Recent reviews by ShiroN3K0

I'll mark this positive because i hugely appreciate Kay Yu and the team behind this, releasing this as a free game is a chad move. However i do think this game has some issues that is putting me off from playing.

I've only played Botan so far but her move-set feels really clunky, moving while attacking makes it so it will always fire at its slowest speed so you need to stand still, that's bearable but the whole reload thing just feels bad combined with the fact you can't dodge out of it just ruins her, micromanaging ammo so you don't hit 0 in a beat em up just isn't right.

The bosses are nice, i've hit a wall with Botan on Lui-nee because of the things i've mentioned above, combined with my poor skills, so at this point i'd usually take a break and come back a bit later and try again, or just smash my head against the boss till i win, but i can do neither - my next point.

Losing is just too punishing, losing ALL your coins feel, forgive my language, ♥♥♥♥♥. I would understand losing some, but not all, this combined with the fact you get placed in X-3 of the 5 stages, so you need to go through -3 -4 and -5 where the boss is to challenge the boss again, well, yeah, hate it, just put us at the beginning of 5 with the items we had when we started 5 before.

And then the other thing - you can't save progress, you quit the game you need to start from the beginning, this is terrible and will stop me from playing, as mentioned above if i hit a wall i will take a break, but if i do that here i have to do ALL the stages again. This is a terrible decision and needs to change. In a game like Holocure with meta progression and short rounds not being able to continue makes sense, but not here where a full run might take a couple hours or more.

Another thing i'd like to request is a Mini-UI above my character, because you are focused on your character and there's a lot of screen space it's easy to completely ignore your health and skill meters (On that note, the skill cooldowns need to be clearer, it's hard to tell when some skills are on CD), so a few small circles and bar above our character would feel great.

That's all my feedback from playing for a few hours, the art, soundtrack, references and everything are sublime so i'd love to see everything else come to par.

Thanks.

Updating my review, the creator has been doing an amazing job in taking feedback so i can now recommend this game as they have improved a lot of the pain points already and will likely do in to the future, this is a fun little game for good value and great for Hololive fans.

An amazing fan-game that is better than most similar games you have to pay for, whether you're a fan of Hololive or not, it's a game worth giving a try!

Game has been long ravaged by bots, SG and AGS don't give two ♥♥♥♥♥ about players feedback and only cares about their 'data' and won't make the changes we need, along with a copium filled player base that think because it's like that in Korea it's perfect and won't try to get a cake a few feet from them they'd rather eat the ♥♥♥♥ that's in their bowl because they think it's perfect because Smilegate took the dump there.

EDIT: Only a bit more than a week after i posted this review and i can tell you to STAY THE ♥♥♥♥ AWAY FROM THIS GAME.

It's clear now that the ones running the game are the same old korean Kakao that don't give two ♥♥♥♥♥ about the games longevity, just this week we've had a feature that was highly requested, a second mana tree page added in to the game, but guess what? It's paywalled on the ruby shop! A second mana tree gives a big advantage for people who have both a mana tree for PvE and PvP, but that's not all!

They added the first 'Weekly' pack to the ruby shop, it has massive exp potions and tigris battle potions which give stat boosts you can't get anywhere else for real money! In a game where grinding is basically the main endgame, these boosts give a massive advantage especially in a game without a level cap, i cannot stress enough how much of an advantage this stuff gives in the long run.

AND THAT'S NOT EVEN ALL.

Premium pets, yes, no i'm not talking about the pets in the game, i'm talking about pets that you can ONLY get from the ruby shop that have much better abilities than basic pets which give incredibly useful stats and vacuum all the items in range every second so your farming becomes super efficient, which once again, will put you far ahead in this type of game, they literally did a second ruby shop maintenance this week JUST to add these, which makes me think the money grubbing owners over in korea saw it wasn't making enough money over here and pushed them, and it definitely won't be the last time this happens.

The P2W is coming, and it will come fast, the promises of the CM's mean nothing when they have no control on the development of the game, understand that this isn't their fault because they aren't the ones changing the game.

Oh yeah, balance? That doesn't exist here, even after a month there hasn't even been a single minor change, in fact we were meant to get a major patch this week which just turned out to be a bunch of minor bug fixes that did basically nothing for the game and we were meant to get a 10 person raid but they cancelled that because players were too weak??? Game is a spam fest of single skills and classes that one shot each-other, no semblance of skill or variety in builds, it's less balanced than an obese persons diet.

In the end, stay away from this game, unless they decide to change it for the better which is less likely than pigs sprouting wings and taking to the air.

