WTC : Relentless Protagonist [SxS]

[b]Note:[/b] In this review, disturbing topics like [spoiler]murder and assault[/spoiler] might be mentioned, so a friendly heads up. Also, a copy of this game was gifted to me by an awesome friend. ^^ [i]WTC: Relentless Protagonist [SxS][/i] is an adventure, murder mystery visual novel (with comedical elements) developed and published by Triority Interactive Novels. You take on the roles of the protagonist (whom you can choose to play as male or female and customize their name) and Grendel, and they have to team up (despite working in opposing organizations) since they have a common goal. Their mission is to find a weapon that could potentially destroy the world and bring it back to their respective organizations, which might prove difficult. However, on the way to their destination, the protagonist and Grendel are ambushed and it looks like their story might end, but does it? On that note, I'll stop my story synopsis to avoid spoilers and all that. XD As for the gameplay, there are numerous choices presented as well as different stories to follow. For example, early on, you can choose either to follow Grendel's mom and get her perspective on the protagonist's and Grendel's situation or to follow the story of The Phoenix Custodians, the organization that the protagonist works for. The choices that are made determine one of three possible endings, one of which is bad while the other two are good. Then there are four epilogues, which are triggered based on what ending you get. Also, there are lots of CGs and a varied soundtrack as well as plenty of Steam achievements, although the latter won't count towards a user's global total until the game is out of "profile features limited". Now that I've gone over the story and gameplay, I'll move onto my thoughts. After playing [i]WTC: Love's Labour's Lost[/i] (do check out my review of it [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/calliestar/recommended/1981690?snr=1_5_9__402]here[/url]), I wanted to try out the other games in the [i]WTC[/i] series, so I decided to give [i]WTC: Relentless Protagonist[/i] a try. First, I enjoyed how the story starts off. It can feel a bit slow, but the story introduces the protagonist and Grendel as they're off on their mission. I found it quite funny how the protagonist is forced to work with Grendel. Spoiler: [spoiler]Grendel's mom kidnapped the protagonist's parents although the parents don't really seem to mind. lol[/spoiler] Despite that this visual novel is the second to the latest one in the series, it isn't necessary to have played the others before this one although you might feel a bit lost over a few references. (BTW, I plan on playing the other games in the [i]WTC[/i] series. ^^) Then there's the attack on the protagonist and Grendel, but thankfully, it turns out that they're both ok. However, it turns out that they're in a simulation where they're forced to be high school students. Of course, the protagonist and Grendel aren't aware that they're in a simulation. Anyway, I like witnessing how the protagonist and Grendel cope with their situation, and Grendel is hilarious as always, wanting the protagonist to pay for her meals and do all the work for her. lol Then the action really starts when [spoiler]people in the school are murdered[/spoiler]. Then there's the interesting part of seeing Grendel's younger self appear even though she calls herself "Bree". There's a very good reason all of this ends up happening, but since that's major story spoilers, I won't say. However, I will say that I liked how the story ends, assuming that you get one of the good endings, and the epilogues are quite enjoyable to read. Especially, I enjoyed epilogue #4. XD As for the characters, there's a good variety of them with various personalities. Grendel is the kleptomaniac who's power hungry, which is obvious since her ultimate goal is to take over the world. lol Then there's the protagonist, who has the gentler personality and wants to put Grendel on the right path, which is basically to drop her goal of taking over the world. Of course, there are plenty of other characters, but this review would be way too long if I mention all of them. :o However, Grendel and the protagonist are the man characters and focus. In regards to the writing, the story can start off a bit slow, but it does pick up, especially when the protagonist and Grendel are attacked. Since the majority of the story takes place in a school setting, there are parts that can feel slow at times, but I think that's fine. There are plenty of exciting parts as well, especially when [spoiler]the murders take place[/spoiler]. As for the gameplay in which I'm mainly referring to achievements, I had no problems obtaining all of them. Of course, I had trouble figuring out how to get a few of them, but after some help from the developer, it was all good. ^^ With the art, I like that the sprites are in the usual anime style and are drawn and colored well. The backgrounds are done well, too, and I especially liked viewing the CGs. They capture certain story moments well. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3208827653 The style of various CGs may feel somewhat inconsistent at times, but I learned that there are plans to update the CGs at a future date, so I'm looking forward to viewing them. Finally, I enjoyed listening to the various music tracks. There's a good variety, and I really liked the tracks that capture the murder mystery and adventure vibes well. The opening and ending voiced tracks are great to listen to as well, and they fit well with their respective videos. Overall, would I recommend [i]WTC: Relentless Protagonist [SxS][/i]? If you enjoy visual novels, are looking for a story with some murder mystery, and don't mind that a few disturbing topics may be brought up, then this is worth a look. Although there are some heavy scenes, there's plenty of comedy, especially from Grendel and her mom, to add some levity. As I mentioned, it isn't necessary to have played the other games in the [i]WTC[/i] series to follow this story. For the asking price, I'd say it's worth getting, as it took me under 9 hours to obtain all of the achievements, endings, CGs, and whatnot. However, you can always wait for a sale. ^^ [quote]For more detailed, high quality reviews like this, please follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44702020/]The Introverted Gamer[/url], prioritizing heart and soul always. ^^[/quote]

