Just a short backgrounds story: I am a huge fan of Princess Maker series and I can spend hours in raising sims in general. To be honest, I cannot quite explain why I have not tried Her2 earlier as I received a copy of this game for reviewing months ago. Yesterday, finally, I got down to playing it, and I should say I was not disappointed. Well, except for the translation part, of course, but I will talk about in in great details in the main part of the review.
I usually begin my reviews describing the plot, but this time I will skip this part mostly because the story is quite short and it would be more interesting for you to read it on your own. So instead, I will introduce you to the bad parts first as they can be a major disadvantage for some people and then move on to what I liked about [b]Her2[/b].
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714166150
[h1]Good, bad and…translation[/h1]
Now, what I really want to talk about is the only really bad part of this raising sim – the lackluster translation. For starters, you can obviously see that either the text was not proofread or the editor lacked important language skills. Just several examples: a girl can suddenly become a boy, the subject of the sentence turns into an object, some words are mixed and sometimes even the name of your cat-girl pops up at strange places; or there is outright no space between two words. Some parts were simply untranslated.
The second issue of the translation is that English text sometimes does not fit in the text box and there is no way to scroll it down to read the whole sentence. It does not happen that often, but is still noticeable. When I was a student, I wrote a yearly essay about Russian localization of the Sims 3 game series (which was sometimes really, really bad). One of the most important parts when translating a game is that languages can be very different – my teacher always told me that when we translate a text from English into Russian, its volume can almost double. This is exactly what happened with Her2 – during the localization process the developer did not think about the differences of Chinese and English languages, which led to some text being too big for the text box. Could it have been avoided? Yes, if there was a good editor or a person who knows English well enough to rephrase the problematic parts.
[b]BUT![/b] [u]There is a very important thing that just must be mentioned[/u]: even though the translation is by no means perfect, it is still understandable at least 95% of the time. I did not have any problems getting not only the gist of the story, but also some of its specific details. So, Her2 is not the SakuraGames case here, thanks God. Yes, you will notice mistakes quite often, but you will not have problems learning what to do in this game and who is who.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714158106
Phew! Well, I think it is high time now to stop grumbling about the translation and move on to the good parts. I am pretty sure that after all you have read you are now quite confused why on earth I decided to write a positive review, right? The thing is, I really liked the story and the gameplay, as well as the amazing artwork.
Let us start with the artwork. It is absolutely, stunningly beautiful (at least most of the time) – the CGs are quite small and look more like photos, but all boast lots of details. B-u-u-u-ut there is one thing I have to complain about: the artwork used for travelling scenes was confusing – it looked more like a bunch of fan-service pictures (of good quality, though) that was not connected with our cat-girl’s age. Like at all!
A lot of love was put into drawing each character and their sprites, of course. The backgrounds are lovely. And the best part? Everything looks as if it was drawn using watercolors and pastel. Another great thing is that characters actually grow during the story, and not only personality-wise, but also as far as their appearance is concerned. They change clothes, too.
Talking of the plot, I should say that the story itself is quite short, so do not expect any wow moments. At the same time, the romance was very heartwarming, and it was nice to learn more about each character. Their endings were also short, but sweet.
Hm, what can I say about the music? There are quite a few tracks, but not many, sadly. Still, all of them are nice and did not distract me from playing or annoyed me in any way.
The last but not least: the gameplay is simple and quite similar to the common raising sims – you send your cat companion to work or to classes in order to raise her stats and earn come cat coins. When she gets tired, you can either go on a trip with her (also opening various pictures) or just let her sleep for the whole day. I did not notice any connection between her stats and relationships with other characters, so you will need them mostly for various endings and jobs. Oh, also: your cat-girl can go on an adventure and kill some cute monsters, which also nets a huge amount of money compared to simple work. But be ready to train your companions Energy and Magic a lot.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714619798
[h1]What do we have in the end?[/h1]
To be honest, at first I wanted to write a negative review – just looking at some translation mistakes made me cringe. However, the more I played, the more I stopped paying them any attention – which came as a huge surprise as I am extremely [i](like, yeah, EXTREMELY)[/i] conscious about any kind of mistakes text-wise. I even tend to reread my own reviews at least once a week to look for any typos [i](yes, all 81 of them)[/i].
[b]Her2[/b] is quite short: it took me about 3 hours to complete it once, and another 2 hours to open four more endings [i](romantic ones with different characters and the one related to the cat-girl's job)[/i]. I think I will have several more playthroughs because I have two more characters to fall in love with – I made several mistakes while talking with them and locked myself away from their endings, - as well as many other endings to experience. The essential problem of this raising sim is its translation, but you can still understand the story and the dialogues pretty easily, so by no means is this game unplayable.
So, to sum up, [b]Her2[/b] is a nice little game that is more simple than, for example, Princess Maker, but still has its own charms. I really liked playing it and would recommend it to my friends.
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