The only other visual novel I've "played" was some anime thing with like 3 dialogue choices in the whole game. I though all visual novels were like that for years, and were all trash. This game is incredibly well written. I was happy to go through again and again, seeing all the options and branches I could figure out. Some branches had further branches, and options had further options - I loved being surprised even on the second or third time a seemingly-familiar scenario began to unfold. Couldn't recommend highly enough.
A game that is crushingly difficult even on the easiest settings, combined with no ingame tutorial (only a handful of extremely short youtube videos). I won't pretend to be even average at strategy games, but having my entire company killed by the lowest-level quests and enemy mobs, repeatedly and with no obvious way to tell what I may or may not be doing wrong, is a real quick way to get potentially interested players like me to stop playing.
The initial sketch of the game sounds interesting - managing a town, equipping and sending out squads to adventurers. Unfortunately, both aspects are pretty meager. The town management consists of building a small handful of unique structures in predefined spots in an already-existing town, and the hero squads require both not enough and too much attention. Not enough in the sense that there's nothing you can do with them once they're sent out beyond a few spells you can trigger for minor effects, and too much in that they constantly require fiddling - restocking health potions, healing damage after a sortie, and restoring their morale before it gets too low. All of which require only the click of a button or two. Either fully automate it and give me other stuff to do, or make it more involved.
A solid gameplay progression from having to mine and gather every resource yourself, on up to almost fully-automated harvesting. Great for zoning out a bit and listening to a podcast, or just relaxing with some simple "to do" tasks.
When I was young and inexperienced, I bought a copy of MOO 3 from a discount bin at the local computer store. I'd heard good things about the series, and wanted to give it a try. What I found was a mess of sliders, selectors, and drop-menus. I could play it, but I never had fun with it, and couldn't believe this kind of game was what everyone was raving about. Years later, I recieved a copy of MOO 2 as a gift, and decided to try that; now I couldn't believe how much better the second was than the third. How could a series get worse in such a drastic way? What led the creators from the fun of MOO 2 to the horror of MOO 3?