----------------------OLD REVIEW--------------------------

So, let's put it this way.

Is it pay to win? Personally i don't think so, while you can buy luminous, pets and mounts etc on the cash shop you can also get them pretty easily as F2P, no wall just small progression, if that kind of system gets you riled up then stay away from the game.

I think Elyon itself is a decent mmo, i don't care that it's on UE3 it's fun, i find the graphics fine and kind of find the whole 'Gotta have best graphics to be good' argument stupid, the combat isn't exactly Tera action but it's better than most other 'Tab targeting with action camera mode' games, when you learn it properly the fights can be really fun to play, the lifeskilling is simple but isn't useless and can be used to progress in the game gear wise, the game has a lot of PvP but that doesn't mean it has no PvE, compared to BDO this game has a lot more PvE and you can progress that way if you want.

Now lets get to the big elephant in the room, the balance is completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ at the moment, we have Slayer as a class that just outdpses and oh-ko's players even 5 levels above them by spamming one skill, and other classes have a similar skill problem where they heavily rely on one skill being spammed which is a complete and utter waste of the skill system in the game.

The skill system can be deep and give a lot of choice for a variety of builds if done right but as it is now it's lopsided, each skill has its base form as well as four skill attributes which modify how the skill works or changes it to something else almost entirely which is great in concept, however what it actually is, is one skill attribute is far better than others, a lot of them are just a waste of skill points and a lot of skill attributes should be what the base skill is anyway! This system needs major adjustment to reach the potential it can, but whether Kakao will actually do that is up in the air (Probably not)

Will i recommend this game? Nope. Not because i don't like this game but because by recommending the game i'd be saying it's fine as it is, it's not.

The outline for problems are.
-Heavily restricting daily or weekly limits, some are fine others are not
-Incredibly unbalanced and lopsided class design
-SERVERS ARE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TRASH (They have continually disabled world events and RvR to stop this lag, only to re-enable them a day later leading to massive 5 second delays, are they even TRYING to fix this?)
-Usual cash shop p2w creep worries
-Lack of updates for core problems and communication a couple weeks in already.

So, while i'm going to continue to play until i've had enough, i'm not spending another dime on this game until they fix this ♥♥♥♥, if they don't it'll be dead very soon, if you've read this and still think it's worth a try, go ahead, just don't spend any money to encourage this mess.

So, this game is in early access and i want to push that point to the top because judging this as a full game is useless.

So far i've put 35 hours in, i cleared the current content in about 30 which has been more than the recent *Obvious Inspiration* has given me so that's already one up for this.

Positives
+Battle system and balance are decent, i've never felt like i stomped everything and earlier on in the game you'll be fighting uphill battles a lot, if you wanted a decent challenge then this works
+Already a good amount of side quests, though most of them are some form of fetch quests at the moment i hope to see these vary later on in development
+A nice handful of Temtem for the areas we have so far
+Following on, there are a good variation in TemTem designs, i'm not a fan of all of them but that's a given
+Visuals are nice and simple but they wore on me quickly and i grew to like them, game runs incredibly well because of this
+Character customisation from base already has a nice handful of options and i've seen a good chunk of clothing options available for purchase with in-game currency already so that's good and i look forward to seeing more
+Writing is decent, nothing too special but i'm not getting bored, would like to see more varied dialogue choices in the future

Negatives/Things i hope to see in the future
-No Fast Travel - While this may not affect people just going through the story too much, when you get to doing side quests or moving around to capture certain TemTem it becomes an absolute chore travelling between towns with absolutely no form of fast travel especially since there's no form of random events or such to spice up the travel, this is a much desired feature for me and hope it will be added in the future
- Healing items are where the cash goes - With the difficulty the game has, unlike the main series Pokemon games, you'll want to be topping off your TemTem's health before every battle, and because of that you send basically all of your money earned on healing items, this becomes slightly less of a problem in the later portion of the game but it's still a big thing, i expect it to improve as we earn higher amounts from later battles but one thing i do hope they allow us to get is extra charges for the healing vial, since that'd extend the time we can spend in route and grinding without the need for sinking money in to items.
- Clothing costs an absolute tonne - Links in with above, i don't see how it is feasible to earn clothing items with the money we earn, once we beat the trainers the only way to earn money is catching and releasing TemTem, which costs money for the TemCards for a very small profit so we'll need to catch thousands for a single item, this is another thing i hope gets balanced out later in the game.
- Evolution - Now i'm putting it in the negative but it's more of a neutral thing i guess, unlike in Pokemon where the level it's at dictates when it will evolve, it's the levels gained since catching that matters, which on one side is understandable since it makes you need to use the TemTem before it evolves, bonding and all, but on the Flipside it makes lower stage TemTem that more undesirable since i'd have to basically level them twice the amount to get them to say, the third stage

