Kickstarter gives birth to many passion projects, which has led to an upswing of more niche games that normally would have a hard time getting funds to come to fruition. MajorMinor is one such passion project. It is a furry visual novel that tells an epic story of political conflict, tragic background plots, an inter-dimensional conflict, and a lot more. Read on as Cubed3 gives its opinion on this engrossing story.
“Less is more” is advice the creator of MajorMinor did not take to heart. The game has everything setting-wise when it comes to what people desire in a visual novel: magic, sci-fi elements, medieval themes, political intrigues, a thrilling plot filled with nearly as many twists as an average mystery novel. It is all packed into this one visual novel. When it comes to the setting, a huge bag of mixed goodies awaits.
It could easily have been overwhelming for the player to have all of these different elements from a huge range of fantasy settings mixed together. Thankfully, this is solved elegantly by slowly building up a world where these kinds of mishmashes are allowed, with easy tricks in both the story pacing and the visual design of the characters.
From a visual aspect, the characters truly fit into the world – or rather, perhaps the world fits them. It is truly difficult to tell, but thanks to their wardrobes that mixes familiar modern clothing articles with some minor changes that make them feel exotic, it becomes very easy to buy into the eccentric fantasy world that mixes the modern, sci-fi, and medieval fluff together that MajorMinor presents.
MajorMinor certainly got all the major parts done correctly with the world building and overarching story, but it does get some minor parts horribly wrong. While the world and character design from a visual standpoint is outstanding, there are some issues with the personalities of many characters, or rather, the lack thereof.
Most of the cast suffers heavily from being Mary Sues. It is an easy pitfall to fall into from time to time, but in MajorMinor it seems to at times be an active choice to make most of the cast like this. The reason behind this is likely because most of the characters are based on someone’s fursona, an idealized picture of themselves as a spirit animal of sorts.
While it is very understandable that the writer chose to handle other people’s fursonas carefully and respectfully when putting them into their own work, it ruins the immersion for the general consumer. While many are too quick to judge Mary Sues, as there are plenty of situations where Mary Sue characters are acceptable and sometimes actually desirable to the story, there is a reason why it is generally not recommended to have the, in a story, and MajorMinor highlights many of those reasons. They remove much of the emotional depth the game could have had when almost every character has nothing but the noblest intentions behind every single thing they do, save for a couple of characters. Guess which characters become memorable to the general reader?
Another problem is that MajorMinor lacks many features that are almost mandatory to visual novels, such as rewinding and free saving. This is due to the fact that the game is made in RPG Maker rather than a more open engine, or one made with visual novels specifically in mind instead of JRPGs. The result is that the game is treated as being in a constant event most of the time, save for some transition frames, so it is nearly impossible to open any option screens or anything.
The saving issue is solved with regular points where the game asks the player to save or not, often either before or after an important story decision, which shows that the developer was aware of this issue. While minor, it makes the game lack many features that have become an industry standard in the visual novel genre.
It is sad to see these little issues stockpile upon one another to the point that they undermine how extremely well MajorMinor handles many things, such as the world building, art direction, and the plot. It is a title that has a lot of the signs of a great visual novel, but is held back by the choice to use a poor engine mixed with a bit too much Mary Sue.
