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Burokku Girls
PC (Steam)
How Can Boobs Be Boring?
2/5 stars
Back in 2015, a new Indie studio calling themselves Silver Cow burst onto the scene with their boob-centric Visual Novel, “Time Tenshi.” As a confessed Boob Aficionado, who had never played a Visual Novel before, I decided that Silver Cow’s work might be the ideal entry point. However, I was ultimately disappointed by their inaugural title, but had already moved forward and purchased their second title, “Burokku Girls” (“BG”). In the mood to binge a bunch of Adventure games (and Adventure subgenres like the Visual Novel) out of my backlog, I decided to give it a go… and was predictably disappointed.
Presentation
“BG” is a very typical Visual Novel built in the Renpy engine. It features very little in the way of animation, and the still artwork was very obviously created by a disparate group of people with varying levels of skill. The background team was actually fairly consistent, but of the three different artists involved in character design, one of them was definitely on the bottom rung. Character designs and costumes are, likewise, fairly nonsensical.
Audio isn’t particularly interesting either, with plenty of generic Renpy Visual Novel soundtrack pieces and sound effects and no voiceacting whatsoever.
Technically, “BG” is bare-bones, but at least functional. There’s no Xinput support, and everything is done with the mouse cursor. The game is stable, though, and never crashed.
Story
Ever since American literary legend, Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens, published “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” the concept of the ‘fish out of water’ story has been rehashed and rutworn over and over again… and it has rarely been done in an interesting manner, not even by Twain himself.
“BG” liberally borrows these same story conceits in its tale of one Takeshi Allerton, the son of a computer scientist and videogame designer whose top-secret work involves virtual reality. When Takeshi accidentally discovers his father’s ready-for-testing prototype for a form of cutting-edge, fully-immersive VR, his dad reluctantly allows him to be the first person to use it. And, of course, something goes horribly wrong and Takeshi finds himself ‘stuck’ in the virtual world of Burokku (an Engrish rendering of the word ‘block’), in which everything is crafted from 3D cubes, a la “Minecraft”… everything, that is, except for the women, who are largely crafted from large, fleshy spheres.
Through a series of events, Takeshi ends up joining forces with a girl named Asahi, who first encounters him whilst fleeing for her life before a hoard of Darklings. It turns out that, in Burokku’s ancient past, people with superpowers were sealed beneath the blocky surface in the Underworld, where they raged and fomented, but ultimately worked toward breaking free. Now they have, and they’ve used the power of darkness to corrupt the hearts of any surface-dwellers they come upon, rendering them feral, sociopathic, and psychotic.
The rest of the tale revolves around Asahi taking Takeshi back to her village – the only one that hasn’t already been consumed by darkness – and coming up with a plan to hold back the coming hoards.
In general, the writing in “BG” isn’t stellar, with repetitive repetitions of the same repeated words repeatedly, plenty of drawn-out dialogs that ultimately lead nowhere, and a generally low amount of fanservice. “BG” is an ‘ecchi’ game, meaning ‘perverted,’ and not a full-blown hentai, but it generally feels like there are too many characters and not enough action.
“BG” is also painfully/mercifully short, clocking in at around 3 hours to explore everything… but it ends on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Personally, I found it difficult to get into “BG” from the outset, as the slow pacing and boring buildup saw me drifting off to sleep while playing TWICE during the first 90 minutes.
Gameplay
Visual Novels aren’t exactly known for their great gameplay at the best of times. And “BG” definitely isn’t the ‘best’ at anything. While most Visual Novels will offer branching dialog choices that change the outcomes of various events in the course of the story, “BG” barely manages this, with a meager TWO choices throughout the game. The first is largely meaningless and leads to the same outcome in subsequent scenes (but it does unlock additional full-screen artwork that would otherwise go unseen), while the second choice determines whether the player gets the ‘Bad Ending’ or the ‘Good (Cliffhanger) Ending.’
The rest of the game is just clicking the mouse to move through dialog boxes. There are no romance options to pursue the various different girls. There is no interwoven web of choice. It’s just a linear exercise in reading.
Overall
Short, boring, inconsistent art, cliffhanger ending, and only two branching dialogs. If you’re okay with all of these things in a Visual Novel that is ostensibly about big boobs, I suppose you might like “Burokku Girls.” As for me, I no longer have any faith in the entire Visual Novel subgenre, and would advise those seeking titillating comic strips involving big boobs to sign up for a DeviantART account instead.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 1/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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