izigame.me

I picked this game up for funsies on a whim, and I am personally enjoying it a lot. There are a lot of elements that I enjoy about this game.
HOWEVER. Just because I personally enjoy a game does not make it a good game, bring it above criticism, or make it a game that I would recommend to others. There are a lot of issues and poor design choices in this game that make it objectively not a good game, even if I'm personally having fun.
(Note: Spoilers ahead that I use to make some pretty important points.)
The thing that a lot of the reviews have been addressing are the glitches, so that's probably a good place to start. There's a lot of these, especially within the late game, and I know that the devs are working on a hotfix, but frankly some of them are so major and/or hard to miss that there's no way the game should have shipped with them. One of the characters has their whole intro scene skipped so that their name never appears on the dialogue box. Several characters are getting stuck in dialogue loops that doesn't allow you to "realize" them. Some of the bugs resulting from devs not expecting a certain pathing through the game are understandable, but the one's I've mentioned are not small and should have been caught by quality control, so I'm not sure how they could have possibly been missed. I've also spotted three places where punctuation has been left off of player choice dialogue, and maybe that's a small thing, but it does really irk me, because it shows a lack of attention.
The game is also missing a majority of the systems in place that are standard for the VN genre; the lack of any kind of Q. Save or Q. Load feature is particularly frustrating. The only way to make sure you're getting the dialogue you want is to go through multiple UIs to make a new save after every single interaction. You can make a design philosophy argument for living with the consequences of your actions, but when your dialogue choices are frequently either so obvious about what the end result will be that it doesn't matter (Dolly) or straight up make mo sense (Chairemi getting upset about physical contact because you try to initiate a sword fight with her in a scene where a sword fight makes sense), it starts to sound like an excuse. On another note, the Date-A-Dex is practically unusable; there's no way to sort by a particular S.P.E.C.S. type, or to search up a specific character, and it updates and pings you every single time you advance a narrative with a character, which is completely unnecessary.
One of the biggest gripes is that a lot of the narratives are really shallow and short. All the characters are one-dimensional, which is to be expected from a game that is intentionally playing up the tropes and puns, and that part isn't a bad thing. But the amount of time that I'm actually spending with each character is incredibly short. And once you get an ending with a character, there's nothing left to do with them. There's a few pieces of fluff dialogue, and the realization, and that's pretty much it. It's frustrating to spend all this time cultivating a relationship with a character only for them to practically (or literally) disappear as soon as I'm done with their little story. Also a lot of the stories hit a lot of the same notes. There are pretty obvious parallels between the shape of Betty and River, for example; you walk in on them talking with someone else, you overhear a conversation, you have a conversation, scene ends. They're not one for one, but the similarities are there. There's also a significant pattern of going around helping people with various things, they slowly fall for you, big dramatic confession, and then you get the choice of rejecting or accepting their love. Even with how interesting the characters are, that pattern only works so many times before it gets repetitive. The only other thing I'll say on this is that one of the devs went on an interview making a comment about how there's more dialogue in this game than Baldur's gate, and I just have to point out how incredibly misleading that is when an RPG game has a bunch of other robust systems and also a a lot dialogue in this game is locked behind a bunch of small player choices that don't overall affect the structure of the actual narrative. (Case in point: You help Bev design a signature drink. In the process you go through 5 different choice menus, each with 4 choices. that's 15 pieces of dialogue that people are going to miss and frankly there's not a compelling reason to go back and get them.)
The last thing I want to talk about is the Content Aware system and it's robustness, or lack thereof. I think this is a great feature to add into a game, and should be a part of a game like this. But the way it's applied is not even at all, and it is frequently undermined by one-off lines by other characters. For example, Keith is marked as a manipulative character, which, he is. But Dishy's character is also extremely manipulative, but I guess that didn't need to be marked because his entire character is played off as a joke about appliances with internet? Or the fact that Bev can just get you black out drunk, and it's just played off as a faux pas? Even if Bev says it was unintentional, she also admits she overpoured because she wants to get people drunk instead of worrying about the taste, and that absolutely could be a trigger for some people! Fantina is marked for stalking but Maggie does not respect privacy and boundaries at all, to the point where there's a one off gag about here stalking your social media (in a creepy way) to make sure you're trustworthy! I'm all for a system like this, but you have to be really consistent with it and with your writing, otherwise it completely undercuts what you're trying to do. And the consistency is straight up not there.
You're going to see a lot of positive reviews talking about how they "don't understand how people can say it's quantity over quality" and obsessing over the characters. But frankly I don't understand how anyone can talk about quality when the game shipped with so many blatant bugs and lack of QoL features. And also, if you're looking at the overwhelmingly positive reviews, you have to take that with a grain of salt because A) this is a meme game (you're dating your microwave. Nuff said), B) it's a game that is explicitly designed for people to obsess over, and C) the game has an all-star voice acting lineup! Which I think is fantastic... but you also have to realize that it's definitely driving some of the hype and people are ignoring the flaws because of it. Matt Mercer as a D20 does not a video game make, y'all.
I'm having a good time with this game, and I will continue to keep playing it. But considering it as a full package, there are a whole lot of elements that are left to be desired, and whole lot of questionable choices in the structure of the game that leave it lacking. That doesn't make me feel confident about telling other people they should pick it up.