Jake’s Love Story is a slice of life Visual Novel that starts off with our character’s first day of high school. Right from the get-go, we have some options on how to start our journey into your teenage years by either turning off your alarm to go back to sleep or get up immediately. With either path, you choose, you’ll encounter an odd girl who doesn’t know her way to the school and once again have a few choices at your disposal. It is quite an option-heavy game that will require your input frequently to slightly alter how people act towards you or open up new scenes. Your choices will be remembered and characters will throw in a quick line to remind you of an action before returning to their set dialogue.
Regardless if you act like a jerk or a good friend, there are no branching paths, though you will be locked out of some scenes. Besides yourself, you will encounter three other people that you will spend your three high school years with. First off you have Emma, the hyperactive anime loving girl. Then there is the antisocial Alice, and finally, you have Mike, who doesn’t really have a defining trait. None of them grow as a person from their initial impressions, though that in itself isn’t necessarily bad if they manage to get you attached to them. Unfortunately, they do not succeed on that front. This is mainly due to how insanely fast time progresses. You don’t really do much of anything before a year suddenly passes by, and even in their last days together they felt more like the type of acquaintances you’d spend a few seconds to try and remember their names than a deep friendship.
With the fact that this title is called Jake’s Love Story it is rather bizarre there is no romance. Your days are spent doing random tasks such as a group project or helping someone with their homework, but there is no actual bonding or development into a more personal relationship. One day you simply go up to one of the two girls and ask them to the prom, which felt like they were going more as friends than lovers. The entire experience is far too unfocused with the content featured in the span of three years being nowhere near enough to achieve what they were going for. This is a case in where the devs were simply too ambitious in scope and a shorter story with more meaningful options would have been the better course to take.
The English translations were a tad wonky from time to time, though nothing that will leave you at a loss as to what they meant to say. Music, on the other hand, is pretty well done and compliments the carefree tone of the game perfectly. It will last you around 30 minutes to get through it the first time around and has a handy feature that allows you to automatically skip parts you’ve read on future playthroughs. As mostly negative I’ve sadly been through most of this review, it is also important to take into consideration this is a low priced three dollar game. I still wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it is far from what I’d call an outright bad game.
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