Bowser's Grade: B
Just want to make clear my grades mean nothing and I just want to share my thoughts with the team to hopefully foster some creative growth.
My absolute favorite thing about this entry is the meta-narrative. The idea of finding a VHS tape of some random episode of a long-forgotten, Saturday-morning cartoon is delightful. It also serves as a brilliant way to manage the scope of the project for a game jam entry. Well done.
The characters are incredibly fun. They fit into their Saturday-morning cartoon archetypes very well while also giving a mature, furry audience exactly what they want. This echos true for the character writing and the visual character designs.
The music is immaculate. Everything's period appropriate while also being well-composed and well-produced. Can't tell you how wide I was smiling when I first heard that title track. That title screen has a lot of impact and leaves a great first impression. No notes on the music. Well done Dieselsaurus/ KOMODOMODE.
The art style is very charming. The design of the sprites and the comic CG fit the project's art direction so well.
Flattery out of the way, I want to offer my critique to explain the "B".
- Presentation
- One of my main issues is how incredible the presentation starts... then it fizzles out soon after. We're introduced to an incredible title screen, accompanied by an exhilarating title track. We click "start" and then taken to a fantastic comic book sequence... just for the presentation lose all steam for the rest of the VN. We have sprites with singular expressions, default RenPy UI, and photoshopped backgrounds. It unfortunately highlights a lot of missed potential.
- To be clear, I don't want to punish you all for having such a strong start and then not maintaining that same level of production throughout the rest of the runtime. If the comic and title screen weren't impactful at all, I'd be more inclined to give you a "C".
- I found the singular expression sprites distracting. You had characters arguing, celebrating, lamenting, and battling all with the same look on their face all throughout the story (aside from Phase).
- I think if given just an extra couple hours of work, you could have each character sporting 2 or 3 extra emotions (maybe excluding Limiter, he might take longer). I'm not an artist myself, so I hope I'm not woefully out of line with that suggestion. That said, I think all it would take for some of these characters is just redrawing the shape of the mouth, eye brows, and eyes. You wouldn't even need to adjust their pose. Subtle changes like that can make a huge difference.
- I was also disappointed with the default RenPy UI and the default font, DejaVu Sans. Changing out the text box does take a good deal of work, I'll grant you that. But changing the font is a very easy fix (download the .TTF and change one line of code). In all honesty, the hardest part is picking out your favorite one. It does so much work to elevate the presentation and differentiate it from lower quality RenPy projects.
- If I may make a suggestion, during the livestream on the FVN Discord server, Camazule made the brilliant suggestion to make the textbox present itself as subtitles. Not only would you be elevating your project from a presentation standpoint, but it'd go a long way to serve the meta-narrative as well. No joke, I'd easily raise my grade to an "A-" if that were to be done along with adding sprite expressions.
- Writing
- I want to start by saying, it was solid! The characters had tons of personality, charm, and natural sounding dialogue. I do have some notes, though.
- I think the script could have benefitted from a 10-15% cut in word count. Just look for redundant exposition, lengthy explanations, or just otherwise needless passages. Your average Saturday morning cartoon is ~15 minutes long. I think erring of being too short would work in your favor.
- Creating a furry visual novel for adults that's themed for a kids cartoon can definitely be tough to write for. You have to keep a balance between making the dialogue kid-appropriate while also appealing to your actual adult audience. I think this was handled well, but could use some improvement.
- This review is already too long, so I won't go through and meticulously detail every blemish I found. I'm more than happy to discuss further with any of the team if you need some specific examples. And it's just my opinion, too! Maybe I'm out of line.
Judging from what I saw, I'm going to make a guess and say that you all wanted to accomplish a lot more with this visual novel but were limited on time. Nothing wrong with that! It's the nature of game jams.
That said, I can't help but see a lot of lost potential that holds it back. Especially since that potential could have been realized with a rather small amount of work. I think a "B+" could have easily been earned with a different font and a handful of sprite expressions.
If given more time, you all could have gone further. More writing polish and a second comic CG for the final battle would have easily made this an "A".
Regardless of the reason for that lost potential, I would love to see this project get a glow-up later on down the line. Not sure if that's everyone's intention, but it would be incredible to see.
You all made something wonderful. If anything, this VN is fun. And it's more than apparent that's what you all set out to do. It was a pleasure reading this one. Looking forward to your next project(s) 😸.