The Ten Worst VNs of 2017

7) Out of Sync (Paper Star Studios)

Hold on. All of the bright, sugary colors almost burned out my retinas. Okay; here we go.

One of the consistent issues you have seen and will see with the Worst VNs of 2017 is their reliance on expected audience investment with the romantic pairs in-game. That train of thinking continues to wreak havoc with Out of Sync: a game that owes is entire existence to fanfiction writing for the past twenty years or so. Fandom culture and ‘shipping’ even gets a shout-out in game proper because why not, I suppose. However, once you get past that you get to the core idea of this game, you quickly realize there is nothing here.

At the very least, The Monster Inside has threads of ideas but didn’t give itself the time to properly execute them. Out of Sync has plenty of time, but no interest in ideas. The only thing the game is interested in is the only thing they figured the audience would be interested: Taisei and Shou. The two are childhood friends who both get drafted into idol groups because. Once they find each other, their former friendship snaps everyone’s neck as it become an intimate fling. Literally, that header I have for this entry happened within an hour of them meeting back up in-game. And like Blind Men, and others to come, the game falls apart.

The reasons are compounded here because the developer’s blatant irreverence for anything outside of these two hooking up. Even the two characters themselves are husks of the stereotypical tropes the developers surely picked out of a hat for the purposes of this game. The only thing to this game is the sex and, I’m sorry; I’m sure that will appeal to some. However, it is an increasingly damning statement on Western developers that it is that easy. After all, if all an audience doesn’t even want the bare minimum of creativity and will happily consume whatever crap comes down the pipe with their fandom label on it, then why should anyone care about the developer in the first place?

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