VN - Ren'Py - Far-Off Friends [v0.8] [FFCreations]

a bunch of fake choices , forced relationships/sex/lewd
there wasnt a single choice that counted in the end
forced in a relationship with that old hag "landlady"
want to ignore that one girl? - nah , lets go on a date
dont care about that other girl? - nah , get after her and try to solve her problems
after a forced sex scene with even another girl, get asked about 5 other girls and dont be able to say "none" on a decision who you like? even if you dont know any of them

the whole story is one inconsistency after another?
why would the mc not just sell the house to the old hag?
why would he go to college there if he was just visiting before his "sabatical" year , the more after getting a large amount of money?
getting a tutor forced on him - for what again?
and everyone seems to be connected somehow , knows about the mc - but the mc is this dumb simp who always agree to anything

nothing makes sense

The game has a very good story with a touch of mystery along with romance, the characters are all beautiful and charismatic each with their own personality and the graphics are also very beautiful, whoever liked the previous game will like this one

I've always held the opinion that good vanilla porn games should be focused on character interactions and romances. Story and exposition is important, but only so far as to bring the love interests together. With vanilla VNs, we want characters that we can give a shit about, good romance between the MC and the LIs, and hot sex scenes. If any of that is what you're looking for, you'll find very little of it in this VN.

The most notable problem with this VN is the extremely bloated and boring dialogue in a generic porn plot. I'm not exaggerating when I say probably 95% of this VN is useless exposition and mundane, non-romance dialogue. And it's a LOT. I'm not one to skip dialogue typically, but I did with this one. I started skipping any dialogue that didn't specifically have to do with character romance and I found myself skipping damn near everything... It still took me several hours to get to the end even despite skipping the boring stuff.

And for my efforts, there was surprisingly little actual romance to find. As of chapter 7, Most of the relationships with the LIs are luke-warm at best. And there are very few sex scenes. One intercourse (LI), One blowjob (LI), One anal (Sidegirl). Only one scene is animated using stock daz animations, the rest are just static renders. There isn't even very much nudity at all in this VN. The vast majority of the nudity as a whole is taken up by that one sex scene and then another scene where an LI is talking on the phone naked.

Oh and let's talk about the renders and character models! They're... normal... They're not bad, but they're also not outstanding in any way. There are also surprisingly few renders per word count. So expect to be staring at the same 1 or 2 renders through out each - often unnecessarily wordy - conversation.

TLDR: If you're looking for something boring to read while trying to fall asleep, then I highly recommend this VN. If you're looking for a vanilla VN that has enjoyable and fruitful character romances and sex, then look somewhere else.

The best part of this developers is how he is very good at rendering but the story and plot is just terrible and how there were so many unneccesary dialogues that goes on and on, simply said its a very boring game with good renders and with this pace the game would take 10 years of development before you can bang all the girls.

It started promisingly, but recently, the story hasn't advanced much or introduced any interesting developments with the girls. It feels more like a mundane life simulator—just chatting with people, going to the gym, visiting cafes, attending college, and so on. I held off on reviewing it since it showed potential initially, but honestly, it has become more boring with each update.

To play this Visual Novel, you need to suspend your disbelief, as the events, to fit into the plot, are somewhat illogical. Perhaps elements were changed to remove incest from the game. However, aside from the script, technically the game has no issues, as the graphics are great. The music, however, did not please me, perhaps because I had played another game from the same company and they reused the same tracks.

My critique of the VN is that I am forced, against my will, to choose situations I would not like, such as having sexual relations with a specific character, for example.

Visually, one of the best looking i have come across in awhile. The story is interesting and different, atleast to others i've played.
No animations, but thats fine, though i saw they are on the table.

The bad points. i could say the lack of choice, or forced into certain directions. but personally i like the routes and chars.... so thats subjective.
i could also say, because it a slowburn, only come across 2 lewd scenes... but again i love the buildup, the world building so to speak.

my only gripe really is... the dialog or structure of the writing. its plainly clear that the Dev, is not an english native speaker and possibly using some auto-translate. theres alot of weird added words and bits, that make each sentence, out of wack or backwards.
can be easily sorted by running by afew native english speaking proofreaders.

so it can be alittle difficult to follow at times, especially as this is a text heavy AVN. but despite that, i really like it and can't wait for next release.

Good Points
+ Art style and models of girls look good, but sadly this is literally the only good point about this game...

