I ended up enjoying The Mighty Ken quite more than I expected! The dev's May Wolf entry really didn't click for me at all, so I was going on with a bit of dread. However, this submission felt very energetic and had very vibrant prose.

The prose and narration are descriptive and verbose and I found them fitting to the player character‘s voice so well. There‘s a lot of fun descriptions and all senses are used (so much description of smells!) and I was fully immersed in the hedaspace of this angsty teenager who is ready to lash out at the world, or himself.

It had a very grounded take on the stress and worries highschoolers go through without being unintentionally edgy. That is a rare feat, considering that "having mental health issues at college" is practically a genre of its own in furry VN spaces, and I find them hilariously edgy most of the time. I‘m glad The Mighty Ken never got melodramatic to that degree.

The other remarkable thing is of course the endings. I usually adore games dropping bizarre shit at the reader out of nowhere, but here it didn't really work for me. It felt less like something weird I‘ll keep untangling and mulling over long after I have finished reading it, and more like the jam deadline is almost here and we have to wrap up this story NOW, everything be damned. The rat is absolutely iconic though and keeps living in my head rentfree weeks after reading the VN. Mission accomplished in the end I guess?

The story does get some intrigue from its abrupt narrative shifts and unexpected endings, but being this short, I think it ultimately feels too unfocused.

To illustrate the point further: the opening is functional slife-of-life stuff on paper, but it might not set the mood well enough (many of the details feel a bit generic or repetitive, especially how often smells are described) to justify its inclusion. It feels like the game only really begins when we get to the gym and hang out with Ken. That part, meanwhile, sets up some compelling drama – such as the troubles the characters would have visiting each other after the protagonist moves – but doesn't really follow up on any of it.

Instead, we get a choice leading to three different endings. The logic behind them doesn't feel transparent; I get why hanging out with Ken is the good ending, but it doesn't feel like his invitation actually has anything to do with whether the protagonist decides to get coffee or not. Clarity of cause and effect would probably have helped this part land, and combined with the two bad (?) endings being weird in general, I fear I had a difficult time getting anything from the story.

'The Mighty Ken' is a short drama vignette about the angst of being a teenager and the friends that make it bearable.   The plot is short, getting a first person experience in the mind of an angsty teen dealing with the stress of moving, and his best friend just being a good guy. What I think this story does well is crafting the protagonist with intention. He's abrasive, he's got opinions, and he's expressive. I applaud the creation of your own art assets, they're bold and simple (very south park).

Good job continuing to make VNs, so here's some comments to keep in mind. While I appreciate the very descriptive settings and environment details, it gets really verbose at times. Try to use detail depth to highlight what's important to your story. If everything gets a huge description, it all blends together. While you've developed a really good set of characters, there's not really a narrative happening. Eddie's has an internal conflict associated with moving, but the reader is never clued into why he's so upset about it. He doesn't seem to like school, so is it only because he'll miss Ken? If so, then that needs to be brought forward more into the plot. Stuff like delving more into the friendship of why Ken likes Eddie as a friend. To have a stronger plot, you'd want your main character to need to be able to take some kind of action to overcome the conflict. For example, maybe Eddie hasn't told Ken that he's moving, and he's building up the courage to do so. The one action in this story that Eddie does make, is whether he gets coffee or goes to have a sleepover with Ken, and those results all have wildly different outcomes which are admittedly funny and absurd (getting taunted by the anxiety rats). You've started out with a good base of character ideas, try to push the ideas a bit further on what the characters are going to do and change over the course of the story. Give them some goals and obstacles that they can overcome. You've made some good progress, keep on finding ways to improve on the next one.

Before I get to anything else, I want to acknowledge that this feels like a massive improvement over your May Wolf submission. I haven't read anything else you've produced outside of this and Find Your Light, but you definitely feel much more comfortable and natural with a small-scale story like this. 

With that said, while I think this generally accomplished what it set out to do, it felt a bit too thin for me to get really into it. 

Presentation was fine across the board - the art looked a little too South Park-y for my personal taste, but I still think it's cool that you went through the effort of providing your own assets for the project. Music worked well enough (other than a very brief and abrupt shift in the coffee ending, which I'll touch more on in a bit) and the writing had few noticeable proofreading errors, though there was at least one point where the narration erroneously switched from first to second person ("Ken positions himself across from you"). In terms of writing style, while I support the effort to make the narration colorful and detailed, the intro kinda overdoes the figures of speech. Similes and metaphors can be really helpful, but if you have them every other line they start to lose their effect. It's okay to spread them out and make sure the ones you keep in are the most vivid and effective. 

