Really? I thought Yin-Yang was fairly light-hearted and fun. One of the more enjoyable games in the series.
That may well be the case - in fact, the reason I tried it was because it was commonly cited here as the best title in CROWD’s X-Change series, so I figured it would be a decent enough introduction.
Anyway I wrote a post about it a little while back in another thread here, it basically summarises my impression of the game:
I hated X-Change Alternative. The first few moments of the game sort of served to mislead me into thinking it might have some substance. Boy was I wrong. The protagonist and most of the characters irritated the heck out of me and the ones that didn’t seemed to do a pretty drastic personality shift in the H scenes, which themselves were pretty terribly uninspired. Given how everyone in the game was so instantly accepting of the protagonist’s transformation, given how it caused so few of the logistical issues that you’d expect (and, fleshed out, could have been an interesting angle to explore) I don’t see why they bothered making this a gender-bender game in the first place when they could have just made the protagonist female. Although I guess it probably wouldn’t make it any better of a game. Why does the protagonist take the incredibly dubious medicine in the first place (other than the fact that it is obviously necessary to continue the plot.) Why do none of the characters have motivations that make any sense at all and seem to occasionally forget why they were written into the game in the first place? I still don’t see any reason why this was made a gender-bender title to begin with- the flashback stuff at the start hinted at something but from my experience the game forgot about it entirely after the first two hours. If I had to group everything into one problem, I’d say it’s this: lazy writing. When effort is not put into the crafting of an eroge, I don’t feel inclined to put in the effort to read it. The H scenes themselves suffer from a similar problem where the writer basically decided ‘yeah, okay, not writing this, so I’ll make this scene 10 lines long and just say blah blah blah continued for the next three hours’- great, okay. I probably wouldn’t want to read a three hour long H scene either but what the hell, why even bother including H scenes if you don’t even care to really write them. It sort of reminds me of the whole ‘and then this and that happened’ writing cliche. It’s incredibly lazy writing. Not that it’s just the H scenes that do this in XCA- plenty of other scenes are just handwaved away in the same fashion- but the H scenes are the most obvious and most prevalent.
Other issues besides the writing seem fairly minor, but the game also pretty drastically skipped on production values whenever it could. The CGs are fairly AliceSoft-y in that while there’s a decent number of them, there’s no sub-CGs/differential CGs for most of the base CGs; therefore, for most of the time the CG you’re looking at doesn’t match the text you’re reading at all. The engine the game runs on is also incredibly clunky and feels like it was made in 1998. Non-antialiased text, slow fades, unresponsive menus and a tendency to crash a lot.
I guess my overall position is that I don’t know what XCA was supposed to be. If it was supposed to be a drama dealing with the issues inherently associated with suddenly turning into a girl, it failed at that by not milking it of any of its dramatic potential. If it was supposed to be a nukige, it failed at that because the H-scenes were shit.
When XCA2 goes on sale at a heavily discounted price (e.g. 999? again) I might pick it up because it does have a considerably higher EGS score (and much higher relative scenario POVs). Probably not going to try any of the original games though.
It’s a comedy. If you try to take anything in it seriously, you’re missing the point.
Honestly, I don’t care for XCA2. Get three methods for quality.