Oh, this entry really caught my attention and I played it at once (in French), start to finish. Unlike usual BAF entries, a lot of time is allocated to daily life activities compared to action. In a shounen, it would be more like the kind of things we see in a prologue/prequel/flashback showing how a former super soldier changed.
The beginning follows quite a clear, classic pattern, but it’s enjoyable to read. The second part is more uncertain as it opens the door to many possibilities, leaving room for surprise. I’ll leave the Writing comments at the end of this post so people who haven’t played it yet are less likely to be spoiled.
Visual
The backgrounds are clearly recognizable and reused smartly by having the daily routine go to the same rooms again and again (the opposite of my own VN which just moves on and on to different locations, giving a lot of work to my BG artist).
The characters have nice design, we can find consistency across the uniforms (even between the super soldiers and the civilian, with the grey and orange color palette), even some sci-fi lights without being too gaudy. I was surprised to see Maria wearing a skirt, as it’s not often seen in space, but I suppose that it’s alright in the future (thanks to artificial gravity - long hair too, actually) and to stress her civilian status.
The character placement could be improved, centering both character on screen when there are 2 of them, and having them face each other (I haven’t used Renpy for a while but Naninovel does it automatically so it now surprises me when it doesn’t happen).
Some facial expression changes are subtle, and the full fade out + fade in of the character prevents us from grasping what changed (comparison is harder when objects disappear momentarily).
“Tractatus lui rendit un regard rouge sang” -> facial expression doesn’t match. Instead, it matches a line more below “Un sourire amer se dessina”. Now, I just checked Tofu’s character sheet and the “angry” expression doesn’t exist, so I suppose you picked the closest one. Well, I just made a game where I prepared 50 expressions that I had to shrink to 13, so I understand the need to “drop it and pick the closest one”.
UI
The Language option at the top-left of the main menu is a good idea to avoid having user go to Preferences first to find it (although in this case “Préférences” it spells almost like English, it could not be the case with other languages).
Audio
Nice music, I see you composed it yourself.
The ending theme is much longer than the ending animation, I paused it at the last message to hear the end. Fortunately there is the album on Bandcamp so I can listen to the tracks in full outside the game (so you created a Bandcamp Pro account for this? Do you have to pay the subscription from day 1 even if you haven’t started selling?)
I would put more SFX on action scenes, but maybe you want to keep things simple. It also have some aesthetics to only play BGM. However, once you add voice acting it shouldn’t be a step too far to add some SFX. That said, I myself struggle to decide where to add SFX and where not to (since you could add them indefinitely to the lowest level of detail, or just stick to the biggest, most important sounds), so it may be a tricky decision.
Writing
I played the game in French, and I could appreciate the literary quality, although a few expressions were reused in some consecutive pages. I found several typos, pretty basic ones which you can fix with an advanced spellchecker (one that detects agreement (accord) or just an ML-based spellchecker like Google Doc), but this is a list just in case:
- étonnement (cela ne me dérange plus) -> étonnamment
- nous sommes fait (pour collaborer) -> nous sommes faits
- (Tractatus fit) un avant en avant -> un pas en avant
- désivageait -> dévisageait
- tu ne serais pas vaincu -> tu ne serais pas vaincue
- Désolée, (mais je ne te laisserai pas gagner) -> Désolé
Other comments:
- When Tractatus stops visiting Critique, she wonders if she has “heurté” him and whether he’s “fâché” which are two emotional words that suddenly appear in her vocabulary. Was she thinking like this all the time and hiding it, or is she really starting to use those words? It’s a bit surprising. But at the same time, I don’t really see how you could have expressed it otherwise. And the next sentence “pourquoi est-ce que je me pose toutes ces questions ?” shows that she’s also in a kind of transitional phase, although it’s weaker than Tractatus’s.
- I just searched for “Tractatus” and found about ~~German~~ Austrian author Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book, which now makes sense together with “Critique” (which could also be written “Kritik” since the book was written by ~~German~~ Prussian author Emmanuel Kant)
The end reminded me more of very down-to-earth (if not cynical) cyberpunk stories. It is, indeed, more rational to create a therapeutic AI companion, move away and join the opposite forces in order to create a status quo with the other massive destruction weapon embodied by Critique in order to bring peace to the galaxy (and I suppose open the path to the new order mentioned by the Creator). In addition, an artificial being is less likely to criticize another AI (although apparently they had a secret ingredient to give them “true life”). However, I was surprised that Tractatus, who built up emotions until this point, managed to follow this pragmatic approach right at the end. A typical shonen progression would have him destroy the whole mothership out of rage - or just leave, promising to create a new order for the human race. Then again, the rest of the story is not typical shonen.
Interestingly, at the beginning, I suspected Maria to… have dropped the poetry book on purpose to change Tractatus’s heart (independently of any mission, just because he needed it). Thinking about it, if it was really a mission, it was relying on a lot of luck that Tractatus would go to the library, as Critique just recommended it to him that day, on a whim. If the plan was originally to meet Critique, though, who frequently attends the library, it would make sense. Maybe there were actually another guy in the library trying to approach Critique but he somewhat never made it?