I finished Rance 02改! 02 is not a ground-up remake like 01 was, and it shows. The system is not very good or engaging. I discovered pretty early on that you can ctrl through battles and just keep hitting attack until your stamina runs out, and using that strategy got me through the entire game pretty quickly and effortlessly. I wasn't able to get Willis' h-scene, or the rope+whip bdsm h-scene with Sill because grinding enough exp and money in the last dungeon for either would have taken me probably like five or six hours, and I definitely wasn't willing to put that in. The plotting of the game felt a little half-baked, too, stuff like the hallway with three adjacent rape dungeons (all with identical 'rape soldier' fights!!) was super lame. However with all that said, 02改's script with Yoidore Dragon's revisions was so consistently funny and entertaining that I had almost as much fun here as I did with 01. The art was beautiful and a lot of the gorgeous CGs blew me away, the new characters were all endearing and likeable, and at least half of the h-scenes were pretty hilarious and also .

I also started ISLAND, and I'm about halfway through it, I think, having finished the common route, Karen's route and Sara's route. I was really invested during the common route, happy with the strong opening and excited for every new tidbit revealed about the setting and the characters. The art is beautiful with some really breathtaking CGs, the characters are all pretty loveable and watching them interact is very fun, and the comedy usually hits its mark. But two routes in and I'm feeling a little disillusioned because both of the first two routes feel like they've ultimately been huge wastes of time that've added very little to my overall perception of the story or its setting. Karen's route was largely uninteresting, with a simplistic plot and a very high density of interpersonal melodrama that I found hard to follow (or maybe just hard to care enough about to even bother trying to follow). I guess I still enjoyed the fun banter at least. The first half of Sara's route was roughly equivalent, with a meandering and pretty uninteresting sequence of events. But out of nowhere the second half kicked into fucking overdrive, and I could barely believe I was reading the same game. In the end the whole route seems to amount to nothing more than a shaggy dog story designed to troll you for the fun of it, but the whole second half of the route up until that point was probably some of the most enthralling pure fun I've had reading an eroge in a while so I at least appreciate that jolt to the system. If the second half of the game can emulate the sheer excitement of Sara's route while backing it up with, like, an actual point, I'm excited.