Mlp love is magic!

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 1 Write a review

I am perhaps uniquely qualified to review this as I'm known to have written several games about talking horses that are, ahem... similar to a certain popular cartoon series. I therefore tend to make note of anything IF-related with ponies in it as it makes me feel less alone.

The thing about fandom though is that different kinds of fans want different things out of fanfiction, be it fixing continuity flaws, exploring the worldbuilding or experimenting with tone and subject matter in a way that simply wouldn't fly in the show... or they want a scenario where they can wander around Ponyville while mares throw themselves at them for no adequately explained reason and that's what this game caters to.

You are a newcomer to Ponyville, a free love commune that has evidently adopted smoochies as an alternative form of currency and your goal is to lock lips with as many of the residents as possible, which earns you achievements and points. As saucy as the premise is, it's a surprisingly tame game, with kisses and hearty GLOMP!s being the most explicit thing that happens.

The writing is uninspired and completely lacks spark. There's nothing that even approaches an evocative physical description, perhaps because the author expects the stock backgrounds and fanmade vectors to do the heavy lifting. The room descriptions we do get is very terse and functional, to the point of unintentional(?) humour:

"You are at the Market area.
This is where most ponies live."

"You are in the West District.
This is the west district where ponyville goods are manufactured."

"You are at Sweet apple acres.
This is one of ponyville's best sellers! They have 23,139 apple trees!"

It is room descriptions by way of wikipedia stubs and I could almost imagine it as one of the dream sequences in Birdland where I am tasked with demonstrating the functions of a human fanfiction writer.

There is absolutely no characterization involved whatsoever and nothing that demonstrates why you'd want to have romantic attention done to you by these characters unless you have already watched the show and have an attachment to them from there.

The romantic scenarios are presented as matter-of-factly as the room descriptions and again with very little that demonstrates why you should find them appealing. For example, the "tough girl who's playing hard to get but secretly just want luuv" is not a complex fantasy, but in order for that to work, there needs to be something to demonstrate that dynamic.

You can't simply, as happens with Rainbow Dash, have the character state she's not easy, and then decide to kiss you anyway because "you're cute." I'm not here to slut-shame the pony (this is a sentence I just typed), but kissing random strangers is about as easy as you can get.

I was kinda holding out hopes that the game would open up in unexpected ways, like Super Lesbian Horse RPG (SLHRPG, with a remake in process called Super Lesbian Animal RPG), which is a fanmade game that presents itself as being a silly shipping-game much like this one, but is actually a very charming Earthbound-parody with absurdist humor that wouldn't be out of place in Undertale. Unless I missed something as I was playing, this did not happen and it is by all accounts a straightforward fantasy that does little to make it appealing.

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