Select Oblige Reviews

Pretty fun

It’s hard to describe my feelings regarding Select Oblige. The reading experience in English was rather janky due to poor-quality edits with many typos and incorrect pronouns/proper names; plotwise, the drama within each route was…bizarre ranging from completely redundant to utterly ridiculous. It’s understandable to call it a bad game like many reviews from the English readers community. Nonetheless, I fell in love with Select Oblige because of its characters. The protagonist was no pushover as he would risk everything to protect and fight for what he loved while the heroines were all unique and had their own distinctive development. The romance, in particular, was very well-written, you can strongly feel the sexual tension as well as the intimacy between the couple in the heroines’ route from the beginning till the end aside from the drama part. The heroines’ designs are cute and the H-scenes were so HOT, I hope other side characters like Five and the Twin will have their own routes in the future fandisc, otherwise, it would be a waste for such cute designs. Furthermore, I really like the theme of Select Oblige being Human Bonding. Despite the peculiar drama plotline, the joy of creating bonds between people was wonderfully presented in every route. Overall, if you’re an English reader, I would recommend you wait a bit longer for a potential proofread in the future, or at least until it gets a bigger sale, and THEN give this story a chance; it’s surprisingly charming in its own way.

As everyone pointed it out by now, the translation is on the weak side. It feels like 3 people made it, sometimes it feels like it was done by machine, sometimes it feels like it was done by someone who is not very good at English but tried their best and sometimes it is just nearly perfectly ok, done by the one person who was really up for the task when it comes to pure skill. It does not appear an editor was involved to QC either because there are too many typesetting errors which would have been likely caught. Behind all that, there is a genuinely good visual novel hiding. I just wish they let the translation bake for at least another 3-6 months. Who knows, maybe it will be improved upon over time. Length wise it is fairly long despite only having 4 routes. (took me 30+ hours) The story while also taking place in a school like a thousand other visual novels, tries to innovate the premise a bit which I think worked really well here. The waifus are great and apart from one route I really enjoyed most of them. There are some pretty interesting twists thrown in as well. Voice acting is superb and art is also great, the amount of different facial expressions are pretty insane actually, those are all hand drawn, there is no modern emote system present from what I observed. Intro song rocks and soundtrack overall is decent. A fairly big technical downside is resolution, it is only 720p but at least super resolution was implemented so I had no problem enjoying it on my 1440p screen. (just do not oversharpen it as it gets really obvious and things start to look a bit weird) Hoping Five and the Twins get a fandisc one day, there is quite a good amount of potential left. As always, get the free patch for the full experience. If you can get over the weak translation I recommend it.

The translation wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. There were parts that were poorly done, but overall, it was readable. I'm not a fan of Kaname's route, mainly because it feels forced or overwhelming. The romance is there in the end, but it all felt like a forced marriage and considering her family status I would understand but I can't really feel their love for each other. Eve and Tori's routes, on the other hand, are the complete opposite. The emotions are there, and you can feel their love for the MC. They are definitely wife material. I'm also not a fan of Kukuru's route. It was decent-not as bad as Kaname's but it felt bland to me. I am, however, happy that Ryuuji and Five got their own part of the story and endings. I always thought they would remain side characters with no progression, other than talking to the MC and other characters (for five) and [spoiler]being the antagonist during the early story (for Ryuuji)[/spoiler], leaving them undeveloped by the end. It would've been great or amazing even if Hana, Sora, Nana or even Shiori had gotten their own side-story scenes. I'm quite sad that this wasn't included. I was honestly hoping while I was doing Kaname's route that Hana and Sora will at least join in the "Action" but there was none. Overall: 7/10