itch.io

I just came to say, the LiL-Like situation is kinda dire right now. LiLdev is having a crisis, Dissodev is MIA, no news from Kaleido in a month, no news from LiY in 3 months.
And what i'd call the smaller LiL-likes aren't doing much.
I hope everyone is doing well. Maybe i should join more discord servers.

From Itch you're downloaing a zip file. Steam lists the weight of the fully installed game.

What Does She Even Do.png

I tried it three times, it happend two times, the second one after restarting the game.
The third attemp was done as i typed this comment and it actually worked, i'd like to also mention this time i got a loading screen i never saw untill this point (The game would just wait on a black screen or on the last frame)

Also, uh, the first Abydos fight does this for some reason. 

Suzumi's first Momotalk interaction does not give me any choices when it should, so it just endlessly repeats the first lines whenever i open her DM.

Infinite Suzumi Glitch.

If i remember correctly steroids make you lose

You need to renew your membership and actually enter the Hot Springs - 1000 CC for 1 day

Lo unico que logras es humillarte a ti mismo más con cada palabra que escribes. Si tu cerebro no dió para leer el comentario del desarrollador entonces obviamente ibas a encontrar cualquier texto decente "Aburrido"

Grabbing LiL's "Amy" event and making it bigger and more confusing was certantly an interesting design choice.

I would like to make it known that this game still runs, in coloquial terms, "like shit" in low to mid end hardware.

On top of that, the extremely low framerate combined with the new "Slow Motion" feature means that the game struggles to differenciate between "Pressing" and "Holding" the space bar, which means you can't reliably pause.

Honestly i didn't notice LiY did not follow the LiL-clone tradition of having a dark-skinned character

I've played both games you mentioned, OOT was a bit too western for my taste so i didn't complete it but i completed AD's lastest update, both are pretty good in my opinion.

And as someone who pretty much played all of those, i'll agree Dissonance is the lightest one, a claim really pushed by the fact it's probably the only one without a depressed protagonist. Another LiL-Like i recently got into is Kaleidoscope, but that one kinda suffers from wanting to be too much like Lessons in Love without actually having the courage do what Lessons in Love does.

LiL seems to be very polarizing, either you love it or you hate it. If you liked this game i would recomend it with the caveat that you should grab the Progress and Guide mod from F95 as with up to 30 heroines the outdated design can become very frustrating.

I'm not sure if 4 years was enough for you to be met with the re-write of the early game should you chose to replay it.

If skills are added to the cooking minigame, i think it would benefit from a difficulty escalation. For example, a new starter dish would be one that requires a few less ingredients and no chicken, then you'd have one that foccuses on chicken so you can learn how to deal with it, then you can get skills that make The Chicken situation easier. But this is merely a suggestion.
The biggest problem in my opinion is that since you seem to be the only playtester, the minigame will feel easier to you than it'd be to the average player. And that's how you end up having to make an easy mode.

I wonder how the "Quests that require other quests showing up" issue showed up.

This visual novel put many thoughts in my mind.... Which is definitively better than forgetting i even played the game, but.... Most of these things aren't good.

But i'll start by the things that are. The writing is good, a spin in the isekai trope that takes its subject matter more seeriously, and the protagonist doesn't inmediately forget about home (Even though he does shift the thoughts of it aside, for good reasons). He can be a bit of an asshole at times, seemingly having mild anger issues, but that's not necesarily a bad thing. If you're tired of your average sloppy protagonist he's a breath of fresh air.

The visuals have a bold graphics style that differs from your usual KKVN, and they actually pull it off most of the time, though they may not be everyone's cup of tea. In my personal opinion thought this game looks interesting in a good way.

But that's where i have to stop to sing it's praises. To put it bluntly, this game suffers from having a rather player-hostile design, which starts actually pretty early, right after you start it. The game opens up with both a disclaimer and a request for donations. Neither of them are a problem by themselves. Usually, anything this early into launching the game would be skippable, but this game in particular forces you to spend a few seconds in these screens for no good reason. The disclaimer is funny, but i don't want to be forced to read it every time i start to play.

But i dwelled too much in what isn't that big of a deal. Here comes the good stuff. The quest design. "Quests", this game's method of guiding the player, are terrible at it. Very often you will have a ton of quests in your plate and they will either rely on another quest being completed (And you have to click the leaf icon on it to even know this), or the time and place information will be out of date (And again, you will have to click the leaf icon to know this). There was a point where i had 5 quests active, and 3 of them were a chain that required the previous one to be done. Why show quests i can't do? It clutters the menu that is already rather bothersome to navigate (All the times you have to activate it makes the little opening animation to get annoying really fast). I'll just like to leave my lastest predicament out here regarding Sara, two quests (Of course two because we can't be a normal VN) want me to get closer to her, but in both morning and afternoon i can't talk to her. And of course neither of the two quests tell me when i can actually do so. (One of them does tell me to talk to her in the morning, but again, i can't.) So either i'm missing a Sara timeslot that somehow opens up with zero warning whatsoever, or the game is broken which i doubt.

That's all i have on quests, so i'll move on to my next point: The general gameplay loop. I try to respect the developer's intended gameplay as much as i can (within reason) so i played this on normal difficulty without the easy cooking patch, and inmediately found out why those were requested.

