Love at First Sight Reviews

This kinetic visual novel, according to the game's Extra features, originally began as a single artist/writer making fake mock-ups about dating a scarred, sweet, cyclopean schoolgirl for fun before deciding to actually make it a full-fledged story. And it's a good story, albeit a tad misleading at times. Mainly, Sachi Usui having only one large eye is just...how she was born. It certainly makes her unique, and the game's main title and Act titles are puns about it, but narratively it's just treated like a weird birthmark (aside from one brief scene during her first date where a suggestion that she tries on sunglasses goes awry). The ACTUAL main appeal, as it turns out, is scars; the player is never shown any wounds in detail, but Sachi does have a lot of marks and bruises from both being bullied and natural clumsiness, and there's some notable scenes in which the male protagonist describes touching them, first as part of an excuse to just touch Sachi but later as a direct affectionate act. The story itself, a slow-burn romance that takes about two hours to read, was very charming and well-written. I do have a couple of issues, and the writer themself stating in the game's Extras that they're aware of these issues does not negate them, but honestly they're pretty minor things. Firstly, each Act has one central scene with detailed art, but I feel like sometimes the focus was in the wrong place. For example, the chapter about protagonist Mamoru's first big date with Sachi has them plan to go see a movie together, with them spending time in town before the showing, and the big scene is holding hands and eating lunch at a cafe. So when it's time for the actual movie, the story skips from them entering the theatre to them leaving it a few hours later and talking about the film, despite it being the big climax of the date. And secondly, I feel like Sadokawa Rui, Sachi's bully, was under-utilized. While she's directly tied to Sachi's scars and lack of self-confidence, and also has history with another of Mamoru's friends, Rui only actually appears midway through the story and again in the final act, says some incredibly heinous things to Sachi in their last meeting, and ultimately [spoiler]decides she's bored of newly-confident Sachi and transfers schools rather than face on-screen consequences for nearly (accidentally, admittedly) killing her[/spoiler]. The friend she has history with does apparently try to fistfight her between the ending and After Story epilogue, but I still wish we got to know her more than just "a sadist that solely exists to cause the story to happen". Ultimately, I enjoyed reading through this story, even if it took me literal years between glancing through the first chapter and then actually reading the whole thing (side note: no Steam Cloud enabled, so my years-later read-through on a different laptop had to start from the beginning, but the story's short enough that it wasn't a huge loss). The main cast is endearing, the art is fantastic (including the Extras and the unique Steam Trading Card pictures), and I can't remember any significant errors in English even though the game's main language is Japanese. The one thing that might still turn people off of this is the price-to-length ratio, currently at about $13 CDN when not on sale for a two-hour read with no player interaction. But I still think this is a story, and a developer/artist/writer, worth keeping your EYE on!