Lovely Overseer

Lovely Overseer takes place at a school dedicated to the rehabilitation of mana-addicted people, to make sure that they can learn to control their magic and go back into society as safe and sane citizens, without the propensity to blowing stuff up at random. You play as Aster, aka Generic McGenericson, an instructor at the academy, and this season you are tasked with training three particular students in order to reign in their addictions... and maybe stick it in them, if you feel so inclined. Oh, and everyone is an antropomorphic cat or dog. Because this is a furry-game, that is literally what you're here for, and don't you try and pretend otherwise.

The artwork is really good... except for the few parts when something is off, which seems to mainly be the sex scenes, which feels odd. The sex scenes are still sexy enough. Nothing too spectacular, but perhaps worth a quick wank if you're into furries. However, if all you want is sexy furry characters getting it on there are other places to get that, even for free (it's the internet, search for long enough and you'll eventually find SOMETHING that'll get your rocks off). If you're playing a porn game, you want the game aspect to somehow enhance the delivery of your porn, one way or another. Sadly, the biggest issue with this entire game IS the gameplay. Which I realize sounds odd when talking about what is essentially a visual novel. However, I shall explain myself thusly:

Lovely Overseer feels like the developers didn't know if they wanted to create a visual novel or a dating sim, and so they combined the two into an unsatisfactory package.

The dating sim elements are honestly too shallow to really be more than an annoyance. There's Energy and Fatigue, both stats that are there simply to mess with your plans for the day and turn your main character into some kind of alcoholic compulsive gambler with narcolepsy. Aside from that there's gold, which works well enough, and four stats for your character's skills; Charm, Romantic, Courage, and Loyalty. If this sounds like it might provide some kind of strategy on how you build you character to face the challenges ahead and impress each girl, I sadly have to disappoint you. Each girl simply favors one particular stat, so if you know who you're going for you should just keep increasing that one stat and let the others gather dust. Then you use your gold to buy as many copies of the best gift you can for your chosen paramour (who are equally thrilled at receiving a shiny rock the first time as they are the fifth time), go take some walks with her, and win. There's no other strategy... except that turns out to be not quite true. There is one more thing you need to do, it's just that the game doesn't bother telling you about it.

During my first playthrough, I set my sights on one particular girl to try to woo. I raised the stat associated with her, took her out for walkies, gave her nice gifts... and then, through seemingly no input on my part, the main character went out with another girl and told her "I love you". Now, when the main character in any kind of romance game says the words "I love you", I feel it should be expected that I go "aww, that's so sweet", or at least "good for you". I should NOT react with "you do? News to me", which is what happened in this game. But then, if I did everything I could to get a particular girl and still got shunted into this path, what exactly did I do wrong? Well, after looking around a bit it turns out that certain romance paths are closed off to you if you do not choose the appropriate responses during the early interactions with the girls. As in, during the first ever choice in the entire game, if you do not pick the right option you lock yourself out of an entire route. My choices were simply so poor, the girl the main character ended up pursuing turned out to be the one girl I hadn't locked myself out of. All my other choices did not matter. At all.

But that begs the question; if you can lock yourself out of a particular route simply by choosing the wrong answer once, why even have stats as something you can increase? Especially considering you don't have full control over what actions to take each day, any available actions are always chosen for you on a day-to-day basis. And if you DO make the wrong choices and keep going after the "wrong" girl, the stats literally do not matter, you'll just get a bad ending. See, this is where the two genres of play sadly clash with each other. The game feels like it needed the dialogue choices for getting you towards a particular girl OR the stats, not both at the same time. And like I said earlier, you only need one singular stat to determine how well you'll succeed in wooing your girl, all the others may as well not be there at all. With this in mind, why was this not just made into a visual novel? Heck, it doesn't seem like you're able to romance more than one girl at a time, so why not just lock us into a short story with that girl instead of faffing about with all this stat nonsense?

But okay, the gameplay doesn't need to be great, even in a porn game. If the story is good, with interesting characters and stuff, that should save it, right? First off, let’s ignore the potential power imbalance that comes with an instructor entering into a relationship with one of their students (the game certainly does, almost gleefully so). It’s porn, we can ignore the finer details if the result is satisfying enough, can’t we?

Unfortunately the characters aren't exactly great or deep. They each follow one singular template for their personality, and never dares to stray from it. We've got The Sweet One, The Peppy One, The Proud One (who, to be fair, has a bit of uniqueness in that she basically goes "I'm sexy and I know it" without being completely horny all the time), The Domineering One, and finally The Emotionless One. Which is all well and good, but doesn't exactly give it any extra points in my book. Basically, they have about one character trait each, and even that's not always brought across all that well. For example, the headmistress of the campus/school/whatever is supposed to be this terrifying archmage whose wrath you would never wish to incur, but she never comes across as very threatening despite the game's insistence, because the game never shows us what would happen if we defy her (heck, even if you do it's left very vague). At least the writing otherwise is fine, nicely evocative and not too stilted, if perhaps a bit corny at times.

As for the story, well... you remember that brief summary I gave at the start of this review? Yeah, that's about all you're getting. After a somewhat intriguing introduction to the world and characters, the game sort of forgets about that and instead it focuses all of its attention on your attempts to bang your students. I'm not saying that the game neccessarily needed a more complex story or anything, but aside from the occasional reference to mana and magic this story could have taken place in a modern university, or rehab clinic, or maybe a prison, which feels weird after that legitimately interesting starting hook. The endings are also really lame, most of them are brought across by one or two text boxes that say "and then stuff happened, the end." No mention of the future of the characters, no real resolution, no nothing.

And there are other small things that drag the experience down further. Like the lack of a scene viewer mode, or the way that people's clothes keeps disappearing (for no reason, I mean. If it happens for a reason I do not mind), or how the label for who's talking is flat-out wrong in certain spots, all of which sadly distracts me from the few parts that are actually good.

If I had to summarize my thoughts and feelings on this game with one word, it would be "unfinished". There are things to like here, but like a house with no roof it's clear that something is missing. This feels like one of those beta-version games created by someone on Patreon that you download off of Mediafire or Mega, with a little message as you boot it up that says "thank you for playing our game, if you like it could we perhaps convince you to sponsor our further development (please we haven't eaten in a week)?". And if Lovely Overseer WAS one of those games, I would be far kinder to it, and might even urge you to give it a look. But unfortunately, it isn't. This is a game I paid 13.50 USD upfront to play, and I'm sad to say I'm left disappointed. I do hope the developers go on to create more games, because the good stuff shows that there's at least some potential there, but Lovely Overseer sadly doesn't use that potential to its fullest.