Ecchi Sketch is a yuri Visual Novel in where we play as a semi antisocial girl named Yume. She lives with her father who luckily enough is all too accepting about her sexual preferences and spends most of her time looking up lewd stuff online or working at a job she hates. After a sudden stroke of inspiration, she takes to drawing her own manga and is promptly laid off the next day for unrelated reasons. Before even having time to pout, Yume accidentally bumps into a newly met friend Kyoko, which causes her to drop all her lewd artwork across the floor much to her dismay. Surprise surprise, Kyoko is extremely impressed and immediately offers our protagonist Yume a job at a girl x girl manga company.
It’s a low tier company with a bad reputation, but simply being given this opportunity is a giant blessing for her, and better yet, she gets to work in a room full of cute girls. Aside from Kyoko, her coworkers are a blonde with quite a bizarre personality called Megumi and a girl that looks around 8 years old named Rin. Most of your time will be spent in their quaint little office with your main choices being which of the three girls to spend time with and pursue romantically. These are not the type of romances built up over time, they are more akin to experimentation between young girls and realizing that they do indeed roll that way, all over the course of less than a month.
Each character has their own personality, problems, and separate routes to see. After the intro chapter, the majority of the scenes you will experience will be new if you pick a different girl from your last playthrough. It is certainly a game you will want to replay, though it does have a bit of the problem establishing the people you are not pursuing. You won’t see or learn much of anything about someone that isn’t your chosen love interest, making the whole group dynamic quite weak. Individually however, they are all fun to be around and interesting in their own rights. After enough time spent with them, things will get lewd and there is a free uncensor patch on the dev’s website to see the artwork as it was intended. This isn’t the type of title where the sex is all it has going for it, if you want a more tame experience you will still find it enjoyable.
The text you’ll be reading throughout is well written and I didn’t notice a single error. I do find the lack of a log to be a flaw. If you accidentally double-click or skip some dialogue, you are out of luck as there is no way to see what she just said. (My mistake, you can see prior dialogue via scroll wheel.) Another thing I don’t consider to be in the game’s favor is the partial voice acting. It can break your immersion with its sometimes odd placement and I hate to say it, but the acting is not all that good. This becomes even more noticeable when the title is trying to be sexy. You’d be better served by turning it off entirely and simply reading it, in my opinion. There is a good amount of artwork to see and the music accompanying it is serviceable. Some of the sex scenes do feature stuff outside of “regular” intercourse, including clamps, plugs and some other toys if such a thing would sway your opinion on purchasing this.
It isn’t a particularly long game after having seen all that it offers in four hours. There is little filler to be found here with the routes feeling like entirely new stories on their own. On the other hand, it does feel pretty rushed at moments and you’ll never have enough time to become attached to any one girl. It is all kind of a mixed bag, though I’d say the good outweighs the bad. Cute art, fun characters, and an interesting setting, there is a lot to like here. Ecchi Sketch won’t blow your mind, but it is a fun and laid back title for fans of the genre that will offer a few enjoyable hours of gameplay.
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