War & Romance a Visual Novel Review (Nintendo 3DS Switch)

Title: War & Romance a Visual Novel Review
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Nintendo 3DS (also on IOS)
Developer|Publisher: The Game Forest | Stranger Games 
Age Rating: EU 16+
Price: UK £10.79
Release Date: 23^rd April 2020

Review code provided with many thanks to Stranger Games

Still Holding on

It’s always nice to have an excuse to pull out the 3DS again. The Switch may have taken the hearts of many handheld games, but I still adore my 3DS. The dual screen and the cool clamshell design that fits just right in my bag. It still surprises me to this day that games are still releasing to the system digitally. The only trouble is releasing a game to a system like the 3DS late in it’s cycle needs to be quite memorable or different in order to grab attention. With a title like War & Romance a Visual Novel, its not the best start. Yet, let’s delve into this visual novel for the wonderful 3DS system.

For this review I played the game on ‘the new’ 3DS XL. Also I apologies for some of my screenshots in advance. I don’t have a capture device for the 3DS.

War and Love

War & Romance is a story set in Roman (or Byzantine) occupied Eygpt. The story originally focuses on an old ritual where a virgin bride is sacrificed to the Nile. It then follows the love story between a common girl Mary and Daniel a boy from a wealthy family. This part of the story was kinda cute following the difficulties in their relationship, particularly Daniels rather nasty mother. The trouble is this story is resolved and finished very early into the novel. The Game then switches focus onto a commander of the Muslim Army, Amr. The novel then heavily looks at the conflict between the Muslims, Byzantines and Persians. I wasn’t as engrossed into this story. While it does help tie up many of the loose ends, I wasn’t drawn to it as much as the love story. The story is also very short overall, I finished the entire game in under 4 hours and I’m quite a slow reader.

Only the Story

There are no choices to make in this visual novel. You simply click to the next text dialogue. You can let the game auto play but I preferred to go at my own pace. You can save the game at any point. With a design like this its very important a visual novel has good artwork, music and a gripping story. Unfortunately the game was not comfortable to read, it is filled with grammatical errors and confusing sentence structures. This may have been due to difficulty translating the game to English. However, it made many scenes difficult to read. It sort of turned into a mini game for myself where I wish I was a English teacher with a red marker pen. There is also an odd use of capital letters on words that probably don’t need capitals. I didn’t particular care for the use of white text against a brown shrivelled paper background. This also added to the reading discomfort for me.

Conflict of Art

The artwork is a mixed bag. The character stills are generally decent oil painted like designs with simple bland backgrounds. For some strange reason the game adds odd hand drawn artwork which really clashes with the nicer art style. It looks like someone drew a doodle over the top of art work already finished. Not as pleasant and it really messes up what was quite an acceptable design.

Then there’s the music, not particularly memorable but acceptable for the themes of war and deserts. I often just turned it down as the constant looping distracted me from reading. What was very bizarre is the game lets you listen to the soundtrack in the main menu. But rather than let you choose what you want to listen to, it just plays each score in a row with a still image until you press a button to skip to the next tune.

The 3DS Stuff

The game doesn’t take advantage of the 3DS as a system. You can’t use the touch pad to skip dialogue only the buttons. It doesn’t make use of the 3D ability, not a huge issue I know but worth pointing out for those that are interested like myself. I guess the only thing it does is present the art on the top screen and the text on the bottom.

The Summary

What saddens me is that buried within the issues War and Romance it did led me to research this historical era further. On doing this it did make me wish the game added more depth to the story and background. Well that and stick to a consistent art style and polish up its translation and music. For the price the game is asking, there are multiple alternatives far cheaper, and in many cases free.

The game is due to release on Switch later this year. I think some tweaks like comfortable text and a cheaper price point may make this more appealing to the most dedicated visual novel fans. If you want to try a taste of the game you can download a part of it for free on the IOS store and see if its for you. For me, I was left feeling disappointed.

Final Verdict: I Don’t Like it