Reseñas de Case 03: True Cannibal Boy

This review will act more as a review for the entire series than just this game, since in a lot of ways this game feels like the culmination of a lot of threads from the previous games and it will also have spoilers for all the games including this one. I love the cynical sense of humor these games have, it reminds me a lot of the the kind of unapologetic humor you can find in some author's first game's or books before they start taking themselves more seriously, and I always think it's a shame they lose it so it's always refreshing to find something new that has that same kind of SOUL The characters and dialogues in these games are really fun, but also surprisingly thoughtfull, I was surprised at how naturally the series treats Brucie's sexuality, Grete for example never even thinks about the posibility of the other person not being a girl since brucie doesn't look like the stereotypical gay, but when she finds out she doesn't outright say "Wow he likes dudes" out loud and that's just how those things happen in real life, and this might also just be my interpretation, but I think that seeing someone "normal" like Brucie be so open about his own sexuality must have helped Lily choose to go after Sally, since we know she had been hiding her crush for a long time and as we see in one of the endings, even when she confesses her feelings to Sally she just hits her with the typical "I love you too besty" since she had assumed she has heterosexual(like most people do). Some times stories with LGBT themes idealizes reality and makes everyone ultra suportive and tolerant(and that's totally ok depending on the type of story or the circles in which the characters move) but these games nail it. Jade and Brucie are amazing and I smile every time they're on scene, but I think that making them secondary characters was the right choicefor diferent reasons: 1. I feel like we've already learned enough about them from case 1 and 0, making new characters the MC makes it easier to put them at risk(since jade and brucie are pretty OP) gives each game it's own essence and it makes it easier to understand them(something I feel Lucy from Case 1 could have used.) 2. It makes them feel like a force the player has no control over, like a detective in a book where the protagonist also has something to hide(altho in this case they would definitely not care about that unless it interfiered with them getting paid lol) Another thing is that most of these games feel different from eachother. Case 0 is a VN, Loser Reborn is actually one of the most unique RPGs I've played even outside of this series(and that's pretty funny since going into it I thought it would just be a parody RPG with not much of it's own lol), Case 2's dice gameplay was also really cool and even tho Extra Case didn't have much player agency the constant looping structure made it feel unique too. In these sense I feel that case 3 didn't have much to separate it for the rest outside of maybe being able to move around the world map, but it doesn't bother me that much since it would be imposible to make each game unique. Another thing I respect from these games is it's smart use of assets, the dev knows what things are worth spending time into and which are not, reducing dev time and the price of the games. This might sound like a weird thing to coment on but as someone that's starting to make games on my own I really wish I could do that T-T. Seeing the map from loser reborn be used in Case 3, or hearing the same silly song in every game are things I really liked, but I wish that each game added at least one or two new songs. My only serious complaint with the series is it's overuse of love triangles, we had one with Bruce, Hans and Grete, we had one with Sally, her ex and her sister and we had one with Lily, Sally and Marty(and we could even say there was one with Lucy, Saphire and Black), when I saw that Lily had a crush on Sally I laughed because I wouldn't believe it was happening again lol. I can't wait to see what else Sounding Stone is cooking for us, but I'm sure it's gonna be amazing. Edit: I would like to add that Loser reborn is my favourite over all but when it comes to atmosphere and story Case 0 takes the cake, and the next one, "club 4 horror stories" looks like it's gonna be closer to case 0 so I can't wait!