izigame.me

I am so sorry that I just cannot give this game a good review. I really, really hoped that bad feeling I had would go away, but one detail put the last nail in the coffin.
Basically:
Pros:
-Decent to good art, even if the quality and style is not homogeneous (so between the chatbox headshots, the moving full bodies and the CGs). The backgrounds are gorgeous though.
-The music and sounds are nice.
-I really feel like there was a will to make a great game, really.
OKs:
-Like a lot of other bad reviews said, the fact everyone keep referencing to the 4 guys as girls and using she/her is confusing as it's not like that that the game was marketed at all. I would be fine with a transgender maid café, if it had been marketed as such. Here it was supposed to be crossdressing guys. It's feels weird, but fine, I'll do with it.
-The owner is just an a-hole who tricks you, omits stuff, and just uses you. Fine, we can all agree some bosses are like that. He's not the only one. But...
Cons:
-Kaede and Nagisa (lilac and silver haired ones) are just mean upfront for no reason, calling you ugly and basically useless, when you're a new manager who just arrived and for who it's the first experience in management. And he has to start on a one-feet-in-the-grave café that the owner doesn't care about. Thank god at least Sena and Ayase are trying to be nice to you. And I will not even come back on the "playful threatening"+flashing from Nagisa on THE FIRST DAY OF WORK.
-Overall the game seems to be in the mood to punch you all the time, and sometimes for some reason it loves you enough to tell you you did a good job. With no inbetween.
-The amount of unique CG is not homogeneous between all the maids. And it's honestly what pisses me off the most.
To make it to the detail.
Art side, it just annoys me (as an artist) how the style/level of the different drawings in not consistent. The level I could understand you don't want to redraw the first illustrations, fine. But their outfits are not even correct between the headshots and the animated full bodies. And between those drawings and the CGs, the style is a bit too different to me (amount of shading, line thickness, etc). And if I can, really a small detail, but Kotori's outfit's lines should have been colored and/or thinned, the contrast between light clothing and the thick black line is too strong when the face has thin, faint lines. It draws the attention at the wrong place.
Now, that part is really annoying me mostly because of my profession, so sorry if it's a bit too specific for most people.
For the story, as a lot of the other bad reviews said, there are a lot of no-no moments. The owner being just wrong with you until the near end, the maids that apparently see you as an ugly bastard at first for no reason, the fact you have no choice to hide the truth from the maids (they care for that café like if it was their second home, of course you should tell her what the situation is and why you took those decisions ffs) and then you get a literal slap in the face later on because you omitted the situation to them. Thanks, love to see the guy I was dating crying and hating me for something I couldn't dodge in the story. This should have been handled differently. This should have been a decisive decision the player has to do, since the game keep coming back to the "we're a family" thing.
What I'm absolutely NOT ok with is the discrepancy between the amount of CGs that the four characters get. FYI, at the time of this review, Sena has 5 unique CGs, Ayase 4 , Kaede 6, and Nagisa 7.
I bought the game for Ayase. As I usually do with those types of games, I get hooked by one character, and if the game is good then I'll do the other routes. So now tell me, do you find it normal to pay ~25 euros for 4 illustration, one of them not being a lewd one, and knowing how poorly the game handles you? There's no hugging nor kissing CGs as I guess the devs didn't want to portray the MC. I could let that go. But why does Nagisa get 3 more CGs? And don't tell me "It's because Nagisa is more upfront with what she wants and has more 18+ scenes", you could have made more mellow CGs of Ayase then, as the story keeps telling you how the MC finds him cute and wants to protect him.
To give you an example for comparison, Divine Speaker, with the same exact price, has wayyyyy more story and, just for Fawn, has 8 unique CGs from his route, and over 6 more in the "common" section (didn't finish the game yet) which are Fawn and MC only, and a couple more in groups. This is what had me drop this review. I could accept most of the bad aspects as "the game is not as good as I expected" but here I feel just tricked.
To finish, let me continue the comparison with Divine Speaker for two other things. I have the same "level difference between the drawings" problem as for GGG. And this difference is due to development time, it's understandable you get better at drawing through the course of it, it also happens with manga and webcomics. But in DS, the style stays constant all the way between all the visuals.
And, what makes them so different in terms of feeling when playing is that, in DS, I make all the choices, even if those are not changing anything, I feel like I am the one orienting the story. In GGG, it's the story that drives me, or more accurately ties me in a mine cart and push me on the damaged rails knowing full well I'm gonna get huge rocks in my faces multiple times and maybe fall in the void with nearly to now way to dodge that. I'm here to have fun, to discover at least one character's story and get attached to them, not to get bashed for things I had no control over.
I know I'm being harsh here, but I just feel betrayed, and I shouldn't feel like that about a game.