Date: 20.01.2024
The highly anticipated Love and Deepspace has finally launched and after playing for 10 hours and finishing chapter 3, I'm left with disappointment. Love and Deepspace is a 3D otome hack and slash with dating and visual novel elements set in a scifi world. Gorgeous high production cutscenes, sexy 3D boys that look straight out of Final Fantasy, and a unique spin on the otome genre with action gameplay, Love and Deepspace strikingly sets itself apart from it's contemporaries. Unfortunately beneath the surface is a very flawed experience filled with AI art, shallow character writing, hard to follow narrative, and repetitive auto combat.
When I first started playing I noticed some weird decions. Servers are region locked so you cannot play with friends from elsewhere without a VPN. The character creator advertised on the app stores is also misleading, with many of the options such as hair colour and styles missing from the story and combat modes, and only allowed in the Photo Booth feature. There is voice customization but it is impossible to preview the available voice languages while customizing. Once you've chosen your voice, you have to spend your one time use ticket to change your character again if you're unhappy with how the voice sounds with a different language.
To address the elephant in the room, the game uses AI art for backgrounds. You can view some in full quality through this link: CLICK HERE. Some obvious tells from my examples are gibberish letters, a painting that is falling off the wall, and many visual artifacts. These backgrounds are used for all the story segments and it is disappointing that the developers decided to use AI. The job market is getting smaller and smaller for artists, especially in China, with the rise of AI. It's an excuse to not pay artists when this company clearly could have. Even if the morality around the use of AI doesn't bother you, the backgrounds are confusing and ugly and having to stare at them most of the story is immersion breaking.
Now to talk about the boys, the main selling point of this game. As of chapter 3 none of them have been properly developed in the story yet the game throws touching minigames where you get to rub their crotches to make the guys horny with special dialogue for it, or rub their butt with jiggle effects or to progress the story. There are also "dates" where you can see ministories of the guys flirting with you, do games like claw machines together, text, etc. All the dialogue is just the guys speaking lip service to you without really learning anything about their character and seeing their development. It's also just plain creepy to be touching inappropriate parts of strangers I just met. This game is designed for quick gratification of having hot boyfriends that you can touch all you want and will say cheesy lines to sway your heart, it's the fast food of otome. I do think theres an audience for this type of content but those looking for romantic development and fleshed out characters will be dissapointed.
Story-wise, this game is really hard to follow as well. The premise is of a young girl being part of a group to fight against evil monsters and meeting handsome men along the way. The game has a habit of referencing the history of the world and its characters without properly introducing them. This is especially noticeable with Zayne because they know each other prior and the player is left in the dark in a lot of the conversations. There is also a lot of world building which feels poorly executed because the game throws a ton of scifi terms at you and expects you to know what they all mean. Luckily, there is a notebook to read up on all the world building but it's asking a lot of the player to have to do that when they could just be properly introduced in the narrative. You are also limited to only doing one chapter a day because there's hard level caps on progression which can only be achieved by doing dailies. While capping progression is pretty standard in mobile games, it felt especially jarring to me in this one.
Combat-wise, this is your standard mobile hack and slash. You are put into an arena and tasked with fighting enemies. Your gear determines if you win, not your skill. Combat is mindless, you spam attack while your partner aggros the boss. Auto combat is included with no real penalty for using it. Since the game wants you to grind and do gacha, fights have a time limit and if you don't have strong gear you won't be able to finish within time no matter how skillfully you play. It's no different from the "argument" combat in Tears of Themis, it's just a game of having the best gear. If you're looking for an action game look elsewhere since that's not the point of this game.