Update Three Hundred and Thirteen: 5 June 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

What’s that, you say? Visual Novels don’t have enough gameplay in them? They’re not competitive enough?

All right, then—Monster Prom will solve that for you just fine.

Monster Prom is a game where to play (legally adult) high school students from Spooky High and strive (or compete with your friends) to date various love interests. Will you win their hearts? Are you smart/cool/charming/fun enough? And—this is crucial—are you lucky enough to get the ending you want?

It ends up playing like a board game with two phases, a ‘class’ phase and a ‘lunchtime’ phase. You can play a long game or a short one, either ‘6 weeks’ of in-game time or ‘3 weeks’. After starting off with a short personality quiz to determine your stats for the run and some early heart bonuses for your potential dates, you pick what class to go to (and what stat boosts you get) and who to sit with at lunch. That basic game loop carries the entire game, and it begins to move quite quickly. There is a lot in this game—I got a little over half of the special endings and all scenes in the game, and they’re all packed with humor and goofiness and jokes.

… a little… TOO… much so, I think. Like, it’s an innovative VN platform, and it’s nice… but it has as much lasting impact as a standard board game. That’s by design—it’s not out here TRYING to be the House in Fata Morgana or anything, but I found after deep diving for… three days… (which feels much longer than it was) I feel kind of empty afterward. It was a fun board game! Not necessarily a fun visual novel.

The art is good, everyone’s hot, it’s definitely NOT kid friendly, and everything’s really over the top in a way that’s endearing and charming most of the time. The amount of stuff in the game is staggering, though it triggers an obsessive-compulsive impulse in me that eventually leaves me rattled (for those playing at home, Hunie Pop was the last game to do that). Anything that has randomization in it fucks with me, and this game is no different.

It’s definitely fun and people, even people who don’t like VNs, will like it. You can play multiplayer online or couch co-op, so it works as a party game for four players, too. It’s not necessary to enjoy the game at all. Look at some cute art and date some goofy monsters while I go lay down with hopefully a kinetic novel or something.

Next up: Oh for fuck’s sake.
Well, at least this’ll definitely count for this month’s theme.

See you soon!