Last note on presentation, but it's always helpful to have different coloration on the dialogue tags to tell characters apart. This was a small cast so it's not that big of a deal, but probably just a good habit to have. 

Plot spoilers from here. 

As I said above, I think this generally accomplishes its goal, which is to convey the sadness and frustration of leaving your only friend and the nagging feelings of self-doubt that go along with that. There still feels like there are bits and pieces missing to help really sell this though. We get a lot of descriptions about how Eddie is listless and melancholy and how Ken helps him out mostly just by being there for him, but we don't get a lot of "why". I understand some of this can be filled in by the reader (I moved around a lot as a kid, and yeah, it sucks), but there's still so much you can explore by fleshing out the protagonist here. Why does he struggle with making friends? What about Ken is different (besides just being generically nice)? Why does he feel like there won't be another person to be his Ken in the new town? All this helps us gets the reader invested in the characters struggles in a deeper way than just remembering being sad.

Two other main gripes here:

1) Eddie and Ken just chatting away through wrestling practice does not feel like a realistic venue for that discussion? Wrestling was never my chosen sport, but I can say for sure that the sports I did play didn't really have that much time for shooting the shit during drills. Feels like that should have been an after-practice conversation. Ken asking the coach what he was like as a kid in the middle of practice also felt out of place, like I can't really imagine that interaction going the way it did in real life, and it honestly doesn't add much to the story anyway. The coach doesn't really have any notable impact on Eddie's perspective, and other than some generic life advice to not be an ass as a kid, he doesn't really provide much of substance anyway.

2) As others have pointed out, the first two endings feel really thin and abrupt. The coffee ending is especially jarring with the red flash, sudden shift in BGM, and the appearance of self-doubt mouse (which, as someone else pointed out, is obscured by the dialogue box) before everything ends and we're kicked back to the menu. I see what you were trying to do with these, but I think (especially given how short the game already is) it would have been more effective to have just one ending and have that self-doubt mouse show up at various points throughout the day, finally disappearing when Eddie gets his last hangout with Ken. 

Overall not a bad showing at all, but I feel like it could've shined a bit brighter with some tweaks. Always love to see the effort here though.

Really enjoyed my time with this one. It's short, but I think that works in its favour by letting the game say everything it wants to without stretching things out unnecessarily, and I appreciate the way that it leaves certain things unsaid so the player can read between the lines. The scene with the coach already got mentioned by someone else, but I definitely agree that it's a good example of what works best about this VN: we learn not only that Ken isn't just blowing hot air about the coach being less of a jerk than he acts, but also get an idea of *why* he acts the way he does at the same time.

If I have any major criticisms, it's that as much as I appreciate the VN not over-explaining certain things I do feel like the "bad" endings feel somewhat lackluster as a result of being under-explained. I'm guessing the idea is that the other rat embodies Eddie's personal insecurities in some ways (they seem to have mental health issues going on so I think it's a hallucination?) but it all feels just a little TOO abrupt. In some ways this works (the sudden-ness of it gives them a nice contrast to the much more "lingering" feel of the 3rd ending) but unfortunately I could also see it leaving people feeling a little confused and not necessarily in a way that feels good or intentional.

Also, if I have one suggestion: this is one project that I think would've benefited from using the 'NVL' mode over the default 'ADV' dialogue mode for Ren'Py, partly because it gives the writing (the key part of the VN imo) a bit more space to breathe but also because during the scene with the rat in the coffee ending the default text box covers that part of the image, while using NVL mode would've put the text in the right position to draw the reader's eye towards it instead.

Overall I think you should be proud of what you've made here! I hope you go on to make more projects like this, with a bit more experience I think you have the potential make something great in future.

Cute VN, if a bit short. The writing is a touch overdone at times, mainly when describing the MC's feelings, but the characters are believable and interesting. I especially liked the short interaction with Ken and the coach, showing he isn't just some stereotypical dickhead of a coach. I did find some of the endings a bit confusing and abrupt though, particularly the coffee ending. I guess the other rat is Eddie's parent, ready to take him away? Despite there being ten days left? Regardless, it's a nice, short and sweet VN. Not a lot happening to make it stand out but it works for what it is.