Tailor Tales is a game I downloaded on Steam a while back. I decided to play it recently, as part of my goal to play and, ideally, complete, every game I have on Steam. Since I did complete one route, I've decided to count it, which gives me 117 completed games out of 229. I've got 7 games in progress, and the remaining 69 are not played. The below is a copy of a review I've just posted to Steam.
This game does have a few things to recommend it, but the flaws outweigh the positives.
Firstly, this is not a complete game. Everything about the game mentions 6 love interests, but you can only actually play through 3 routes (and the first chapter of a fourth). While, yes, the store page mentions that 3 routes are incomplete and 'coming soon', that's dwarfed by everything screaming "SIX ROUTES". Don't show me six routes and then tell me I can only play three. Show me three routes and then, surprise, now there's four! That's good news. Showing me six routes (but actually only three!) is bad news. Not least because at least two of them are not expected until 2022.
The other big problem is that the game is, for want of a better word, janky. It's janky. If you uninstall and reinstall - for example, because it's randomly thrown a glitch - your save files get deleted. I mentioned this on the discord chat for the game, and immediately got a "she's just one dev, she's doing her best!". I don't care. I shared not because I thought anything could be done, but because if something happens that makes a player think "this game isn't fun any more" then a dev should know about that. Sure, maybe the dev will decide not to act on that information. There are lots of good reasons someone might decide that. But coming at me trying to convince me to feel sympathy and give the game another chance out of the goodness of my heart or not to say "mean things"....no. Why should I? I'm playing the game to have fun, not to do the dev a favour. I don't care what behind the scenes thing causes errors to happen or makes them hard to fix. Those things aren't my problem. As a player, I play if it's fun and stop playing if it's not. Telling the dev what those things are is a gift because, sometimes, those things affect lots of players and can be fixed. This is why supermarkets spend so much time and effort trying to get you to use loyalty cards, to get that kind of info. This is why facebook sells your info. Anyone who wants to sell you something or make something for the general public needs to know the effect their product is having and why someone might choose it or not.
The other excuse I got was "some games are saved to the steam cloud but this one isn't". Okay, and? I don't know exactly how the behind the scenes stuff works, but I'm pretty sure Steam doesn't just make that decision by itself. That is something that dev has some level of control over. There might be good reasons to avoid it, but acting as if it can't be helped at all is just disingenuous.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that the dev has some fixes in place for things like save files being deleted. There are passwords you can enter in-game to completely unlock two routes, so you don't need to replay content you've already played or grind in the "mini-game" to unlock them again. The dev will also offer to create special save files to put back things you've lost, like gold and things you've unlocked in the "mini-game". Those things aren't good enough when the problem shouldn't be happening in the first place ("but it's a new release and it's only one dev!" stfu, it came out two years ago and, again, I am not playing as a favour to the dev. If something makes the game stop being fun, I'm not going to keep playing no matter how much whining you do). Also, the fact that the dev has all those things in place tells me that she knows it's an ongoing problem.
That reminds me. The actual first response I got to my feedback was a fake nicey-nicey "oh you should have asked here [on discord] before doing anything, I could have helped! Can't fix it now!". Really? You think every single player is going to ask the dev on discord before doing something as simple as uninstalling or reinstalling? Or is this just a case of fuck the people who don't think to do that? Plus, fixing it - as I worked out myself - was as simple as restoring the game from the recycling bin, then copying the save files and completed fashion files to my desktop before uninstalling and reinstalling again and copying just those files back over. No one else thought of that before going straight to "have this fake save file with extra stuff on it!"?
The main reason I don't like the "here, have a fake save file with stuff unlocked!" is that it reframes the problems with the game as me-problems. They're not me-problems. The game is lacking basic functionality. These problems should not arise in the first place. Making individual save files for all the people who bother to get on Discord and tell you about it strikes me as inefficient. Not least because it leaves everyone who doesn't use the Discord or who don't want to share their experience out in the cold. At the very least acknowledge that I am giving you feedback - whether you intend to act on it or not - instead of acting like I'm making a complaint and must be bribed to shut up. I don't want a bribe. Ideally, what I want is to hear "We're working on fixing that issue" followed by "here's how to restore your save file from the recycle bin". Hearing "Oh no poor you uwu here's the exact steps you should have psychically divined to prevent this happening, can I offer you a fake save-file with loads of stuff unlocked but none of the stuff you spent time working on in this trying time?".
