Update Eighty-Six: 1 December 2017
Animal Lover
21 hours, 24 of 24 achievements
5/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Hmm.
I did want to like this game, and there are certainly good things about it, but ultimately Animal Lover didn’t move me in a particular way, other than puzzlement.
Charitably, at its core Animal Lover is about dating men who were turned into animals as punishment for them succumbing to various aspects of toxic masculinity, and them demonstrating to you that they’ve changed and repented and feel bad about what they did so they’re loveable again.
Uncharitably, it’s about how the male love interests pissed off the wrong feminist witch and now you have to go and demand her to remove her spell on them and get over her anger at what they did to her because they’ve been punished enough. She’s clearly framed as being in the wrong (and you can call her a bitch multiple times) because her reaction (cursing them to live as animals for sometimes up to centuries) is disproportionate to the things they did to her (harass her, stalk her, physically assault her, corner her…).
Because…. we need another story where the woman is in the wrong in matters like this, even if the only way to manufacture that is by a fantastical element? Especially playing it now, where America (where I live) has been bombarded for months with sexual assault/abuse scandals coming to light all at once, some decades old, because now society at large is willing to listen? (and still having to hear a lot of people say X should be forgiven because………..)
I dunno, guys. Call me a bitch myself but I just couldn’t get on board w/this. (and I’m not interested in debate on it, either) It wasn’t worth the hot guys.
That’s not to say there wasn’t good things in here. The writing is snappy and the characters have good, unique voices. The art is nice. Everything would’ve been just fine if the general conceit of the game had been anything other than…. what it was, lol. I hadn’t heard anything about this game before or since I picked it up from a bundle, which is probably just about what it deserves.
Next up: Last time RNGesus gave me entry 18. This time RNGesus gave me entry 18. Will I like this game more or less? Let’s find out!
See you soon!
the next one felt so bad to me sorry haha
Yeah, it’s….. not super great so far. Whenever I get a VN that doesn’t even have an options menu my face looks like :/
The art I find kind of charming, though, like it’s right out of an old 90’s shoujo manga
Ah, I always wondered how you RNGed your games. So you have them in a numbered list and draw a number?
Yeah! I have a spreadsheet set up to help me keep track of stuff, and I have it organized by date I originally got the game. I’ve appended to it over the past few months and have a page that’s my wishlist and a page for games I need to revisit.
I use random.org to pick the number.
I like that approach, I always take so long to decide what to play…
So do you put every game you have in the list or only preselected ones? I imagine if I would take your approach I would probably reroll and reroll again until I hit a game I like. Or are you just very disciplined?
I do have every game, and I try to be disciplined and play what it lands on. I might fudge the numbers if, like, it’s selected two action-adventure platformers in a row, or two long-ass jrpgs in a row, stuff like that. To mix it up, though, I alternate between RNG, my girlfriend picking for me, and me picking myself.
That’s for just straight up games - for VNs I have a separate list and I have just been letting RNG pick from that list over and over again.