"American Isekai Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "American Isekai". American Isekai is n't even released on Steam yet, but that's okay, because it's just an utter garbage RPG Maker asset flip with your usual high school anime club dropout fanfiction cringe writing and a bunch of RPG Maker assets rearranged on badly laid out RPG Maker tileset maps... ugh. I don't think we need to go over why RPG Maker is garbage yet again.
But this isn't completely relevant because this is not American Isekai, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "American Isekai Prologue" too.
This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time.
It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace.
It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers.
Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.
Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer response here is dishonest, misleading, and an appalling insult to gamers everywhere. Let's break down this train wreck, but as we do so, remember this advertisement only garnered a peak user count of [b]only four people.[/b] That's textbook, abject failure from a failed developer. Take the rest of the developer response in the context of the incompetence of the developer.
The developer lies and misrepresents this garbage. The developer tries to pretend this is not an advertisement by [b]listing a whole bunch of things that advertisements and marketing are intended to accomplish.[/b] You can immediately see how the developer acts in bad faith and misrepresents the facts when they were caught doing the wrong thing, on purpose, to the detriment of gamers.
This is a little disturbing as the developer indicates they started stalking me and feverishly reading through my reviews... either just obsession with me on their part, or desperation to try find something in one of my other reviews that would somehow change the objectively terrible quality of this failed "game". Whatever their motivation, creeping on reviewers like this is [b]not okay[/b].
The "developer" argues that I review a lot of games, therefore this game review isn't valid or truthful. Huh. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, would the graphics and gameplay of this crap game suddenly improve? No. The developer seeks any possible angle to throw shade at me personally to discredit my review. You can see what they are trying to do. If this was the only review I have ever written, would that change any of the properties of this game or alter the facts contained in my review? Of course not. [b]My reviews for other games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed product[/b].
My review explains clearly why RPG Maker can never make games of acceptable quality, it's a childrens toy. If Larian had made Baldur's Gate 3 with it, it would have failed. It's garbage, and it produces garbage, and yet the developer is offended by this objective fact and attacks me for his incapability to use actual, real game development processes and uses a childrens toy construction kit instead, and now attacks me for his choice.
Yes, the developer breaches Valve guidelines to attack this reviewer in an attempt to make this all about me instead of his objective failure and incompetence as a developer.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
Stalking and creeping on reviewers as this developer has done is utterly unacceptable.
