The Far Rings: A Space Opera Visual Novella

fook yeayh

a nice and interesting sci-fi visual novel. loved all the characters

Alright, so at this point I've played through and gotten all the endings and it was... OK. Pros: - The background art and character sprites are generally good (I especially like that we get a sprite for the MC and get to see her reactions to the conversation - the expressive antennae were a nice touch). - The music was nice, if a little repetitive after a while. - The voice acting, when there was voice acting, was pretty good. I especially liked the actor who played Chiron. - And speaking of Chiron - I like that there was a character that used they/them pronouns. It doesn't exactly feel like non-binary representation given that their whole species is just non-gendered by default. But I'll take what I can get and the worldbuilding around a non-binary race was kind of interesting; I just wanted more of it. A further exploration of how a half Ogygian like the main character sees gender would have been especially welcome. - Chiron's character design was cool, different enough to look genuinely alien while human enough to be relatable. -Multiple bad ends emphasize the difficulty of the position the MC finds herself in. -The ability to click on items and people in the ship was a nice touch. Other than the characters and the sleeping pod, nothing you touch really effects the game [spoiler]OK, with the exception of the red button that inexplicably blows up the ship[/spoiler] but I enjoyed the flavor text. Cons: - The voice acting disappears shortly into the story and doesn't come back at any point - even for the endings of the two character routes when it would be really nice to hear their voices again. This makes the game feel a little incomplete. - Character motives don't always feel as fleshed out as I'd like. We learn that Odysseus wanted to join the military [spoiler] despite being secretly half-Ogygian[/spoiler] but not [i]why[/i] that was so important to him. We learn that Chiron [spoiler] is taking the blame for anther member of their race[/spoiler] but their motives for doing so just didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. [spoiler]In fact the whole Ogygian plan made very little sense when I stopped to think about it.[/spoiler] - The conflict between the two main races is never really explained. The Aeaeans (yes, that's what they're really called) seem to be the aggressors, but we never get more than the faintest ideas about the motives and ideologies of the two sides. This is especially disappointing because our heroine, Athena, is of mixed heritage and caught between the two sides. - The main character's names--Athena, Odysseus and Chiron--all come from mythological characters, yet the reference to Greek mythology feels ultimately pointless. There was potential in the idea, but it didn't work for me because, a. the story of this game takes place in a universe where no one is human and so Greek mythology either doesn't exist or is unknown to the characters (making the fact that they happened to be named these things a bit immersion-breaking) and b. the stories and personality traits of the characters in the game seem to have only very slight possible connections to the stories and personalities of the mythological figures. All said, it would have probably been better to just give them generic alien names. Or go all in and call one of the races [i]Aegeans[/i] rather than Aeaeans and the other Trojans and really play up a Trojan War metaphor. - The way that the routes split off didn't make much sense to me. I got Chiron's route after spending more time with Odysseus and vice versa. Total Rating: 3/5 stars I don't regret playing it by any means. This game was free and was a decent way to kill a couple hours. But nothing more than that. The disappointing thing was that with just a little more development of the characters, themes, and the central conflict between the two races this game could have been so much more.