Bad Points
- The story makes no sense at all. For example, there is literally no logical reason and logical explanation for why MC gave house the to Melissa. Honestly story would have made a lot of sense if Melissa was MC's long-lost mother, literally everything about the story points out that direction, and the whole game story feels like based on that fact, yet we don't have it.
- Classic some girls being mean/rude to MC for no reason trope, like always makes no sense and is not enjoyable at all.
- For an adult game it's pretty bad, currently we have only a couple of sex scenes in the game and only one of them has one short animation for a blowjob, other than we have no animation, and since we lack animations you do think we might have a lot of different positions/angles for sex scenes, sadly we don't have that either and they are pretty bad.
- Choices don't matter most of the time and as a player, you feel like you have no power over the story at all.
- Relationship developments have no build-up and they do make no sense at all.

For The End
The game has good models/art, but lacking animations in sex scenes nor not having at least a logical story is a very bad point, this game needs a remake and a lot of improvements for sure until that day I'm going to give 1 star, hope the game became better with updates and they do consider remaking the game because the current state of the game is not acceptable for 2023 at all.

As usual,, Great looking Models. I don't know how this developer makes such great looking models one after another, while many high earning devs have no clue how to make good models or it's probably good taste of this dev compared to others.
The game is still early stage, so split path should come with more choices in the future. The dev doesn't have too many Patrons so, splitting path from the very beginning will be a lot of overwork for him considering his revenue.

Update: As far as I said earlier things didn't pan out that way. Unlike FF this VN story sucks and illogical as hell. I don't understand why some devs changes outside story just not to pose as Incest content. You want to do incest then provide an Incest patch or produce a clean VN with coherent story. I'm lowering the stars to 3 from 5. 3 because of great artwork gorgeous models.

As of v0.6


PROS

• Good looking models
• Different story
• Well made.

CONS

• Forced into routes
• Forced into scenes
• Weirdos & bitches only

CONCLUSION

Good looking but choices don't seem to matter, you have no influence over the story (such as it is) or LI routes. Would've put 2.5 stars I could as it's too well made to be poor but it's less than average.

This is a basically a kinetic novel and a poor one at that. The main part of the story, if you can find it, actually isn't too bad but the writing is terrible. As others point out, most of the writing is just distracting filler that really doesn't have a place in this story. You can click 40+ times and not miss anything that is core related.
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There are also errors on almost every 'page' such as:

"But looking back, we aren't nothing but cosmic dust, who were luck
enough to turn themselves a cluster of cells....."

"What am I supposed to do with this? Sending via e-mail? Giving in her own hands?"

"Why didn't you said you went to a run?"

"I could have just following your pace"
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Some of the words are spelled differently even when used in adjacent sentences. One might argue that English isn't the dev's native language, however, their prior project was much easier to read and had fewer errors, if I remember correctly. Also that's just a poor excuse, especially with regards to a seasoned developer.

The graphics are fine. I don't have high needs or expectations so these are perfect, right in that medium range. Bland but nice looking ladies and a few backgrounds are just stock images that many dev's use.

Since you don't have any choice as to whom you interact with or the type of relationships, it doesn't really matter if they are good or bad experiences. One scene has a guy being somewhat aggressive with one of the MC's love interests. It almost sounds like something bad could happen yet the MC hides behind a wall for the most part and just listens.

The prior project was great other than ending very poorly. The writing was also much better, if memory serves. It's a shame this one has taken so many steps backward. This is more a case of Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me...... so will be deleted.

The renders are good and that is it sadly.
The dialogue is all over the place. After the MC refused to say who he was to Melissa and instead play a game of being the tenant the game was over.
The will reading was so poorly written and not even logical. When you are at a will reading it is the lawyers job to get you to understand and let you ask questions.
Is this the same person writing as in Freeloading family?

Freeloading family had funny written characters, unique and somewhat quirky but this is just a snooze fest.
Don´t know what happened since FF but this is atrocious.

Yes the renders are good, exceedingly bright at times so that's a problem.
MC monologues with himself forever like damn take a deep breath man!! I'd say about 50 %of every update has him blabbering himself.
Animations are borderline alright.
Zero sexual buildup with whatever content we got till now.
That town they live in is way too liberal for my taste.
Friend of his is typical horny fucker whenever mc has a chat with him, he'll sure deduce the conversation down to perverse.

+
Good renders
(And thats it.)
-
Why are near all woman bi-lesbians? (Not a problem with it but 90%?) Not all people has that kink.

