Official Score
Overall - 60%
60%
Superstorm Melon Date’s dystopian world tries to be original with its bizarre premise, but this visual novel follows the standard tropes of the genre a bit too closely to make a splash.
From the Nonary Games to the classrooms of Danganronpa, visual novels are no strangers to outlandish premises. However, A. Hagen dares to tread new ground with Superstorm Melon Date, a game where you date a half human-half melon hybrid. It’s something the genre has certainly not seen before, but is there a good reason for this?
Superstorm Melon Date Review
The future of Superstorm Melon Date is a dystopian one, one rife with disaster. Earth has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, and superstorms are shutting down cities and forcing residents to bunker down. Food shortages have become a problem, and untested engineered food designed to solve this dilemma is causing its own set of problems.
Arguably the biggest problem is with newborns. Not everybody can afford to have human children, leading people to fuse human and melon DNA to create new melos children. This led to segregation between humans and melos, with different neighborhoods coming into play.
Enter the player, who is looking for love amidst this dystopia. After hopping on a dating app, he comes across the melos Melonias. What follows is an evening where the player gets to choose how things play out.
Is it original? Absolutely. Is it coherent? Not necessarily.
While the setting is something that leads to questions about humanity, one’s past, and where we stand as a society, at the end of the day it’s a game where you’re dating a half-melon girl. Even those with the most open minds will feel like this is a bit beyond the pale, something that stemmed from an in-joke the player is not privy to.
Let’s say you ignore the whole melon concept – is the rest of its world worth exploring? It depends.
While the world that the protagonist lives in is a futuristic one with robotic servers and nightclubs selling cough syrup-laden drinks, the story itself is a bit by the books. The segregation angle does come into play, but the underpinnings follow the typical visual novel dating tropes a bit too closely. Ironically, the conversations and situations Melonias finds herself in have been covered in other tales, making this one feel like a bit of a retread. The story can play out in different ways depending on the choices you make, but all of the usual beats are there – even if she is a mind reader.
The average playthrough of Superstorm Melon Date clocks in at around 20 minutes, but there are different routes the player can take that change where players go after each locale. It’s nothing terribly complex, but the gesture is still welcome nonetheless.
Superstorm Melon Date’s dystopian world tries to be original with its bizarre premise, but this visual novel follows the standard tropes of the genre a bit too closely to make a splash.
