Major\Minor Review Part One

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil.” Psalm 23.

Major\Minor recently came out on Steam for $9.99, and against my better judgment I bought it during a sale. The game is made by Klace, and I’m led to believe that this was mostly a one man job. Our editor-in-chief, Josh Bray, jokingly suggested the title for review. But I’m a glutton for pain, so here we are. I will be reviewing the game as a series since new chapters are coming out every month. Needless to say there will be unmarked spoilers, which I don’t believe will bother anyone.

The story centers around you as the protagonist traversing a furry filled world that is not all it seems. Your gender is left ambiguous (which I like, actually) and you also get to pick the name of your furry-self. Please excuse the names I chose that you may see in the screenshots.

You are haunted by weird visions of another world that you try to forget as you make your way through Japan to meet your favorite pop star Klace (I see you over there game dev, you egotistical little bugger you). You and one other contestant recently won a contest to spend a year with Klace and tour with him. The gameplay was somewhat of a let down. You sit and watch furries talk while you wait for your turn to finally be able to say or do something. The music was surprisingly very nice in spots, and this made it the most bearable part of this game to be quite honest. The settings are fine, all that jazz can be fiddled with at the beginning of the game. The first thing you may want to do is turn down the music, though, as it’s very loud when you start.

As mentioned above, the story centers around two contestants — you being one of them — travelling to Japan to spend a year on tour with your favorite self-insert dev/musician, Klace. It’s pretty straightforward after you get through the character naming portion where you’re “in between worlds” talking to a mysterious unnamed character. After that you’re zapped back into your body back in the bullet train you’re riding. You meet someone named Kila, the only other English speaker on the entire train.

Screenshot (158) — What’s wrong with your faaaace?

That blue… uh… squirrel thing? That is Kila. You think to yourself, “Oh, I wonder if he’s gonna be important later,” while you’re also waiting to get off the train and meet up with Rook. He is connected to Klace, though you don’t know how, so this could all be a clever ruse and you’re on Punk’d or some shit (or maybe I am for playing this game? I can’t tell yet).

Screenshot (159) — I hate you both. Please burn.

You then meet up with Rook and the other contestant. And I wonder who that is? Oh well, of fucking course it was Kila, you stupid piece of shit! Who did you expect, the pope?! Were you expecting any sort of surprises in this game? What were you thinking, you moron?!

Klace is stuck dealing with something, so for now you, Rook — who is a total flat and distant asshole — and Kila — who is also pretty flat as a character — go out and have a fun day out on the town. Depending on which choice you picked earlier when talking to Kila on the train that one time, you can either go to a Maid Cafe or somewhere Rook chooses which turns out to be an awesome, giant arcade. I chose the Maid Cafe, and I’m sure glad I chose that route because it was a gold mine. You’ll see why.

Rook thinks you’re lame for wanting to go, but still takes you to the cafe. You hop into a limo with this griffin limo driver woman thing, and Rook lightens the mood by telling you about The Midnight Deaths where people either kill other people and/or themselves. After thoroughly scaring his new friends, Rook dumps you off on the street and stays away from the cafe. Here the griffin woman, Jade, gets out with you.

And then Kila, who is apparently some Maid Cafe connoisseur, says this:

Screenshot (155) — What? How do you know tha… Whatever. Let’s move on.

Inside you meet Eclair, the woman who runs the joint.

She’s a nice lady who comes to serve you and plays a little trivia game (where, surprise, you get no choices) with you and Kila. You find out she was close with Rook at one point, and he was even a host with her. After telling you all this she gets upset and leaves. You can either go after her to help, or leave with Kila. When you leave, Kila yells at Rook for being cold and mistreating the two of you as you go to your hotel. Otherwise, if you go after Eclair she’s off crying at her desk.

This is my favorite part, actually.

She was crying with bedroom eyes, and the plates and shit still in her hands. Eclair dear, I don’t believe you were crying one bit. Now who’s under that desk?

After she talks about her weird almost romance thing she had with Rook, you exchange phone numbers and leave. You head out to the hotel where you will be staying, and sit around with Kila in your room and turn on the TV where a reporter is talking about another Midnight Death. Wanna know who died?

And this is the first real surprise in this entire affair. I want to give the dev credit for not letting his own character live long, but you know this shit is going to put him on a pedestal and we’ll never stop hearing about the amazing deceased star dead before his time, further fluffing Klace’s ego. Like we didn’t do that enough by shelling money out for this thing.

MajorMinor plays just fine for a visual novel. Although — and I hate to say this — Depression Quest had more meaningful choices than this title did. It’s a “horror” visual novel, but I wasn’t very scared. Maybe it’ll get better with time as the new chapters come out. We can only hope. You can easily just hold down your spacebar, and that’s all you really need to do when it comes to controls.

If you want to get the thing over with as soon as possible, it really does add to the experience to see that pretentious and useless dialogue just fly by.

The framerate is fine being that it is a visual novel (for the love of God, if any VN messed this up I do not want to know) and the requirements are very basic. Here’s a screenshot for you nerds that like system requirements.

Screenshot (167) — Ok. I admit, that is pretty amusing.

Now let’s take a look at the art. I want to believe Klace drew these characters on his own, but something tells me he didn’t. He doesn’t seem to credit anyone, or anything, and claims you’ll see the credits at the end of the last chapter of the game which could take months at least to find out who did his art or music (Klace does seem to be addressing this, somewhat, via text file credits in recent patches). His website listed on the Steam page isn’t helpful either, because it’s his Patreon.

I’m suspicious as to who really did the art, seeing as the characters don’t ever change to emote. At all. You saw Eclair’s face earlier when she was crying/giving an unseen person a BJ. They all have one emotion; which is something that bugs me.

Not to mention the art is just off altogether.

The proportions are off. Just look at them; look back at other screenshots. I have to say my least favorite part is Kila. His neck looks like it was made of Play-Doh, and someone smushed it in. All their collar bones also make no sense.

Not to mention the constantly blurry backgrounds no matter what you’re doing, or where you are at. There was a point where the blur was hurting my eyes so much I had to stop playing.

Oh! I almost forgot. Look closely for what’s wrong here in the phone’s cropping. I’ll let you figure it out.

The music is good, I enjoyed most of it. It was certainly the most bearable part of this experience. Although I cannot find out who did the music. Come on, Klace, tell us already! I found one song on his YouTube account that was composed by someone else, but he wrote the lyrics for it. That’s it. Not to mention the tracks remind me of Chrono Trigger. Most of the music sounds a lot like Chrono Trigger in fact, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. I kind of don’t want to remember one of my favorite games while playing this.

So far MajorMinor is an anthropomorphic Hell that I sincerely hope gets better by the next few chapters. I wouldn’t recommend getting this, but it’s your money and I’m not your mom.

This game is ongoing, so I’ll be reviewing subsequent chapters as more comes out. I went in this optimistic that this would be better than I expected, but I was dead wrong so far. I actually thought that this was some 16 year old’s first game, and I wanted to go easy on him. But then I found out Klace was 25 and still added himself as a majorly important character and the game is wrote in a way that was so cringey and illogical. Honestly, look at it.

There’s also something dubbed Klacegate that I’d rather not get into here, but decided it would be worth mentioning so anyone who actually still wanted to buy this game by now is forewarned.

Stay tuned for farther parts of this review as more chapters of this furry trainwreck come out! I pray my sanity lasts.