Making*Lovers

if someone recommended you this because you enjoyed katawa shoujo, this probably actually won't be for you. spends so much time meandering and then doesn't even really get to a point with real substance.

Heartwarming and with good comedy. A good starting point if you're new to VNs or you just enjoy a good Rom-Com

Making Lovers is kinda tough for me to recommend. I found it pretty banal and boring for about half the game. A lot of people are praising Karen for having the best story but I think that's very far from the case. I'm not really into "gap moe" or tsundere characters at all, I think it's a really bad trope for an adult frankly. Mashiro's romance is conceptually cute but there's a lot of plot points that just... don't go anywhere. There's some ominous foreshadowing but it's never actually followed through on. The writing is just very fluffy on her and Karen's routes in particular. It sucks because they both are interesting characters. It also portrays LGBT issues in a really weird light, but 99% I can write off as "2010s Japan". However, Saki and Reina's routes are pretty interesting love stories, and Ako... despite the faux incest angle is okay too. I liked their love stories more than I thought I would. This kinda blows though because that means only one fully realized adult character in this VN centered around adult relationships actually has competent writing. Karen and Mashiro hardly have any adult conversations, and Ako and Reina both focus on their dreams for their personal future rather than a family or anything besides fleeting moments here and there. To me the stand out route is probably Reina because it was actually really funny at points and has a cute ending. The common route is non existent, and the story basically focuses on 5 different types of love encounters: Childhood friends, supporting someone, a fateful encounter, faking it, and dating to learn love. When looking at the work from this angle, I think this is why I've set this one to recommended. I normally wouldn't suggest this to an average friend due to how fluffy and boring most of the game is, but I think looking objectively at the loves formed in these different ways is quite interesting. You can see the trappings of something good here. The protagonist is the platonic ideal of what an eroge fan should be. He's not excessively perverted (but will randomly refer to eroge at bizarre points), he's pretty charismatic and quite particular about love. I don't totally like him but he's way more tolerable than other Smee work's protagonists. Overall, a very, very weak recommendation from me, and only from an analytical angle really. The music is average, the TL is okay (I think a lot of the puns in Mashiro and Karen's route suffer from this), and the writing is basic to just okay in the vast majority of the game.