Ren'Py - JL: Next Generation [v0.04] [Big T]

I tried to play this and honestly gave up fairly soon.
Sandbox system is bad, with a weird "energy" system that makes it all seem like a badly made mobile game.
Graphics are fairly grainy, which is surprising considering the size of the download.
The MC looks like a junky.

And saving the worst for last, the engrish is really really bad.
Typo after typo, weird wording and over all just makes an already bad game that much worse.

Looked promising, turned out to be a total disaster.
Would give 0 stars if possible.

Lets do the Good, The Bad and the ugly

The Good
The dev is obviously trying very hard.
I think the plot has some interesting premise, and with a good editor could do well.
I've seen a lot of games in this forum use this engine, and almost all of them end up with faces that look like they have been worked over by a Waring blender. This dev gets faces and body's right and does them very well.

The Bad
English is obviously the second language of the Dev. That's not a show stopper by any stretch, but they need some help from someone as an editor or writer to clean it up majorly. Right now the misspellings, and grammar give it a grade school feel.
The navigation is abhorrent. Moving between areas makes the whole game feel grinding because its just time of repeated clicks over and over to get somewhere.

The Ugly
The back and forth on image quality is annoying. Your skill points that you allocate have zero to do with anything or any results in the game beyond a checkmark for a quest. Good example is in the hand to hand combat training with Luna I did 6 pts of damage at level 8 strength. At level 16 strength I also did 6 points of damage. No correlation whatsoever. The quest log doesn't always acknowledge that you have accomplished something until you are several points beyond what was needed. The over all UI has a very clunky feel in its engagement, and the screen interface is slow in reaction time adding to that feel.


Summary
This isn't fap and go. It could be more than what it is and with good assistance I think it could be a lot of fun but it def needs a lot more work than what's in it now. I think the dev is trying hard - I don't think its laziness. I think rather its reaching beyond their own skill set which is good from a challenging themselves point of view, but they def need some assistance in a couple areas to make this vision something more than what it is at current.

I will likely play the next update - primarily because I want to see if there is any improvement.

Pretty amateur offering. If you're wondering why it's 2.6GB at v0.04 and with few enough scenes to not even have a vaginal sex tag yet, it's because not only are all the images uncompressed, but the dev has actually left all their photoshop work files in the download too.

Swaps back and forth between grainy renders as the dev learned to denoise, dialogue has many elementary grade grammar mistakes like I's being lowercase and stuff like calling Batman BatMan, they use a comic sans font to try to give it a comic feel but it doesn't really sell well outside of chat bubbles and is also just small enough to be annoying to read, some sounds aren't assigned to a sound channel so they just play full volume regardless of slider settings, completed quests don't get removed from the journal so enjoy scrolling, and scrolling up on the journal rewinds the game, etc. I could go on with countless other little gripes, but overall it's enough said that it all just feels very amateur.

Probably worst though is it does the sandbox navigation thing which is rarely a good idea for solo devs to try to tackle, and this is a pretty textbook example of why: It's ambitious and probably took a significant amount of effort to setup all the imagebuttons and everything, but like most other games that do it without a good reason and a large team to flesh it out it really adds little to the experience and is generally just a tedium between you and the content. Every quest appears to be necessary to progress too, so it's ultimately largely kinetic anyway and makes it all the more useless. With that there's also the skill grind too of doing repetitive minigames that aren't particularly interesting. I ended up just cheating the points as I had no interest in interacting with that (the variable is named power_points for anyone else who needs it).

I only got to one lewd scene before I lost patience with the rest of it, and it was also fairly amateur and pretty standard mid-level basic Daz posing. Not nearly hot enough to grab my attention.

Overall, not really something worth your time right now. A lot of effort went into it and it's not just a lazy VN patreon scam in a default renpy installation or anything, but it unfortunatly instead feels like an overly ambitious DeviantArt fanfiction project by a first time dev. I'd recommend the dev A) write your script in a word processor first to catch these basic grammar mistakes, and B) drastically reduce the gameplay scope of the project and find a more stable, smaller, foundation. Loose all the navigation shit, or if you really want selectable content, just have a single map screen where content pops up as it's available. Otherwise is wasting both your and the player's time.