Some Thoughts

Otome dating sim: http://www.winterwolves.com/loveandorder.htm
littleramyun
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Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 6:28 pm

Re: Some Thoughts

Post by littleramyun »

Hope you don't mind, but I'd like to post on this thread as well.

Many things I felt about the game have been said, but I wanted to add a bit of my own personal experience with Love & Order.

I used to work in a legal office as an administrative assistant, and it was pretty much the same. However, this was both good and bad. I was satisfied with the simulation part, because I like management games, but after a while it became something I just kept up to keep progressing the story. I would have liked more special events to break up the monotony of the week, and have had a goal for doing good work, like getting a raise. I didn't find much difference when I worked really hard on tasks from when I only did a few. I started not reading the description of my tasks given after a while, because they were very generic. Most of the text I didn't read because it was repetitive. I read the parts related to the mystery and my dates. But the thing is, the mystery and the dates were bland to me. The mystery was generally composed of making a series of phone calls and requesting documents, which was just like work, and just annoying to do more than anything.
Spoiler:
I liked that my boss surprised me in the reception area, but it was the only surprise in the game. I had guessed the culprit very early on.
My dates had very little substance, and I would like to be asked if I wanted to go or not, especially since it costs me money. The game ended with me knowing next to nothing about my love interest. Weekends were a useless span of time. I would have liked to have gone out and run in to people, or get some work done, but it never happened. The game's ending would come suddenly and was very short. I'm not compelled to play again with a different love interest, because I expect the same thing to happen (no character development). It's not worth the two hours I put in to it to just unlock another CG, though I did love the art.

I hope it didn't sound too bad. I enjoyed it enough to finish my playthrough, which I don't always do. I just feel it could have been a solid game.
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Snowflake
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Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 10:53 pm

Re: Some Thoughts

Post by Snowflake »

I loved the design of Love & Order. The characters were all so adorable, especially the guys...
After seeing Jonathan and his blunt way of flirting, I fell head over heals for him! :D He's a real hottie (Why isn't there so handsome guy in real life?) and somehow I did really like his daring words. Normally I would hate to hear words like that, but somehow it those words made me grin broadly. Dunno why... Hehe.

The gameplay was quite interesting at the beginning, but after replaying the demo a few times, it kinda bored me. After all... Why can't I eat lunch with my colleagues or at least randomly meet them, when I went shopping or eating outwards? A bit more interaction with other characters would have been much nicer. To only talk about work is a bit odd, you know?

Until yet I managed to date Jonathan and Pierre, but somehow the dialogues were quite similar. I hope the following dates won't be that similar to each other?
Spoiler:
Even though I was very suprised, that Pierre played in a band (or was he an solo artist, well doesn't matter...)
Oh yeah, and I tend to run short in money, once I even made Jonathan pay my bill at the expensive restaurant, because I was in lack of money... Why does he always chose such a expensive place? I think a change of date scenery would be great to and especially not that expensive. (Jonathan is ruining me... :( )

Well, I don't really know if I should buy it or not, I really like the artwork and the characters, even though I didn't get to know them quite much, but if you can learn much more about them, it should be worth buying the game. :)
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Ellume
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Re: Some Thoughts

Post by Ellume »

Snowflake wrote:Well, I don't really know if I should buy it or not, I really like the artwork and the characters, even though I didn't get to know them quite much, but if you can learn much more about them, it should be worth buying the game. :)
Unfortunately I don't know if there is much more in the way of character depth.
seienhananosei
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Re: Some Thoughts

Post by seienhananosei »

Adding onto this...

I've only played the Demo so far, although I purchased the game, due to some technical issues (which I am working out with the nice people in Winter Wolves tech support) but I wanted to weigh in on what I thought so far.

First off, I love the art, and for me that can be a rather substantial factor in whether or not I buy the game. I'm extremely happy with the different emotions, the sprites in general, and the fact that you can change outfits and whatnot.

I did think that the game progresses rather slowly, or at least it does if you want to make sure you get everything done as far as work goes. Because I really don't like leaving things unfinished or doing them incorrectly, I have been saving pretty much every time before I do something. This makes the game a long process for me because I get an assignment, often with 3-5 different things I need to do, and then I save, do the first thing, save if I was successful, do the second thing, restart if I failed, and then save again if I was successful etc. In the end I can end up saving and restarting 5 or 6 times just to get one thing done.

To be fair, that is also just me being a perfectionist, but I also feel that some of the game mechanics make it so that this kind of game play is inevitable, at least for me. The reason being, as soon as you get ~16+ stress, you start failing at everything hard core. I ended up learning that I don't really fail all that much more at 70 stress than at 20 stress. So basically, I end up doing everything at once in an attempt to keep up with the office demands and raise my affection with all the office people and just trying to follow the story whenever there is a lull.

At day 30 or so, I have just about everyone maxed out stat-wise and I have been at a perpetual state of broke-ness. (After I bought the $70 and $40 clothes at the beginning of the game I have been unable to make much money while keeping my stress down, so I eventually ended up sort of fixing this by just keeping my stress at 100 all the time and never spending money to reduce it.)

Basically, with a lot of save files and a lot of restarting (which is kind of hard sometimes because you can only save when you're at your desk and you can't load save files-- You have to go back to the main menu every time) I managed to ask someone out on a first date by day 30ish. I was glad to finally get somewhere, and their relationship bar turned pink and everything which was nifty, but the date was short and I found that after I invited the guy on a date, suddenly I could not invite anyone on dates anymore. While this is a great thing to avoid the Tenchi Muyo option (date everyone at the same time, basically) this also meant that I had to wait for him to ask me out on a date before I could go out again.

Since I was in "get everything ever done" mode, this kind of sucked because I couldn't control when I went out on dates-- I just kind of had to take it as I went.

I notice I'm kind of going on and on, so I'll try to sum it up.

I like the game so far, I think the characters are great and I really appreciated that the jobs were different every time and actually seemed like legitimate things. (Having studied law a bit I didn't see any glaring weird things other than a few typos.) And like other people stated, the characters could stand to have more scenes, or at least longer scenes. (I hesitate to comment on character depth since I only got to the second date and had pretty much been sucked into the office part of it.)

But I think that at the very basic level, the stress mechanism could stand to be tweaked because otherwise you have to choose between managing stress and making money. (Or you can do what I did and just reload every few minutes.) If you want to keep your stress low, you can either never work overtime or you can spend all your money on reducing your stress. Because the only free ways to reduce stress are TV, solitaire, and.... That's about it. Neither really reduces stress that much, and I guess you can take lunch breaks but if you want to get anything done in the day you end up working through lunch and the evening, leaving no time to, say, watch TV. (And for some reason you can't watch TV on the weekend, and sleeping doesn't reduce stress, so you are doomed to waste away your weekends or just spend all the money you worked so hard for.)

I like the game so far, but the stress vs money thing is something I see as something meant as a way to make the game challenging, but instead it takes up all the game play so that you don't have the time, money, or stress to do the actual content type stuff like dates and investigation.
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