#trainwreck studios

Animal Lover

Release date (Windows, Mac OS, Steam, Android) English: February 14th, 2017

"Animal Lover is a dating sim/visual novel where you will play a young woman trying to cure five beefy, attractive men from being turned into animals forever! Woah! It's funny, it's sad, it's weird! It's got cute boys! What else does it have going on?

Romance! Drama! Mystery! Animal Lover!"

#JakeReviewsItch

Animal Lover

by Trainwreck Studios

Price (US): $9.99

Included In: Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

Genre: Visual Novel

Pitch: A Frog Prince story. Lots of kissing. Lots of cute boys.

My expectations: The Itch page boasts, ">150,000 words!" which sounds more like a threat to me. There's no way I'm reading all of that in time for a review. Another choice quote from the description: "No furries! Don't let the title fool you!" If you're concerned people are going to be misled by the title, maybe dig into your >150,000 words for a different title, rather than hoping they'll click on the game and look for clarification.

Today, I’m really excited to bring you a review of Trainwreck Studios’ new supernatural romance visual novel Nowhere Girl! Way back when I was first getting started with this blog, I wrote a review of Trainwreck’s first VN, Animal Lover, an otome about rescuing cute boys from a curse that turns them into animals. Nowhere Girl has an equally bizarre premise, with a female love interest this time—one who’s magically chained to you until you fall in love with her, and who’s also a ghost. And in case that’s not awesome enough, Nowhere Girl pulls you in with a beautiful opening animation, followed by an encounter with a narrator who has a personality and wants to read you poetry. After those first five minutes, I was totally hooked. But if you’re not as sure as I was about whether Nowhere Girl is your thing, the rest of this review will go into some more detail about why I liked it, as well as some minor things I didn’t like as much, while avoiding spoilers as much as possible.

Nowhere Girl really shines with its characterization of Pseudo, the ghostly main heroine. I especially appreciated her character design. I find that pretty often in media, if the reader is supposed to sympathize with a ghost character, the ghost will just look like an attractive human who’s slightly translucent. But while Pseudo is still cute, she has bright blue skin, and the whole lower half of her body is just a big ghostly tail. It makes her look a lot more interesting, distinctive, and not-quite-human than most other supernatural love interests I’ve seen in VNs. She also has several varying poses, making scenes of dialogue with her especially dynamic and fun to read. If the goal of Nowhere Girl is to make you fall in love with Pseudo alongside the protagonist, I think it will work on a lot of readers.

However, as much as I enjoyed Nowhere Girl, it is a little rough around the edges. For one thing, I suspect that letting players choose the protagonist’s gender might have been an afterthought, as they tend to read as male even if you select the female option. One example that stood out to me is that the main set-up for the plot involves getting extremely drunk with a random dude you just met in a bar. I don’t know many women who would even consider taking that kind of risk, no matter how bad a day they’re having. There were also a few other points in the story when I felt like some more variation based on protagonist gender would have helped—nothing huge, but once the idea got into my head, I just kept noticing little things that could have done with a bit of a change. But of course, for those of you who prefer to choose a male protagonist, none of that will be an issue at all.

There were a couple other aspects of the story that I didn’t like at first, but as I read on, I started to appreciate them more. At the beginning of the narrative, the protagonist is harbouring a secret crush on their friend and co-worker Holly, and their internal conflict about their feelings for her is one of the major problems that stands in the way of attempting a relationship with Pseudo—aside from the whole ghost thing, of course. And at first, I felt like the writing could have done more to really establish what’s so special about Holly and why the protagonist likes her so much, since I didn’t think that she was particularly interesting or that they even seemed to have much in common. But I eventually started to understand that the protagonist’s connection with Holly really was supposed to be as strained and artificial as I thought it was. They were clinging onto the fantasy of what a relationship with her would be like, when they really needed to step back and realize how far removed their ideas were from reality in order to move on. There were also some early scenes in which I found Pseudo really annoying, such as when she’s forced to follow the protagonist to work, and keeps distracting them and making them seem crazy to onlookers by making comments only they can hear. But while reading those scenes was really frustrating, it also effectively made me empathize with how the protagonist was feeling. So while some aspects of the writing of Nowhere Girl might not appeal to all readers at first, they’re successful in achieving what I imagine the writer intended, and they just might grow on you.

Time Ace (DS, 2007)

Published by Konami. Developed by Trainwreck Studios and The Farm 51.

So here's one that I got recently. Essentially a spiritual successor to Konami's own Time Pilot, this game sees you going through different time periods to stop your former assistant, Scythe, from taking over the world after stealing your time machine, so you hop on your biplane (which just so happened to have a backup time machine... plot doesn't make much sense, expectedly) and get to it. You later get the help from a Russian agent named Nadia, who you meet during one of the WWII missions. She mostly gives you your objectives as well as coordinates of where Scythe may be.

The game itself is a mostly on-rails affair, rather than something like an Ace Combat lite, so there is the issue of the game bouncing your craft back to the path if you try to go off of it, mostly when attempting to grab powerups, but it's still an enjoyable romp nonetheless. In terms of the eras you go through it's mostly similar to Time Pilot, you do go through the 1910s, 40s and 70s like on that game, but you also have 1950s North Africa, present-day (present-day = 2007) USA and the Middle East, post-apocalypse future Russia, and of course, SPAAAAAAACE, amongst a few others.

The planes you use are mostly off-brand versions of various famous planes like the P-38 Lightning, F14 (or F15, no idea) and the Su-27, as well as a spaceship near the end, and you can use whatever plane you want on each mission if you unlocked it, so if you wanna go through 1940s New York in a futuristic spaceship or take the P-38 lookalike to space, you can do it.

Game itself is rather short, it takes about 3 or so hours to beat, and in terms of replay value there's really nothing. Sure, there are a few bonus missions, but they're still part of the story, and they do help towards getting the unlockable planes, so they're not exactly bonus. There's also a multiplayer dogfight mode, but I haven't been able to try it, so I dunno how it fares.

Interesting tidbit about the devs: Trainwreck Studios, the "main" dev, was apparently a division of developer 2015, a company most famously known for making Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, as well as for the fact that some of their former employees would later found Infinity Ward. Now, apparently, Trainwreck was already dead by the time Time Ace saw release, so it seems that most of the work was done by Polish company The Farm 51 (most recently known for Painkiller: Hell & Damnation), albeit under the Trainwreck name, for some reason. The even more interesting part is that some of the development staff also worked for now-defunct developer InterActive Vision, responsible for such "gems" as Blades of Thunder and Top Gun DS, and in fact Time Ace does seem to have some similarities with the latter. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if it shares the same engine.