My review of the game

[M'igo Kazan]

Friend of mine mentioned the game in a stream I watch and said it was free so I figured why not, it's prolly gonna be one of those cheesy dating sims that's gonna waste an hour or two and... well I ended up playing it for an entire day to get all the achievements.

Pros :

The art is good. Nothing fantastic, but defo a cut above the average dating sim.

A few of the characters are well written... a few.

Some of the stories can actually be quite touching at times.

Quite a bit longer than the average dating sim... heck, probably longer than a good chunk of visual novels, too!

Skye is a sweetheart.

Cons :

The animation for random NPCs is... non-existent. Main characters can breathe, so it's a little offsetting when you have a rando pop up in a conversation and they're just... sorta there. Not breathing, no idle animation, just a cardboard cutout.

Seth's story is, ironically, the worst written and has the most typos by far... which is funny since he's the writer character.

There's quite a bit of inconsistencies linked to the game's design. All those characters who say they don't want something casual? Yeah, three dates is all it takes for 'em to be all over your pants. Puppy love the Game.

Little to no skill required; your choices don't really matter. Even if you mess up on purpose, chances are you'll still get in anyone's pants; they'll be pissed at you for one frame, then go back to their usual experession the next. All paths lead to Rome, as they say.

The conversation graphics are wasted potential. Many, many times the game just fades to black and describe what's happening and it's usually something cool like describing Jax's bartending acrobatics or Zenith pinning you down during the picnic. I'm not asking for a full-on animation of the scenes, but at least having a still shot of the scene instead of looking at blackness would be nice... heck, for all the talk about Jax's beautiful tail, we never actually see it!

The music is repetitive and doesn't loop smoothly... I just turned it off and put my own after a while.

The minigames are dumb and out of place. Unless you're gonna put a relevant minigame for every single character, I say don't do it at all. The cooking minigame is insultingly easy, and the shooting minigame just isn't responsive enough for the 2500 points achievement to be physically possible unless you have a touch screen or are an eSports player.

Many of the characters are cliched and unoriginal. Oh look, the shy-looking bunny girl is actually a horny mofo. Oh look, the lion dude likes to be in control... but doesn't actually have any control over his own life. Oh look, the big tough dragon is actually a big softie with a troubled past. Oh look, the butch husky is a butch stereotype. Oh look, a chick with a ♥♥♥♥ (why is that such a big trend this year? I swear 90% of porn is chicks with ♥♥♥♥♥ now). Oh look, a flaming nympho with no personality of his own. Oh look, an uninspired writer who suddenly becomes inspired the second he sees you and who becomes successful despite the odds being extremely stacked against him.

But the biggest gripe of all is... the romance scenes. This is where all of the game's flaws are condensed into one, painfully bad scene... and I hear it used to be the game's focus! Shameful. The animations are the equivalent of smashing two cardboard cutout into eachother and using the distort tool to try and smooth things out... in vain. The anatomy is all kinds of wrong, the moaning overlaps with itself during the later stages and everybody ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moans, including the characters who say they're not moaners. What's on screen doesn't match at all with what's being told, and just ends up being distracting. But the most annoying thing is that character customization goes entirely out of the window. Spent a while making your character at the beginning? Well too bad, you're a human male with a skin condition now.

Suggestions :

Focus more on the characters, find an actual writer or something if you can't think past overused stereotypes. Right now, it feels like only Jax and Skye had any effort put into them, the latter being kind of a given considering she's the game's mascot.

Give the random NPCs an idle animation. No need to give 'em facial expressions or anything like that; just make 'em breathe.

Spellproof the dialogues before posting 'em... especially if they're about a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ writer.

Be consistent about the characters. If they say they aren't into casual sex, don't make it so you can ♥♥♥♥ 'em after only three dates.

Do yourself a favor and be flexible with the game's design. I can understand Coby and a few other characters being easier to get in their pants, but the whole three dates thing is unrealistic (yes, even for furries) and just promotes unhealthy habits. I can think of many dating sims from the golden age of Newgrounds flash games from the mid-2000s that you can take example from. Many of 'em are extended to a 30 days period and you're the one who chooses what to do within that time period. Wanna date multiple persons? If you can play your cards right, you can. Want to give someone a gift or go to a fancy restaurant? You gotta work to get the money for it, so you gotta find a balance between work and pleasure. Wanna learn a certain skillset that one character likes in order to impress 'em? Gotta go to school or something but again, that costs something so gotta find a balance between work, self-improvement and pleasure. Play your cards REAL well? You can still do everything within that 30 days period, but that'll require a lot of skills and planning. Don't play your cards well? You can actually get the bad ending and stay single. See? A helluva lot more depth in a free flash game from almost 20 years ago, and it was most likely made by only one dude in his early 20s over the course of a few months.

Polish the sound design... seriously.

Respect your userbase. If you're gonna make it a furry game and allow people to make their own fursona, then allow 'em to play as the fursona they made. Show it off once in a while instead of only seeing their hand when they use their phone and most importantly, DON'T insult 'em by defaulting to a human male when you finally get around to seeing it.

Now, about the romance scenes. See, I know we prolly won't see any improvement since "officially" they don't exist, but this would be the perfect time to put an actual animation into the game. Not a lazy "press two Barbie dolls together and use the distort tool to make it look better", but an actual animation that actually matches what the dialogue is saying. Yes, that'd require effort, but welcome to the world of proper game design. Seriously, I don't know who the animator was for those scenes, but I hope it was his first work 'cause if not, he should prolly consider another career path.

SO TL;DR : the game definitely has a lot of potential, but it still requires a lot of work before it'd actually be worth paying for. Although acording to the Patreon, they've already moved on to their next project, so that's a shame and a poor foreshadowing for this company's future if all they do if jump from one project to the next without fixing anything.

[@madgeark.pmd.social]

Based