Okay, I need to point out I'm the functions tester that took on the job of testing Relentless Protagonist. So they've already heard all my feedback (and acted on what they could, real quick too!). I'm reviewing this as a gamer though so...I liked it. It got me coming back to play more of it as the story was intriguing (I'm a sucker for spies and sci-fi). Some parts are genuinely funny, some very disturbing and the game writers have done something good with their twists - they make you doubt your own idea of what is happening. Honestly, give it a try if you want a different visual novel experience that isn't focused on romancing hotties like a sexual harassment checklist.

One of the best visual novels i have read and played. Good story, good line up of playable case, good art work, some of the teachers made me miss college life.

WTC: RP is a 'not so canon' sequal in a way, to its predecessors. If you haven't played or give some time to the early games, you probably need some time to catch the drift here, unfortunately. Though, it doesn't necessarily mean you can't play or experience this title, singlehandedly without having try to other ones. In fact, you can play this game as long as you don't mind the storyline overlaps or certain flashbacks where you can find yourself in a place that you cannot understand the arch. On the other hand, WTC: RP offers quite humorous experience. It gives out because the plot writers are from UK, I reckon, hence the name WTC (Welcome to Chichester) Anyway, if you are in dire need of some relaxing, comical, cute, life of slice kind of a visual novel to dive in, you are right on it.

Each game release improves on the last. From just a few minutes in, I can tell this is definitely one of the better WTC releases out there. Comments disabled because I wont be able to hear you over the car radio anyway.

WTC : Relentless Protagonist [SxS] is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. As usual from this failed writer, who only ever managed to get a book onto online bookstores by paying a lot of money to publish an error riddled and factually incorrect coding manual some decades ago which nobody bought, this high school tier anime club cringefest fanfiction is basically about his imaginary girlfriend waifu that he wants to date. There's no value whatsoever in this garbage from this highly toxic would-be author publishing slash fics and fanfictions on Steam as if they were video games. This garbage is just polluting Steam and making gaming worse for everyone. It gives legitimate amateur developers and authors a bad name. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 2 readers. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected. This E-Book features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the E-Book launched on Steam, all are marked as "recieved this product for free", and all have very similar wording and writing style. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor reader count. Given the "developers" toxic history it's likely he wrote these himself. The "Positive" review score on this E-Book should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might be done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product. WTC : Relentless Protagonist [SxS] has the insane price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this E-Book. [quote][url=https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27]Online Stalking and Harrassment[/url][/quote] The developer has started stalking me, delivering personal attacks and is attempting to publicly cyberbully and intimidate me by posting hitpiece videos and articles. This is a breach of criminal law in many jurisdictions around the world. Why? Because I wrote an honest and frank assessment about an objectively bad and failed product. It's an objective failure rejected by gamers, for the reasons I supplied in my accurate review. Certainly, the hitpieces the stalker/developer has linked up in response to some of my reviews are false and misleading, but cyberbullies don't care about facts, they just want to intimidate and attack those for providing the truths the developer can't emotionally accept, like a child throwing a tantrum when caught doing something wrong. This behavior from the developer is utterly unacceptable, and is a chilling attempt to intimidate and stifle reviewers. Now, you can look at the objective facts of my review, and then have a look at how this reviewer is attacking and intimidating reviewers, and suddenly the overwhelming rejection of his craptastic Ren'Py asset flips makes a lot more sense. I will not be intimidated or silenced by stalkers and bullies.

