十三月のふたり姫／The 13th month Reviews

Pretty crude game in terms of technical execution, those who make games on the Unity engine are crying from f*cking Spanish shame....

Cool story and visuals, despite some small inconveniences like it being auto-save only. The premise lends itself well to having enjoyable and unique encounters as well. I really got sucked into this story and just finished it one sitting. ...Also Crawling Chaos accidentally becoming the biggest wingman is so funny, 10/10. [spoiler]Whoa, rando dudes visiting you weren't your true love, and instead it was this girl who was protecting you for a literal millennia? What a surprise... took you both long enough to realize. [/spoiler]

I don't really know whether to recommend this game or not, I will err on the side of "No" The good : the arts style is beautiful, the music is good. The ok: the story is well interesting, it is not ground breaking, you can see the twist a mile away. The bad: the game is very slow, not that the pacing is slow, for a Novel game, and every time you move to another sentence and it took 2 sec to clear up single alphabet of the previous sentence, it makes the game very slow. There are some bug, I think they are bugs because sometime there is no voice at all. This is more like a Kinetic Novel than your normal VN.

[h1]A great VN marred by serious technical issues[/h1] The game opens in Japanese, without an option to change the language - which is very alarming. Thankfully this wasn't a problem to me, but anyone who cannot read Japanese to find the English option might have issues. There are very basic VN features missing. No auto mode, no text speed increase/decrease, no individual voice options, you [u]cannot save whenever you want[/u]! Checkpoints are not displayed, so you have to try and play chapters in their entirety, to avoid having to re-read the same parts. Because [u]you can't even skip already read text[/u]. And this way getting to where you left off takes a very long time. That's not good at all. A lot of lines are voiced, but even more aren't. What's there is excellent and I wish there were more. The game (at least in English) likes to auto advance between voiced lines if multiple characters are talking on the same page, so lines are sometimes cut short and a new voice is played. It's disorienting in a bad way. It is very hard to advance to the next page after all the text is displayed. The game only allows mouse left click to advance, you can't use the keyboard at all... no setting to change this either. Worst of all, for some reason [u]it takes 5-6 clicks to register that you want to advance[/u], even after the arrow appears on screen to indicate it is safe to move on. The text is displayed on top of the artwork, without a textbox. Since the background and characters move around, it's a bit hard to read the text sometimes. Not obstructing the art was likely a conscious decision, but it would've been nice to include a textbox as an option at the least. The English font used already makes reading a bit difficult. After stopping for the day and returning to the game the next, I accidentally misclicked and selected "New Game" instead of "Continue" and the game [u]wiped all my progress[/u] and [u]deleted all save files[/u]. Having to speed up the game and attempting to click faster than humanly possible to reach where I stopped, was not a good time, nor a substitute for a skip function. This feature should be the bare minimum for a VN released this day and age. While looking for the save file to make a backup (in case I mess up again, there is no warning about your saves being deleted), I found [u]a folder literally called "FutariHime_BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame" in the game's files[/u]. This is sad. Especially since the art and story are quite captivating. But with things as they are, avoid unless patched.