So I'm at this convention, right, and someone's showing me Letter to My Dream on their laptop, and I'm like, this is the jankiest visual novel I've seen since I tried running some old Ren'py game on my phone during a power outage. The art is that specific kind of CG hentai where everyone's eyes are slightly too big and the backgrounds look like they were traced from stock photos of actual universities. I kept expecting the protagonist to walk into a lecture hall I recognized from my cousin's graduation photos.
The whole thing is about this guy going to Rosendale University, leaving his dad behind, and honestly the dad character appears for like two scenes and then just. Nothing. I spent way too long wondering if he was okay. Does he call? Does anyone check on him? The game doesn't care. It's too busy making you choose between being nice to your new roommate or being a complete dick for no reason. The choices actually matter though, which surprised me. I picked something mean as a joke and suddenly I'm locked out of an entire friendship path and this girl won't talk to me anymore. That's not a complaint exactly, just. I wasn't ready.
The sex scenes unlock based on your choices with different characters, and they're that particular flavor of visual novel where the dialogue during gets really specific about body parts in a way that feels like someone was checking off a list. There's this one scene with a character you meet in the library, and the whole thing starts because you helped her reach a book. I'm not making this up. The game plays it completely straight too, no self awareness at all. The romantic paths are actually kind of sweet in between the explicit bits, which is weird because the writing quality swings wildly. One conversation feels genuine and the next sounds like it was translated through three different languages.
I got invested in one of the student characters, the one who's always in the cafeteria, and then the episode just ended. No resolution. I sat there staring at the screen like an idiot. The game's episodic apparently, so maybe there's more later, but right now it just stops. The university setting is basically just a backdrop for meeting people to fuck or date, which I guess is honest at least. They don't pretend it's anything else.