I was really excited for Yomi Alliance as finding a space themed visual novel is pretty rare and it seemed to offer a deep story to it. Sadly it turned out to be a buggy mess and have many game play aspects that could be improved. For starters it is a bit of a grind as each week you set your schedule to take certain classes and increase stats but you never see how these stats play out. For instance what made me finally quit the game was I got to a point where I had a fight against three people and each time I would die. I have no idea why though. It’s not like in an ARPG or something where it shows you how much damage they do to you or what attack they used. I have nothing to go on as to what about the build I had done for my character could have been changed to help me win. Furthermore, and this will be a constant theme in this review, the dialogue was handled very poorly in this fight. It actually says twice “you won the fight” before cutting to a scene where they talk about my death. I tried changing the difficulty from hardest to easiest but I still die. I don’t even know if this is a bug or not. There was an update to the game recently so I was considering starting a fresh play thorough with different stats but I came to find there was no option to skip text that you have seen and I didn’t feel like going through another two hours plus of play time only to find out I die at the same fight again.  Another issue I have with the character creation is that you can’t assign points manually. You have to roll for a random assignment of initial points. This is a terrible idea that makes it more difficult for players to customize their character. The relationship system is also a bit weird. For instance when I chose to flirt with one character one single time dialogue after that referred to us as a couple, we hadn’t even gone on a date. The art was a bit bland, the models almost seemed fuzzy compared to some other games. The lewd scenes were also not very interesting as they weren’t animated. The story itself was interesting to me. There were lots of different species with a ton of effort put into their back stories and lore. The characters themselves were alright overall but I found it hard to root for many of them. Aberoin would complain about how other recruits only talked about her gender and sexual identity yet that’s all they talked about. I had no idea about any of  their likes; dislikes; family; goals; etc. Serena came off as just vapid and annoying, pushing people for the sake of it. Sulijan was the only one I could stand spending any time with as she seemed the only sensible one. The game has limited voice acting; meaning one character is voiced. The voice acting seems a bit monotone but I actually think it suits the character myself. I will say however that having only one character voiced seems strange in practice. There is also a codex that seems like it’s supposed to be a log of people you meet and info on different species but it didn’t seem to have but a fraction of the people I came into contact with including team members.

    I played Yomi Alliance on Linux. It never crashed but there were loads of spelling and grammar mistakes. So much so that I created a thread on the Itch.io store page to post screenshots of them for the developer to fix. This should have never been released in this state as it just doesn’t look professional. You can manually save whenever you want and there are fifty four save slots. You can change the difficulty at any time although I have no idea what that actually changes. Alt-Tab didn’t work.

Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.11.2266
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 4.7 GB
Game Version Played: 1.0 (loaded 1.1 but bulk of play was on 1.0)

GPU Usage: 1-26 %
VRAM Usage: 581-1759 MB
CPU Usage: 1-14 %
RAM Usage: 2.2-3.4 GB

    The deep story that seemed to be there wasn’t a saving grace for the spelling issues; poor lewd scenes; poor characters; poor character creation and poor combat scenes. I paid $9.99 USD for it and even at that price I can’t recommend it. I tried my best to enjoy it but quit after two hours and forty seven minutes.

My Score: 3/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 22.0.1 |  Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle  | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.17.3-zen1-1-zen