I AM FINALLY PLAYING NANO GAMES and now I am gonna write a WAY TOO LONG opinion on this one~
...It was really, really fun! XD It was exactly what I was hoping - beautiful, stylish as
hell, and I loved everybody. You did a great job of crafting a family; I could tell how much they cared about each other, both when they were getting along and when they were fighting. And the heroine was definitely something special - I've never seen a POV character like her, and I really enjoyed guiding her. I love her bob haircut! XD
Alexei was my favourite of the guys, so I guess I'm a bit boring <XD I chose him the first time because I thought I had the others pretty much figured out (boy was I wrong about Giovanni!) but I didn't quite know what to make of Alexei. When it turned out he was
the overly serious guy who works too hard and feels guilty about being hugely jealous of naturally talented people
I really had to laugh, because I had essentially chosen my RL-husband completely by accident <XD
Oh yeah, this game is freaking gorgeous all over. Just, wow. I am humbled by the level of detail and skill in everything from the characters to the BGS to the interface. And even alternate costumes! Holy cow, you guys crammed a lot of work into this. However, I did have one visual problem - the dark-blue inactive menu text blended in so well with the text box background that I literally couldn't see it at first ^^; No kidding, when I opened up a glossary window in the tutorial I couldn't work out how to close it and I thought the game had frozen. It must be a monitor balance kind of thing, but I can't imagine my kind of cheapo monitor is all that uncommon, so you may want to tweak that a bit ^^;
Like some folks, I preferred the friendship endings to the romantic ones. It's not that the romantic ones weren't cute (I liked Emilio's the best) but the heroine felt a bit less like herself, somehow. I think they seemed a bit sudden to me - Gio was the first romance I got, and that was almost by accident; I didn't even realise he was interested until testing day! And I actually though Alexei didn't
have a romance ending at first ^_^; Emi, OTOH, telegraphs his affection waaay more, being so adorably "tsun" all the way through, so that's probably why I prefer his. That, and I liked everybody staying together! In the end, that was much more important to me than romance - which honestly feels quite appropriate here <XD
Disappointing areas were... well, with so much of the spotlight being on the boys, Viv and especially Marie kinda lost out. I wanted to get to know them better, especially Marie, and I get the impression that was planned but had to be left out for time/narrative flow/come on it's a one-month game. Still... I wanted Viv to have a romance
so bad :< Marie less so, because she felt so much like my mum, but Viv and I would have been tremendous together! C'est la vie, I suppose <:)
I felt, sometimes, that the endings had kind of been sprung on me - like, my first time through the game, I saved Alexei, but failed the test, apparently for congratulating him for his choice? Everything seemed to be going well, so that really came as a shock. Okay, so some "bad choices" are easier to distinguish than other (*coughEmiliocough*) but I like to pick choices in games that show the POV character's flaws, since those usually have more interesting results, so I was a bit disappointed that being a little stubborn right at the beginning of training could make the difference between failing or succeeding right at the end. I get
why it needs to work that way - you have limited opportunities for "wrong" responses when there are almost as many endings as choices! - but, I wished I'd had more chances to be "wrong" without failing.
That aside, I still love this game all over. Great concept, amazing execution, charming humour, top-notch writing and editing. I had a great time (and immediately went to get all the endings, even the horrible ones that made me cry AUGH). Actually, as tragic as the others are, I think the Lethe ending may be the worst of all. It's so subtle/simple, it requires no detail whatsoever to be one of the saddest damn scenes I've ever read. Anyway, GREAT WORK!
(Oh, and if I'm wrong about Arrow being a reference to the most awesome dog in gaming, I don't wanna be right! XD)