Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll

If you are looking for a visual novel that is pushing its visual presentation to the next level, you are looking for Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll. Prepare yourself for one of the best indie games I have had the pleasure of playing in a very long time. There is a lot to love about this title from its writing to its style, and you will find the hours of gameplay flying by while it engages you with a brilliant story and loveable characters. This is a must play and if you want to know why, stay tuned as we dive on into it. Let’s go!

Gameplay

So, this is a visual novel. That means the gameplay mostly consists of reading and selecting whatever response you wish to give when the prompt comes up. Its simple but effective, and most of the challenge comes with deciding who or what you wish to pursue and then making the correct choices as you go along. This is definitely a game where you can fail, provided you have set a goal for yourself, but it’s not one that often presents you with a game over screen. For casual gamers, this is ideal. It functions like Doki Doki Literature Club or Steins;Gate but with none of the weirdness.

Visuals

The visual presentation of these games is half of its unique selling point. Many of these games have a series of pictures for each character, and the pictures change to better depict what the character feels or how they are acting and these are called sprites. I.e., they will switch to a sad face when you are mean or a happy one when you are nice. Usually these pictures just switch out, and it looks a little clumsy but this game has completely switched this up and they now provide characters with animated sprites.

Long gone are the days of characters flitting between a selection of pictures, they now react to what conversation options you pick by fluidly moving as though they were a 3D character. It is such an inspired change that I’m surprised more novels don’t do it. Much of the background is also animated which really adds to the overall feel and production value. A considerable amount of attention has been paid to the art style here and it really shows in each frame.

Story

You take control of Nikolai, a Soviet immigrant in Japan who is going to have to pick between the multitude of babes that will suddenly be thrust into his life. There are other things that you will be doing as Nikolai like interacting with the strong musical plotlines that exist throughout the story as well. But try as you like, everything eventually comes back around to the girls.

The characters are fantastically written with some real depth in this title, something that I found to be a refreshing change from the one note characters that you get in some of the other games in the genre. Instead of oversaturating the game with 50 different girls who all have a single personality trait each, they have kept them to the single digits and allowed them to be more rounded. It really works.

Pros

• Excellent visuals
• Amazing characters
• Brilliant writing
• Great story

Cons

• I wish the game was longer