VN - Ren'Py - WVM [S2 Ch. 1 Ep. 13 B3] [Braindrop]

I'm going to be one of the odd fish who gives this game a 3 star rating. The game isn't as bad as many are making it out to be. That said, development has gone in a strange and sub-optimal direction. And I think this can be excused if BrainDrop is spending most of his energy at the moment on the season 1 redesign.

Very simply: there are too many girls now. It's not even necessarily a number issue, but rather the writing has gone heavily in the quantity direction, and consequently half of the characters don't have any personality at all. As a basic rule in this type of development, if you add a new character, you give that character the screen time to have their personality, traits, and quirks develop. Rather, the developer seems to add new characters, teases you a bit with them, and then doesn't really do anything with them for months or even years of development time. In the unlikely event he reads this: please stop adding new characters for a while and focus on adding depth to the ones that are there.

That said, there's still some really nice moments and development for the few characters that have been given attention, like the recent(as of this post) story point about Rachel was really nice. BrainDrop clearly has the writing chops, but he seems to enjoy spending too much time on the asset store buying new girls, which is a shame. Hopefully the re-write of season 1 will lead to a fully fleshed out character roster, and that's where his energy is going.

And stop blueballing me on Stacy and Azel. I understand that having Azel content is a no-go for patreon rules, but some sort of officially unofficial modded content would be nice.

The core narrative of the story has become a bit convoluted, but still has the potential to be good. I don't even like basketball, but I feel like one of the central columns of this game should be the...basketball. No? The game about a basketball star has been in development for 4 and a half years and has only 1 game of basketball even referenced, let alone played? The main plot of the MC's backstory has some potential I suppose, but it has been spinning it's wheels for a while now.

The renders, particularly the most recent ones, are nice in their appearance.
The characters are hot, and even though the writing isn't there to properly differentiate them, there's good variety in terms of appearance and body types.
Not everyone is genetically engineered to be voluptuous, and that's nice.

Ultimately if you play through to the end of the current version; there's a lot of content, but it feels like a mixed bag of good and bad components. With better love interest character development, a slowdown of the ingame chronology's pacing, and more "everyday" content mixed in with the high stakes mystery stuff, and this game could be really good. But if I'm honest, as of right now, the game feels most like a kinetic novel porn simulator. And there's nothing wrong with a kinetic novel porn simulator; I just don't think that's what this game should be, though.

5/10, improvement easily possible.

Essentially the game went far to balls deep on the concept of a harem to the point it gets weird. Hadn't played this for years I don't know wtf happened.

Good

- Hot girls - I mean it has a lot....no a fucking LOT.

- Renders - It's rendered well enough outside some facial expressions. Gets the job done

- Content - There is a lot here at this point.

Bad

- Story - It started as a budding basketball star going to a relatively small college. He also had a GF and best friend. Now I don't know what the story is. I'm not sure if stuff was been changed or I was misremembering. It well and truly lost me. It went of the fucking rails.

- Girls - Outside looks I couldn't tell you the names. They just become a blob of dick sucking faces with no real personality or consequences. Which feels like the opposite of what a VN should aim for.

- Harem - It's porn Pokemon at this point. I've seen a game make a 20+ girl harem work so large harems can be done well. This does not. It just becomes weird. there's points I was genuinely wandering if the ending of the game would be the MC waking up and realizing it was all just a dream. It seems women fall in love with him basically on sight. It's fucking bizarre.

- Choice - To fuck or not that's basically it. It's awfully close to kinetic novel territory.

- Facial expressions - Unless there's a hidden camera and they're fucking around for it why do the girls keep making such retarded faces? Actually if all the women are retarded the story makes more sense.

- Boring - This is about the worst thing I can ever say about a game or novel imo but this is. There's just too many characters with too little meaningful happening. It's mind numbing.

- Sex - The problem when you have an AVN that throws so many girls with no story or personality is it becomes just pure porn, bad porn at that. Simple fact is AVNs don't beat real porn at been porn without doing the VN part well. If I want an AVN experience this isn't it, if I just want to fap porn stars are a search away. I can't help feel the dev missed the point a little.

Summary

Basically a weak weird story with far too many characters, mostly inconsequential. I genuinely struggled to come up with good points because I was just overwhelmed with how stupid it is now. The word that comes to mind is a mess. This review could seriously have just been 5 words; it's a complete fucking mess.

