Shinigami Love

EDIT 2: 12/30/2024: As this project is now abandoned, there's literally no reason to play this. There's one softcore scene of a character taking off their shirt, and that's it. All of the dev's links, including their account here have been deleted. If it one day comes back from the dead, maybe there'll be something to this. But as it is, if you really need some Bleach fanfic you'll be better suited going anywhere else. This review was written for the Chapter 1 version of the game. Honestly, I don't have much faith in this project. It's still extremely early days, but there's too many signs that this won't go anywhere. The dialogue is serviceable, but doesn't do anything interesting. The game play is currently just fetching items for characters, which I'll come back to in a moment, and selecting between the obvious wrong choice and the boring correct choice. This doesn't appear to affect much outside of the responses immediately following. The characters are decent facsimiles of their manga/anime counterparts, but outside of some one-note character traits they're pretty lifeless. The writing is hurrying along, leaving a lot of boring stuff, but its rushing towards equally boring plot threads that I have no reason to care for. The art is standard koikatsu, which leaves a good number of the characters looking awkward and ugly. Some are fine, like Orihime. Others, like Unohana or Grimjow looking nothing like their manga counterparts, the forming looking like shes wearing some bizarre hijab/helmet instead of hair and the latter having some garish makeup on instead of his signature bonejaw. Koikatsu isn't the most robust of character creators, but with mods you can do some pretty impressive stuff with it. Considering this is base koikatsu though, we're left with basic and drab models. There isn't much in the way of H-content at the moment, just a few scenes of light petting or ogling. However, considering the state of the characters I don't anticipate there being anything worth playing through to see. Honestly all of this could be forgiven as an inoffensive 5 or 6 out of 10 experience you could spend a few hours on. The main problem is the compression, or rather, lack of it. This is a game that uses hundreds of still images stitched together to give us movement and action. It's a tried and true formula, I'm a fan of it and it's done pretty effectively here with most movement looking natural and posed correctly. But when the average image is 2.5 mb each your game with barely 3 h-scenes and only an introduction to the premise balloons into a 3.85 GIGAbyte game. That's totally unacceptable. Dev, if you take anything I've written here, let it be this: Please compress the image files. You don't need that much graphical fidelity for something like this. If this is going to be a multi-part project, it absolutely cannot continue like this. The folder containing chapter 1 is 2.8 gigs of data by itself. At this rate, chapter 12 is going to make the game 25 gigs~. That's way too heavy. One easy fix would be to convert/create images to jpg/webp instead of pngs. That's all I ask for. It's simple and will really make the biggest difference. All that said, I can't recommend this game in it's current state. If you've got storage to spare and don't mind mediocre writting, give it a shot. For everyone else, try something else. Edit 11/12/2024: The dev has now since compressed the game to an adequate degree. It's gone from almost four gigs down to under one. Its still pretty massive for a game that's low on content still, but that's a huge improvement and solves my biggest complaint. Again, I still can't recommend it yet, but if this seems like your thing give it a shot, warts and all. Bumping the score up from 2/5 to 3/5.