Yomi Alliance

Foreword

Gameplay

. . . in a nutshell

I need to make some revisions.

out the shell. . .

As a visual novel, this game involves a lot of mashing through text boxes. Don’t expect anything action-packed.

Before starting the game, make sure to check your “Preferences” from the title-screen. When I first started the game, the difficulty was set to “hard”. You will need to create a character before enjoying the game’s content, which starts with a species. I picked “human”, because I didn’t want to be a hairy reptile (or “nixanti”). Afterwards, you pick a gender (which for me was “female”). Then, your stats are rolled and you pick a name for your character.

I opted for the prerolled name and stats.

Let’s talk about stats. You have Agility, Perception, Presence, Intellect, Vitality, and Strength. Each stat plays into Skills, such as Engineering or Medicine. After that’s out of the way, you have to select a Profession, or sort-of a focus on your education. Then, you pick a job. I was a scholar of “Command” employed as a “hot-shot pilot”. Later, you will pick a (more-specific) subject to focus on, to supplement your career choice.

With all of that out of the way, the real game starts! At this point you’ll want to make sure that “Vanilla Mode” is set to off, unless you don’t want to see the “adult-scenes”. After an in-class introduction to your class and classmates, you will be presented with the schedule-screen. You have a limited number of weeks to socialize, study and work.

Each week, you can exercise your stats or visit your classmates. There are twenty-four weeks total, and you have a limited amount of fatigue to perform activities with. You’ll want to relax and wander, to restore lost fatigue. By building-up relationships with classmates, you can unlock new scenes and dialogue. Often, the actions you choose will introduce new virtual-novel segments with one or more choices.

Story

This title is a choose-your-own-adventure title. This means that the story can change drastically depending on your decisions, such as your field of study or species. However, a few details will remain the same (regardless of choices). The game begins in 755 AY. You have been accepted to the prestigious Yomi Star Academy. Before your journey can really begin, you must first discuss your aspirations with a “career officer”.

And. . . that’s where the story takes its turns. Personally, I began my story as an aspiring Command officer, and “hot-shot-pilot”. I gave the reins of leadership to an attractive female, who was really some spoiled brat who payed her way through school. My squad fell-apart, and our leader took an alien fist to the face. I tried to romance her nearly every-day of every week, but romance is reserved for. . . future updates. Shucks.

Visuals

The characters and props for this title are 3D rendered, and generally static. If you are familiar with Daz Studio or Poser, you will know exactly what the visuals look like. I do enjoy Daz models, as they are clean and professional (though common), I think that many in-game assets should have spent more time being rendered, as a lot of the images display visual artifacts and distortion. I find it extremely jarring. There was multiple spelling errors, but the English is good overall.

The Goods

Verdict

Well, this is a game with potential. A very ambitious virtual novel which encourages (several) play-throughs. It definately needs a lot work, from new content to debugging. My two-and-a-half hour playthrough netted about four crashes, though (thankfully) I was able to “roll-back” to prevent lost progress. If you trust this developer, buy the game and put in your word.

I’ll be looking forward to new updates.