Date Everything!

Given the amount of time I've invested into this, it almost feels a bit weird to not recommend it. If I didn't like it, why did I play it for 30 hours and get a good ending? Well, I'll try to explain myself a bit here. But if you're just looking for the long and the short of it, I'll say this: Date Everything is a game that ends up being both too much and not enough at the same time. It leaves you feeling both respected and disrespected at the same time. And my god I can't stand these objects. I guess to start, dating games are not my go-to choice for entertainment but I have a history with them. Katawa Shoujo was like my 3rd game I played when I got my first laptop and it made me fall in love with what a story driven visual novel with branching paths based on decisions could be. I hold that in the highest standard, and given that this is clearly a dating game I'm going to make comparisons to that. Holding this next to Katawa Shoujo, Date Everything ends up feeling incredibly shallow and unrewarding in most cases. Date Everything really embraces the Quantity over Quality idea, which I suppose is obvious given the name and all. But rather than having the interactions being a speed-date style meet and move on deal, Date Everything wants you to feel like you're making a huge impact on all of these objects' lives and ending up forming these deep bonds with them by the end of each of their storylines. But to me, almost every story ended up feeling shallow and forced when it tried to reach that conclusion. Some characters can reach love endings in one or two interactions, and you expect me to care about these people like I love them? And even characters that have longer plots that take 5-6 interactions, it really just ends up feeling like you're playing out a bit and then turning around at the end to say "Actually, I'd love to have sex with you. Can we be lovers?" It feels weird, and not like what an actual built up relationship would feel like. I understand that there are plenty of joke characters, and it's fine to have a little fun now and then, but when you want me to act like I love my TV because we complained about modern streaming services for a few days it just feels... empty. There are also plenty of characters that are just an absolute pain to deal with. I would say that the overarching message of the game is that if you're nice to people and either show interest in their gimmick or help them overcome their trauma/hardships, they will be romantically interested in you. This only holds true for some people though, and you need to somehow be perceptive of the people that don't actually want that and want you to be an ass to them in order to get their love endings. How was I supposed to know that by being nice to the triangle that she would friendzone me and basically brush me off? At least one character makes it clear they want you to make jokes at their expense- and that worked fine. But there are plenty others that end up feeling extremely obtuse or closed off for basically no reason. Others will brick your relationship for failing what is essentially random chance (One guy is literally random, I would be mad if they hate ended me even if I succeeded everything else), or from not knowing very specific random facts in certain situations. While these hardships didn't stop me from getting a good ending, which I do at least appreciate on the most basic level, it did stop my first run from being a full completion for what feels a failed dice roll, and that sucks. It also feels very awkward if you're not at least a little bisexual, because to some degree almost every character is going to come on to you. It's been a while but I think you can put in your sexuality at the start, but that never mattered in any interaction I had with anyone. You're never forced to do anything, I would have stopped playing if any character forced me to do anything like that, but it almost feels like dancing around a bad ending if you start turning people down. By the end of the game I just gave up and always ended up taking the love endings even when I didn't want it just to avoid the chance that I would piss someone off. In an effort to be something open to everyone of every gender and sexuality it almost feels... I don't want to say oppressive, but it's overbearing at least. Honestly anything regarding sex felt really awkward and I kind of wish that was all just left out. I'd also like to make a note of the "main" story, and how I feel like it was paced very poorly. You get a ton of up-front main plot as you awaken objects, but that just totally falls off in the period between awakening them and [spoiler] realizing them [/spoiler] . And then you get another load of plot as you finish up that task into the end game. The fact that the final mechanic to end everyone's stories can't happen without a huge point investment (for most characters) AND you can't get those points without reaching relationship statuses with everyone AND you can't even DO the mechanic without finishing every other story that character might be involved in... it leaves a weird middle ground where you lose the main plot for a while and then are suddenly blasted with like 20 updates at once. Maybe I played the game wrong and focused too much on finding all the characters before I got endings so my stats were low for a long time. But the task the game gives you is literally to "awaken dateables", which means finding them. So it just felt weird. There are positives though, clearly given my time investment. A lot of the art is quite good, for both the characters and the unlockables related to them. I particularly liked the snapshots at the end of the game, a lot of them were drawn very well. There are some instances of good writing, and stories that can be fun or engaging. There are plenty of good jokes, and topical references that made me laugh. A lot of the voice acting is good, and you will certainly find at least one or two voices you recognize. And I have to respect that they made unique music tracks for all 100 characters that you meet- not all of them are good, but the effort is not unseen. So at the end of all this, would I say that other people should play this? Eh... probably not? Like a solid 5/10 I think. It's probably a decent game to give to someone as a gift if you know they like dating games/ visual novels, but it's not something I would tell my friends that they should check out for just how much it frustrated me. Despite having like 40 something boyfriends and girlfriends of various levels of interest and 50 friends to go along with that I barely feel like I made any connections. I'm not going to commission art of textbox-chan any time soon like I have with characters in Kawata Shoujo. But I suppose I didn't all the time I spent here. Only some of it.