Recent reviews by ステームビン

Some technical polish issues aside, the game is fun.

This VN made me want to keep reading it through the enigma called Otonashi Ayana and great writing yet almost as often, it made me not want put it down and just stop reading it. But you should still read it though. Just power though it, it's good and I can't say much else without spoiling.

The rank system is perhaps what I hate the most about this game. In an effort to protect egos, the rank system allows you to easily get promoted if you get lucky and run into a couple of weaker players as you are rewarded a disproportionately high amount of points towards advancing to the next rank. Not only that, the rank system forces you to pick three different characters. In fighting games, you not only have to master a character but you have to master a character in the context of playing that character against one of the other characters. FS's rank system is designed to increase the chances of upsets instead of being a means for players to gauge their rough skill level. Even after reaching gold rank, I feel undeserving like I cheated my way there and IMO this is the sign of a bad rank system. All this is exacerbated by my preference for games that enable players by giving them more freedom and tools which is the antithesis of FS. IMO this game has most of the things that fighting games need from a technical perspective but from a gameplay perspective, it has very little of what makes fighting games fun.

Solid VN that resembles Planetarian. But while Planetarian has a more pronounced atmosphere, Lucy focuses more on playing with your heartstrings and opening up a dialogue about AI and what it means to be human.
Minor gripes and praises
Gripe 1: For such a short VN, it has a a lot of choices most of which felt a unnecessary and IMO detracted from what could have been a much more tighter experience.
Gripe 2: The VN tells you a lot and talks at you quite a bit instead of showing things to you. It gets better later on but it does bog down the earlier sections but if you look pass that it's quite a good short VN. It could have been longer but that might detract from it's focus on Lucy so it's more of a minor gripe than an outright flaw.
Praise: The only voiced character being Lucy really helps the audience focus on her, her personalty, and her problems. Both of which are the pillars of the story's ability to play with the audience's emotions and the discussion surrounding AI and the questions about humanity.

Lamunation is an honest VN that delivers what it promises and doesn't try to be anything but what it sets out to be. It might be too over the top and random at times but if you like that kind of humor then there's no problem. But it's best consume slowly as too much of a good thing can be a bad thing lol.
In a landscape where there are giants to live up to and all kinds of expectations being placed on games, a simple and honest comedic VN like this is very much welcome. After all, not all VNs have to be Key's tearjerkers or one of nitro+'s f'd up works.
Oh and the music is great, it fits the theme of the VN and doesn't get old easily.

Obviously not for the faint of heart.
Spoilers:
IMO saya no uta tell a simple boy meets girl story and tells it pretty damn decently. Underneath that story however is the theme of the trappings of humanity, of how following neither logic nor emotion alone leads to happiness, something that can be seen in the only choices both fuminori and koji make. But perhaps, the clearest trapping of humans is how easily we are manipulated by visual and audio stimuli and how much we want to cling to what has become normal to us. Just by having the filter turned off, the red makes the viewing experience much more unpleasant and just like fuminori, we want to focus on saya who is both pleasant to the senses while looking away from that which is not, and fuminori's infatuation with saya is something that resonates with our need for the normal in a landscape of the abnormal. Koji too tries hard to normalize fuminori's actions throughout the first half of the story. To add to that, there are many scenes in this VN where IMO there is a deliberate choice of what tho show and what to tell. Through that, they tell us how monstrous saya is but we don't feel it because we don't see it. Instead, we SEE the good sides of saya and her child like portrayal and thus cognitively struggle to equate what we see and what we hear. about saya and end up choosing to believe what we can see Even in the finale, where saya destroys humanity, the visuals and the audio paint a picture that is beautiful and bittersweet and we in the trappings of being emotional human beings that are unable to see beyond what we SEE, struggling to equate her actions with what they truly entail.

Great fusion of bullet hell and fighting game, in my opinion it's the superior senko no rondo with much better speed and feels much smoother. If you prefer slower paced bullet hell versus games, senko no rondo or the new maiden and spell might be what you are looking for.

Unique fighting game that actually rewards smart defensive play in a tangible manner while also providing the tools for and rewarding good offense.