Notch - The Innocent LunA: Eclipsed SinnerS Bewertungen

Welp, if there ever was an experience I would describe as a "mixed bag", this would be it. I would describe this VN as "16-year-old Wong-Chu from the province of Gan-Su watches some badly subtitled bootleg copies of Higurashi and Umineko, doesn't really understand any of the themes but likes how they taste on his tongue, and proceeds to write his own VN with no writing experience whatsoever" This SCREAMS "first draft from an inexperienced writer" - the beginning, past the kind of intriguing prologue, is horrendous! The MC is so monumentally dumb that I'd suspect he has some kind of intellectual disability, the childhood friend character that inadvertedly motivates his actions for the entire story is basically not a character but a plot device wrapped in the driest, most boring execution of a stereotype possible. It is not until the fourth chapter that things get tolerable, even quite interesting around the internal split between the "Alpha" and "Omega" episodes, and that is because for a while, the story focuses on an entirely different set of characters only tangentially related to the prior focus of the plot - and they are VAST improvements. Hell, the author managed to actually use my low expectations against me and pleasantly surprise me by introducing what would end up becoming my favorite character of this flawed piece of work as one of the most unlikeable guys possible, before putting his actions into context and turning him into a tragic antihero that was WAY more interesting to read about than the lobotomized MC. The worldbuilding has some genuinely interesting ideas, and I did not see coming who ended up being the murderer (well, I did know before the MC, because it was revealed to the reader before he understood). That juxtoposes to some very contrived and chemistry-less romances building the basis for the semi-competent melodrama that dominates the second half. I will be frank: If I had not bought this game in a sale for a lot off, this would be a thumbs down. However, I am aware that this is the developer's first game and they were a one-man team at the time. So in that context, the quality of the art and the improvement in writing overtime makes me optimistic that their later works will be much more worthwhile. UPDATE: I am now in chapter nine, and one character is basically being sockpuppeted by the author right now to let out his own increasingly evident disdain for the idiot MC he created. This kind of fun stuff is why I'm enjoying the second half: you can just psychoanalize the creative process so well~