Its a fucking KN! Choises are factitous.

And the worst part what realy grinds my gears...
Are the FORCED sex scenes. Even you hate the LI and give the worst answers... BOOM!

Freeloading was a good game. But this is garbage imho.

I love the amount of work that went into the writing, but god is it wordy. Like I dont need to know the deep personal thoughts of the MC on every character he meets. No one talks how this dude thinks. I think dude could use an editor. Other than that every older woman has to have giant tits and every younger woman is built like an instagram model. I'm not saying its bad, but with some editing and may some variation than 1) milf body and 2) college girl body and this could be better. Characters seem varied enough but its your general staple with no real surprises. I feel like a lot of people are gonna hold that skip button after a while.

I was so bored I ended up skipping most of the story. The hook of the mysteries was just something I found myself completely uninterested in. This is all because at the end of the day it's too wordy for the medium and forgot that it's a porn game. Also side note I support trans rights, but the delivery here is so bad that I think we just convinced some people to turn into haters unfortunately.

This was... disappointing.

The writing, is utterly boring.
The game constantly plaster you with meaningless and useless details, making it feel like things are not going anywhere fast.

Despite that, you end up fucking/getting sucked by a couple of females quickly, for virtually no reason at all, even saying "I love you" to a female, within a couple of days (????).

The girl's design is fine if you're into cow udders. I guess lactation could be coming at some point seeing the size of those things.

The game is also, quite poorly, trying to give the player a moral lesson on accepting trans, which is more than likely going to be off putting to quite a few people. Not only it's completely out of place, it is so poorly written, any woman giving that lecture to any sensible man, would be left alone, single and on her ass faster than you can say "run away!" Twice so far.

Regarding the sex scenes, they're not exciting in the slightest. The renders brings nothing new to the table, and are not going to be in any top tier, neither good or bad tiers, they're barely average.

It feels like the writer had some idea, but got lost somewhere, quite early in, and is trying to reconcile puzzle pieces that do not fit together.

Not going to recommend that game.

I get this game from the developers patreon because it's one of the few I find worth the money. The game is great, the art is absolutely believable and the story is realistic and believable. The characters are believable as are the events with each character being realistic and interesting.

First things first I apologize for any grammar mistakes.
The positive side of this game is the renders, they are good and most of the models are great, almost on the same bar with Freeloading Family, and the character's personalities are average,
But unfortunately, that's it!!.
the cons are too many, the game is all about the usual dead parents with inheritance and usual school teenagers' drama, many other DEVS did it on a better scale and better story, but there are many issues with this game.

Firstly the pace of the story, is too damn slow and boring, almost half the dialogues are unimportant, and feel like a filler to be precise, too many inner monologues, skipped half of the story and didn't miss any critical dialogues, secondly, the choices, they don't make any difference, the forced sex is a huge negative, we simply have the illusion of choices,

so don't want to pursue Erika or at least not kiss her, too bad you can't, you don't want to have a relationship with Melissa, lol too bad you are forced to kiss her, wanted to have a year off, lol also too bad couple dialogues with strangers and you simply changed your mind going to college, The MC simply lack a spine and is incapable of acting like a normal adult. and we don't have any meaningful choices to change that.

I know this may seem harsh, but the dev's previous game had me excited for his next project, only to be disappointed with it, perhaps if the dev read the critics both the good and the bad ones, may be able to change many points of this project.

I can't believe it's already been years since Freeloading Family. It was one of the good ones of it's time, and with Far-Off Friends, it's definitely been an upgrade. Characters looks better, the story seems more polished and there's not a thousand split paths you have to play and make you choose much between the girls(at least at the moment.)

It was always one of the irritating thing about FF. I liked most of the girls, but had to go through the same text multiple times just to enjoy scenes with some of them. I hope that's not the case again. Linear VNs are underrated. Don't get why people like non-linear games that takes 437 years to finish every path, you don't even get scenes of the girl you want certain updates. Some choices like 'yes or no' to certain girls and kinks are important of course.

But despite some obvious plotholes and simplistic premises that the characters wouldn't step on for reasons, the story is pretty solid, a bit too good to be true, yes. But it's fantasy, it's supposed to be fun and not like real life.

Writing's good overall, reminiscent of FF in the ability to evoke deep feels, albeit abit plain and unfitting at moments. Lots of content and dialogue even only after 4 updates.

Much potential here. Check it out.

To the Dev: looking forward to more updates! Keep up the great work!