TLDR showed promise but ends up been a meaningless sea of sucking and hugging faces. It's a complete fucking mess.

Review for HUG Simulator... ekhm WVM(S2-C1-E13)
Let me start by saying that this is probably the last episode I'm playng, there are already like 600 girls in the game(irony) and new ones are being added all the time, and I'm voluntarily in a relationship with 4. So I'm going from one I'd be happy to avoid and hug her to another I'd be even more happy to avoid and hug.

Good:

- A few nice girls.
- Frequent though brief updates.
- Giving us the option to reject almost all girls.
- Dev does not make the mistake of many before him, who out of the blue create our Li`s bi-sex, here we have a choice.


The bad:
- We hug every 8 seconds on average with every girl, no matter if we are in a relationship with her or not.
- Imposed two partners
- Hugging.
- We sleep(no sex) with absolutely everyone, no matter if in a relationship or not.
- Absolutely every conversation ends with a hug.
- Abandoning the sports aspect of the story.
- After one basketball game, basically the game is about talking and cuddling and sometimes sex.
- The goal of dev, is to use absolutely every girl model on the market in his game.
- Did I mention hugging?
- Did I? That's there's even more hugging.



A bit more broadly about the game and slightly spoilerish.
The beginning is quite promising, you get the story of a young basketball player who will undoubtedly be a future star of the sport. He chooses a college that is quite weak for his abilities, but he is driven by the desire to stay with his girlfriend and friend. Unfortunately, in the course of the story we are forced to maintain a relationship with the girlfriend and, to make matters worse, another one is forced upon us. Fortunately, with the next women we already have a choice and can reject them and, most importantly, it depends on our choice whether the girls will be bi, if not I would probably rate it 1/5 and abandon it long ago.There are dozens of girls in the game and with each update more are thrown in, if you are one of those who go for all of them and you play for the sex scenes, which are not the best although most of the forced ones with two imposed girls i skipped then you are probably will be enjoyed playing it it .Back to the plot, the basketball player after just one quarter of the game in which we "play" dev practically abandons the sports aspect of the game and focuses on the antagonist, who disappears after his defeat. It all happens quite early on, and from that point on the game changes to meet a new girl or girls, have sex with them and hug them or just hug them. Then we hug the ones we've already met and have sex, then talk to someone else and hug them, go to the next room/location where we meet a new girl and hug her.

Good game with good renders and well written english. 90% of the characters are women and they're all into the MC which is kinda weird, but not a deal breaker.

Spicy scenes are alright and could use a little bit more animation but that's not an easy ask (lots of work).

All in all: worth playing.

Too much dialogue that's just filler with not enough content. Once again I think I am starting to understand the Harem haters. I have liked this genre for the longest time. Somewhere, along the line though certain games decided to crank up the Pokemon aspect of this of gotta catch em all and this game is the epitome of the trash. Too many similar/same models rehashed, too many girls to even care about them, & again no proceeding with the plot (this last one is probably because of the sheer number of girls).

Fantastic render quality, engaging storyline, and plenty of "content" ;D
I've followed the development of WVM for a few years now and with each update the quality improves more and more. Despite the struggles in Braindrop's life, it's clear this is a project born from true passion and I'm glad I've stuck with it every step of the way.

I was a fan of this VN when it just came out: It was something that felt new, fresh, the obligated GF who you cannot dump was never of my liking but at least had a charismatic and fun personality, and all the girls you met had some distinct variety.
As the game progressed, it got worse and worse. The storyline went from 'fictional/fantastic' to 'ridiculous/over the top' too fast. Too many things happening at once , all the girls eventually get the same personality (worshipers who treat MC as a god in a ridiculous way), and despite being harem there's way too many girls, so many that you just end up getting quantity over quality. (which sucks, cause every girl had an potential interesting story when you just met them, then it just falls flat).

It also didn't help that the author is a self-proclaimed 'contrarian', so instead of taking (the initial) constructive criticism by fans who actually loved the game, he just kept adding more of what annoyed people, which resulted in cartoonish expressions from the girls that made them look unappealing.

It's sad cause this one got so much potential and I was rooting for it, but IMO it gets worse with every update.

Started out good, but dev basically started putting no to minimal effort into the game long ago. He also would do literally the opposite of what people - including supporters - asked. One example people asked to cut back on the stupid duckfaces, instead he increased using them. He was also asked to stop introducing so many LIs (there were already so many it was impossible to keep track) - instead he started making more and not even giving them real names (just colors based on color clothes they wear.) Releases came less often and became smaller - went a very long time at one time. Quality went down in many ways over time. Not at all recommended.

