Roencia, they're a phenomenal artist. The art used in Omni Link (and later Crypterion) is legitimately top notch. Genuinely, I hope to find more of Roencia's art out and about, because it's very lovely and easy on the eyes. Their story telling? Pretty good, too, truly.
Where you lose me is the gameplay and the [b]proofing[/b].
I played Omni Link originally in 2018 before it completed its Early Access. At the time, 3 chapters were completed, and you could finish up to the informant's "Party" event, then it cut to black and said "Neener neener, come back later." - so I shelved Omni Link with the expectation of returning. Well it turns out it came out of early access later in 2018 and I super missed that memo, having just poked at it again December 2022. Oops!
The game apparently "updated" so much that old save games were not compatible, and that excited me! I was like, 'Holy cow there must be a lot of new stuff!' This also meant I had to replay the first 3 chapters, but, such is life. The game is finished with only 4 chapters, so I needed to theoretically replay 75% of the game. Well, that's where I was wrong. After finishing the game, it turns out chapter 4 comprises of 5% of the entire game; a legitimate slap to the face, since I had to replay the entire game. The 4th chapter is a rushed mess full of "plot twists" and spelling errors, it made me cringe. It was wholly visual novel with some very minor "ship movement" gameplay (So minor you couldn't even summon other ships, you just did what you were told which took a grand total of 5 minutes) so the chapter was just an exercise of "how fast can you read." So I experienced the game twice, just to find out the ending was crap.
Omni Link... most of the game is Visual Novel. There is some shoot-em-up ship combat that honestly is brain-dead simple to cheese (it's so unbalanced, and some ships don't save their HP when you recall them, so you just hot-swap between a broken ship and a normal ship to get full HP back. I played most of the game in the 50 credit ship you buy, because it can shoot in any direction and has a shield. Other ships do more damage and you'll use in boss battles, but for the most part, being able to fly in circles - because the A.I. can't shoot you worth salt - and you shoot sideways... it's just too easy). As I mentioned above, the story is wonderful. Not a tear jerker, and it's definitely got some sappy stuff in it, but I enjoyed it. The ending was bogus though. It fits, at least, but is super loose.
My biggest complaint of the game is the lack of proofreading. It's like Roencia used Microsoft Word and kept right-clicking "Add to Dictionary" on words they felt we're showing up incorrectly. They spell so many words wrong, and worse yet, they spell it wrong every time (Okay, actually, I'll admit not EVERY time. They would spell "a lot" wrong throughout the entire game, until chapter 4, at which point it was suddenly, magically correct all three times I saw it. Even though in Crypterion, it's again spelled wrong, so I don't know what's going on over at Roencia Inc.'s Editing Department). What super-duper makes the 4th chapter appear rushed, is immediately following the black-screen to say "You've entered chapter 4", you're presented within 60 seconds with three spelling errors. 'Experience' (spelled wrong three times in a row), 'welder' and 'visibility.' The reason I'm highlighting this as a complaint, is because 99% of the writing is grammatically correct and spelled correct. I'm not trying to be nit-picky here, either. Let me again stress that the grammar is even correct - proper use of commas, punctuation, capitalization, the works. There are so many words more complicated to spell than "experience" that were right every time. There's just these rare words throughout the entire story that are spelled wrong every time, and it's just mind-blowing how that came to be!
As you can tell, I've written nothing about the story, and honestly that's something you need to experience yourself. This is a Visual Novel, after all. But I will warn you, dear reader, that the [i]other[/i] half of the game is really slow and lame spaceship shooting stuff on larger-than-necessary maps. I'm not going to say I hated it, but if you removed that, the VN itself would be about 4 hours long - so the "reading" aspect of this game is quite short. I have 15 hours on record because, again, I had to play the game twice.
Now, having started sampling Crypterion, also by Roencia... I have to say it's a far better experience/game and it's still early access. Their skill has shown ample improvement between Omni Link and Crypterion, but the updates on Crypterion are... slow, if not altogether gone, so I'm hopeful there's a major update soon because I genuinely like where it's headed. It's much more my jam (No crazy space battle stuff, just some merchant life in between the VN stuff. A far better and casual gamer experience!)
