A solid story. The setting is well developed, and if you have snarky friends than the dialogue will seem quite natural and real. There are enough hidden twists and turns to warrant replay value, and the developers built NewGame+ in to help you with that. Grab a drink, get comfortable, and try to relax: even as the world is falling apart around you, VA-11 Hall-A offers a little haven. A respite from the troubles of post-modern times.
Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I found the whole experience very underwhelming and even grating at times.
- Gameplay. Yeah, it's a visual novel, but they felt the need to shove in a tedious drink mixing mini-game where you have to drag and drop 10-20 bottles while following a recipe just to move on with the story. It adds nothing but tedium. There are QWERT keyboard shortcuts to speed it up a bit, but it still drags the experience. It's also probably the only visual novel where you can't save at any time. You have to keep chugging until the next checkpoint, which might take a while.
- Story. No over-arching plot, it's all slice-of-life. There's a handful of customers that come in and do small talk which is surprisingly mostly centered around sex. E.g. there's a child prostitute (which is apparently okay because she's a robot) that keeps talking about her sexual escapades in graphic detail. There's a big-titted friend of the protagonist that keeps lamenting about her streak of one night stands. There's a dude obsessed with sex tourism and porn. There's a streamer girl who's pimping herself out any chance she gets. Etc etc. Yes, there are no actual sex scenes, but so much talk about tits, vaginas and shoving things up somebody's ass that you might find it more than a bit off-putting.
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.
I like that it's cyberpunk and it has a great atmosphere. I don't like that some of the most interesting characters in the game aren't developed at all by the end of the novel and you're left with a lot of questions.
There's a hologram that the main character can only see that shows up at odd times and teases her. You never learn who it is or why they're there.
There's a terrorist attack on a bank that one of your customers was involved in. It's never really explained who carried out the attack or why. All you learn is that some servers there were hacked and that there was a huge data leak. That's it. No further development.
There's messages being sent to Lilim throughout the city and they're all acting odd and glitching out during this time. It all blows over like nothing happened and it's not explained what the messages were about.
The plot focuses on the main character's love life. She's a bisexual and broke up with a girlfriend years ago. The game ends when her ex's sister shows up to talk with you and you reconcile. This makes the game kind of shallow. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this world but the writer seemed to be focused on making a dystopian future where everyone is gay or bisexual or dates sex robots. All that other interesting stuff be damned.
This makes the whole game disappointing. It looks like this studio had a great team except for the writer. If you're going to make a visual novel, you first need a good writer.