WTC: Relentless Protagonist is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, maintaining the usual WTC formula but taking us to whole new areas and introducing new power groups. Big at 6-8 hours and loads of location variety. WTC Relentless Protagonist follows WTC's usual formula, providing exactly the sort of light-hearted hijinks you expect from this franchise. This is one of the better ones, and also one of the biggest. For more niche curation, follow me at: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27440015-CSH-Picone/

Now there's two of those annoying little...

Please Miss Wilder Love(Grendel's Mother)

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34294631/] Follow Far2close - Visual Novel Playthroughs Curator Page [/url] [b]WTC: Relentless Protagonist[/b] Developer: Triority Interactive Novels Publisher: Triority Interactive Novels [h1]Intro:[/h1] The antics of The Phoenix Custodians and The Council of the Unseen return in this separate story containing outworldly elements. The protagonist and Grendel Jinx work together to recover a weapon from Shadow Crew, located in Zafast City. Once they reach the destination, they get attacked and rendered unconscious until they find themselves to be in front of a school. Following a school schedule and going through each day figuring things out, murders start happening around the school. Using their wits and flamboyant personalities, they must figure out what is going at the school before they become victims themselves. [h1]Pros:[/h1] [b]1.[/b] This story feels reminiscent of the first Welcome to Chichester, which is not a bad thing. My complaints with some of the previous titles were that the stories felt like it didn't follow the overall feeling of WTC, they felt like they were just side stories and nothing else. Relentless Protagonist is something else, it feels like it belongs in the main storyline. Protag and Grendel teaming up trying to infiltrate Shadow Crew? Absolutely cool. A fourth group, Enemies of Civilization? Interesting and added a bit of a twist. Murder mystery and manipulation of our characters? Cool to see. This story was definitely entertaining. [b]2.[/b] The characters are what you know best if you've read the previous titles, it also may confuse you to see exact same characters go by different names, but once you're informed of why it is like that, it all starts to make sense. The introduction to Shadow Crew and The Enemies of Civilization were interesting to see, as it paints their true intentions behind their actions. [b]3.[/b] There is several CG art and they do a fine job in adding more to the scenes they are placed in, such as the murders occuring. Although they may vary in how they look, they do their job. [b]4.[/b] The music fits in quite well. "Action Strike" adds in that emotion that a briefing for a mission is happening or agents are storming a building. There are also tracks that help add to the idleness of the school life such as "Stalker" with its calm serenity. There are also some insert songs such as "Someday" by All The Right Moves and "Fighter" by Trial & Error. Overall, the music may mostly consist of royalty free tracks, they do their intended purposes just fine. [h1]Neutrals:[/h1] [b]1.[/b] It is [b]NOT[/b] required to play the previous titles but I lightly recommend it if you want to understand The Protagonist, Grendel Jinx, and several of the staff for both The Phoenix Custodians and The Council of the Unseen. [h1]Cons:[/h1] [b]1.[/b] The pacing near the end did feel a bit quick where [spoiler] everything was starting to fall apart in the mind operation and the Shadow Crew HQ was under attack. I believe this segment would benefit with a scene in a different perspective like what was happening in the HQ before the events leading up to Bree's attack on the protagonist. The aftermath where we are recovering in the hospital and talking with Grendel's mom did have a choice where we could see us watching Dr. Not-Nice while strapped to the couch. [/spoiler] This scene felt too long and overstayed its welcome to the point it was unnecessary. [b]2.[/b] Shadow Crew and The Enemy of Civilization are cool enemy groups, however I wish they had more presence in the story. These two groups were presented but didn't reach their full potential. [b]3.[/b] Some graphical improvements for the textbox and user interface should be looked into. The interface works fine but visually, they are severely lacking. [h1]Conclusion:[/h1] WTC: Relentless Protagonist looks like the writing is coming back to its roots and possesses a consistent goal in mind. It may be a separate story, but it does well in being entertaining. [b]Score:[/b] 7/10 GOOD