First off I'll say, wow, there is a lot of content here.

Regarding the art, the renders are high quality and the animations are all very smooth. Nearly all of the girls are very attractive with plenty of lewd content.

On the subject of story, its passable. It doesn't always feel like there is much depth. There are plenty of stretches where it just feels like filler to get from one lewd scene to the next. Most of your choices don't feel like they matter much, basically just "do you want to fuck/keep fucking this person?" Additionally every relationship comes on a light speed. There is practically no build up before they are deeply, madly in love with the MC. But thats not really out of the ordinary.

My biggest complaint has got to be pacing. I mean, damn, every single day in the game has WAY too much packed into it. I know this is just a game, a bit of fantasy, but every single day has WAY too much packed into it. It really breaks the immersion, for me personally I found myself constantly thinking "damn you can't keep adding things into this day, just push it to the next!" After day 9 or 10 there is a message about a planned rework and thus you're jumped forward to day 31 or 32, so it seemed like the dev realized things needed to be spread out over more time, but that rework hasn't happened yet. Also, the days that follow that message are just as jam packed which makes it feel like the lesson wasn't really learned.

The quality of the art and the earnest attempt at a reasonable story place this game above the vast majority. The lack of meaningful choices, pacing issues, and overall absence of real depth keep it out of the elite tier.

This is one of those games where there's just the illusion of choice, and whilst that illusion remains strong in the first chapter it seems like a really high quality and strong game. But the illusion breaks and the cracks quickly appear. The girls have no personality. They just want to suck your dick. The choices have zero impact. Its just "do you want to fuck this girl" then off you go. And once you do there's no way out. I slept with Rachael a couple times now every time shes around my dick is in her vagina whether I want to sleep with her or not. Found myself tapping through the boring story to get to the scenes but theres so many mindless boring drones just in the scene for the sake of it that even then I was racing through them. Premise is great but this is BORING. Ffs your GFs sister, who was basically sexually assaulted by you in the early game (no hate if you went that route, but thats what it was) is so madly in love with you that she becomes depressed and moves out because you wont let her join your harem or fuck her again until she apologies to her sister. That's the level of nuance youve got here

An absolute mess of a Narrative with so many people introduced you barely remember who is what.
The plot could be pulled from any P*rnhub title with as much depth, the only choice you get is "Will I bang it or not" , the render style has changed to the point that the women literally look like ducks .
Avoid this mess of a title, now they are redoing Season 1 you know where this title is heading....

New version
Well.... that was painful. Why? why would you go back and redo your entire game just to make it so mutch worse?! Was there really no one around to tell him to NOT do this?! The original game was one of my favourites here, the characters was good, the lewd scenes was good and varied and tones of different characters to interact with. This new version is just a 100% downgrade from the original. I say give this game a pass and play something else, the game will be abandoned in a year when all support have dried up anyway.

Old Version
You know what, its not bad. Have been playing the game almost from the first release and i really like the story and characters. Renders are good and i find most of the hate the game receives now are blown a little out of proportion. Sure the story did take a little dip, but its still interesting and I'm looking forward to every update.
I recommend it to anyone and their is a lot of good content for anyone interested.

The story is an utter mess. The developer keeps cramming in useless characters or girls just because. They all have the same personality; of they fall flat in love with the main character and want to have sex with him.

The animations are not bad, but all the girls have this pucker lip or duck face syndrome. It's hard to look at sometimes.

The game started off some good but I think due to the real life issues that the developer has gone through, it has affected his writing or direction of the game.

There are better harem games out there, this isn't one of them, this is a convoluted mess.

I only give it 2 stars because it's one of the very first light novels I played.

The renderings are not ugly but are not incredible either, the story starts well but the more we advance the more unrealistic it becomes, literally the MC can have all the girls on the planet, there are too many people, 99% of whom are feminine, so 3/4 of the characters have no personality, the more I play, the less I want to finish it, too bad my crush when I discovered the light novels several years ago.

The narrative is pretty poor, the mc is pretty much a worshipped god, even jesus is less revered then this guy. There is literally no narrative plot of this MC and hes extremely unrelatable. One bonus is that this has good renders, its one of the only parts of which I can commend.
You can compare this to other high end renpy games.

