Amy's Fantasies Review

Contributed by J. Sarunski aka Unicorn

Genre:
This game (as most C's-adventure-games) is a visual novel with a behaviour like an adventure. It tells a story and leaves the player options to choose, but only if the player makes the required choices, the story continues.

Story:
Emi and her brother Tomomi are orphans since last year, when their father died. However, they managed to continue to live on their own in the house and with the money, they inherited from their father and are right now about to reach finally the age of 18 years. But just some days before this event, a secretary of their father appears out of thin air and claims all their belongings for herself, generously offering them one month for leaving the house.

With no money left, they have to quit their expensive studies at a private school and have now to face the hard reality. Well, not exactly "they have to", because at this point, Tomomi mysteriously disappears and leaves Emi alone with a quest to reveal the mysteries of the past and to find out about his whereabouts. In her quest, Emi has to face most of the usual themes (and cliches) of erotic animations. The story is devided into three parts, that are available from the "Start Game"-option of the games main menu. At first, only the first Part is available. The other parts become unlocked, if the part before has been played through.

Gameplay:
Nothing special: The story is told and sometimes, an additional window with the available options pops up. After selecting one option, the game continues, until the next decision has to be made.

Sound:
All at the C's-games (compared with GLO*RI*A, Desire or Eve Burst Error) usual quality level: Nice sound acting, average MIDI-soundtrack and sometimes even environmental sounds.

Graphics:
Same quality as in all the other C's-games: not spectacular, but still nice. However, they are right now surpassed in the quality (read: resolution, colurs, detailed backgrounds and size of the images) by the newer released games (read: all PeaPri games and most G-Collections games (except DOR) as well as "Adam the double factor" from C's).

Animations:
Minimal animations (eyeblinking, changing facial expressions and other details of the graphics) in the game graphics and some animated intermissions (that feature the characters in SD-format) in the story exist.

User Interface:
The screenis split into two parts: The upper bigger part shows the current graphic, the lower part displays the text of the story. If the story reaches a point, that requires a decision from the player, a window pops up and displays the possible choices. Other functions, not directly related to the flow of the story (loading, saving, quit to main menu, switch between fullscreenmode and windowmode, etc.) are available from the Applications title-menu.

Extras:
After all three parts of the story have been played through, graphics galeries and a music room become available from the main menu. Hints to another extra (and maybe also an still unfound extra in Desire, that I myself could not yet find and confirm) are told at the end of the third part.

My personal opinion:
The same abivalence as in XChange strikes me again. In fact, the story could have been written by the same author: The main character is thrown into a mess of problems at the start of the story and while she overcomes them, she makes a lot of sexual experiences that can neither be evaded, nor in any means be changed (It's a novel with no alternative paths, after all).

What I liked about this game was the special kind of humor. Sometimes, the characters are aware they are characters in a game. (I only missed the usual "knocking from inside of the screen and direct talking to the player). I took it a bit as a parody on bishoujo games in general and a great deal of parody on hardcore-sex-animations in particular (you may have noticed: I told almost the same im my review about XChange).

Besides the fact, that there was no escape from all the brutish scenes, another thing in the story bothered me much: The casual way, the risks of incest were put aside. The fact, that there is a small, alomst vanishing possibility, that the child of an incestous couple would have no genetic defects becomes turned over into an almost reckles point of view: Ther eis a possibility that nothing might happen, so nothing will happen. Maybe, the story tried to make at this point a "dumb-blonde"-joke (yes, Emi is a blonde), but if that was the case, it's a very peculiar joke that exceeded my sense of humor.

But if I leave this aside, I enjoyed this game. Especially if you get the puns on the cliches /stereotypes, you are in for some fun. The story becomes unrealistic enough to not be taken serious and thus to be laughed at.

However, I would this came certainly not recommend to:
- people, who played and hated XChange
- newbies to the genre, that might get the impression, that the stories of bishoujo games are indeed just about sex and thus take the "H = Hentai" point of view.