Despite my low expectations due to the “mostly negative” review score at the time, Sutekina Kanojo still managed to disappoint me. If this VN was any longer I would have dropped it by the time I thankfully finished it, if not sooner. There is not much of note to say in terms of positive aspects, but the negatives are blatant and varying in severity.

The main complaint I have with the story of this VN is the severe lack of balance in its pacing. Since it is a short VN, it’s of no surprise that it moves from scene to scene very quickly and doesn’t dedicate much time to characterisation via prolonged dialogues. That much is fine and does not warrant a complaint, unless you are looking for a longer story. However, the changes in tone between certain scenes are so abrupt and lacking in build-up that I wondered if I had accidentally skipped a chapter or two somehow. The main character is a mentally unstable university student and swaps between personalities frequently, but the way this is written in practice results in some very jarring and confusing storytelling. By the end, it had gotten to the point where it was annoying, lost any effective impact it may have otherwise had and made it hard to sympathise with the character. This is especially true for the majority of the endings, in which the protagonist’s “evil” mind takes over and causes her to perform one of various non-consensual sexual acts to her love interest, which are indefensibly presented as porn; using real world mental issues as an excuse for immoral fetishism and audience pleasure.

The story was a lot less dark than I had imagined, based on the majority of the other reviews here. Is the subject matter dark? Yes, but not to the point of being disturbing, and the atmosphere is too indecisive for it to feel that way. Are there visually disturbing scenes? Depends what your fetishes are, because they are all presented as porn. If you are looking for a genuinely dark and disturbing story which will leave you feeling uncomfortable, this is not it. It hardly even makes the effort, other than via some trivialised and disingenuous depictions of what it means to have a mental illness. The writers clearly could not make their mind up about whether they wanted to depict mental illness in a realistic and sensitive manner or as something fake which only exists as a form of attention seeking. For me, as I’m sure would be the case for many others, the blatantly insensitive aspects take precedence here and negate any positive message. With that said, the story does provide a perspective to suggest that the character’s actions aren’t her fault, which is more than I had been primed to expect.

After some boring cut-and-paste romance between the two main characters, the story did start to introduce some interesting concepts and intriguing peeks at what may be going on in the bigger picture. Some of these moments were introduced via the character Doc, the protagonist’s faceless and voiceless online friend who provides advice for her throughout the story in the form of dialogue options. There are a couple of things that Doc says which made me stop and question things, as well as some dialogue options which seemed very freaky and as if they were hinting at something bigger. I was looking forward to these being followed up later on as they likely could have redeemed the story if handled well, but I ended up being disappointed. For some reason, these plot points which were obviously intended to provide a mysterious spin on things were not concluded, or even followed up for that matter, no matter which route I chose. Unanswered questions sometimes serve as a way to form your own interpretations and promote discussion, but in this case they felt pointless and may as well have not been introduced in the first place.

Most of the endings consist of various immoral h-scenes before an abrupt cut back to the main menu. The rest of the endings were pretty much the same thing, but with a small amount of dialogue after the porn. I followed a guide in order to complete all of the routes and I collected all of the achievements, so I am pretty confident that I experienced everything the story had to offer. None of the endings felt like the “correct” ending due to the frustratingly neutral nature of them, with the running theme being a complete lack of resolution. In a lot of cases it can be fine to end on an open-ended note or to not have a definitively correct ending as long as they are all well written, but here it just felt like the writers couldn’t think of a way to tie things up. At best, the endings introduced more questions, and at worst they were nothing more than self-indulgent sex scenes which insensitively utilised mental illness as a means to that end.

I hold a lot of importance in the soundtrack of a game or visual novel, and in that regard this VN does deliver. I have yet to find a visual novel which I don’t enjoy the soundtrack of, so it’s fairly par for the course, but this is another example of that. Yes, the atmosphere is all over the place to a fault, but the soundtrack is still very successful in enhancing the mood of any given scene in isolation. However, all of the endings use the same BGM, which became repetitive and only served to further highlight the mundanity and lack of thematic variation between them.

