Of Girlfriends of Steel

Aloha!

"Girlfriend of Steel" is the title of a rather old visual novel/dating sim which uses the cast of Neon Genesis Evangelion to tell it's story.
I played through it.
And it was...weird.
The writing is good, the characters and their actions seem fitting to the personalities of the Evangelion-Anime. The "game" starts by introducing a new character - a girl, which takes a liking to Shinji, and is hilariously forward about it(in a good way).

The game itself (=the engine) does have it's problems. I already mentioned that it is fairly old; 3 resolution options that only scale the box around the picture frame in which the story happens and no scaling of the pictures that seem to be at 640x480. Saving can only be done whenever you can take actions of your own - most of the game is self-running, can't be paused and doesn't need any input.
Really, it's more like an anime with still frames and the occasional optional input for more exposure of the world. Only the last decision in the game makes an actual difference, choosing one of three possible endings - there is one other choice in the game, but it only affects whether or not you get to see a kissing scene. This does not affect the progress of the romance in any way.
The biggest issue is, without a doubt, the already mentioned self-running. You can't play the game at your own pace, it advances through the dialogue at a predetermined pace without any pausing, with saving only possible when the game decides that you should be able to do some arbitrary actions that don't affect the story.
For enduring this, you get a fully voice-acted pseudo-dating sim that's true to the source material and feels like it could be part of the anime.

I enjoyed playing it because of the characters; the actions and reactions felt fitting, especially Asuka's.

So long everypony, until next time!