x-change 1 spoilerless review

[charlbeef 196]

> - X Change spoilerless review -

 

Title: X Change

Vndb link: https://vndb.org/v43

Length: 2-10 hours of gameplay

 

Vndb Description:

 

[You are Takuya Aihara, an average junior college student with one character flaw: you're a bit of a weakling. No matter how hard you try, it seems that all the girls around you are constantly pushing you around: your teasing step-sister Natsumi, the genius president of your chemistry club Mami, but especially Asuka, your beautiful childhood friend. No matter how hard you try, you just can't assert yourself.

 

One fateful day, while cleaning some shelves in the chemistry room, you spill a mysterious chemical on yourself. The next thing you know, you've been transformed into a girl! And so begins this hilarious erotic adventure in which poor Takuya gets some very interesting lessons in anatomy and sex education!

 

As a woman, Takuya discovers a new world of experiences, some welcome and others not. Can Takuya find a way back to normal, while avoiding the many temptations that come with his new female body? Can he find a way to express his feelings for Asuka, without hurting another who loves him?

 

From: Peach Princess

 

 

I was searching for a vn random unique vn's and i stumbled upon this vn... i checked vndb a bit and found out its quite old but it was short, so i gave it a chance and managed to finish the game 100% within half a day.

 

my operating system:

i played this on a windows 7 64bit OS and this was made for windows 95 i think?(it still runs on windows 7 64bit)

 

graphics:

this vn was 1st released in for japan in 1997, considering the current level of cg creation apps at that time and the trend art style at that time, i can say that this was quite beautiful for that time period.

 

Music:

the music indeed feels like 90's and i played this 2017, and i must say, for me, it felt natural and fits the current scene well.

my only problem is the occasional music bgm stutter, which is probably related to my operating system(or so i think)

and another flaw for me is the bgm that actually ends and doesn't loop. it just loops for a little while then it ends, making the scene become silent. it feels like the music isn't actually looping, it feels like the music is just one long music. thankfully there's a music button in the interface so you can just manually press that and the song will play again every time the scene becomes silent. also, the music doesn't have a good exit when the scene ends, it just changes unnaturally.

 

voice acting:

this vn is a non-voiced vn

 

 

story:

well... the game is a nikuge and nikuge's are notorious for having an inferior story compared to non-nikuge vn's,

this game lets you play as the heroine and lets you choose who the protagonist is. and maybe because of that and the short duration of the game, the character development is almost non-existent, even nikuge's somehow manage to establish who a character is. the story despite being kind of tragic on some parts, it's was delivered as happy and hilarious, which is a unique experience, that certainly gives a 90's feel.

 

game system issues:

not sure if this is due to the game being old but, it has no backlog and skips unred text, so once you've passed a certain dialogue the only way to re read that is by loading a save point

 

overall i rated it as 4, since i rated it as a 2017 vn reader. but if i would rate this as a 90's vn reader, i would've gave it a 7 or an 8.

 

p.s.

i installed X change 2, the sequel of X Change and played for about 5mins, and thank got the interface imrpoved!

it now has, backlog and voiced! I haven't checked it this vn skips only unred text, i hope it does

Edited February 15, 2017 by charlbeef

[TakiMinase 148]

Eh, now that I have completed X-change 1 and 2 myself I decided to check your reviews for both VNs. It would be a shame for nobody to comment on this so let me be the first one ... Let's go from one point to the other:

 

I was searching for a vn random unique vn's and i stumbled upon this vn... i checked vndb a bit and found out its quite old but it was short, so i gave it a chance and managed to finish the game 100% within half a day.

 

That was some rather bad luck on your part, while the VN is certainly unique in the terms of its content (Genderbent Sex, Changing of Sex Fetish) it failed miserably to be any kind of good, even though it's very short and quite old, it's definitively not one of those VNs I would recommend to anybody, even if they were looking for a VN dealing with genderbent sex.

 

my operating system:

i played this on a windows 7 64bit OS and this was made for windows 95 i think?(it still runs on windows 7 64bit)

 

I played it on Win 7 64-bit as well, it certainly works on this OS but has some flaws like the fact that the crack which was made for it doesn't work (so you need to play with the disc mounted at all times instead) and the resolution is an ass (it's not even a 800x600 VN but a 640x480 - speak of the oldness!! xD) if you are on a higher resolution monitor but it was expected to be, considering the VN is very old (the first release on VNDB says the first year when it came out was 1997 so definitively a VN made in Win 95 ... maybe even made in DOS xD).

