LOST:SMILE memories

/!\ At the time of this review, the game is only available in Japanese. No translation patch exist. Only buy it if you understand the language. After the very good Seven Days, Life0 returns with Lost:Smile. Long story short, it's not as good as Seven Days. If you have to buy only one and are hesitating, now you know. It's not a bad game and it has its good parts, but sometimes feels a bit too long. Graphics, voices, music are in the top tier of the genre, no worries on that point. Recommended route order is Misuzu->Jun->Meguru They are very different in their content. Misuzu's route is a more spiritual/fantasy-esque route that will explain a few key points for the protagonist. Jun's route is the sport/action route. Sadly, the action will only be in written form, so you better know volleyball/beach volley basics. Meguru's route is the comedy route as it has the most funny moments, but it still deals with a sad story in the background. This is a Life0 game, after all.

Made in Unity, this game is super buggy and slow. It also crashes at the end of two routes if you're on Win7. But that's not all, as often enough you'll have to deal with more generic bugs such as: 1) Missing voice; 2) Voice present but not played automatically, requiring you to do it manually from the backlog; 3) In one scene, a character sounding like they're on the phone despite talking to someone in person; 4) Narration lines being marked with speaker tags, as if it's dialogue. The overall performance of the game leaves a lot to be desired and scenes shift with big delays. NumpadEnter doesn't work. Regular Enter works but does not contribute to skipping the painfully slow scene transitions. LMB helps a little bit but still not enough for a comfortable reading experience and you'll be constantly wishing the game could move faster. OP plays with such immense lag that it's completely unwatchable (another win7 thing maybe?) Well, enough about the technical part. Common route is a chain of mundane events day after day with nothing happening. Every day protag wakes up, walks around for a bit, talks to some people in the hotel he's staying in, soaks in the hot spring, goes to bed. …