As far as i played, there were 2 minigames: Cooking and fishing. The problem with Ren'py minigames is that it's hard to make them not become boring. This game tried and failed.
The first problem with the cooking minigame is a minor one. It doesn't really count how many ingredients of the needed type you already cut. I'm willing to accept that this is only an issue for me though, so we can move on to The Chicken. The Chicken requires way too much attention, which is a problem because for example, you need to cut every single tomato you see to get all 5 of them. The Chicken requires way too many slices and then you have to click on it to avoid Marty from stealing your loot. The rest of the minigame is alright i guess, basically Fruit Ninja with an objective, but you can tell there's a reason Fruit Ninja is a moblie game.

The second minigame is the fishing minigame. All the budget went to the cooking minigame, so this one is far less troublesome due to it being extremely simple. 3 icons, two are fake, hover over them to find out. Of course the game design can't be normal, so we are forced to sell our load every 3 fish caught. Out of the three KKVN's i played that have a fishing minigame, this is definitively the weakest, but when everything in the game's design feels like it's trying to fight you it becomes somewhat of a relief.

So that's it. Somewhere in this text it started feeling like a rant, but those are my honest feelings about this game. It has a strong vision with many cracks that make the gameplay loop frustrating at times, to the point of making it hard to even open the game at the worst of it. It feels like the developer looked at Hero's Harem Guild's design and tried to put his spin on it, but somewhere in their kitchen, a big fat bottle labelled "Lessons in Love's clunky, grindy and short-sighted game design" fell into the cooking pot, spilling all of it's contents inside. Obviously theres not a hint of LiL in this game beyond, again, the frustrating and grindy design, i simply wanted to draw paralels to other works that i know. 
 
 

Dicho como buen jugador de basofia, consumir demasiado porno te pudrió el cerebro, hombre.

Welcome to the Friendship Club and Two Sides of the Same Coin are other two games from this "genre" i've personally labelled as "LiL-Likes" (Dissonance being one of the biggest), but TSOTSC is kinda rough because it was the author's first work if i remember correctly.
There's also Another World, but that doesn't really have the same vibe.

I seem unable to unlock A Big Deal. Despite having every required event completed, nothing happens on Friday.

Edit: Natsuki event "Good boy" was marked as completed despite not being so. Similar thing happens with some photo messages arriving before they should. I think there's something going on under the hood.

During the part where Kaede sings a song, i picked the english video. There was no audio and the textbox was present, blocking the subtitles. I wonder what happend.

There's also the part where the textbox is also present when pulling out the phone, which makes things a bit harder (My guess is that you summon the phone with  "ShowScreen" instead of "CallScreen" for some reason.

Pretty sure this game was heavily inspired by Dissonance and Lessons in Love, lots of traces from both games can be found.

Edit: Ignore this comment. I didn't even notice this issue was patched, but the patch was uploaded separately.

Edit 2: So uh, i installed the patch, and now not only do i get the infinite crystal the other guy was talking about, but i also can't enter the gym now

Edit 3: Passing a day allowed me access to the gym again

I'm getting a lot of errors during training. Missing assets it looks like.

I fear i may have downloaded or unzipped the game wrongly.

They are so bad they actually force a second training action on me.
Skipping helps in avoiding them.

Does bro know what a boobjob is? And the things it requires?

How much time do you have?!

Honestly yeah the memories thing is a bit messy but it's simple once you get it: They are set in the past and you could watch them when they pop up, because they will be referenced later on in the story.

The VN really is pretty vague, lets hope answers come as the plot develops.

Though everything else in your comment kinda feels like you tweaking over nothing.

Probably nobody read this but i found the answer, the first time i got the "Talk to Kitsune about Yuki's books" was apparently a fake, what i actually had to do is go to the convenience store when she's there. Glad i get to read more about best girl.

I found them fishing in the market pond. They are extremely rare. If they don't show up after trying to fish many times just ditch the quest.

I dunno how you missed it but it's because dude's basically working on one big thing he wants to release at once

....How do i ask Kitsune about the books? (Also i want to crack the fox)

This sits more on the personal preference side, but i don't think saying she's bipolar is quite right.  Though i'm not sure how much i should discuss her given that i don't know how far you are into the game, but i can assume it's not very.

The only thing i can say about her is that i don't justify her actions, but i understand where she comes from and why she's like this. 

In my personal opinion, she's among the most, if not the most interesting character in the game. But you may have to see for yourself if you want to agree.

Edit: I don't quite understand the part where you keep mentioning that you can't get Bond with her trough repeatable events. You can. I may have forgotten if the choice was unlocked later or not, but it's there. Weekend mornings.

Welcome to the "LiL-like" genre.

I think you misunderstood Hazel completely. Her whole point is that both the demon that terrorizes her underlings, and the caring motherly woman, are two parts of the same person. If you don't belive the way she treats Jin is genuine, look at Kanoi who is also right there, especially that one scene which i won't even try to reference in fear of spoiling.

I've noticed that Kaori's new animation is not locked behind a requeriment, soo you can just call her at night and hop into it way too early.