 

graphics:

this vn was 1st released in for japan in 1997, considering the current level of cg creation apps at that time and the trend art style at that time, i can say that this was quite beautiful for that time period.

 

I beg to differ, even for a 1997 VN, this art wasn't up to my taste ... Yes, I know it's meant to look like those old 90s animes, it gives those kind of vibes but I still found it very awful and couldn't stand it at all. To draw a parallel with some other VNs from that time, I'd pickup Heartwork (https://vndb.org/v2477), Divi-Dead (https://vndb.org/v119) and Castle Fantasia (https://vndb.org/v106) as some of the more prettier and more acceptible looking ones from that time. It's a shame that many of the much better looking VNs from that time never got translated like for example Atlach-Nacha (https://vndb.org/v163) and Diabolique (https://vndb.org/v2261) ... Now that's an art from the late 90s I'd enjoy more. I'd put Bible Black (https://vndb.org/v9) as an example of an old VN with amazingly good art but that VN was from 2000 so it doesn't fall in the 90s category of released VNs (though it's pretty close).

 

Music:

the music indeed feels like 90's and i played this 2017, and i must say, for me, it felt natural and fits the current scene well.

my only problem is the occasional music bgm stutter, which is probably related to my operating system(or so i think)

and another flaw for me is the bgm that actually ends and doesn't loop. it just loops for a little while then it ends, making the scene become silent. it feels like the music isn't actually looping, it feels like the music is just one long music. thankfully there's a music button in the interface so you can just manually press that and the song will play again every time the scene becomes silent. also, the music doesn't have a good exit when the scene ends, it just changes unnaturally.

 

The music in both X-Change 1 and 2 was below mediocre (I guess you could say it was a standard music for VNs in those days) and I had to disable it in both X-Change 1 and 2 (albeit for different reasons ... In X-Change 1, the music was just awful to my ears and in X-Change 2 it wasn't that kind of bad but I found out the game stutters to load the music files so when I used skipping read text feature, the game just hanged for 10 secons waiting to load a music file so I had to disable it to make my playthrough of X-Change 2 less painful) ... As for stuttering of BGM in X-Change 1, I can't remember if I encountered it and besides, I disabled it after like almost an hour into the game xD ... What you mentioned is actually typical of these very old VNs, I think they have the same kind of problem even when run on operating systems which they were made for (Win 95 or 98) ...

 

voice acting:

this vn is a non-voiced vn

 

While indeed the English version of this VN was unvoiced, there was a Japanese re-release of the game that had voice actors from X-Change 3 added in as well as much better looking art and graphics overall (https://vndb.org/r1756). There was also a re-release for X-Change 2 (https://vndb.org/r1757). Sadly, what we have are the translations of the older Japanese releases so we had to stick with the old art xD ... But trust me, even if I were to get a better looking version of X-change 1 and 2, I wouldn't re-read them (though my initial review votes would go slightly upper because of better graphics and voices).

 

story:

well... the game is a nikuge and nikuge's are notorious for having an inferior story compared to non-nikuge vn's,

this game lets you play as the heroine and lets you choose who the protagonist is. and maybe because of that and the short duration of the game, the character development is almost non-existent, even nikuge's somehow manage to establish who a character is. the story despite being kind of tragic on some parts, it's was delivered as happy and hilarious, which is a unique experience, that certainly gives a 90's feel.

 

Well, I wouldn't agree 100% on the notion that all nukiges are inferior in story (a.k.a "real plot") compared to non-nukige VNs (albeit it's true for majority of the VNs) because some nukiges actually manage to have a good plot (at least for my standards) ... In which category does X-Change fall? Well, for me, it wasn't even a nukige, I consider X-change to be a trash black comedy VN that isn't meant to be taken seriously at all. Definitively not a VN I could imagine myself fapping to so it's not a nukige in my eyes. Yet is not a story VN either, as I said, I see it as a trash black comedy VN similiar to the likes of The Water Closet (https://vndb.org/v1484). Albeit if I were to compare them all in terms of how fun they were as black comedy VNs, my comparison would be something like this: X-Change 1

 

