Hiveswap Friendsim: Volume Five Review (Gab Rosemary)
Volume 4 is an interesting one. Zebruh Codakk from the Troll Call if you've been following and a... mystery troll we've never seen before???
First I'll say some general things. The backgrounds are lazier in this one than usual, it feels like. And I'm also PRETTY sure there's some old-style inverted daedric troll text in there, on backgrounds that I'm pretty sure are recycled so they've probably been there in other episodes too. I wonder if they're going to need to do something about that. The art for the characters themselves is as good as ever, but the lusus portrayal is also... different. I don't want to say it really looks lazier or much worse than how it already was, but... well, they do have a good reason to do it this way for a visual gag, but the thing about THAT is you can only really see it if you press H to hide the text boxes and stuff to see the character sprites in full.
Anyway, to touch briefly on the writing, it occurs to me it's getting increasingly silly to try and analyze the writing of each of them. Speaking personally, I can't detect much variance in quality or skill from one episode or writer to the next. In fact, I still haven't even bothered to look up who writes who. I just don't care that much. I... GUESS? The writing seems a little more clever and funny than last volume? Both routes this time had a line that actually made me laugh out loud, and that's not something that happens to me often. I don't know if any of the last volumes did that even. But take that with a grain of salt. I don't think it matters either way because the characters are all so different and convey so many different crazy things that it's hard to really compare them to each other. But since the writing always does the job of exploring the character, showing them in their highs and lows, everything else ends up being tied to the quality of the character itself.
Anyway, I think that's about as much as I feel like saying without getting into spoiler territory, so if you haven't yet, check it out. I recommend it as much as any other volume!