Recent reviews by Reader

yeah.
Don is great.

What is there to say?

The mundane may not seem interesting to the average person but the people who manage to make such mundane, in terms of the world, as thought provoking and as interesting as it is deserve some sort of credit.

VA-11 Hall-A, and it's world of Cyberpunk Bartender Action is a relatively short game where you play through Jill, a normal bartender who has lived a normal life, as she meets with old acquaintances, friends and new acquaintances, who all have lived relatively normal lives, or at least those whose lives were disclosed. If you look at it from the perspective of someone looking to just enjoy a game, it seems odd as there is no trademark action or overarching narrative and setting that can really sell something to you. If you, however, simply would want to take the time and learn from such characters, you may learn something more than that.

This game has not much to say about it. It's art is quite unique but that is all there is to it. It's music isn't particularly stellar, though, at the very least, it is something very much my alley. It's plot is just as I've described on the tin and as it is described at it's tin. So then you look towards the characters, and at a glance, they seem ordinary in their own right in such a cyberpunk fantasy world. But maybe because they are ordinary, we are then enthralled with such ideas of them being ordinary. They tell us their problems. They tell us what they like and what they've been through. They tell us what they want to do and all of these things but what makes it seem as if that we'd just want to continue on, and on, and learn more about these people and the answer to that is.

Because they are human. They have their flaws. They have what we like and what we dislike about them but at the end of the day, they are their own respective quirky, crazy, yet still average human whom we can actually see on a day-to-day basis if we simply interacted with whoever we meet. It is because they are such people that we are so engrossed with this idea as their ordinary is simply different from our ordinary but besides that, what is more important and that in which we are more engrossed in are probably because we can relate to them. Each character has their own problems and each problem is something we may encounter or we've already encountered and there is something that one can simply learn so much from reading about these people.

At the end of the day, even I, someone who loves this game quite a bit cannot summarise it with this short of a review. If I were to compile a list on things that have simply just changed my viewpoint in life and helped me become a person, this would have a spot on that list along with such classics such as 1987 and The Little Prince.

As a wiseman once told me, being wise isn't about learning from the top. Being smart, is about learning about people at the bottom and people who are mundane and this visual novel provides an excellent way for one to learn more about such ideas of the mundane.

To make an impressive story isn't about crafting something grand. It is about making the mundane interesting to people such as you and I because it is in that very mundanity or ordinary, though this novel only explores the ordinary of an unordinary world, is already enough because in everything you can learn something and in this novel I, myself, have learned to appreciate people who are simply ordinary.


P.S. There are cute girls. Bossu is Best.