Review of Popotan
| Subject | Popotan |
| By | Helpfulness: 5 tomtheerogeman on 2019-04-01 |
| Review | A lot of people have heard of this game at some point, thanks to the caramelldansen meme many years ago. Researching the origins of that meme was also how I found out what a visual novel was, and what made me the man I am today. I guess you could say that I've waited many years to read this. But honestly, all it did was put me to sleep on my weekend afternoons. The game has really good artwork for it's age, a lot of music, and character sprites and backgrounds that are somewhat animated, all giving you the impression that it costed the devs a lot of money to produce. But beyond this facade lies a poor script. The game is tagged as comedy, but the comedy never really made me laugh. It consists mainly of 2 things. First is how the MC often walks in on the heroines while they are naked/masturbating/using the toilet etc and how magically none of the characters do anything to alleviate this (yes the doors have locks on them, they just never use them for some reason.) Second is how Mea talks and acts, because she is a robot with AI so usually she can't read social cues well and talks in a strange, "robotic" sort of way, and thus conversations where she is present can often end up digressing into something kind of stupid. There's other things as well, but basically if you find autistic behavior to be funny, then you might enjoy this game. Of course, comedy can be pretty subjective, and most of you reading this might feel like this game is simply only suited for a Japanese person's sense of humor. I thought this as well, so I went to EGS to see what people there thought of the game, and the general consensus there was pretty much the same as how I felt about the game; that the script is overall "weak," but everything else is OK. The DVD version's raunchy OP and the scene recollection menu makes it seem like the game has a lot of H scenes, but in reality I think everyone gets just 1 sex scene. The game was tamer then I thought it would be, apart from Mii's route where there's a bunch of scenes of her masturbating. The CD version gives you less time to walk around sometimes, doesn't tell you where the arrows lead you, and (I think) has fewer mini games. Still, it's kind of funny how the DVD version's average rating on EGS wasn't any better than the CD version's. Oh, and this game is fucking hard to read. Things like irregular/hyougai kanji, yojijukugo, gojijukugo, proverbs, and other anomalies in moege writing are a frequent occurence in this game's script. My copy of the game (the CD version) would crash with any attempt to hook it's text, however the recent Textractor program works like a charm. It was for this reason why the game that introduced me to VNs took so long for me to start playing. I finished Ai, Mai, Mii, and Unagi's routes. Despite the grievances I've listed above, I still played it as long as I did because I'm running out of new vocabulary from pre-made anki decks from the internet, and so I have to start mining more obscure vocabulary and expressions from my games if I want to learn more Japanese. I know some people wanted to read this VN and there was even a translation project for it long ago that went nowhere, but honestly most of you EOPs aren't missing out on much. |
| 5 points |