Review: Melody

 Ed's H Game Review!

Melody

Game Type: Ren'py Choice Based Visual Novel

Creator: Mr Dots Games

Version Played: Final release

If F95's ratings are to be believed, this game is extremely popular and beloved. So for you fans of the game, let me get this out of the way now: just skip this review. Because what I'm about to say isn't going to be pretty.

Fuck this stupid fucking game. Fuck this game with a garden rake. Up the ass. The business end. Sideways!

It's one thing to get me to not like a game. I've not liked plenty of games. No one is going to like everything. It's a whole other thing to leave me feeling genuinely insulted by a developer. Melody is the rare game that finds me in the latter category.

I was almost not even going to do a review of the game. I stopped playing at about the halfway point, and just figured, fine, I just didn't get it. But over the last few days, the annoyance with the title just kept festering. Kept growing in my brain. I need to talk about this. So I'm going to.

First, the theme of the game is "work makes relationships hard, if not impossible." The problem is, that theme is hammered into the fucking GROUND. Every relationship EXCEPT the borderline jailbait college student seems to be sabotaged exactly like this. Isabella? Gets an air hostess job on international flights. Bye bye. Amy? Fashion design job across the country. See ya. Becca? Museum job just an HOUR AWAY, but apparently that's too far for the MC to drive. The entire game is dedicated to pushing the MC with his music student, logic or consequences be damned. Over and over and over again. It just got TIRING. It's a fine thematic construct to use once, maybe twice. But every damn time? Come on. That's just lazy writing.

But what's more is that these decisions happen at random, arbitrary parts of the game for NO REASON. If these were endgame conditions that would be one thing, but the game informing me that it's locking me into an ending at the halfway mark, WHY? If I wanted to go with Amy - which was an option - then everyone in Melody's life would be gone for no reason, a decision completely out of character for literally all of the cast. There's no actual thematic decision behind this except the writer going "I want this character out of the plot, so out they go." And then making us feel bad for not agreeing. 

Which brings me back to the biggest problem with the game: Why present it as a choice based VN if there was no real element of choice at all? Why create a game where innocuous choices throughout the game can utterly sabotage you? What possible gameplay can be derived from that? 

And you know what? Let's talk about the gameplay. It's just not hot. It's just not. The sex scenes are few and far between, when they do happen, the animations are stilted, rough, don't match the narration at all, and are the most basic possible animations. The decisions to get closer to Melody or anyone else for that matter (not like anyone else matters, but I'll humor the author just this once) are arbitrary and puzzling. Sometimes involving a music quiz. A word to the wise, if you have to google music history (or have an Audio Production degree I guess) to get points with the girl in a required segment, you should PROBABLY rethink that. And they're all like that. Who can you hug, who can you be more affectionate with? There's no way to tell. 

Okay, the animations and the sex are bad, and the gameplay all but requires a guide. How is the artwork? Well, at first glance it's actually pretty nice. Individual characters look unique and stand out. Environments are the usual Daz3D things, but they're used well. On the music side, there are some very cool custom models of actual guitars and actual mics and actual amps. But as you play the game, you start to notice... absolutely nothing that isn't directly relevant to the plot appears. No waiters or bartenders. No pedestrians on the street. You take Becca to go see a book reading, well we never see the book or the author, the camera just stays focused on the girl. Go to a movie? You ain't gonna be seeing any of it. Go on a tour? No tour guide. Go to college? No teachers or other students. Go to a club? Only dancers are going to be you and your girl(s). It just feels so empty and hyperfocused in all the wrong ways. It feels like an episode of the old 60s show The Avengers (no relation to the Marvel Comics property), which never hired extras. It feels eerie and wrong.

How about the writing? I've already mentioned the big issue, but I feel like there are a bunch of smaller ones too. The game loves its music - and I'll talk about that in a bit - so it spends a lot of time talking about musical artists... or weird ass alternate versions of them at any rate. You know what, that's fine. Smarties is a pretty funny pun on Eminem. Royal for Prince, okay, sure. Makes sense. And there's a lot of these, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out who they're talking about. Clearly the writer is very jacked into the music scene. But if they're doing it to avoid Copyright, why then is Uber a company? Why show actual screens of the John Cusack movie High Fidelity? You're already in murky copyright water just from that, so why confuse your audience other than to show off how many music puns you can make? Yet another thing about this very tiring game that just got even more frustrating with time. Do these fake names really benefit your audience in any way? Do you think calling Keith Richards "Leith Dickson" is really that funny?

And then on top of that, as the story progressed, things just got so much more melodramatic. I just dropped out of the game when it became just way too much of a soap opera for me. I'll admit that's a personal issue, but on top of everything else, why keep playing it? So I didn't.

So what is there to like? Well as I've brought up repeatedly this is game that loves its music. Loves the music industry. Loves musicianship. That much is extra clear. If you are a lover of music and can tolerate music pun after music pun, at least in that regard there's something to love about the game. 

Okay, let's recap. The game punishes you for getting random choices wrong. The writing punishes you for not getting music puns. The author punishes you for picking a girl that the author disagrees with. The amimations punish you for expecting a porn game to be hot. The one thing it gets right is music history, but who is playing a porn game for that? 

It's very evident the writer had a specific vision for how this game should go, but why then pretend it's a choice based VN when your choices ultimately either don't matter or will be punished? If Mr Dots wanted to make a linear, kinetic novel, that's what he should have done. Developers, make the game you want to make, but do NOT piss in my glass and call it lemonade. I don't like feeling tricked.

Pros: Music History buffs will like a lot of what's talked about.

Cons: Where do I begin. Everything? Can I say everything about this game is a con? Sure, let's try that.

Overall: 1/10

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