The Spirit Of Disaster (Competition 2012)

[Funnyguts]

Fairytale for Innocent Children was fantastic. I'll do a full writeup of it eventually, but it was definitely one of the most original stories. Also, it's the only story to have a lesbian Spirit of Disaster. (There's one other story that theoretically has one, depending on how you read it.)

[Coren]

Can't wait to play this when I get home!

[Mink]

Okay, I haven't finished playing it yet, but to whoever wrote Balancing Act:

I LOL'D.

Edit: I really hope this is going to be explained.

Edit 2: Okay, that turned out to be WAAAY less creepy than what I was expecting.

[Coren]

Oh my goodness. And I thought ''My Entry" was epic...

[Funnyguts]

Here's a discussion seed for another game, so Fairytale doesn't get all the attention right off the bat. This was the very first game in my list, and when I do these kinds of writeups I'll be going through the list in the order I got them. I'll try to at least do a few a day.

Meaning:
Synopsis: Melissa is busy studying when she sees something fall from the sky! She investigates and meets a young girl. She takes the girl back home under the guise of a babysitting job. The girl bugs Melissa to take her places. The girl thinks Melissa is depressinated, but Melissa says she just knows that life is short and there's no point caring. The girl sees a sign about a missing art portfolio and makes Melissa come with her to find it. Eventually Melissa gets bored and annoyed and heads back home. Then the girl takes Melissa to the space between life and death, and explains that she died in a drunk driving accident. She spent years in the Veil but got bored and decided to come back for a little while. She tells Melissa that because she is still alive, she can decide her own fate. The girl pushes Melissa out of the veil, and Melissa learns her lesson about loving life.

Characters: Girl is kinda hyper, Melissa is kind of depressed. We don't have any feel for why Melissa is depressed or fed up with life, she just is because something has to change with her before the end of the story.

Things that stuck: Not a lot. There wasn't really anything to get me excited about either character or their situation.

Technical presentations: Acceptable. Sometimes the music transitions happened a bit too quickly, and there were quite a few spelling errors.

Limitations: It looked like a pretty standard kinetic novel to me.

Uniqueness: There were a few other stories that touched on similar issues, such as 'Living through Disaster'. This one didn't do much to stand apart from them.

Themes: Live your life to the fullest.

Overall: It's hard to critique this one because it didn't really elicit strong opinions in me either way. Other than some spelling mistakes it was competently made, but neither Melissa or Girl had any strong personality to them, and stuff just seemed to happen in order to fit the prompt.

[Coren]

I think we should spoiler-tag some synopses so that people don't get spoiled. Many of these games have plot twists.

[Funnyguts]

I was planning to spoiler tag it, but Papillon suggested avoiding it when possible. I'll make the title text a bit bigger.

[Coren]

Hmm... Hanako, I think we should have spoiler tags. It's not actually very easy to skip past spoilers as well as how much to skip. Spoiler tags do more good than harm.

[papillon]

I'm not saying you absolutely cannot use them, I'm saying avoid them as much as possible. It slows things down and makes it awkward to have meaningful discussion. People *should* be spoiled for surprises in games which they did not find themselves, so that we can talk about them.

That said, published reviews generally manage just fine to talk about a product without having to use spoiler tags. *Most* of what you need to say about a game you should be able to say without hiding it. A tiny little spoiler tag at the end for some particularly important reveal maybe, but for the most part, it's not necessary.

If you talk about GAME A in big bold letters and then use similar headings when you're ready to switch to GAME B then it's easy enough for people to scroll down looking for the next game's heading if they want to try and skip spoils.

[papillon]

There's been an update to the entry 'Falling', correcting some small problems near a few of the endings. Please let me know if you find any more problems with your entries!

[CheeryMoya]

... I shouldn't have expected so much from an entry titled "My Entry." It was, unfortunately, not fun while it lasted. Following Funnyguts' format to save time on this one.

