VA-11 Hall-A's visuals and music are consistently great, but they can't make up for the very obvious shortcomings in the writing department. What drastically amplifies this problem is the fact that outside of the dialogue and the story there is really nothing going on in this game, the whole game hinges on its writing to a very large degree. At least in my case, this turned out to be its fatal flaw. From my perspective, the writing is vaguely interesting at best and downright cringeworthy at worst. The main trend is a complete lack of subtlety, making most characters come across as comically weird and zany to the point where it becomes really apparent that no real person would ever speak or act this way. When the characters' traits aren't turned up to eleven and basically paraded across the screen, the dialogue still remains incredibly forced and unnatural in many ways. There are multiple instances of people going on terribly ham-fisted expository tangents that almost made me embarassed to read them because of how badly they fit into the conversation and at least once I felt a character's presentation and their actions were completely contradictory to each other. These things constantly undermine the believability of the characters and make them seem more like cobbled together collections of wacky traits instead of actual people. To top it all off, the characters that hide under this bumpy presentation often seemed to me to be little more than annoying teenagers anyway. Where the game falls apart completely is when it attempts to slip in banal life advice of the "just be yourself"-variety that just ends up coming across as patronising. So while the visuals and the soundtrack deserve praise, I wish they were attached to a more enjoyable game. In my eyes they just can't carry a whole game by themselves, especially a text-heavy one like this. Since there is no accounting for taste, I'd say at least make sure you enjoy or at least don't mind the writing.
