Lair Land Story Reviews

Very interesting core, but massive disappointment for English players. Game is technically playable, but practically its painful mostly due to literally 0 language quality assurance, it would take 5 minutes(not counting the intro cutscene) for a translator to notice that something is very much not okay. Its less than few bucks of works worth, but devs don’t care. Most egregious, in game story choices(which dictate your character development, stats, story routes and endings) are not fully translated. Usually there are two choices per scene, and they copied the first choices dialog onto the second, didn’t bother to translate it, so you have 0 idea what you are chosing in the second dialog. Translation is very inconsistent, there are like 10 stats in the game, but there are around 25 of different words used in different places to relate to those stats. Blessings=devotion=piety, Kindness=humanity, patience=endurance, motivation=tension, sense=refinement=elegance?, In every place every stat is translated differently, so you have no idea what item and activity will affect what stat, and you can’t always make an educated guess because words can differ drastically and logically. More related to gameplay but tangentially to translation, every round you can visit 2-3 of around 12 locations in the city. If you miss one event related to a specific character, you are locked out of their route. Even if I was tryharding balancing visiting many locations at appropriate times, i didn’t have any romance ending because I was locked out of all routes which is very easy to do. There are around 4 years of gameplay, each year is divided into 4 seasons and seasons are subdivided into 3 time periods(early, mid, late). Each period lasts 2 rounds and if you miss one key locations in the specific time period you are screwed. And you have no idea if there is something important happening in a location or you will just get 1 liner generic dialogue with 0 effect and waste one of your visits, sometimes you can waste 3 explorations in different locations achieving nothing but repeatable generic 1 liners. Only solution would be guides which specifically say to which location you have to go at specific period to be able to have all events per character. But I didn’t find any guides in English, and those in Chinese/Japanese even translated don’t help as they use Chinese character names, and auto translations are very rough, especially with different stats(some event might require stats thresholds), but with 3 in game translations of one stat, and another one in auto translation good luck. Game should have at least some exclamation mark on important events, in game guide/journal, or at least don’t count repetable generic events as explorations. Similar problem is with endings, as there are around 40 endings in the game, but they have priority system, so if you could achieve multiple endings you will only get the highest in the priority list, with no guidance on what affects what ending and which have higher priority so what should you avoid. Sensible option would be to just give the player a choice at the end of all the endings that you passed the thresholds of, so you could choose yourself, even the worst one if you would want. Solution is again, guides and delicate gameplay, but again Chinese/Japanese barrier. Game is designed with replayability in mind(you have meta currency and unlock new clothes, hairstyles, starting bonuses), but because of these issues its not cool as you have no idea what you are doing in further playthroughs too. There is an option to skip text with CTRL, but it doesn’t skip the slow “animations” so every scene still takes a lot of time as its constantly stopping to display an animation(and game is very text heavy and VN loaded). Game is still very oldschool, only after playing I found out that this is 2007 game, and this can’t be even called a remaster or remake. There are classic audio issues like muffled sound and peaking like in the good old days anime, and the length of transitions between screens is criminal especially on modern hardware, and you encounter transitions like very few seconds, so there is A LOT of waiting. I really like the game core, want to love it, there are a lot of interesting ideas like rebuilding the city, research, Herol having his own romance options unrelated to Chilla, housing system and crafting, many characters are very interesting and unique, not 1 dimensional. Some ideas are half baked, i would like rebuilded buildings to give some more features(rebuilding a store gives you more items to buy, but with other buildings like city gate or street?), or research being more meaningful(unlocking new stuff not just giving you money/stats). In the and I think the game is good, and if it didn’t have 0 language quality assurance for English, and the routes/endings/exploring system would be better implemented it could be an amazing game, but in this state I can’t recommend it. I hope for Lair Land Story 2 to be something much greater. // There is a guide on steam called Menu "Glitch" Fix (thanks Tam!), where you can go into the events file and manually line by line fix the choices translation, so at least you know what you are choosing, but I didn’t find an option to fix the stat names(maybe they are hardcoded images?).