kevdodance LongStory Review

What weirdly good games. I played the first episode of these games awhile back, but never went further since I didn't feel they were worth the payment for every episode (and the extra episode being political was kind of an eh for me, but I'm just glad it has nothing to do with the game and/or sequel's story) but this game was shockingly worth it. The characters were all oddly fleshed out. I played through Colin's route first which was nice as he had his own dynamic, and I'm currently playing through Marcel's. The artstyle is very nice, with the character's respective busts having a nice 2000s vibe to them and the environments looking very on-par with what you'd expect. The story is pretty good. You play as a character while trying to find someone to either date or just be friends with everyone in the school while also attempting to solve a mystery on the girl who was seemingly bullied out of the school (revealed later to be a trans individual which was a good surprise) and surprisingly, the game maintains the plot well and doesn't veer off at all. It also adds pretty fitting/nice dialogue choices for the scenarios which is good, especially for maintaining a good flow on conversations and the overall realism of the game (even if that isn't what it's shooting for). The music is also actually pretty good with even the title song being very catchy and some of the additional songs throughout the game's story are even catchier, the only complaint with those is the instrumental tracks are very, very, very reptitive and overplayed. Not like Persona levels of overplayed where the song is good and even after hearing it like 150 times over 3 90 hour playthroughs, you can still tolerate it, it is like played very frequently, albeit it usually is fitting to the situation at hand. Overall, LongStory 1 was a really good game that, even as a dating sim, had a lot of character and shine to it to make it differentiate from other games like it at the time. The only thing that sucks about it (I beat it on PC) is the way it is just slapped right onto PC without any real changes to cater to that platform. Not even a press a key to advance text, you have to spam click over and over and over to advance text or use the fast-forward, but then there's a chance you miss out on important dialogue.