Review: BUSTAFELLOWS is a Decent Visual Novel Plagued by Terrible UI
BUSTAFELLOWS is a visual novel from Nippon Cultural Broadcasting Extend Inc. that was recently brought to the west thanks to PQube. It’s an otome visual novel game that means it plays heavily into romantic subplots and I was intrigued by the trailer to see what unfolded. PQube was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the game on Steam although you can also play it on Nintendo Switch.
As an otome title, a genre known for its female leads and romantic subplots, step into the shoes of a strong, smart, and gifted journalist embroiled in a life and death adventure. With the ability to jump back in time, and into the bodies of others, collect clues, press witnesses and protect your friends in this thrilling noir visual novel!
I’ve only played the first chapter of BUSTAFELLOWS and while the story is interesting and fun to watch unfold, the game has frustrated me to a point where I have to put it down for a while. The basic mechanics for the game are a lot simpler than I expected and the usability on PC is a nightmare. These are the main points that I’ll be discussing after some brief points in favor of the game.
My first positive for the game is that the artwork is really good and the voice acting sounds good. It’s all in Japanese (I wish they had localized it) but each character is unique and feels very much themselves. I also want to say that the bit of the story that I have played through was interesting. You play an aspiring journalist that can apparently do a kind of time travel and you end up working with a bunch of hot guys who you can eventually try romancing. The characters appear to be pretty one-dimensional when you first meet them, but as you play, you can start to see there are more layers to them which is always nice.
Now, let’s discuss the simplicity of this game. I’m pretty new to visual novels, and especially otome, but I was hoping for there to be a bit more of a gaming element to this visual novel. Every now and then you can make a decision, but the decisions I’ve made so far seem to have 0 impact on the story which is a little disappointing. Also, the opportunities were a lot further apart than I would like. Other visual novel games I’ve played have more of a game element like puzzles or even match 3 moments so this was a much simpler approach that some will enjoy, but wasn’t for me.
Finally, the dealbreaker for me: the game’s interface. For starters, there’s no way to close the game from the game. I have to use Ctrl+Tab to get out of the program and then right-click it and close the game that way. This is very confusing. Also, the text in the menus looks blurred on my screen with no way to adjust the resolution and make it clearer. This is minor, but still annoying. Probably the biggest problem though is that the button to pull up the menu is extremely counterintuitive and cannot be changed. I would expect the Esc key to pull up the menu, but instead it just minimizes the text box. In order to pull up the menu, you have to press Home. I couldn’t figure this out until well after the game released and someone shared it on a forum. I did find that F2 is a quick save button, but I couldn’t find any way to load the quick save file. This user experience really left a sour taste in my mouth.
If it had been a manga, I probably would’ve enjoyed BUSTAFELLOWS more. The visual novel has an abysmal user experience for doing simple things like saving the game that really is hard to overlook. The story and art are intriguing and fun. While I would’ve liked more interactivity, I also know that I’m rather new to this genre of game. The game would have scored much higher if the user experience wasn’t so bad.