The art style for the sprites is very nice, but only the two main characters actually have sprites despite the existence of other semi-major characters. The sprites are also nicely animated and are constantly moving rather than just looking like static PNGs on a background. This is arguably one advantage that this VN has over many others, but isn’t necessary and doesn’t contribute (or rather, make up for) much in the way of immersion.

For a visual novel, one of the simplest types of a game to program from my understanding, this one has far too many technical issues which introduced themselves from the moment I launched the game. First of all, there is no framerate cap, which caused my GPU to get unnecessarily hot due to the fact that it was outputting over 2000 frames per second. The game provides no settings to limit the framerate manually, but since it is a visual novel there is no reason why it should not have been limited by default and is almost definitely a programming oversight. I had to fix this via the use of an external program. Another complaint I have is that this VN cannot be outputted at any resolution higher than 1080p. For a game released in 2021, many users (myself included) are likely to be using 1440p or even 4K displays, and being limited to 1080p means that I had to choose between running the game in a smaller window or in a very noticeably blurry fullscreen mode. I also encountered a sprite duplication bug very often throughout, as well as at least one glitched line of dialogue which happened to be triggered by loading a save file.
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2491843092

Sutekina Kanojo is a mess that kept me engaged for 3 hours by pretending it was going to eventually get better. Excessive and obnoxious changes in tone, combined with a multitude of technical problems, ensured that I never felt immersed in the story enough to care about what I was seeing and its insensitive depictions of mental illness meant that I was only left with reasons to dislike it. If you want to get the most out of this VN without having to experience its bad points, look at the screenshots on the store page and watch the trailer.