As for your "this game let's you play as the heroine and let's you choose who the protagonist is ..." - Nope, the game is about an effeminate guy that after a freak chemical accident gets turned into a woman and somehow manages to get into all sorts of different funny rape shit and random plot developments (which would have been fun if they weren't so lazily put out and developed). Also, you don't choose the protagonist, you have only one protag in the game and that's Takuya (I think you wanted to say something else here but due to not knowing how to say it in English, you worded your thoughts incorrectly xD). And yes, I agree that character development was utterly thrown out of the window xD (X-Change 2 at least attempts at doing some character development and hence was a totally different experience compared to X-change 1 ... but it was still overall not a decent VN in my opinion due to weak bishoujo type of shit you have seen in some other VNs and the overall characterization there while better than in X-change 2 was still kind of weak due to some other reasons that I could elaborate on in your X-Change 2 review).

 

game system issues:

not sure if this is due to the game being old but, it has no backlog and skips unred text, so once you've passed a certain dialogue the only way to re read that is by loading a save point

 

Yup, indeed it has no backlog, no voice replay, no skip read text option, nothing, it has no real settings to adjust (X-Change 2 was a major improvement because it had implented everything mentioned). Being a very old VN, I think I can forgive it because all those old VNs were like that (I think they started implementing these options only after 2000s). What you forgot to mention is that due to all of these technical problems, the only way to actually "fully enjoy" (if I can use those words xD) this VN is to use a walkthrough and play all of its 7 endings that way, in order not to experiment with choices that sometimes look rather unintuitive (X-Change 2 also has some rather unintuitive choices but is overall done much better - but I still had to use a walkthrough for it due to some choices in it were also being rather unintuitive as in the prequel X-Change 1). Speaking of save points, it had a rather limited number of save slots (this problem is even bigger in X-Change 2 due to it having dozens of choices but only like 10 save slots -.-).

 

One other thing you forgot to mention: X-Change 1 has no ability to advance text by pressing "ENTER" or any other keyboard key for that matter. It works only on mouse buttons ... This was a big problem for me, I hate VNs that force me to be constantly clicking (and have no auto-reading so I could sit and relax). So it was a major pain in the ass because I had to read text while constantly clicking left mouse button just to proceed. The only saving grace with this was that the VN was short so my pain didn't last that long xD.

 

overall i rated it as 4, since i rated it as a 2017 vn reader. but if i would rate this as a 90's vn reader, i would've gave it a 7 or an 8.

 

No way I would have voted it as a 7 or 8 even if I were a 90s reader xD There were many better VNs at that time that would have deserved an 7 or 8. I rated it as a 2/10 VN (yes, it was an awful VN, the only other VN to earn 2/10 on my list was Tottemo Pheromone and I can safely say this VN was as bad as that one). The sequel was much better compared to it but it was still a VN on a scale between 4 and 5 (I gave it 4.5). That one was between weak and so-so.

 

p.s.

i installed X change 2, the sequel of X Change and played for about 5mins, and thank got the interface imrpoved!

it now has, backlog and voiced! I haven't checked it this vn skips only unred text, i hope it does

 

Yes, they implemented a new UI in the sequel but let me be honest here. I didn't like the new UI. Yes, the implemention of "ENTER" recognition for advancing text, voice replay, backlog, stopping skipping at unread text, etc. and all of that was very nice but I am definitively not a fan of UI where 1/3 of my screen is occupied by the UI quick actions zone (https://s.vndb.org/sf/17/21017.jpg) ... why the fuck is the left side occupied with all of that? They should have made smaller icons and just stuffed them all at the bottom, like the usual VN menu, with just textual representation, no need to make such huge buttons for all of it and then just have a big space occupying the screen. X-change didn't do that kind of stuff but in X-change 2 they somehow thought that such kind of UI was good (I dunno where did they get such an idea from).

 

To summarize my opinions: X-change 1 (2/10) and X-change 2 (4.5/10) were both disappointing VNs. I didn't read X-Change 3 and Yin-Yang X-Change Alternative but I will read them some other time. While certainly an interesting premise (Sex-change plot) it lacked in its execution hence why I didn't like either of them that much hence I am hoping they really improved in X-Change 3 and Yin-Yang. That's all for my opinion here ...

 

Thanks for writing this review beef so I can spew some of my trash opinion on it ^_^ ...

[stkrge 172]

for old vn everithing its good even graphic hcg!