Further Notes
~At the current point in the story you will lose your Skates due to plot, and you can't get them back in the current version of the game, so make sure you explore all the areas you want to before advancing to the third island unless you want to be locked out of them.
~I guess i'll note this, i don't care for gender politics, there's options for he/she/them pronouns, body types instead of genders, all that's fine and there's a lot of same sex couples in the game, so much so that i felt they were more common than straight (?) i usually don't play games that play heavily on the subject so it felt overbearing to me at points, but in the end as long as i can make my character look as i want and aren't forced to play in to them it's fine; i just hope the developers play to both sides of the stick... or all the sides of the die.. or whatever.

I'm gonna play the devil's advocate here i guess.

Would i reccomend this? not really, while the *latter* half of this *inncocent* vn was interesting in the least, it's nothing new to anyone that has encountered such thing as a creepypasta before.

The characters are typical and the twists are ridiculously predictable if you think and read between the lines, this vn relies on shock value and the stark difference between what the random steam viewer was expecting to see and what they end up reading and building up a false world and progression then to hit the user with edgy twists to be seen as 'good'.

The one thing i will definitely praise the writers about though is the poems and such strawn throughout the novel, it was interesting learning about the characters inner thoughts and feelings, though they gave way too much away imo; Of course then there's the whole ARG portion which ehhh is incomplete as of now, or just exists for the sake of easter eggs, as admitted by the writer himself.

Would i reccomend this? probably not, it's nothing new, whilst yes it was well made i feel there could have been even more options and 'fiddling' the players could do to unlock new ♥♥♥♥♥ iykwim, true ending is kinda not satisfying either, but whatever, it's just what i'd call a Edgy Kusoge with shock factor as its main source of value.

However i will still say props to the devs for putting time and effort in to this and still releasing it as a free title, nice way to put a mark for yourselves on the market, i hope you will release something more interesting in the future.

So i'll leave a short review since i don't want to spoil much

First of all, how was the localisation? Pretty damn good, they've re-done the translation completely and have managed to capture the character kinks and speech charms a lot better than the original translation, they've also included extra CG's for certain scenes and extra dialouge here and there making it a much better experience, and the upgraded engine making it run smoother. along with every diagram/map being fully translated it helps you understand what's going on better.

Next i'll just give my opinion on alternative itself

It is, without a doubt, the best Visual novel on the market (That's been translated) that i have ever read
You DO need to have read most of the routes of Extra and at least 1 of Unlimited to enjoy this, it's a part 3 to Muv-Luv's first two parts

The story is incredible, it takes what you thought you knew about the betaverse of the series and blows it all away, nothing you learned in the first two VN's is entirely accurate, there are many secrets yet uncovered and many points of developments to be had.

The strongest point of Alternative is most definitely it's character development, whilst the characters themselves may be fittable in to the standard Archetypes, the way they're made to interact with the expansive world and other characters plus the inceredibly intruguing events that take place in this VN breathes life in to them, i've heard people saying that having only one route makes this VN bad, however you should not look at it this way, Alternative does not have 'one route', it is a single story with one outcome, The characters develop together and better themselves through debate, conflict, sorrow and such forth, unlike route based novels where the development is lopsided, everyone develops together.
Also on this note, the main character does not suffer from the self-insert problem that most vn's suffer from, in fact he is the most amazing source of character development throughout this novel.

Anyway, the novel deals with some heavy topics such as general ethics, patriotism, politics, coping, ptsd and many more in an absolutely beautiful way, this isn't some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Eroge nor is it a Kusoge, if you think it's either you're simply reading it wrong.

Most of this was just rambling, but this was my 6th time reading this novel through and i'm glad that i backed it when i did, our folks over at the Muv Luv Team did an amazing job bringing such a great localisation to us in such a short time for a VN this length, and they even managed to dodge the censor bullet that most Steam releases fall to (I mean, yeah there's no explicitally r-18 scenes however most scenes were completely uncensored apart from the 2 original h-scenes which were basically just given a new CG that displayed less and had the text remain mostly the same, which is great)

Amazing, fast, arena based skillshotting combat.
Quick to learn, harder to master; there's a nice balance of simplicity and complexity to playing this game yet it gives you the freedom to play whatever hero you want and build them to suit your style, heros seem decently balanced and the game looks and plays amazing for an early access game, will highly reccomend this.

