Cyber Troops (vol.1) released

[Samu-kun]

I often times feel the same way you do. :3 I just have one story arc that I absolutely love and I keep making games around that one story, but none of them ever seem to meet my expections. There's two realities - the reality inside my mind of what the game should be - and the reality in front of me of what the game is. No matter what, there's a significant gap in quality between the two realities. That's why I keep remaking my games around the same story arc. My current game is actually the fifth game in the same universe. Each time I make a game, I always think there's a too great of a gap between what I've created and what I've invisioned. But with each time I make it, this gap seems to shorten by a little bit. Eventually, it's all about getting the gap within acceptable bounds.

What I'm just trying to say is keep working. ^_^ My games weren't any good the first time I made them either. They weren't really good the second or third time either. It's a process of doing everything over and over again for years. But after awhile, you get more experience and you look back on this game and be embaressed you could have made something so bad. That's what always happens to me. ^_^

[Cybeat]

I often times feel the same way you do. :3 I just have one story arc that I absolutely love and I keep making games around that one story, but none of them ever seem to meet my expections. There's two realities - the reality inside my mind of what the game should be - and the reality in front of me of what the game is. No matter what, there's a significant gap in quality between the two realities. That's why I keep remaking my games around the same story arc. My current game is actually the fifth game in the same universe. Each time I make a game, I always think there's a too great of a gap between what I've created and what I've invisioned. But with each time I make it, this gap seems to shorten by a little bit. Eventually, it's all about getting the gap within acceptable bounds.

What I'm just trying to say is keep working. ^_^ My games weren't any good the first time I made them either. They weren't really good the second or third time either. It's a process of doing everything over and over again for years. But after awhile, you get more experience and you look back on this game and be embaressed you could have made something so bad. That's what always happens to me. ^_^

I can vision that, too. I should've done short stories first. Well, I'm doing one now. I'll post some information on it soon.

[F.I.A]

And so, I have spent some around 20 minutes finishing with this vn. Since you are working on another title at the moment, consider these comments what to improve on:

File size management
- Others have commented on its horrendous size, and I have to agree on that. A game released should be compact enough to have each byte spent effectively. While it will not matter for the game's performance, most will be rather turned off when the game peaks over 100 mb, discouraging them to download.

Story plot
- The introduction when you tell the setting sounds like you are directing a screenplay instead of portraying it. Could do better if you write something like "Year: Galaxy 8080, Cyber City, inside Tenth's Cyber Troops base" at the direct center instead of using the narrating text box.
- The whole storyline about Light and Gun Kid recruiting members. Most of the time, guild or organization recruits talented candidates instead of having a guy searching around for them. If a guy do that, he tends to be the leader himself. And most of the time, to have someone joining a team of two guys, the two must have displayed a sort of good leadership or so to convince the other side to join. Light does not really display such sort of leadership except probably for Blaze's case, but it is still ambiguous. The whole recruiting talk in this game sounds like those from mmorpgs, where some guys ask people around to join their guilds and so. To mend that, display that Light has what it takes to lead. Either by a great value of friendship, or the strong will to risk himself.
- Also, every time Light comes across a problem, there is always a guy or two that he get to recruit at the end make it too obvious after the hotel case, which pretty much kills much suspenses later on. Not to mention each merrily joins in the group without much hesitation. More variety should be considered. Judging by his attitude, Ninja Kid might just end up being the neutral guy who follows the team silently in search of this Devin.

Comedy Value
- While random humor can be good, it won't work if you want to write a story that will get you killed in one shot if you moved wrong. The 3 witnesses make me at loss with them still having a big grin even when caught. A gnome, and later on a dog(?) and lizard, which are supposed to be there to pull pranks on the gnome but ended up joining the team. Then the Ninja Kid talk with a nerd kid while infiltrating the enterprise. These are weak attempts of humors. Make those humors consistent and from the current events instead of out of the sudden. The dog and lizard can be the pranksters who tried to confuse the team in the cave, but later on get convinced to join their team after some other events etc.
- The excessive usage of swearing and cursing at the later part. Using foul words ranged from "gay" to "faggot", while intentionally avoid the usage of the F word will not get you anywhere. Even in japanese, they tend to use only "Kozou/Gaki(Brat)" or "Yarou/Koizu(Bastard)".

My advice on this matter is to read more stories and play more vns. For reading material, you got a handful of mangas that where the main character leads and recruits more to his force, such as Kinnikuman and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 3. For anime, Forke's adventure in Power Stone might show you how a daddy-boy gets to recruit even a psycho into his team. As for VN, there is hardly any action-oriented I can refer to. The closest might be lordcloudx's Binary Hearts and Dream Chasers, with the latter being more on philosophy though.

That's it for now. Hopefully that will help with your future game.

[azureXtwilight]

Okay, like everyone else have said, I was about to download this game and screamed when I saw the size, I DID!

Like F.I.A said, he finished the game for about 20 minutes. I think 100 MB games has more than 1-hour gameplay, too bad.

But since you said you can't stop making this game, I hope you'll reduce the size.....

Next time!

[Cybeat]

No, not like that. The story of this game is meant to be written as my "future manga", not a visual novel. I already planned on making 12 volumes for the story. So, I think I see why this game didn't come out right, along with reasons what everyone else said. I guarantee you guys that Mujinchitai is not going to be like this!

[lordcloudx]

Well, I played through this game and it was certainly entertaining. Took me a bit longer than 20 minutes; maybe an hour or so. The ending left me hanging, but that's understandable since this is just Volume 1.

I won't dissect the elements of this VN and will just go straight to the story. (Although I must admit, I loved the different music tracks.)

Before I begin, yes, I'm aware that you plan to address any issues I might bring up here in future installations and in your next VN, however, just take this mini-review as specific to Cyber Troops.
I'll be honest with you, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to be able to even mildly enjoy this game. I just felt that all the events seemed to happen at random and for no particular reason other than to help introduce the latest member of Cyber Troops. Now you might argue that everything in this story did have a specific purpose other than the one I mentioned, but that did not come through at all in your writing. One of the main reasons for this perhaps, is because I could not feel any kind of empathy for the characters. None of them had any distinctive personality traits beyond the standard anime archetypes and they seem to stay quite static throughout the entire story. In short, zero character development which makes them seem bland and unrealistic.

However, I can see a lot of creative potential in your work. For example, (As pointed out by another person who has yet to fully play through this game) there are lots of allusions to classic literary works littered throughout the game - whether you actually intended this or not, remains to be seen. Also, there's the heavy racism theme that pervades this VN. You used the discrimination against Neblins to pull this off with some degree of success, in my opinion. (A little off-topic, but perhaps this is why you felt so strongly about my using the word gaijin in that little bogus translation project thread I instigated.)

All-in-all, Cyber Troops has its ups and downs. With a little tweaking, you might be able to make that spark of creative potential that I see in this relatively unpolished work, shine through. Just work a little bit more on creating a harmoniously flowing story with events that do not seem as disjointed as the ones in this VN. Maybe write some motivations for each of your characters other than helping to recruit more members for Cyber Troops (including villains and minor side-characters) and try to avoid using deus ex machina type of events where the character just powers up for no particular reason to defeat the pseudo-villain who joins the cause later on or where talking pokemon-like creatures appear from out of nowhere to save the day.