ACE Academy Review (NuclearSpider)
ACE Academy is a game that has potential, but it falls short of my expectations.
Having recently played visual novels from well-established Japanese developers, I found myself comparing ACE Academy to them. It's perhaps unfair to draw direct comparisons, considering one was made by an indie dev team backed through Kickstarter, while the other... well, you know.
Reused backgrounds are my biggest issue with this VN. It's one of the few things that truly pulls me out of being immersed in a VN. I usually imagine entire worlds around the backgrounds and location descriptions, but it gets completely thrown off by reusing them. I'd honestly prefer they simply showed me the sky than reuse backgrounds.
Another issue is the seemingly odd choice of story placement. Throughout the entire game, you get to pick who you want to have interactions with. I'd been avoiding picking Mayu the entire time until I couldn't anymore. An entire backstory of how the MC and Mayu started a band and were looking for a singer. I'm sorry, what? This is the first I've heard of this, and it's never brought up again either. Perhaps it's featured in the Mayu route, but I can't be bothered to read her route, to be honest.
This is something that the game does quite a bit where it springs onto you little bits of story that don't really quite make sense. I'm not a writer so I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but for some of them, something just felt off every so often.
Now that I've got my peeves out of the way, I want to say something positive. I can tell there was a lot of passion behind this project; I actually burst out into a full-on laugh several times, and not many games can do that.
The voice actors did a great job, and it was nice listening to English voices for once.
The art has its charm to it, and I think it works rather well.
While the story isn't the best thing I've read, it's nicely executed and wraps up alright. While I would've liked to see it fleshed out more, the devs simply didn't have that privilege with the funds.
So in short, I didn't love ACE Academy, but I had fun. There are improvements to be made. I look forward to playing what they've brought out since they released this.