**PA FOR THOSE READING FOR THE FIRST TIME, READ EXTRA FIRST GODAMNIT DOING OTHERWISE RUINS THE EXPERIENCE**

Soooo after a fairly decent wait, however not long at all considering how other kickstarters have worked, we finally have the first two (Technically one) VN's in the muv luv triology, since i have read both of these thrice over or so i'll just do a quick review after skimming sumika's route

First up, they have done an excellent job importing this to the Alternative engine, this brings more life to the vn with actual movement and lip animation in the characters and of course a 16:9 resolution over the original 4:3

Along with that they have also improved the translation quality which is amazing considering it didn't take too long for this to be released, they also added an option to switch between english and japanese image text (and normal text) which is also another bonus

Anyway on to the vn itself

Extra:

This is a generic romance, not going to hold anything back because this is my favorite VN series of all time, the characters are all cliche as f*ck however they aren't that bad in terms of writing, the reason why Extra is techinically 'bad' is because the entire setting and such makes the characters act in a typical uninteresting way which is what this triology relies on heavily. You have your main character which can appear as a 'self insert' if you lok at it that way although he generally is a lot more agressive and a lot less, ahem, frgid?, you'll also notice that Extra likes to make fun of typical romance tropes, a lot actually since the bulk of this game is pure comedy which isn't that bad

Overall without spoiling, Extra is a romance with decent comedy, general charcters and settings, nothing is surprising and it's fine that way, how much you enjoy extra will be based on your experience with the Romance/SoL settings in general

Next up is:
Unlimited:

Yes, this is where the story takes about a 90 degree turn (180 is alternative) and thrusts our poor Shirogane in to an entirely different world, or is it?

*SPOILERS START HERE*

This is where everything starts to get interesting, the entire world has been at war for over 50-60 years with an alien race codenamed BETA [Beings of Extra-Terrestrial origin that are Adversarys of the human race) and the town he had lived in was now a crumbled mess and he 'spawned' in his house in the same location as his house in the previous world, a quick walk around town still leads him to believe it to be a dream, it's only when he approaches a seemingly miltaristic base where his school used to be that he starts realising it's a reality, or well, kind of

Unlimited largely relies on your familiarity with the cast as they all appear in Unlimited (MINUS ONE), while yes it does rely on slice of life and romance genres like Extra, the setting and events all push it out differently, All the characters still retain their personalities of the previous world however due to their experiences and such in this world their ideologies and such differ a little and Takeru realises this quickly, however there's no point to dulging in to this quickly as Unlimited just scratches on the surface at what will come in to Alternative

Anyway, Unlimited is quite a bit more enjoyable than alternative, it does delve in to much deeper themes and many serious events occur which start to flesh out these counter-parts of the characters you experienced in the dream world of extra whilst still retaining the dreamish feeling by avoiding any drastic or downright dark events, keeping unlimited still in the realms of a slice of life, it also exists to familiarise you with the BETAVERSE, how the political structure is working, how the civilians and the military think and work, all of this incredibly strong worldbuilding exists here and should not be skimmed over, while it isn't shown a full timeline exists showing every single event since the beta landed over 60 years ago.

The VN ends off at a point which makes you ask questions, i'm not going to lie as this is not a VN with a 'happy' ending, the ending is supposed to make you anticipated for the sequel, in the end there is nothing that could be done and the dream is shattered, it's definitely an ending that will hit you if you have actualyl read Extra + Unlimited

I'll post a suggestion on the routes here:

Extra:
Sumika - REQUIRED
Meiya - REQUIRED
Ayamine - Largely Suggested
Class Rep - Choice, though it's similarity to Ayamines
Tama - Complete choice as this route doesn't explore much
etc

Unlimited:
Complete choice since all the routes are the same except the ending is different
As in it's the same event but different heroine etc
However i suggest doing Meiya's (I did Ayamine the first time around, Meiya second)

Anyway that's my, ahem, quick review of this VN, probably just sounds like ramblings to most people

Suggestion status:
READ IT AND WAIT SHIVERING IN YOUR TSF FOR ALTERNATIVE

Ooooor go read Alternative Projects translation of it, your choice

EDIT:

After finshing the vn 100% (all achievements) i can say they did a great job in localisation, other than renaming Eishi to their proper name Surface Pilots
Along with that they added voice lines and extra animations in as well as additional CG's which bring everything together nicely
No issues with it after being made on to the Alternative engine
Only thing i found weird was that whilst the marimo scene was still in there, there was no 'bad end', also the unlimited
common route isn't there either
Anyway, go read now!