INTRO
meh, nothing super duper interesting happened this week, mostly cause I took break from this neck of the internet for my mental health. But, I mainly spent this week trying out Tavern of Spear, absolutely not vibing with it, and started Cienie instead.
TAVERN OF SPEAR IS A GAME
yeah, so i was on youtube just browsing my home page when i started getting recommendations for this random fvn called Tavern of Spear. morbid curiosity got the better of me, so i watched the videos that were recommended to me and found myself incredibly intrigued. i mean, the main character looks hot and theres fucking enemy sex scenes? at the very least i need to see what the fuck is up with it. come to find out that its not just an a visual novel, but also an RPG. now the first thought i had was that there's no way that would work in Ren'Py, but the other thing i noticed were the weird options that appeared on the battle ui during gameplay. a "submit" button? a fucking lust meter? now i gotta know what's going on. so after a while, i downloaded the game and started playing. then i noticed something that would be very apparent throughout my short time playing the game. the writing is ATROCIOUS. im not gonna shit on it too hard, since the guy who's writing it clearly doesn't know English as their first language, but it's very noticeable at times and really distracts me when i'm reading. while, yes, the grammar is sometimes not perfect, i can give some leeway considering that it's still a beta. something that i can't really look over though is the way that it's very eager to show sex scenes. i know i sound hypocritical, and to a point, i am. this is an nsfw novel, and i shouldn't really get surprised at the fact that people have sex in it. still, i think how the game incorporates that into writing is subpar, to say the least. the hyena shopkeep guy (i forgot his name) starts flirting with you the second you head up into the inn, which i mean sure yeah, but then the game goes more into detail about stuff like how he moons you and stuff like that, and it just feels like its trying to hard to make it hot. the thing that made me put down the game though were the enemy scenes. for some context, when i was finding videos on my youtube recommended feed about tavern of spear, i found this one animation that was about the slime enemies that you encounter at the beginning of the game. i saw the video and was like "theres no way", so i get to that part of the game and sure enough, if you lose the slime has sex with you. i saw this for the first time and had bad feelings about it, but i put up with it anyways just to see what else the game had to offer. and then i got to the forest area where you fight the bulls and decided "there's no way there would be a worse scene if i lose to the bulls right?" i was dead wrong. the scene was very uncomfortable to read for me since it very much felt like an assault, and afterwards your character is like "i want more" which was such an ick to me. there's more that i could say about it, like how the battle mechanics are clunky, or how the story's pacing is complete wack, but really the main thing was that i didn't fuck with the nsfw, which is unfortunate.
CIENIE IS PEAK
after trying my hand at Tavern of Spear, i decided to play the next game in my backlog, which was Cienie! funnily enough, the only reason i know about cienie was because of that weird TSR drama between the two vns LOL! so yeah, i started playing it and WOW did it feel nice to not be teased with sex for once while reading. once again, yes i am aware that i was reading nsfw fvns, but man i didn't realize just how much i needed a break from nsfw in general lol. but yeah, i started playing it and really started getting invested in the story. i'm not gonna say its one of the best things i've ever read (yet) but it's definitely a step up from what i've been reading in the past month. i'm not terribly far, i've only gotten past the part where they discover kamil has been following Tom, but other than that i'm excited for what comes next!
POSSIBLE WEBSITE OVERHAUL?
not necessarily a confirmation, but just an idea i have currently. now that i have a bsky, there's not much of reason to have a full fledged blog, especially given how private i keep my personal life on here. so i'm thinking of just changing this site from a normal blog type site, to just a backlog site for me to keep track of vn's that im playing, and give live reactions to as im reading them. while i thought the blog idea was good at the start, now its shown that it's just something i'm not terribly interested in (at least for my use-case as of now). so there may be a possibility of a redesign, idk, we'll see.
CONCLUSION
once again, thanks for reading my blog posts! i'm trying to be slightly more consistent with how i post these, and even if the content of my website changes, i still hope that you will continue to check this out in the future. thanks for reading!