Alright, so, I read a different May Wolf entry a few days ago that involved a guy currently in a relationship with a girl that experiences some gay temptation, and I was pleasantly surprised when that story ended with the guy choosing the girl instead of the hot gay wolf guy since the latter seems like kind of the default M(a)y Wolf ending.
There are no such surprises here, and this story ended exactly where I thought it would. There are interesting details and bits of worldbuilding along the way, but you basically know what you're getting into just looking at the cover on this one.
"One Last Week" was my personal #1 from last year's May Wolf, and while this one is just a teensy bit more self-indulgent than the other stuff I've read from you, this was still a solid entry. I have thoughts though.
Implementation of Theme:
Yeah, we're certainly covered here. If anything, we might be overly covered here. I think this met the mark already just from werewolves and their relation to Ezath, but then we get even more on top of that with some local legends like one of Mitch's apparent favorites, Damartos, who started feeding the wolves, then hung out with them until he became one. Subtle.
As alluded to, I'm not sure you really needed the extras there, and I wonder why it's there at all unless you thought that werewolves might have been too accepted in-universe to be considered "folklore" and wanted to be doubly sure you met the theme. It's not like you need any additional foreshadowing here; the guy's cuddling a werewolf in the icon. I don't think any of this takes away from the implementation of the theme, and I'm still giving full marks for this category, but I did think that was curious.
Presentation:
I thought the presentation was pretty great here. I was a bit worried at the beginning with the one static background, the one set of character sprites, and the one looping music track, but the visuals, and to a lesser extent, audio, open up as the story progresses. The art style had a storybook-esque vibe that fit well with the setting, and while the music could have been more varied, it was understated enough that it didn't bother me at all. I think there was also a page turning sound effect for changing scenes? I could have been hallucinating that, but if that was there, that's a neat touch.
For a one-man show, the amount of sprites, variations, and CGs was really impressive, and I thought they were high quality, even if humans are absolutely not what I'm here for and I do not and will never understand beards on anthros.
Writing was meticulously proofread as well, with maybe only one or two errors that I caught through the whole VN. Really great work on the polish here.
Story/Writing:
Generally, I thought the plot and prose here were pretty solid, but in the interest of keeping this to a semi-reasonable length, I'm going to jump into a few critiques:
- There's a pretty clear thematic parallel of lycanthropy being analogous to homosexuality, and while this is superficially fine (if a little heavy handed), I'm not sure if the circumstances that led to werewolves being regarded as "against nature" totally work for this analogy. Like, when that kind of language is used for homosexuality, it's a false justification for discrimination that focuses on "otherness" because there's no actual harm to point to, but in this universe, there was a very real war in Ezarth, that (allegedly) involved very real werewolves, that inflicted very real casualties, that caused the survivors to have very real PTSD. It's intentionally vague how much the soldiers encountered werewolves in Ezarth (Thalis' account of his platoon's eradication doesn't account for any prior engagements, any subsequent reassignments to another unit, or the experiences of any other veterans, since he isn't the only one from the village) but the "othering" of werewolves is a bit more complicated if your only exposure to them has been seeing one rip your friend's face off.
I think you try to get into this a little, but there are other points as well, like Mitch lamenting destroying his father's figures because Thalis told him to, that could've used a bit more nuance (yes, it's absolutely tragic that the mementos of Mitch's father are lost, but maybe keeping a bunch of severe PTSD triggers around the house isn't a great idea either. There are probably compromises that could have been taken here, like just hiding the figures.). I feel like I'm not doing a great job of explaining this, but the general point here is just that there could have been more nuance in exploring how legitimate trauma shaped the attitudes of the village in addition to any preconceived notions or misconceptions.
- While I applaud the decision to have Mitch and Abel stay in the village to try to make things work instead of abandoning Birdie and the others, I feel like there's still a bit of hand-waving on this issue so we can hurry up and get to the happy ending. We get the line "But those things will come in due time" but, like, will they? Things seemed pretty dire just with the dowry issue, let alone blowing up the whole engagement. I understand said happy ending, but I'm not sure I'm as optimistic as the leads.
- I typically like seeing branching paths and player input, and the effort is always appreciated, but from the differences in length and content of the two endings I felt like the choice was less about caution vs. trust, or pragmatism vs. optimism, as it was characterized by the options, and more just about whether you got the Big Gay Sex Scene or not.
- Fuze already pointed out the anachronisms that I noted, so I won't reiterate those, but there were some awkwardly verbose lines of dialogue here too. For example, when Mitch first encounters Abel, he has the lines "I suppose so, but it's not like your techniques are all that efficient either!" "I mean, what do you stand to benefit from stacking the wheat up into such a massive pile?" I kind of struggle imagining an actual person saying that, and these could be condensed down to something like "You're over there building a tower of wheat and you're calling ME inefficient?" I know jam constraints don't leave a lot of time for drafting and revising, but just a stylistic thing to consider.
Creativity:
On the positive side for creativity, I think there was a lot of effort here in the attempts at detailed worldbuilding as well as the general aesthetic direction for the project, and overall I'd consider this a highly creative product. With that said,
1) Thematically, "supernatural mutation is a parallel to being gay or otherwise othered" was novel and original when X-Men was doing it 50 years ago, but I feel like this is something I've seen quite a few times at this point, and
2) let's be honest here, man. There were plenty of points in this story where you probably could've cut out the middleman and just named the protagonist "chmron" instead of "Michail". I'm not sure how far outside the box you had to go to come up with the core plot here.
I know there was a lot of feedback above, but I really do think you did an excellent job with this, so please don't take any of that the wrong way.
Final score of 12 bottles of Old Spice Wolfthorn body wash out of 3 uncomfortably realistic lupine fursuits.