I should probably talk about the actual gameplay itself. This is a visual novel, with 3 routes currently written and 4 more planned (it was 3 but the dev has added another one - ambitious since she still hasn't done the ones she planned in the first place). Each character has 25 main chapters, and then two different endings consisting of 3 chapters each. You can't lose. Which ending you get is determined by whether you pick more 'fierce' or 'kind' choices in the first 25 chapters, and you're immediately offered a chance to view the other ending on completion. The writing is decent, but a bit weird sometimes. In the newest route, for example, the love interest is repeatedly referred as "the redhead" in that weird amateurish fanfiction way. I suppose we should just thank our lucky stars that the writing doesn't go with things like "the shorter man", "the younger man", or the dreaded "orbs". On that note the love interest's "cyan" eyes are referred to repeatedly, but that gets less wanky when you realise that this story is set in a world where people have red or cyan eyes rather than just brown or blue.
You unlock more chapters with gold, which you get through designing clothes. Honestly, I hesitate to call this part a mini-game. The clothing consists of pre-set types, and you need to match things like length, colour, pattern, pattern colour, and details like collar and hemline to a randomly generated design. I dread to think how this works for the colour-blind. Though, that would be easy to fix by having a way to view the name of the colour instead of just having to go by what it looks like. The menu could also be improved. There are something like 9 main colours with variations on them, and the game will accept any colour as long as it's a variation on the main one. So why not show me 9 colours and let me click on them to see the variations instead of making me scroll endlessly through all of them? You can also use this process to design outfits for your main character, and that's the stuff I lost with my missing save file.
One plus point is that the game allows you to change your main character's eye colour, skin tone, and hair colour for CGs. This means this game is the first otome in which I've seen a black woman as the main character. Though, that said, the game only offers two hair styles for black women - the rest must be wigs or require quite a lot of products and damage - and the text in one route makes frequent mention of hair in a way that makes it clear the MC is white, or, at least, not black. So it's not really designed for women of colour, though it does at least make more of an effort than most.
Speaking of race, it is really unclear where this game takes place. It's written in English so why does it act like 'confessions' - a Japanese thing - are something everyone is familiar with? I would guess because they show up a lot in otomes because most are Japanese, but that's not a good excuse to act like they're something the audience should be familiar with. That's poor writing, to rely on your readers to be so familiar with other games in the genre that you can throw in something from a totally different culture and trust them to make the jump based purely on having played games in the genre. Every otome is someone's first otome, like every episode of a TV show or a comic-book is someone's first entry into that series.
This game has 'Plus' content which the dev plans to 'eventually' release as DLC. Until that blessed day, you can access Plus content via Patreon. If you do this, you need to download the game via Itch.io. You cannot access the Plus content through Steam and you cannot use your Steam game file at all. You have to start a totally new game file. You want me to start a whole new game file to access some extra end-game content? Fuck that. Sure, you don't have to grind through all the chapters you've already played because, as far as I can tell, Plus comes with those already unlocked, but still. Why not have downloadable files to add to your Steam game, like Huniepop did for their 18+ content? Why not make it so you can load your Steam file in the Plus version? Well, I can guess at one answer. Perhaps it would be a lot of effort and the dev doesn't think it's a big enough problem to put that effort in. That's a fair decision to make. I disagree, but I only have my viewpoint. I can't say whether enough people would find that a problem to decide if it's worth spending effort on. I find it a big problem though, which is why I think it's worth pointing out in a review. You now have this information as a player, you can decide what actions to take based on that.
Full disclosure: I was one chapter off finishing the second route when my game glitched, so I have finished two of them. I'm probably going to finish the third route in the game, and when the fourth route is released - May 2021 - I might play that as well, assuming nothing else goes wrong. A big factor in that is that I know how to give myself free money using Cheat Engine. If I had to grind the stupid mini-game, I probably wouldn't bother. I also probably wouldn't bother if the routes were any longer than they are, and I probably won't bother if anything else goes wrong. I'm also wary of starting any other games by same dev.
Edited to Add: Hang on. The next route is due to be released sometime in May, and the one after is sometime in 2022. This dev expects me to just keep this game downloaded, taking up space on my PC, for all that time, or to lose my save file and unlock all of the clothing elements and redesign all of my custom outfits again? Fuck that. This game was not designed for players.
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