Title | ChronoClock |
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Developer | Purple Software |
Publisher | Denpasoft |
Release Date | February 28, 2017 |
Genre | Visual Novel |
Platform | PC |
Age Rating | 18+ |
Official Website |
Let me just start by saying that ChronoClock was my first real venture into playing visual novels. I had read a couple before this, but they had either been really small, or purely comedic. This was my first attempt at a more serious and drawn out story. So with that being said, how does this game hold up?
Chrono Clock H Scenes Resonance Of Fate Wiki Fantasy War Tactics Reddit Dead Space 3 Release Date Panzer Corps Gold iowafasr. It doesn't seem like a popular game but. Scenes with mild sexual content (e.g., panty shots, frontal nudity in a bathhouse) were censored in the non-adult version. The adult version restores panty shots and H-scenes, but not frontal nudity. H-scenes are included as omake. Buy the FAKKU version or 18+ patch, then apply the linked fan restoration patch. I have a few more omorashi H scenes that I plan to upload in the coming weeks featuring the likes of Chrono Clock,Grisaia No Kajitsu,and a newly translated title Maitetsu. So look forward to that I guess. My omorashi YouTube (RIP).
The prologue actually starts you out at the beginning, but then it makes you go back to the very start of everything. The gist of the story is that you have a magic pocket watch that has been passed down through your family, which explains how your family has so much wealth. You can rewind time, but only for five minutes every hour. During the prologue, you try to help a first year named Miu confess her feelings to your friend. It doesn’t go well at first and she falls off the roof (not for the last time either). But you soon take her out on trial dates so that she can build up some confidence. After she confesses her feelings, then the real story starts. It’s a real slice of life style of a visual novel, with a lot of comedic elements thrown in there for good measure. There’s also a hidden message in the plot that really hits home for me personally. The storytelling is solid, and nothing ever really feels off.
Everything in this game is stunningly vibrant and beautiful. You’ll come across different locations during the game, and none of them feel similar or like they could fit in anything else. They’re all unique, and that really helps the game stand out as something special. There’s so much detail in every image that it makes it feel real. Another thing I really liked was that some of the backgrounds weren’t static. Take the beach, for example. There’s a small animation of the waves crashing on the shore of the beach. It was very minimal, but it added to the aesthetic really well. This is the scene where most of the important character moments happen, after all. The characters in the game are also really well drawn and animated. They are really detailed and how they look really matches their personalities almost to a tee.
The music in ChronoClock is always on point and matches the exact tone that the scenario is trying to portray. There aren’t too many tracks to talk about, but the ones that are there are stunning and really nice to listen to. The voices also fit the characters, to the point that I can’t ever see them having any other voice. Everything just meshes together, and that paves the way for a great story.
The characters were my favorite part of this entire game. All of them, even the character tropes that I don’t normally care for, are really likable. My favorite girl was by far Makoto. She seems like she has a really soft exterior, but on the inside, she’s tough and really headstrong. All of the girls have some quirk about them that just makes them charming to listen to. There’s Miu who is really shy and klutzy (hence the roof incident), D.D. who’s a really ignorant foreigner, Misaki who is a bit of a tsundere, Michiru which is your very poetic sister, and Cro which is the spirit of your watch that presumably no one but you can see or hear. Even the characters that aren’t female are amazing. While your friend might be a little blunter than you are, you’re both complete smart-alecks who never fail to get a laugh out of me. They’re not always like that though, they both seem to legitimately care about other people. They just like poking fun and tormenting their friends whenever they can. The main protagonist is really relatable, and that works splendidly in the story’s favor.
Everything works really well in this game, minus a few chinks here and there. One of those being the character D.D. and her dialogue. In the Japanese version of the game, she messes up and sometimes uses English words instead of Japanese. That works fine, and when they translated it they changed the random English words to random Japanese words. While that sounds like a good idea on paper, it makes for some very weird Engrish that makes it very hard to tell what she’s trying to say. Sometimes it was easy because of context, but a lot of the time I actually had to look up what the word meant. It was a really tiring process that got old very quickly, and made her route one of the least enjoyable routes in the game. Aside from that and a few minimal translation errors, the game runs very well and you can edit just about everything to fit your liking. The routes were easy to figure out, and there wasn’t a lot of guess work involved in trying to figure out how to get a specific route.
Chrono Clock H Scenes Youtube
As with any 18+ visual novel, there are some H scenes. These are optional and come at the end of each route. This doesn’t mean they’re bad though, just not necessary for you to view. The scenes are very well written and match each character perfectly. They expand on what the characters have gone through, and what they have become because of it. The character resolutions are nice and fill you with pride knowing that you caused them to be like they are now.
All in all I really enjoyed ChronoClock, it had just enough charm and mystery to keep me interested until the very end. You get a lot of scenes once you’ve beaten the game on their respective route. If you can overlook a few minor details then I’d definitely recommend picking this up. It was a fantastic story that kept me invested for well over the 40 hours that it took for me to complete the main routes. There are 6 routes in total, with two of them being hidden. The hidden routes aren’t that hard to figure out, but they would’ve taken a lot longer to complete. The game is $40 for the full adult version on Nutaku and $30 for the all-ages version on Steam. This seems well worth it to me, though again this is my first venture into games like this. Definitely pick up this title if you want a really gripping story with amazing characters and stunning visuals.
