Keiko Everlasting

Before I start the review, one of the user-defined tags is "Visual Novel". It is not a visual novel, it is a kinetic novel, so there are no choices (just reading). I liked the story. It was well written and quite enjoyable. However, it was very short. The music is good, but the use of it is the most important. And that's also well done. The art is good, but the placement and size of the sprites could be adjusted so that it "agrees" with the environment more. Overall, it is a nice kinetic novel to read, and it's good for the price. It is on sale quite often, so it is a good idea to get it then, unless you want to support those who made Keiko Everlasting.

An interesting story. The plot is decent, the characters fun (though some have names that are a bit similar). Thing is, there is no way to resize the window, and if you are looking for choices that matter... not here.

So I picked this up for less than $1 and I must say it's enjoyable once you get into it, but the problem is the game doesn't do much in the way of storytelling and choices, so it feels like you just reading a book with no say for the first 20 minutes. Only then does your first choice come and it doesn't even have a impact on the story. The story is 95% told and 5% choices. At least the voice acting is good for the price, but it's completely in Japanese with no way to change it. Only English subtitles are available, but as an anime lover I wasn't bothered by this. A really annoying thing is that the game runs at 720p windowed, which totally breaks immersion. No way to change the resolution (There is NO SETTINGS MENU!!) So the game runs fine, but the borders break the immersion. Also the names of the characters are Japanese. Would be totally fine if they weren't so similar to each other. You will have a hard time trying to remember who is who. Trust me. Overall: 5.5/10 (Okay story, Decent voiceovers, Effort, Music is excellent. The game is cheap) || (Bad UI, No Settings Menu, runs at 720p windowed, story dragged out)

A novel where the end is worth it more than most of the journey leading towards it. The game definitely dragged during the first half, but got better during the event linking the halves and the second half. The characters look rather nice and the music is acceptable. My biggest negatives are the complete lack of any CGs and... technical performance. Never thought I'd have to mention performance in terms of a VN, but the game appears unresponsive for seconds at a time whenever a large amount of characters appear and additionally when changing scenes with them. It also takes a considerable amount of time to even start up and save/load menu functionality breaks if you make the window fullscreen. I'm more bagging on TyranoBuilder at this point than the game, but it is easily the worst VN engine around. Supposedly it's the easiest to just start using, but it lacks so many QoL features that are default elsewhere. That said, the ending is rather sweet, even if it's already stated on the store page. Voice acting is also a plus that wouldn't have expected to find here either.