Once upon a time, there was a girl named Ami. Ami is your typical anime-loving high school girl. One day she’s told that she has to join a club before she’s allowed to graduate. Not knowing where to go, Ami decides to join the coding club. This decision will lead to romance and some catgirls. Oh the catgirls…
A Wild Catgirl Appears! is a short visual novel that revolves around Ami. After joining the coding club, Ami creates a character for a video game – Starla – and then wishes that she was real. Well, her wish comes true, and Starla becomes a reality! Soon after, Starla’s friend Eiko comes to join in, and you’ll be making a few choices to ultimately decide who your girlfriend – human or cat – will be.
While I can give A Wild Catgirl Appears! props for not having many noticeable spelling or grammar errors, the writing as a whole feels really weak. This game was apparently made within a month and you can tell. The story just doesn’t feel that strong at all, and you’ll likely end up not feeling very compelled to go back and try and get all of the romance options.
The lack of will to go back for the other options comes from more than just the story. A Wild Catgirl Appears! appears to have been built within Unity and not one of the other options out there for creating Visual Novels. This turns into no option for viewing the dialogue backlog, as well as no option to fast forward through previously read text. In fact, the game’s only options are from the regular Unity launcher that comes up, and these are really basic.
I’m not quite sure what is going on with the resolution, but it definitely seems like the game was not meant to be played at the resolution options they have available to you. The in-game graphics appear to be extremely stretched out and pixelated. Even the menu options end up stretched out. All of this ends up with some extremely low-quality looking backgrounds and menus.
Speaking of the visuals, A Wild Catgirl Appears! has some… interesting… art. There’s definitely some issues with some clashing styles going on. Some pieces look fine, others looks like terrible paint jobs. For example, take this piece:
In one spot, you’ve got the regular head for the character. It does not match with the body it is attached to, nor does the person on the left (Ami) look like she even belongs in the same game. This really degrades the quality of these “full” arts. Each character also only has a few facial expressions. There’ll be times when characters appear in different outfits as well, and these outfits really make it look like the artist has no clue what a female body looks like. Pro tip: when a character model has visible breasts in one outfit, they should not appear to be basically flat chests with a weird pointy coming out of their side.
A Wild Catgirl Appears! is a wild mess of design. The game would have benefitted greatly from being on a different engine. Sure, the game was made in a month, but I’ve also seen better quality come out of these “Game Jam” projects than this. The story is incredibly forgettable, and I feel absolutely no urge to try and see the rest of the stories available. With that said, I cannot in any way recommend this game. There are just better VN’s out there.
A Wild Catgirl Appears! Review Score
1.5/5
With that said, I’ve also read worse VN’s. Not many, but I have.