Review Score | |
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Overall |
Review copy provided by nutaku.net
ChronoClock is an essentially plotless moege with solid production values, great dialogue, and fabulous characters. If you’d told me that before I started playing it, I probably would’ve skipped it entirely, and that would’ve been a mistake. Plot matters a lot to me: it’s probably the thing I get the most out of, when it comes to visual novels. But ChronoClock is a bizarre exception, a VN that proves that when the characters are truly stellar, you can take a thin excuse for a plot and still make a great game out of it.
Let me start by addressing what plot there is: the plot of each route is basically independent. In all routes, it boils down to Rei first choosing a heroine (via extremely straightforward “pick a girl”-style choices), at which point it’s clear to both of them that they like each other, but some issue gets in the way preventing them from coming together, which they work through during the route. Predictably, working through said issue brings the couple closer together and helps them confirm their feelings for each other, leading to a trite but rewarding happy ending, and then, if you’re playing the 18+ version, two post-game H scenes per heroine. H scenes aren’t part of the normal flow of the game and instead are explicitly (heh) picked from the main menu. They don’t add anything to plot or characterization but do feature quite a few fun moments for the characters, since they typically contain a decent amount of scene-setting dialogue.
The titular object is a magic pocket watch granting limited time traveling powers. Sounds like a good premise? Well, it is, but it’s actually a surprisingly small part of the plot, and not all that heavily used. Something of a MacGuffin, it becomes increasingly irrelevant as each route progresses, only figuring prominently in Makoto’s route, and even there it doesn’t really take center stage. All told, there’s really not much to the game plot-wise.
Fortunately, the characters themselves completely make up for that gap, largely because each one is both unique and likeable. Most VNs I play feature a heroine or two who come fresh-pressed from a cookie cutter: excitable little sisters, head-over-heels childhood friends, energetic sporty girls, reliable older girls, calm girls who don’t say much, tsunderes who proclaim their undying hatred of the protagonist right up until the ending credit roll… They’re all charming in their way (they’ve earned their exalted trope status), but they get less so every time I see them around, and it seems like even the best VNs have at least one or two heroines who feel like they’re just stamped right out of one of those molds. Not ChronoClock. Every last one of its heroines is unique, from the at-first-blush classic tsundere who almost immediately starts spending all her lines unabashedly proclaiming how crazy she is about the protagonist, to the demure blind little sister with a roaring libido who’s constantly trying to jump the protagonist’s bones. Every one is a breath of fresh air, and it makes them all feel much more real. Fleshing out those essential characteristics, and serving to make those characters feel unique, are a few things: delightful voice acting, standard but nonetheless great art, and snappy writing courtesy of a translation that, despite some rough edges, is generally excellent.
Yeah, I said it. You’d never guess given all the heat it takes, but ChronoClock’s translation is largely excellent, in my eyes. If you want to see it at its best, go read a few exchanges between the protagonist and the male sidekick character, Shuuji: the way these two guys trade insults is fantastic, and the magic of it is mostly coming from a very creative translation. The translation is not perfect (they never are, right?): the initial rushed release led to proofing errors, most of which were fixed within a couple weeks of release; narration tense is something of a mess throughout, flipping back and forth between past and present fairly frequently, though from what I can tell this doesn’t seem to bother anybody who’s played this game but me; and there’s some odd phrasing hanging out here and there, especially in certain of the H scenes which I suspect still haven’t gotten a proper edit in the release I’m playing (which I believe is the latest as of the time of this writing). There are also some questionable decisions (which I don’t think are “problems” per se, but are, well, questionable decisions): D.D.’s affectation is annoying as hell, though I can’t think of any better way to render it and haven’t seen any suggestion which I actually think would be better (for better or worse, I hear her frequent English interjections were considered incredibly annoying by Japanese readers, so maybe props to the translation for effectively capturing her character?); use of British English throughout, especially a lot of slang that was completely unrecognizable to me as an American, was also annoying, but obviously not something you can call a mistake. But those were mostly little snags, and were more than balanced out by lively dialogue that made the characters jump off the screen for me.
I mentioned the art before: it’s pretty typical moege art, and while I won’t claim to actually be able to judge quality, I do like it more than most of what I see. Outdoor backgrounds are vibrant and bright without being garish, enhancing the game’s summery vibe, while indoor backgrounds are generally more subdued and unremarkable. The sprite art is mind-numbingly cute, as are the CGs, full of happy smiles, rosy cheeks, and flashy hair ornaments (some girls wear two or three, because moe).
I don’t have a whole lot to say about the music; it was good but didn’t leave too big an impression. Most of the girls had themes which I only thought were okay, but I do remember really enjoying Cro’s. Also, one of the heavier tracks (perhaps the only heavy track?) which only came up infrequently, the game being generally pretty light, was quite nice. The soundtrack certainly went beyond merely getting the job done, and I’m sure once I get the soundtrack and give it a listen, it’ll be good for a pleasant nostalgia trip from time to time, but it was certainly no Grisaia or Flowers OST.
Chrono Clock H Scenes Videos
In the end, I’ve probably got more cons and more merely good items on the checklist than I usually would for a game that I ended up feeling so positive about, but it all comes down to the characters. If I could get away with it, I’d just fill this post with screenshots of Misaki saying ridiculous things, or Michiru shamelessly flirting with Rei, or Cro just being adorable, or… well, you get the idea. They’re just all so much fun. Sometimes, that’s enough, and this is one of those times: play ChronoClock.
Pick up ChronoClock on Denpasoft (18+) or Steam (All Ages)! | VNDB
- Fred the Barber's Review
Summary
Pros:
+ Fabulous characters brought to life by delightful dialogue.
+ Very cute art.
Cons:
- Practically no plot.
- Some weaker routes, notably Misaki's.