#a cute novelty for a cute questline

[red-catmander]

got that new chair!

those orbs were a pain to hunt, but it's done with!

the chair classic

the sexy lounge

and the uh... the... um... the ocupado...

[vivaciouswordsmith]

On Dream Daddy being “too short”

I just finished playing Dream Daddy last night, and I have...incredibly strong feelings about the whole “it’s too short” thing being bandied about right now. I have a lot to say, so, if you’re interested in my take on this...

Here’s the thing: simply put, length in hours is not a good way to judge whether or not a game is good or not. For several reasons. All of which I will try to cover in due time.

First off, there’s a stark and radical difference between a game’s length and the game’s experience. Think of something like Skyrim, for example. I’ve sunk over five hundred hours into Skyrim at this point, but my most memorable experiences come from back when I was still figuring the game out. Yeah, it’s still fun, but some of the gild has worn off by now. Mods inject some freshness, but otherwise it has largely faded as the novelty’s worn off.

More to the point, however, is my next, well, point: time is more a factor in a strong gameplay experience, and Dream Daddy is all about a narrative experience. I can play Skyrim, or MineCraft, or even something like Bejeweled for hundreds upon hundreds of hours because those games revolve around gameplay and not so much around story.

To elaborate, Skyrim is a vast game that can take ages to get through. There’s tons of content. However, its story definitely leaves something to be desired, not to mention the fact there’s no reason to complete the main questline. You’re not going to get punished for wandering through the woods picking flowers, even if you spend a hundred in-game days doing it, so there’s no pressure to save the world. There are people who, to this day, have never even gotten close to defeating Alduin, because they exhausted the game’s capacity and grew bored with it without touching the main quest.

Same goes for MineCraft. The only way I can really enjoy MineCraft now is by playing mods like Sky Factory or Pixelmon (RIP). It’s not that MineCraft isn’t fun. Far from it. It’s definitely an “easy to learn, hard to master” sort of thing, and opens up more and more as you progress. But it definitely gets old fast. I’ve never managed to play vanilla MineCraft to the point of defeating the Ender Dragon or the Wither, just because, again, there’s no real reason to, and you won’t get punished if you don’t.

(And don’t even get me started on the fiasco that was No Man’s Sky. That, in my opinion, is the prime example of what happens when a game’s length is more important than its experience.)

Dream Daddy is more or less a visual novel. That means it doesn’t have any really new or interesting gameplay to offer. Thus, it rests fully on being a solid narrative experience. And that’s much, much harder to pull off well. Good gameplay needs tens or hundreds of hours to really be fully explored, but a story, if not done well, can get old much faster than that. Any storyteller worth their salt knows that the worst thing they can do is make their viewer/reader think they’re wasting their time

A good narrative experience actually benefits from being shorter and more concise. Some of the best narrative-driven games out there are only a few hours long. One of my personal favorites, Spec Ops: the Line only took me six or seven hours to finish, and that was only because some of the gameplay sections really ramped up the difficulty near the end. Also, the Stanley Parable, a game that, like Dream Daddy, rests almost completely on its narrative, can be almost fully explored within a handful of hours. Pony Island has good gameplay and a good story, and is only two hours long. Same goes for Undertale. If they were any longer than ten hours, they’d be overstaying their welcome.

That is how I feel about Dream Daddy. Yeah, it definitely has places it could be expanded upon, but mostly, it’s a solid story, with excellent, likable characters that you quickly get invested in, and much more depth than your average dating sim. Unlike something like, say, HuniePop, I actually felt compelled to seek out and befriend/date every dad because I got invested in their personal struggles. I ended up sinking twelve hours into the game just so I could know the ending of every story. The fact that it didn’t take that long to complete didn’t bother me at all. Their stories were short and sweet, and I’d play them all again.

Something else to consider is not everyone can devote the same amount of time to games. A kid on summer vacation (or an unemployed schlub like me) can afford to spend a weekend hunting down every last secret in a sixty hour open world game, but someone who works forty or more hours a week can’t spare a lot of time to games like that. For someone with not a lot of time on their hands, a short, decent experience is way more valuable in that it can be finished faster.

I’ll wrap this whole diatribe up with a simile. A good gameplay experience is like a full three-course meal, while a good narrative experience is like a piece of chocolate cake. By the end of the three courses, you’re full and content, but you probably didn’t clean all your plates entirely, and maybe you liked something somebody else didn’t, and it takes a long time to get through all three. A piece of chocolate cake might not last as long, but if it’s fluffy with creamy frosting and a lava center...you’re gonna remember it for a while. You might think you want a second piece of cake, but you’ll probably regret it if you eat another.

Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense.

TL:DR - Dream Daddy may have its flaws, but being too short isn’t one I’d value too strongly. It has a great story, great characters, and is overall very lighthearted and cute. Definitely worth checking out.