My Lovely Daughter

if i could vote neutrally i would. i'll say it isn't a bad game necessarily, but left me feeling disappointed after the first couple go-arounds / after achieving the proper ending. i wish i liked this game more, the premise is very interesting to me. it plays much like a monster collector/tycoon/daughter simulator/visual novel game. the gameplay is interesting and fun for a while, though it gets mind-numbingly repetitive at a certain point, especially mid-to-late game. i'm used to playing games that are fairly monotonous, so this didn't bother me as much as it might for other people. the art style is interesting and unique, and i enjoy the character design of a lot of the characters. what really bothers me is the writing. it repeatedly warns you of its dark content (even in the store description), which isn't bad per se, but kind of sets up this expectation that what's in the game is going to be really raw and brutal in its approach to its subject matter. unfortunately, it fails to live up to that expectation, and the result is more surface-level than it seems; to the degree that, in hindsight, the warnings almost make the devs themselves seem afraid of the subject matter. don't get me wrong, there are some dark topics in this game, especially of illegal varieties, and it feels like there was an ATTEMPT to do them justice... but the depth at which these topics are explored are shallow, and in many cases it feels like they were considered far less than they should have been. some approaches are on the cusp of being realistic, but others feel like there wasn't nearly enough research done, or that perhaps they were too nervous to dig into them any deeper than they did. i wasn't expecting (or necessarily /wanting/) anything too graphic or explicit, but i think that if your intent with your story is to deeply disturb and write about abuses which rarely get the respect they deserve in media, then you should give them more space than just MENTIONING the topic every so often. i mean, after a while the non-daughter characters just start blatantly TELLING you their traumatic pasts (or in some cases the crimes they've done) with the subtlety of a hammer in the span of a couple sentences, and that's about it. which i KNOW can be excused as "its what the character would do", but when its literally all the characters, it reads more like just not knowing how else to tell/show/imply to the player their intentions/backstory. this gets especially damning as you approach the more sensitive and darker topics, ones which require tons of care to depict properly. the "true" ending is also deeply disappointing and confusing, and comes so entirely out of left field - in a way which feels completely disconnected with the game itself or what it was setting up - that it almost feels like a joke ending of some kind. it makes me think that they wanted to write a story much bigger than this, but realized the gameplay wouldn't allow for it, and just mashed all of it in at the end and hoped that it'd be an "interesting" "deep" "twist" ending. the dialogue is stiff and blatant, and almost always plays into cliches/archetypes. the characters (including your daughters) are hard to care about - even in moments when its clear they /want/ you to - and un-immersive because of the unrealistic dialogue; hard to describe this, but it feels like i can tell i'm playing a game, rather than learning to care about this story and its characters. this is not good for the visual novel side of it. part of me wants to think its perhaps a translation issue at times, but even if it were written linguistically with more grace, the 'bad writing' extends even into how the concepts are handled, rather than only the language used. i feel a little bad, because i can tell a lot of love and effort and personal meaning went into this game. if you dont mind repetitive gameplay and don't mind the possibility of unsatisfying writing, then by all means feel free to play it. i just found myself deeply, deeply disappointed by the writing.