Matchmaker Agency Review (Sapphire)
The game is… fine. But I cannot recommend it as my run was plagued with bugs and translation errors.
I picked up this game because I thought it might be a cute, fresh take on a management sim. It was in theory, not in practice. It’s both far too easy and far too obnoxious. Tbh, it would be an absolute wonderful game but nothing is explained well (for example how am I supposed to know if a flower, sun, or heart means good/great/best if it’s never explained) and several mechanics will simply RNG screw you forever if you get unlucky.
You can put out ads for clients, but there is no way of getting a specific demographic guaranteed. If you are looking for love for the lone lesbian on your client list and only have straight girls/men on your roster… you simply have to wait and hope. I seemed to get groups of similar demos in small pairs and then only have one or two options pop up before my queer clients got fed up and left. Frustrating and not well thought out. There are several poorly thought out aspect to the dates and unique story characters… the other big thing is that compatibility was nearly impossible to determine when the translation and tutorial are this bad.
Once I unlocked the upgrade that highlighted positive and negative trait associations I realized why I struggled in the early game… it just didn’t make sense! Traits are often oddly named/catagorized, so often obvious connections were neutral or bad OR certain traits heavily clashed without it being obvious (hypothetically someone with the SUN trait might clash with the QUIET trait… and there’s no explanation why?). I’m still shocked.
While I can absolutely forgive the occasional typo (double that when it’s a translation under a small team/budget), I couldn’t go two minutes without something severely mistranslated, a show of poor grammar, or the game showing the wrong portrait/icon for the speaker. It was a true slog that occasionally felt more mistranslated than not.
Finally, the game constantly bugged for me. Apparently several of my upgrades simply didn’t work like intended and trait interactions were sometimes complete inconsistent.
Although it did receive a patch since the last time I played… I cannot forgive release such a fundamentally broken/shallow game.