My Entry:
Synopsis: Ponna has to save the world with her Twilight knights or something. Just don't read it, it's a time waster.
Characters: There was Ponna, Edwardo, Marbo... IDK too many for what the contest provided sprites for.
Things that suck: Everything. I'm serious. Check these screenshots if you don't believe me. Lack of punctuation everywhere, lack of flow, lack of... everything.
Technical presentations, Limitations, Themes: Let's not go there, I beg of you. Ponna's head was cut off, that should be enough to tell you something.
Uniqueness: A clearly troll entry, Ponna is the cat girl is shown on screen while the Twilight boys are not given a sprite, simply because there weren't any provided. It was very... hard to follow.
Overall: All other judges, skip this entry. I played it as a joke but there are a lot funnier things in the world to do than force yourself to read this... thing. I swear upon my name that you will find nothing of value here, and that this will not qualify for anything besides worst entry award.

[jw2pfd]

My Entry:
Overall: All other judges, skip this entry.

Honestly, I have to say that I laughed out loud while playing "My Entry". Even with such a title, I went into it willing to give it a serious chance. It became very clear rather fast that it was not intended to be the best entry. Once you know that errors are on purpose, it actually became a little entertaining to see an absurd misspelling or grammatical error. For the purposes of humor, I think that some of the backgrounds and music were actually used well. The background transitions to the junkyard photo and Ponna/Donna/Ponnna or whatever you want to call her says "I'm in school now". The section where she thinks she is being chased uses the upbeat, happy sounding music. I am just saying that there was probably a little method to this madness.

I have completely assumed that whoever made this entry did so not as a "serious" entry. All I can say is that if the intent was to get a laugh out of some people, then you got a few good laughs out of me at least.

[papillon]

Even if everything about a game seems awful to you, talking about the specific details of what's awful is useful to future authors to know what to avoid. The point of the discussion period is not to find the 'best' entries but to talk about what works and what doesn't work in a VN. If you're thinking in terms of "saving time" you're going about this all wrong.

Lack of punctuation everywhere

Ponna's head was cut off

Ponna/Donna/Ponnna or whatever

The section where she thinks she is being chased uses the upbeat, happy sounding music.

See, these are useful details!

[KimiYoriBaka]

about Fairytale for Innocent Children, were those sprites supposed to be blinking? Cause that broke any and all immersion the story could have had.

anyway, I think the base premise for Fairytale for Innocent Children was pretty good in that it was a unique twist on the given prompt, and I think the words of dani's father made for a good hook. Unfortunately, the spirit's character was so jarring that it felt like I was reading a different story. It didn't help that the spirit's way of describing her own background made it hard to tell if she was talking about something supernatural or just being cruel. Lastly, it felt like the consequences of the choice at the end were really arbitrary. I couldn't help but think "Now why would that have mattered at all?"

[AshenhartKrie]

The Day I Died
The script was well written, but knowing who was speaking to the MC when it isn't the girl would be helpful. I kinda assumed that it was his mum, but I wasn't sure. I found it interesting and it drew me in. I wanted to know how he/she was going to die, and I liked the ending, even if the MC did get a bit hysterical, IMO.

Ariana
Once again, beautifully written (I swear that by the end of this the only feedback I gave would be 'well written' gah!). I loved how Clara and Ariana interacted, although I felt that the romance between the two was rushed, and it kinda didn't feel 'right' for me. If it were to be a proper romantic game, I would feel like it would need longer to get the romance flowing.

Dhumaketu
I'm not going to say it was well written even though it was XD But the way the person who wrote this understood disaster is refreshing. So many people I find these days believe that death and end and change are bad, but the author understood that sometimes changes are needed to bring about something better. I like that about this VN. And the world it's set in, the stiff rigidity of it, almost as if they are controlled.

Since I'm only reviewing three at the moment becuase me reviews are short here's something I noticed:
One thing I noticed about these three that I've reviwed so far is this: the Spirit is hyper. In all of them. One thing I would have liked to see is a serious Spirit. Imagine if you had to carry the weight of being able to cause disaster. Would that make you happy? I see that the Spirit is (obviously) but not human, but some diversity in the personality would have been nice.... Unless that was part of the guidelines, and the Spirit had to be Hyper. I'm assuming some of the other's might have serious Spirits, like 4dimensional. Liked that one, but I can't be bothered to review it right now. Gods I suck at reviewing things.