, your character moves slow and the reason why that's important is because you spend most of the game doing countless fetch quests where your walking around an environment and clicking all over the place. Not to mention that in most RPG Maker games, you can click "Z" to interact with items and you just can't do that here which makes the controls very archaic. It doesn't help that the controls are not always responsive either. Unfortunately one of the main characters, Dr. Watts, just proves to be annoying and an overall jerk. Imagine going to a mortuary and having the person there just make dumb and lame jokes about your deceased loved ones in a vain attempt to be funny. And that's exactly what this is: constant unprofessional cringe dialogue ruining a somewhat interesting story regarding the client and his wife. Then there's these really lame block puzzles that you have to do just to advance the plot. In essence, this game would have been way better as a visual novel rather than all this pointless slow walking and clicking which serve little purpose. These bad gameplay elements may have been okay for the time this game released, but I simply can't recommend this game to anyone nowadays.
Most idol games/themes feature girls that just want to invigorate the world with optimism through their song. Add in a pinch of cringe and you make an idol game all complete. This is one of those games where I played it for the hentai, but stayed for the story. It is clear that the writer of this story did a lot of research into how the idol industry even works. Whereas most idols in other games media show only the positive side of the industry, this game seeks to add a really good balance of optimism and realism. Each of the girls represents an anime trope but every one of them has their own deep seated problems and issues that the MC needs to resolve. Through each of these issues, we can see the ugliness of the idol world; an industry created on to serve the shallowness and whims of a male audience. Due to that, it makes for an awesome read. As for the hentai scenes, they are basically your average vanilla scene from any other hentai game. Overall, a very fun adventure.
Children of the Zodiarcs is one of those tactical RPG's where you play a small group of impoverished people trying to fight against an oppressive government. As someone whose favorite board game is Dominion, I was quite looking forward to the deck based skill system. Just like any deck building game, you want to make your decks lean and contain only the most vital cards to your strategy; hence why having a deck of 20 tends to be ideal as it allows you to consistently draw your best cards. Unfortunately, this gets old fast as you find yourself in situations where you wish you had a particular ability and RNG has screwed you over. In a normal RPG, you are given access to all your skills (after you learn them from leveling of course) with your only limiting factor being your mana pool. This allows you to strategically choose abilities to use based on your situation. In this game, you spend all of it tailoring your deck trying to reduce RNG so that you can hopefully get the cards you want. Even worse is the dice system. You can manually roll dice and pray to the RNG gods that the dice give you something favorable to whatever situation you're in. I set mine to automatic rolls since re-rolling can cause you to accidentally change dice that have already been rolled. You can customize your dice by destroying other dice, but the dice is not as customizable as they seem; generally your worst outcomes can't be overwritten by something better. The more I played, the more I realized that I'd rather have dice that all have the same result. In most RPG's, you're given a character and and then there's some sort of growth tree where you tailor your characters to get stronger. Here, you're given bad RNG and you spend the whole game trying to remove as much RNG as possible from these poorly made characters. And finally, their official description says this is "story-driven" which is a lie. There isn't much story development in this game at all. It's more gameplay focused.
