ChronoBox

The ratio of content that I liked compared to the content that I didn't like was pretty bad. The "real deal" parts of the game are pretty intriguing and interesting to read, but they only last for a very brief period of time. The game has many "routes", or loops, that are mostly what you'd expect: the main character goes for one of the heroines, they do things, fall in love, then there's ero and usually in the end you get a small glimpse into the overarching plot of the game. The last part is sadly very, very brief, especially during the early parts. After this you're again back at the start of the loop, with some changes having occurred.

The routes, or loops, are not very long. This means that a lot of the development in the game is very sudden, especially with how much of that short time is used for ero. Because of this most of the cast feels rather hollow, and the only character you truly spend a lot of time with, the main character, sadly doesn't escape this fate either. He is for the most part rather bland, though despite not having a voice he does have a face! In the end my favorite characters ended up being Hase and Shie: Hase is just simply a blast to have on the screen and he basically is a machine gun of funny lines. Shie played a much smaller role in the game than I was expecting, which made me a bit sad, but this also gave her a distinctly different role from the main heroines, which was very likely one of the reasons I liked her so it was probably for the best (from my perspective, anyway).

ChronoBox also contains a lot of ero, and I'm not really too interested reading huge amounts of it. Especially since the majority of the ero in ChronoBox is just normal stuff. Actually straight up skipping the ero is also not possible since some of the scenes contain rather plot relevant information, not very much, but still enough that you're going to be missing some crucial details if you do. So I skimmed through 45 ero scenes here.

All of these combined created a very frustrating experience since I wanted to know what's going to happen next, but before the next part I was interested in I had to go through this route with characters I couldn't really get invested in just to grasp a small part of the mystery before the next round began. The later parts of the game had a lot more of the interesting stuff in them, but after all is said and done the overall experience was one of frustration.

Miscellaneous stuff:
This is a somewhat common complaint I have of a lot of eroge, but I'll still mention it every time: I find it kind of annoying when apparently almost every person in this game seems to be an eroge industry expert cracking eroge jokes. It's clearly fitting for Hase, but why everyone else? Also while I did find Hase's stuff pretty funny for the most part, I think some of the meta type commentary he gave just seemed to mock the game itself...
Also not necessarily completely a negative, and this might just me being dumb, but the game did have some stuff that I'm not really sure how it fits into the story, and it just felt like it was put in there to spice up the presentation and act as red herrings.
There is also one small thing in the game that probably most people just clicked through without minding it at all that just tilted me on a level I've never experienced before...

A few more spoilery comments(possibly):








I think everyone falling for the main character without basically any reason was kind of annoying, and just made me think "nice eroge logic". This is later explained, but I still was wondering this for most of the game and it was annoying. Though that said, the relationship between Kabane and Nayuta really needed to be more fleshed out. How it's presented in the game is that Kabane goes from "oh it's a dude" to being deeply in love with him in the span of like two minutes and it's weird. Especially how Nayuta hardly does anything at all in general.