![]() ![]() ![]() The demo alone contains 21 tracks, and they’re all pretty good. LMR is a ostensibly a game about music, and as you can expect much attention has been paid to its soundtrack. Their level of simplicity goes against the standard Japanese style of ostentatious character designs, but are very likeable nonetheless. I quickly got used to it, however, and came to like the sprites as well. At first I felt like the difference in art styles made the sprites and backgrounds clash with one another, with the characters feeling out of place. In contrast to the backgrounds, they are lightly detailed and flatly shaded. In LMR, every scene feels richly detailed, full of interesting things to observe thanks to the strong background art. The in most VNs they serve little more than to establish the setting, but the main focus is always on the characters. It’s not usually a part of the game readers think much about. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen better looking backgrounds from any other VN, western or Japanese. The detail present in the environments and especially the strong attention to lighting makes for some incredibly atmospheric scenes. The backgrounds and CGs are nothing short of beautiful. What it does do, however, it does with far more polish and pizazz than any of its contemporaries. It doesn’t buck every trend of western VNs, nor does it do anything remarkably innovative. ![]() I came off surprised by both what it was, and what it wasn’t. I’ve been looking forward to this game for quite a while, so I decided to give the demo a spin. They need our help to finish it, however, and they’re asking for $30,000 on Kickstarter, with a fresh demo to entice us with. And simply put, it is the most ambitious visual novel ever developed outside of Japan. Founded by team members who worked on the popular Russian-made freeware VN Everlasting Summer, Soviet Games’ next project is Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll. Soviet Games is aiming to climb out of this rut in a big way. Every once in a while you find a cool western VN doing its own thing, but it turns out to be little more than a brief novelty, or maybe the level of quality just isn’t there. And then there’s how many western VNs are content aping their Japanese counterparts almost exactly, just with lower budgets. Part of the issue is that I value polish and production value highly, and the amateurish qualities of many western VNs can be off-putting. I’ve had mixed feelings on western visual novels for almost as long as I’ve been a VN reader. ![]()
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