ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area

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ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area
You'll probably have a better chance of hooking up with hot singles in your area than having fun playing this game.
Genre(s): Visual novel Dating sim Rating(s): M Platform(s): Microsoft Windows macOS Nintendo Switch Xbox One Linux Release Date: Microsoft Windows WW: 29 September 2022 macOS WW: 29 September 2022 Linux WW: 29 September 2022 Xbox One WW: 29 September 2022 Nintendo Switch WW: 13 October 2022 Developer(s): Veritable Joy Studios Publisher(s): Veritable Joy Studios Country: United States

ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area is an episodic visual novel game developed by Veritable Joy Studios. The first volume was first released on Microsoft Windows in September 2022, but a demo can be played for free.

Why It Will Never Get Laid Without Serious Help

1. The art style is very inconsistent, with some of the characters being drawn in a semi-realistic art style and some being drawn in a simple art style, which results in the characters looking out-of-place as if they don't belong in the same game if they were put in a scene together. The reason is that the game has a lot of artists that are working on it which could've been solved if they could've at least gotten most of the artists to do the character designs and concept art and one to do the character artwork and sprites. This, however, was only promotional material, and they have since updated the sprites as their project got funded.
2. Awful, unappealing character designs for most of the characters. Almost all of them, such as Catherine, Bigs, Rocky, and Anoki, look like OCs that originated from Tumblr, and the fact that the game was made by leftists and possibly toxic BLM supporters shows.
3. Racism:
   • The game's developers were accused of discrimination towards white people, for having a cast of 12 PoC characters and having only one white character in the game.
     • They were also called out for having stretch goals on their Kickstarter page that says that they were going to add a white character named Keaton if they reached $32,000 and one that says that they would remove him anyway (even after adding him into game) if they reached $100,000. Afterwards, they made a now-deleted tweet mocking the detractors who criticized them which shows they can't handle criticism.
     • Another example of the developer's being anti-white is that the description on Anoki's bio reads "On god, fuck white people" before they removed that line.
     • They are also shown to be Italophobic (which is Keaton's nationality, by the way), such as posting an anti-Italian meme on the game's official Twitter account asking people to retweet if your account isn't a safe space for Italian people.
     • Some characters don't even look like their respective native origins. For example, Rocky and Yolanda are both black, yet they're supposed to be Chinese and South Korean respectively according to their bio cards.
   • A lot of the text in the character bios (including Anoki's) is a huge example of this.
4. The "backgrounds" that are used in the game are actually real photographs that were placed with filters, which comes off as lazy.
5. False Advertising: A plot summary on the game's website says that there are 12 characters in the game, yet there are 13 characters (this could be a typo by the way).
6. Terrible, cringeworthy, politically correct dialogue such as "You enter the salon without thinking. All of the stylists and patrons are black, and you know you've made a mistake."
   • The character bios also have poorly written descriptions that look like a middle schooler had written them.
7. Poor sense of humor throughout.
8. Aside from the racism, the developers have also done very terrible and controversial things:
   • Danulmao (the head director of the game) insulted Valorant: Agents of Romance (another dating sim game) on Twitter because the existence of games like Valorant are the reasons why ValiDate isn't being funded and that publishers won't take their game seriously.
   • The ValiDate team supports AAPI, yet their game ironically has two Asian characters (Rocky and Yolanda) that were both black-washed. Sound familiar?
   • The developers also can't take criticism shown by making a meme mocking the "racist" people that criticized their game by saying what society would be like if people would stop "complaining" about their game.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Keaton has an appealing character design if you're into e-boy aesthetics. Too bad he's the only white character in the game, as mentioned above.
   • Ashlie's design can also be quite pretty great and attractive to some people and is the only PoC character in the game with an appealing design, which is saying a lot (especially for a girl with pink hair).
2. Thanks to all of the bad qualities of the game, the game can come across as unintentionally hilarious for some people, especially if you're eating a cup of popcorn and/or noodles.

Reception

Despite positive reception from journalists (a good reminder of why you shouldn't trust journalists), the game was heavily panned by gamers due to its blatant black pandering and because of how racist it is against white people.

Despite being an episodic game, it's less likely that developers would make any more volumes of this game since Vol. 1 sold poorly.

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