I'm Oh, So Busy...: A Week with Yoshimi Reviews

[quote][h1]Check out my website: [url=https://pixeldie.com/]Pixel Die[/url], for more content.[/h1][/quote] The glory of the Slice of Life genre for games, sitcoms, and TV is the exclusion of a plot to allow more time for the characters, their relationships, and their emotions. It's a testament to the writer's credentials when you can keep an audience motivated to watch without a constant rise in tension and the proverbial exhale when the set conclusion sets in. Sometimes a week can be eventful in more ways than one, but that's all you're getting here. I'm Oh, So Busy touches down on the life of Yoshimi Hertz, a budding woman moving from the comfort of her hometown in Iowa to the bustling future of her new career in Boston. After a rather turbulent flight, a tired but excited Yoshimi gathers her belongings and heads to her new apartment. With a nice high-rise apartment to settle into, Yoshimi and her pet ferret Cinnamon Bun tackle a week of starting a new job, figuring out new social norms, and generally just trying to make it in a new chapter of her hectic life. Yoshimi fills her time getting acclimated to the new area: signing up (and dealing with the below-average male interaction) to social apps that may or may not rhyme with “Hinder”, trying out the new gym, making cupcakes for a needed sugar rush. She'll take time to hang out with Cinnamon Bun, supply you with multiple quotes from multiple authors, and reminiscence about past times that pull double duty to humanize Yoshimi and beef up the word count. IOSB's intended dark humor seeps through during her off-time, where it feels like Yoshimi garners an almost cursed amount of bad luck. This can lead to some overused self-depreciation and bickering which can tailor on for a bit longer than wanting. What's most interesting is the profession that Yoshimi spends on her day-to-day: a telecommunicator for troubled individuals struggling with mental issues stemming from financial ruin, past trauma, and others. It's a topic not seen many times, if at all, in visual novels where the protagonist is the common hope for troubled strangers in a non-dating fashion, especially so in the office environment format. These conversations span over multiple days, getting calls from people in need and seeing how Yoshimi's words help their current situation. Each caller is fully voiced to help follow along with the emotions tethered to each person, and while some conversations do carry that dark humor detailed throughout the game, some are just uncomfortable to run through. But that's the harsh reality of some folks: that some people have it much worse than others and need a helping hand at times of need, regardless who it's from. It's a bold step to even tackle mental stigmas this way, and Berry Guild does well to carefully mix humor and seriousness together so Yoshimi doesn't come off as unintentionally cumbrous. IOSB accompanies Yoshimi's daily life with a hodge-podge of lo-fi instrumentals that carry a nice tune throughout the story. I definitely enjoy the lo-fi genre, so I have no complaints with a nice soundtrack to guide me through a VN, but the upbeat and bass-thumping tracks felt a little done-teaf with some of the later calls at Yoshimi's office and some other serious scenes and could've used a softer touch to mesh in with those moments. While Yoshimi is characterized to be clumsy and ill-fated, IOSB reluctantly follows in stride. While Yoshimi's callers are fully voiced, she herself will chime in with little phrases or noises to accentuate her dialogue. These range from mild-mannered and humorous to downright obnoxious at times, with the former outweighing the latter. The menu tabs, which can be bright to the point of not being able to see text, have certain places where they can break the game when done in a specific manner. For example, when accessing the options, the New Game button is still usable and will start a fresh game while your current game's screen is still up. The ending is a tinge confusing with new things being shown that were never alluded to right at the end, and makes me wonder if I missed a path or flag that would've explained things further, but seeing as this is seemingly set up as a single path Visual Novel with no choice screens throughout the title, I don't think I did. But do I feel like I wasted my 3 hours? Not really. I'm Oh, So Busy's execution is sloppy and some choices made may not have panned out in The Berry Guild's favor, but it's a lot like Yoshimi's journey to Boston and to her new independent future: rough around the edges, obnoxious to a fault, but ultimately worth the effort to see what the future has to offer. [quote][h1]Follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33247611/]A Review Is Worth 1,000 Words[/url] for more Steam Reviews.[/h1][/quote]

For what is advertised as a dark comedy drama this story seems largely void of dark comedy or drama, and is mostly just a monotonous internal monologue simulation. While it is expected for a story to take time to escalate, forty minutes in and absolutely nothing has happened besides the protagonist relentlessly talking to themself about the most ordinary boring things. Forty minutes it takes for the story to progress from the protagonist arriving at the airport, taking a taxi, then arriving and falling asleep in their new apartment. The protagonist has almost nothing interesting or funny to say about anything, all they can do is perpetually ramble about extremely ordinary and unexciting things. It doesn't even serve much to establish their character as the main thing the reader learns is their academic background and basic childhood. Forty minutes for that information, forty minutes of that information continuously rehashed for zero advantage. It seems like this might be translated but even so the fundamental way that the protagonist talks feels scripted. They add unnecessary descriptive words and terms onto their phrasing as if they're purposely trying to speak like a written narrative, which is generally not how humans talk. Nor do humans internally monologue by standing still and relentlessly musing about random aspects of their past and whatever else they can think up. The protagonist even gives readers a play by play of what they're doing, "Oh I'd better go to the lobby now and blah blah blah" why are they thinking this instead of just doing it; why is their monologue scripted so inorganically. The story appears to be entirely founded on their internal monologue yet their internal monologue isn't written like an actual genuine monologue; it's like a combination of a narrative description and a backstory description pretending to be the internal monologue of a character. It doesn't seem like any other characters in the story have talksprites. Which is boring, immersion breaking and only continues to place more emphasis on the rambling protagonist. The protagonist themself looks great, although some of their talksprite sets are strangely unaligned. The default, suit wearing state of the protagonist is fine but other sets of their talksprites like the one where they have their airport luggage are inconsistent. In those sets, whenever their expression changes their position on the screen also slightly changes because apparently the different images are not aligned properly so every pose is inexplicably standing in a slightly different place. Additionally, the backgrounds are a strange combination of seemingly drawn images and also images that look like bad three dimensional models. The grocery store, which can be seen in the screenshots, looks especially bad. Some of the backgrounds are also incomplete as they randomly lack details like; an entire section of the world. The airport exterior has absolutely nothing in the distance, the entire world is just an open blue sky there's no grass fields or distant city or anything. Many of the city backgrounds also lack buildings in the distance, giving the impression that the world is just a blue void. And everytime the protagonist does go to a new location the dialogue box feels the need to tell the reader the exact name and time of the new setting before the next scene begins, further breaking the flow of the story. Forty minutes in and the protagonist is still in their apartment, still talking to themself about pointlessness. I'm desperately reading through the text hoping something interesting will happen soon and nothing does, the self indulgent monologue just keeps going. That is not a feeling a story should ever give to its reader, at any point. Especially in the beginning, which is supposed to be the hook. Maybe this story actually is a dark comedy drama slice-of-life but apparently it takes at least forty minutes to become that. Perhaps it takes even longer to become that, or it never becomes that. Either way after forty minutes of listening to monotonous rambling I'd lost interest. Readers could actually get this same experience from just finding a selfish human and attempting to socialize with them, resulting in the human rambling for forty minutes egocentrically about themself. That's actually just what this is, for at least the first forty minutes. If you're interested in finding some games that I do positively recommend they can be found on my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38950844-Anoemalous/] here [/url].