[h1]How To Make A [strike]Wonderful[/strike] Poorly Written Girlfriend[/h1] Despite my low expectations due to the “mostly negative” review score at the time, [i]Sutekina Kanojo[/i] still managed to disappoint me. If this VN was any longer I would have dropped it by the time I thankfully finished it, if not sooner. There is not much of note to say in terms of positive aspects, but the negatives are blatant and varying in severity. [h1]The Story[/h1] The main complaint I have with the story of this VN is the severe lack of balance in its pacing. Since it is a short VN, it’s of no surprise that it moves from scene to scene very quickly and doesn’t dedicate much time to characterisation via prolonged dialogues. That much is fine and does not warrant a complaint, unless you are looking for a longer story. However, the changes in tone between certain scenes are so abrupt and lacking in build-up that I wondered if I had accidentally skipped a chapter or two somehow. The main character is a mentally unstable university student and swaps between personalities frequently, but the way this is written in practice results in some very jarring and confusing storytelling. By the end, it had gotten to the point where it was annoying, lost any effective impact it may have otherwise had and made it hard to sympathise with the character. This is especially true for the majority of the endings, in which the protagonist’s “evil” mind takes over and causes her to perform one of various non-consensual sexual acts to her love interest, which are indefensibly presented as porn; using real world mental issues as an excuse for immoral fetishism and audience pleasure. The story was a lot less dark than I had imagined, based on the majority of the other reviews here. Is the subject matter dark? Yes, but not to the point of being disturbing, and the atmosphere is too indecisive for it to feel that way. Are there visually disturbing scenes? Depends what your fetishes are, because they are all presented as porn. If you are looking for a genuinely dark and disturbing story which will leave you feeling uncomfortable, this is not it. It hardly even makes the effort, other than via some trivialised and disingenuous depictions of what it means to have a mental illness. The writers clearly could not make their mind up about whether they wanted to depict mental illness in a realistic and sensitive manner or as something fake which only exists as a form of attention seeking. For me, as I’m sure would be the case for many others, the blatantly insensitive aspects take precedence here and negate any positive message. With that said, the story does provide a perspective to suggest that the character’s actions aren’t her fault, which is more than I had been primed to expect. After some boring cut-and-paste romance between the two main characters, the story did start to introduce some interesting concepts and intriguing peeks at what may be going on in the bigger picture. Some of these moments were introduced via the character [i]Doc[/i], the protagonist’s faceless and voiceless online friend who provides advice for her throughout the story in the form of dialogue options. There are a couple of things that [i]Doc[/i] says which made me stop and question things, as well as some dialogue options which seemed very freaky and as if they were hinting at something bigger. I was looking forward to these being followed up later on as they likely could have redeemed the story if handled well, but I ended up being disappointed. For some reason, these plot points which were obviously intended to provide a mysterious spin on things were not concluded, or even followed up for that matter, no matter which route I chose. Unanswered questions sometimes serve as a way to form your own interpretations and promote discussion, but in this case they felt pointless and may as well have not been introduced in the first place. Most of the endings consist of various immoral h-scenes before an abrupt cut back to the main menu. The rest of the endings were pretty much the same thing, but with a small amount of dialogue after the porn. I followed a guide in order to complete all of the routes and I collected all of the achievements, so I am pretty confident that I experienced everything the story had to offer. None of the endings felt like the “correct” ending due to the frustratingly neutral nature of them, with the running theme being a complete lack of resolution. In a lot of cases it can be fine to end on an open-ended note or to not have a definitively correct ending as long as they are all well written, but here it just felt like the writers couldn’t think of a way to tie things up. At best, the endings introduced more questions, and at worst they were nothing more than self-indulgent sex scenes which insensitively utilised mental illness as a means to that end. [h1]Presentation[/h1] I hold a lot of importance in the soundtrack of a game or visual novel, and in that regard this VN does deliver. I have yet to find a visual novel which I don’t enjoy the soundtrack of, so it’s fairly par for the course, but this is another example of that. Yes, the atmosphere is all over the place to a fault, but the soundtrack is still very successful in enhancing the mood of any given scene in isolation. However, all of the endings use the same BGM, which became repetitive and only served to further highlight the mundanity and lack of thematic variation between them. The art style for the sprites is very nice, but only the two main characters actually have sprites despite the existence of other semi-major characters. The sprites are also nicely animated and are constantly moving rather than just looking like static PNGs on a background. This is arguably one advantage that this VN has over many others, but isn’t necessary and doesn’t contribute (or rather, make up for) much in the way of immersion. For a visual novel, one of the simplest types of a game to program from my understanding, this one has far too many technical issues which introduced themselves from the moment I launched the game. First of all, there is no framerate cap, which caused my GPU to get unnecessarily hot due to the fact that it was outputting over 2000 frames per second. The game provides no settings to limit the framerate manually, but since it is a visual novel there is no reason why it should not have been limited by default and is almost definitely a programming oversight. I had to fix this via the use of an external program. Another complaint I have is that this VN cannot be outputted at any resolution higher than 1080p. For a game released in 2021, many users (myself included) are likely to be using 1440p or even 4K displays, and being limited to 1080p means that I had to choose between running the game in a smaller window or in a very noticeably blurry fullscreen mode. I also encountered a sprite duplication bug very often throughout, as well as at least one glitched line of dialogue which happened to be triggered by loading a save file. https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2491843092 [h1] Conclusion [/h1] [i] Sutekina Kanojo [/i] is a mess that kept me engaged for 3 hours by pretending it was going to eventually get better. Excessive and obnoxious changes in tone, combined with a multitude of technical problems, ensured that I never felt immersed in the story enough to care about what I was seeing and its insensitive depictions of mental illness meant that I was only left with reasons to dislike it. If you want to get the most out of this VN without having to experience its bad points, look at the screenshots on the store page and watch the trailer. [h2][quote]𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 [url=https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/33853800/]𝐎𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐤𝐚𝐢'𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐠𝐞[/url] 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐑𝐏𝐆 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬[/quote][/h2]