Right…
I was actually wondering whether I should bother to blog
this one, given the potentially embarrassing subject matter and the fact that
it is barely even a game, but if this online tracker of my journey to beat all
my games is going to mean anything, I need to be showing the worst of this as
well as the best. So yeah. I played, beat and yes, completed Sweet Fantasy.
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| This was the first thing to come up on Google Image Search... |
This visual novel was brought to my attention by the
Co-Optional Podcast hosted by TotalBiscuit, Dodger and Jesse Cox in the release
section they do at the end. I enjoy the show and it is how I hear about a lot
of games, and having heard a brief description of Sweet Fantasy I thought I’d
give it a go. I’d never had a visual novel game before, so I don’t know if this
one was a good one to get started on. It’s about a dryad called Pumpkin, who is
hopelessly in love with her mistress, Ms Amethyst, and she’s trying to make a
love potion in order to get Amethyst to sleep with her.
So the question is: Is it any good? And the answer is no.
The idea is puerile, but it allows an unashamed exploration into a lesbian
relationship between a dryad and an elf (I’m assuming Amethyst is an elf; her
ears are pointed,) and had potential. But the characters are shallower than a
petri dish and it’s not very interesting at all. Pumpkin is dozy and silly,
Amethyst is stuck up and arrogant, and this doesn’t vary at all through the
‘plot.’ There are other characters in it, a snail and a mermaid, but they’re
all ‘One-shots’ (only appearing in their scene) and don’t contribute much more.
The plot is a mixture of a short journey and confused ramblings: you either
find what you’re looking for to make the potion or you don’t; it doesn’t go
anywhere else. Also the localisation wasn’t very as good; the text could have
used an extra pair of eyes to check spellings and grammar. I know that sounds
like a minor gripe but if you’re trading on the idea of being a visual novel,
we could at least expect some competency in the text!
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| Your first task is to find these mushrooms... |
As for the so-called gameplay, that comes down to a couple
of decisions you have to make with regard to how to handle certain plot points.
This reminds me more than anything else of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’
books, and I guess fits in with the idea of a visual novel. But there’s no
skill involved; no indication of what you’re supposed to be doing, or which
choice is the right one. It is guesswork, nothing more; you either get it right
or you don’t. The small amount of challenge comes from remembering what the
wrong choice was, re-loading the game and choosing the other option. Any game
needs to have an enjoyable process and a satisfying outcome, and unless you
really like soft porn slideshows, this doesn’t have much of either.
So is there anything good about the game at all? Well, the
art is very well drawn, I’ll give it that. Obviously an anime style, but it
works. It’s clear that this is where most of the effort went in to development,
perhaps to over-compensate for a lack of writing talent. There’s no
game-breaking crashes or bugs that I could see, and it was designed competently
enough to at least include a ‘skip’ button for parts of the dialogue that
you’ve seen before. Very useful when re-playing sections for the better ending!
And at least it’s not very long; I’d seen the whole game in roughly 40 minutes.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Matt,” you’re
thinking, “what did you expect? It should have been obvious what this was; an
over-sexualised piece of fan service. How could you have possibly thought this
was going to be any good?” Well, in fact, I didn’t. It was a dip into a genre
of game that I hadn’t looked at before, and I’d never have known until I tried
it. Now that I have, I feel no need to do so again.
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