Cannonball ~Neko Neko Machine Mou Race!~

writing/scenario: How to even describe it? There's just so much going on here. Well, it takes place in space and has catgirls, AI, witches, knights, prostitutes, jabba the hut and there's some political shit going on and the longer you play the more ambitious and downright surreal it gets. The setting comes alive absolutely brilliantly, the game world is enormous and the colorful cast is not only interesting and entertaining but it is amazing how many characters they designed for this game tbh. At the same time, the pacing is far more swift than longer VNs like this normally are, and things are introduced or skipped over very haphazardly, so you have to kind of fill in the gaps yourself. Usually VNs will kind of beat you over the head with the contents, so I like this approach, even if it's possible that it's a budget thing. The story is HUGE but the game length is like 30 or 40 hours (much of which can be considered padding, I'm talking about the races) when with typical VN pacing it could've easily exceeded 100. The core of the story is about racing, and at first it might appear to be kind of like Wacky Races in space, but this is only really one part of the game. I would say the real meat is of the game is the storytelling in which the "main" one gets really interesting but on its own wouldn't be a true classic, what makes the game a classic to me is all the mini stories as well because a lot of those are truly golden. There's a lot of characters and character relationships and I'm digging it.

visual: Imaginative. Great CGs, sprites and backgrounds. The volume is impressive as well. I think like half the CGs are H scenes, though. Cool looking racing sequences. Overall a really attractive VN.

sound: The music is pretty meh. The characters are voiced, including most of the less important characters. However, I think liar-soft had budget issues for Cannonball, because there are a lot of unvoiced events.

gameplay: So there's two main types of gameplay. The first is the racing gameplay, which is horrible. Considering you have to play through the game twice to get the true ending, and play and load even more to see all content, the races are going to get annoying in the long run. The race is like a turnbased strategy or kind of like an RPG. You choose what to do in the turns, you should mostly just accelerate your vehicle, but you can also talk to the other participants and some other things. From time to time, other participants will try to fight you, and if you win the fight you will go past them in the race. These fights are incredibly bad, you have a number of moves at your disposal, but the game outright lies to you about when or how each move is effective. In reality, the effectiveness of certain moves has nothing to do with the in game text, and is pretty much just completely random. Each turn in the fight with a certain opponent in a certain race has certain moves be more or less effective, and the only way to find it out is by reading the guide or just experimenting. I would say gameplay couldn't possibly be any worse than this, and playing blind is terrible since there is no strategy involved. Just use the guide for this. The other part of the gameplay is much better. During the adventure/novel portions, you can choose which events to partake in. Sometimes you have to do certain things (like place better than an opponent in the race) to unlock events. Sometimes you have to pick an event to unlock another event later, sometimes many times over the course of the game, so a guide is recommended. To see all events, you need to do a lot of playthroughs or save/loading. When you are done you can also unlock "Tail Play" which is a dumb yet funny ecchi game.

hentai: Very good and very varied. The H scenes don't overstay their welcome but they're oh so memorable. There is a lot of great H scenes here and I would say out of all my favorite VNs this one had the best H scenes. Also be wary that even outside of H scenes there's a lot of casual nudity. Both one of the catgirls and one of the AI heroines always have their chests exposed and one of the witches randomly exposes herself as well. I really like this part of the game actually because sex and sexuality in cannonball is so casual and it's just taken for granted that it's natural and not something the public has to be protected from.

overall: Definitely a personal favourite of mine and not a game I would expect most people to find as impressive as I did, but it is such an unique experience and it is really ambitious and I just find most things about it to be so damn likeable. If you pick it up, be wary of the beginning, the game might not seem that good at first and has a lot of awkward content before it really gets going. If you can't stand poor gameplay then the racing sequences will be frustrating and/or boring, but I have to say that some races are quite atmospheric.