I don't have twitter so I hope it's okay to post here!
First of all, I would like to say a huge congratulations to everyone who worked on this game!! Ganba ganba~
The individual assets were excellent, the writing of the individual routes was so much fun (and very poignant at times??), the art (ESPECIALLY the sprite art for every single route, my gosh, I loved how varied and unique all of the art styles were, you guys did such a great job), the UI was super cute and accessible, and the MUSIC AAAAAA I’m astonished that you all came out with so many lovely original tracks, I’ll definitely be revisiting the music player!!
If there’s anything I’d criticise about the game was the…management of the assets, maybe? I understand that it’s difficult to manage and organise such a large group of creatives to work on a project, and I would like to congratulate the staff for putting this together, but that difficulty does shine through in the awkward way things did (and didn’t) come together.
All of the routes are wonderfully written, but they all mention a birthday/anniversary live, so I thought that maybe we were building up to an event where we could see that live and have everyone’s routes tie together that way. But then it never goes anywhere, and the game just ends with Reine (who never appears anywhere else other than in the beginning and end, I don’t think?) and a photo of everyone.
The individual routes were also spaced apart in a way that makes it feel like there was meant to be something happening in-between scenes, but because there was no breather where you could do other things, it was a bit of a slog to get through them sometimes. It was a bit of an odd choice to have the player just straight-up select their character route? Since this is a diary, you’d write your entries according to the date, not people, right? Instead of selecting the routes and playing them through according to character, maybe it would have been better if you could just pick a character according to the date?
This is not at all a criticism on the writing of the character routes though!! I love love loved everyone’s takes on the talents and Haato’s dynamic with them, I laughed, I was emotional, I was (delightfully!) disturbed. My only guess is that there was meant to be a main route linking everything together that didn’t make it in, and the individual character routes were never written to be played all the way through in one go to begin with.
I noticed that there were credits for mini-games but…there were no mini-games? There’s a stamina(?) and haachama bar but they don’t really seem to serve a function? I really liked the phone UI (and also just the UI in general, the little pig in the corner is so cute, again big kudos to them!!) and again, I assume it was meant to be a really cute and fun way to jump between characters, except at the moment you can’t phone anyone else other than the talent whose route you’re on, so right now it feels a bit obsolete to have it in there.
There were times where music was playing where I felt like maybe there shouldn’t have been music, or maybe that the wrong track was playing, but like with the writing, I’m assuming this was more of a management/communication issue than anything with the music itself, since the pieces are great as they are individually!
Also, is the developers section meant to be there..? If it is, I don’t really get why…I feel like it was there for testing and the devs forgot to take it out. Maybe it’d make more sense to have a proper commentary section instead? Something like having the different creatives talk about what it was like working on the game, what changes they had to make, various trivia etc. As it is, it really just highlights how many things were arbitrarily left out (and also left in).
Ideally it would be great if we could have an update later on that integrates those assets properly, since it looks like the extras team worked hard on them! But of course, I understand if the group as a whole would rather be done with it.
One last thing! I noticed this about the last two projects too, but the credits speed is so fast that it genuinely made me dizzy to look at them. At least in a youtube video you can pause to catch them all, but in the game all you can do is replay the credits over and over while your head spins.
You can tell from the different art, music and writing styles that this was a collaboration by a large number of talented people, and it’s a shame that all these individuals are just zoomed past like it’s a chore to go through them, which I’m sure could not have been the intent.
I looked down other avenues to see if I could find them without having to squint through the speedy blur of names in-game for the eleventh time, but there aren’t any credits on itchio, the youtube channel, in the OP, trailers, teasers, or a single one of the many promo tweets that have been posted either. All I could find were credits for the staff on the official website, which is a little disappointing for a group that prides itself on having so many fans collaborating together. That being the case, I think it’s even more important that the fans who worked hard on this are credited as accessibly and mindfully as possible in the game at least!
Maybe if the credits were something you could manually scroll through? But given the large cast, I’d suggest having a credits section at the end of every route listing the people who worked on that specific route and what their roles were!
It might also be a good idea to differentiate who illustrated and who animated, both for the main OP and the individual character OPs!
This was an amazing accomplishment, so I hope that every single person who worked on this is acknowledged properly! It’s a good thing to support Haato, but it’s important that this community doesn’t neglect to support one another too!