Forbidden Love

Forbidden Love is so bad, I don’t even know where to start. I’ve played my fair share of Dogenzaka games, so I had my expectations pretty low going in, but I was in no way prepared for how truly awful this piece of garbage is… It’s actually stressing me out trying to figure out how to approach this review. I make it a rule to read through an entire visual novel before reviewing it; sometimes a route or character is good enough to make it worth reading through for just that, but no human being should ever be forced to read through Forbidden Love. Doing so may be considered cruel and unusual punishment… Before I even get to the translation, let me just say that I don’t care about the characters, the story, the artwork, nothing. They’re all bad. The whole premise of the MC getting caught up in the drama over who’s going to inherit her step-father’s business is boring and stupid, and it’s not like the characters give me any reason to care about their struggles either...

[b]14.09[/b]: Word wrapping was patched in. Script still desperately needs to be proof-read and edited for grammar though. -- I really wanted to like this but compared to other Dogenzaka Labs VNs (which I like overall), it's a gigantic mess. I can ignore the low resolution backgrounds and cluttered main story screen. For whatever reason, characters aren't given their own screens in this so it's up to you to sort through 6 pages worth of stories and figure out the character continuity if any. Sure, OK, I can deal with that. What's unforgiveable is the quality of the translation and its presentation. [strike]There is no word wrapping in the text box so words will be cut mid-line and continue on the second line. If you can get past that without your brain melting eventually[/strike], you'll have to deal with what appears to be [b]a total lack of editing/proof-reading[/b]. Within seconds of starting the butler route, I was inundated with so much truncated gibberish, I couldn't even tell...

I've played this game on android and loved it, so I was super excited to see it in the Steam Store. But, the fact that it was published by Dogenzaka Labs, I hadn't expected the dialogue to be so poorly thrown together. Phrases repeat often, the grammar is bad, there are a lot of lines of dialogue that don't flow well with the conversations. They REALLY need to review and edit it all. I expected better from Dogenzaka. :( Until it is fixed, I would not recommend buying this game.

This is actually a halfway decent port of a mobile-phone game. It is better than many of the Dogenzaka Lab games, probably because they only published the version on Steam, and didn't develop it. There are a LOT of paths to go down. The characters are decent enough. The protagonist... suffers from differing levels of "otome-protagonist-syndrome", depending on the route chosen. That aside, it appears there are some stories not transfered to the PC version, and the main story is that of the MC and her step-brother Mike. And those stories are sequential (1st-7th). Also, the achievement for completing all scenarios triggered for me when I finished all of the "Rainy Day" scenarios. Another thing to note is that aside from the "bonus" scenarios, the stories last an average of 20 chapters. One was as short as 15, while another took 34. Would suggest getting this game when on discount, but it will take hours to get through.

This game was definitely worth the money i paid for it. There is enough content to keep you going for a long time. There are so a lot of love interests that have multiple stories. I loved this visual novel as you can see by the amount of hours i have played it, so far and I still have a way to go before i have completed them all. Best visual novel i have played in a while.

i'm gonna be real i knew this game was bad back when i played it on my ipad on 2013, but i never got to finish it, so. i dont actually think this is worth it at full price, so i grabbed it with the spring sale. that said, i'm a sucker for step siblings romance, and im actually having fun playing this, even if the men are all assholes and the mc is insufferable lmao. but idk, sometimes you like bad stories and i like this bad story. if you like these type of things and dont mind spelling/translation mistakes then ig give it a chance BUT only while its on sale, it's not worth its full price.

As on par with a Dogenzaka Labs game, don't expect too much. I was actually pretty excited to play this game because of the forbidden-taboo aspect of the romance, but this let me down so bad. The story is.... short, but it feels excruciatingly long? The translation for the dialogue is SUPER awkward and makes every line read as some low budget early 2000s drama that never got off its feet. It's chalked full of typos as well. You can say a lot about the Dogenzaka Labs games, but the art is never unpleasant, even though everyone is a copy and paste of each other. Just different colors. I've only played Mike's story so far since his route is the main story, but it just wasn't good at all.. It was an awkward, unromantic word soup that couldn't inspire even a little bit of thrill in me, and every turn is predictable. The MC is meek and submissive, which allowed for tons and tons of misunderstandings and the ML's terrible attitude really didn't help either. Everything has flimsy reasonings ...

I own and played pretty much all of the Dogenzaka Labs games, and I really enjoyed the vast majority of them. Despite this having mixed reviews when i got it, I still wanted to support a company who's games I enjoy. But this game is just not good. The characters and the stories are so BAD. There'd so many ways you can do "forbidden" romances (like the age gap in Pub Encounters). They really drive in that you view this family as your true family, even if you're not blood. the pseudo-inc*st is really prevalent. Your character does all but scream "big brother" in the romance scenes (which are weak and uninteresting btw) to remind you that this is her family. Even in the side stories where you're not related to the character the fact that you "remind them of their little sister" is a big focus. 90% of the gqamwe can be broken down to: 1. your brother being hostel to you 2. you apologizing 3. you getting kidnapped, targeted or just needing to be saved in general I can handle a lot when i...

Can't really add more than what others have already said tbh. Bad grammar, lines repeating themselves, seems like no proofreading was done at all. I expected better...I was let down :( Still haven't finished all the story lines because its near impossible to figure out where they stop and then continue on because its all a jumbled mess on the main story pages with no sorting by main characters, Gallery is total trash too not many pictures and not all the main love interests are featured. I started playing this game a long time ago, and keep stopping because its so hard to get through because its really bad (but I hate leaving a game with unfinished achievements). I've played alot of other VN's Published by Dongenzaka and enjoyed them. I just think this game needed to have a better team put on it or just trashed from the start.

The way this game is layed out is very confusing, there are a lot of stories for one character then a few scattered around for other characters. The grammar/sentence structure was a mess throughout the route I played to the point where I couldn't enjoy the story. I was pretty hopeful for this game since taboo topics in otome games are usually pretty fun to play through, but I couldn't bring myself to enjoy this. There were only three CGs in the one route I played, one in the first chapter then one for each ending. I didn't like the route very much for Mike Jones so I actually preferred the "second ending" to the happy ending.