1. This is Cheers in game form. You spend all your time in a bar. You serve beers. You have crushes on your coworkers and your romantic life is in the public domain. An important gameplay element is getting to know everybody's name.
2. I admire Sukeban Games's utter commitment to VA-11 Hall-A's core mechanic. The only way you interact w/ the world in any way at all is by making people drinks. It is taken to the point to where, even though you spend the whole game talking to people, you don't even get to chose dialog options. People come to to titular VA-11 Hall-A bar. They ask for drinks. You make them drinks. The drinks you make affect how the conversation goes. That's pretty much it.
3. The player character, Jill, is not some super special person. She doesn't even have greater problems than any other person might have, let alone super powers. She has a story but her story is just one of many stories you learn of behind the bar in Glitch City.
4. The art and overall presentation draw you into the world. The retro-tinged but not completely retro pixel art and chip-tune inflected music create a vibration that is feels realistic w/o ever going for anything that resembles actual realism. It plays on your familiarity w/ game art. It's comforting, a place you have been before. Again, this is a video game version of Cheers.
5. Okay, I guess Cheers didn't have sex ro-bots that look like little girls.
6. And the fact that little girl-looking (but fully able to consent) sex ro-bots co-exist w/ everyone is really a big part of the VA-11 Hall-A's charm. They set up Glitch city as the most progressive city in the world--esp. w/ regards to ro-bots--and VA-11 Hall-A is a truly come-as-you-are sort of place. Your character, Jill, is a lesbian. No big deal. Sex ro-bots. No big deal. Regular ro-bots. No big deal. Gay men. No big deal. Bounty hunters. No big deal. Kitten ear women? No big deal. Actual children? Just don't serve them alcohol.
7. There is not much in the way of gameplay challenge in VA-11 Hall-A. You can find your way to a "bad" ending but if you wind up there, you've done so basically by choice.
8. All of the drink ingredients you use are imaginary but after a while you start to feel like you know what they taste like. A few times, I'd look at some drink recipes and just being like, "Oh God, I bet that gives you a hell of a headache in the morning." I also found myself getting concerned for the health of characters who too frequently ordered strong drinks.
9. What really impresses me is just how much of Glitch City and the world
at large you get know from the perspective of one person who spends
ninety percent of her time in exactly two locations. As Jill, you have
conversations w/ bar patrons and spend a few minutes a day on your
smartphone. From this, you learn of all manner of corporate
and government intrigue plus the culture and technology of the day.
10. You get to pick the music you play in the bar. I could never quite get a bead on whether it affects anything else you do. You might get a compliment on the music but maybe it's just a canned response and you'd get a compliment so matter what you picked. Who knows anything these days. It's a mixed up, muddled up world when you tend bar at Va-ll Hall-A. (You see what I did there?)
11.Upon starting a new game, the game reminds you to grab some drinks and
some snacks before starting. Let's just say that I personally chose to
forgo the snacks.
12. VA-11 Hall-A takes a relatively simple conceit and runs with it: you are a cyberpunk bartender. W/ this minimal
setup, Sukeban Games manages to build a full world for you to live
and relax in for a while. They successfully create a feeling w/ pixel art and unvoiced dialog that huge studios struggle to make w/ several million polygons on screen and nine digit budgets. VA-11 Hall-A feels real and VA-11 Hall-A is the sort of game you will replay just to see some familiar faces in a place you've been before.
13. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name...
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