Being a dik has humour, good renders and a good narrative plot with a decently relatable MC

Desert Stalker has one of the best renders in the genre, a good post apocalyptic story, and doesnt hide from what it is, a male power fantasy, thats fine if the game admits it which it does.

This game has not one single relatable character, the humour is nonexistent, the plot is erratic because it gets retconned every new big patch, the girls are uninteresting but I can forgive all of that, all of this shit if the MC wasnt such a bore, Ive never seen such a boring MC in these type of games. There is no rhyme or reason why this guy is interesting at all, you might think "Well hes an aspiring and upcoming basketball player" and I can accept that IF the girls didnt treat this guy like hes the second coming of jesus mixed with the emperor of warhammer 40k.

a boring game, too many characters, plus we only have one type of face, we have the impression that all the girls are part of the same family, they all look the same
we really get lost in this game with each episode we introduce new characters while forgetting the main ones
an aesthetically very beautiful game but it remains soulless

This was an interesting experience ... (up till chapter 11) . Pretty great on the visual and sex scenes aspect obviously , but some things just annoy you over so many hours of the game . I know what kind of game it is , an adult one , so within almost all of them , there is that element of everyone brainwashing themselves that what the MC does is good or fine ...

But god , this felt like cult indoctrination from start to finish . It feels as if every dialogue with each woman , is about how good , great even , person you are . How perfect, how selfless . These women all parrot the same weird koolaid from your first official girlfriend : "You're god's gift to humanity , so it's ok to share you , you'll make everyone so happy" !

And honestly , being an adult game , even that would be fine , if it did not lead to them droning on about it each scenes , instead of diving more directly to the plot line of said scene . Girl A got some info and news for you moving along the plot and sex scenes , well nope FIRST let's talk for 15 mins about how great of a person you are . This goes way beyond padding and could use editing .
This would make me root against my character , and for the villains , if they weren't so purposefully lame and mean for no good reason .

I'm also not sure about the way the plot dragged its feet over the obviously upcoming lesbian sharing (leading into threesome) between at least two pairs of characters . It's being mentioned , teased , discussed among the concerned girls . Even when they finally agreed on it , somehow it's in flux , limbo with weird hangup to slow the pace and milk it further.

And on a more hilarious note , stop giving me new Houses all the time . I believe at one point (but I'm not sure) , we went to one new house , didn't even use it one day , before being offered a new one and moving into it

So.. this is a tricky one to rate/review. Season 1 (the real one not the imaginary one that Season 2 is based on but we'll get to that) is one of the best VNs I've ever played. The girls are gorgeous and varied, the writing was solid, and the story had heart to it. There was a really good balance of sexy times to story. Then the dev apparently got a lobotomy and made the most epic clusterfuck of a season 2 that's maybe ever been made. It's based of an apparently WILDLY different season 1 that literally doesn't exist and no one will probably ever see. This was incredibly jarring come straight from the end of season 1. Suddenly, you jump from the morning of day 10 to "it's been a month." That's one of many dramatic changes and only the tip of the iceberg of the clusterfuckery you'll experience. *Review 1/5*

Some times games can be fun or not so fun, or can be the good, the bad,
or the ugly. This game is one of the good ones, it's about a boy named
Ethan and he has a girlfriend Jamie and they haven't gone all the way just
yet, and he also has a best friend who is named Shauna. He is number
one in basketball and goes to a college where the red carpet
is rolled out for him, and throughout the game he meets more
and more women, also his GF decides she wants him to please
the women that truly deserve him giving him an option for
open relationship with meaningful girls.

The script is good and the graphics are very nice, the drawings look
very life like and the bodies are very attractive. So I have decided
to give the game 4 out of 5 star rating.

This is quite a divisive game...it goes against convention, it challenges the moral and ethical paths that we are brainwashed and conditioned into following. It's a game that breaks down borders and expands possibilities into areas that are almost 'alien' to us.
But I like the idea of love without boundaries, rules and regulations, religious monogamy, restrictions that force millions of people to live in loveless marriages and feel guilty if they stray. I've never been a 'free love' guy, but this game creates a universe that is a complete improvement over the one I am currently living in! It's not a perfect universe, but it's an improvement over all the fighting, growing poverty, rising energy bills, inflation bursting food prices that exist in my reality.
So, this game is my escape and I love it.