Update Sixty-Four: 14 October 2017
Blue Rose
19.6 hours, 19 of 19 achievements
tsuper review: 6/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
This is my sixty-fifth SIXTY-FOURTH, I CAN’T COUNT review, and I’ve learned something about myself:
It’s really hard to talk about a game if it’s just okay.
If it’s really good, I can talk about what makes it really good. If it’s really bad, I can swear about all the ways its awful. If it’s just okay…. there’s nothing really more for me to say. I hope that’s all right - it’s the truth, so it’ll have to be.
Blue Rose is okay. It’s a competently made visual novel. You won’t waste your time if you get it and play it, but you aren’t missing anything, either.
The art is just fine, though the artist is…. really bad at drawing people in profile. The writing is passable, with a bunch of typos.
The biggest problem, other than how it’s just okay, is the missed opportunity with the story. This game has different endings based off of which romance route you’re on… and I don’t think this game should have had romances at all.
There’s a plot beyond your romance story, and because this VN isn’t very long, its time is split between the plot and the budding romances with not enough time to do either. Each ending, you resolve the main plot in pretty much the same way, and the romances are different. This was really disappointing because the romances were very shallow - there wasn’t a lot of time to develop them, remember. And the plot was such where I WANTED to be able to influence how it went, but I literally couldn’t. All the choices were romance-based, and whether I wanted the good or bad end.
That was soooo disappointing! It made everything feel very shallow, and made this novel just… okay.
Next up: This is the VN that’s the oldest in my backlog. It also fits the spooky season!
See you soon!
Blue Rose is the first visual novel I’ve tried. Downloaded the demo and then really didn’t like it. Good luck with Date Warp. Looks interesting.
YESS!
Thats basically how I felt about Narcissus it was just okay. I couldn’t think of anything I liked about it but it also had reasonable writing and stuff so I couldn’t really say I disliked it.
it was just okay…
I HEREBY DECREE that the neutral shrug of ‘eh!’ is forevermore an acceptable BLAEO review staple.
Yeah, I didn’t particularly liked Blue Rose either. The plot was never able to get me interested enough to care much about what was happening.
Yesss….. especially…. like….
I guess I won’t black out spoilers bc nobody seems to care that much but watch out:
Why would you create and humanize two characters…. and then just kill them over and over again, with like NO way to talk them down or peacefully exorcize them? Like even though they were ‘villains’ I felt pretty bad for Adale and Elrica, especially the former because the game kept emphasizing how young she had been.
Like… can we save the bitches? Can we exorcize them? Can we do something other than kill them in different ways? I’ve been way tired for years about how in most video games violence is the only (or by far the best) option for progression… and now I gotta get that in my VNs, too?
There were so many directions the plot could go in… and then it didn’t go anywhere. No direction. Okay.
To say the truth I don’t even REMEMBER anymore about those characters?? That’s how much of a weak impression this vn left me.
The only thing I remember well and that left me a bad taste in my mouth is that the major plot points that were happening in the endings (like a dragon attacking the town?? did this happen?) were different depending on the character you chose to romance? Like things that other characters did that shouldn’t have been affected by your route decision, it felt like the different routes were set in parallel universes. I have no idea if I explained myself enough lol