Sound of Drop - fall into poison -

[h3]Help! I've been Ass-Slapped with a Portuguese Man 'O' War! and ~30 other half-baked stories that probably aren't worth your time.[/h3] Play experience: I got through maybe 3/4 of it, dropped it, read all of Umineko, contemplated buying more VNs, then started back from the beginning 5 years later to clear out the VNs I already own. I got through one ending: -Himeno-. Maybe I'll go back to try and figure out what was going on with Kenji eventually, but this game has bored me away from it. Music was pretty good, visuals were overall great (I'm not the biggest fan of how non-chibi characters are drawn outside of maybe Kenji though that's obvs subjective, the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous), translation was discernably B-A-D BAD, and the mediocre plot doesn't help. I actively felt this game try to kill any interest I had in it every time Mayu opened her mouth. Not that Mayu is an unlikable character, on the contrary, I REALLY wanted to like her as a protagonist! But all of her growth (and she's really the only character that seems to GET "growth") is very tell-don't-show-or-do. She's very flimsy as a person, and so is Himeno. I just can't get over how unrealistic the both of them feel as middle school girls (I was one of those once, I should know). They have a conceptually sweet dynamic, but this game is OBSESSED with tell-don't-show. A lot of the game's problems lie in that you just can't feel a lot of the things that they want you to with characters as flat as this. I can feel the narrative slowly try and destroy itself the further on I read. Despite my initial wonder at the gorgeous backdrops of the mysterious Manten Aquarium, what we have is a collection of setpieces and the little one-note goonies that run around it to TRY and make it work, through clunky-sounding exposition. And, considering my dwindling lack of interest as the game went on, it sadly failed. My favourite scene was probably the ominous opening story Himeno was telling Mayu--the horror writing in this game isn't bad, per se, but I do think that scene is at least *one* of the best examples. Considering a lot of the game's advertisable meat is supposed to be this horror writing (ie, the bad ends)...that's not good! It works in certain RPGMaker games but MAN, the bad end-focused gameplay does NOT feel like it works particularly well here. Sort of just yakking my jaw, but this game wasted my time pretending that it had something to say, and that always kinda frustrates me. [spoiler]Seriously. That clunky, stupid title drop at the end of -Himeno- is probably the entire reason I'm bothering to write a negative review.[/spoiler] . If you want a sorta mysterious slightly unfamiliar world-feeling game focused on girls with loads of bad ends, just play an RPGMaker game at that point. Play Pocket Mirror.