Seriously, this again?

First of all, let me be perfectly clear - I respect that someone has shown as much determination as this guy has, he's clearly thrown himself totally into this project. He also must have extremely tolerant parents, propping up their 25-year-old son for the last 5 years while he does nothing but work on his game.

However, if he does ever release this game, it's going to fail, and fail hard. For those of you that think it looks "cool", do some reading, and apply some critical thought. A good place to start is this 17 page thread on somethingawful, where the creator himself participates for a while.

Now, let's look at some of the facts:

• Supposedly, (from what little of the game he's actually willing to talk about) the game is basically "an RPG without all that repetitive combat stuff". Which only leaves walking around talking to people.

• He implements negligible, annoying "features" like the camera panning all over the place during dialogue, and tries to hype them up like they're revolutionary.

• He has "hundreds of unique characters", but if you watch the youtube trailer, they all seem to be extremely basic stereotypes, such as "crazy cat lady". Truly original.

• He obviously thinks replacing the word "you" with "Yuu" (the main character's name) in dialogue is exceedingly clever. Every second line of dialogue in the game appears to do this.

• The last boss of the game is "Bob", a game designer who spent years building the ultimate game, or some such thing. So the game is about a game made by a guy named Bob and the game is named "bob's game" and it's actually made by a guy named Bob and oh god it's all so deep. To quote Bob himself: "Some of it might be too advanced or philosophical for the younger crowd, but it's the sort of thing that'll hit them later in life and all of a sudden make sense." Right.

• Nobody else has ever played the game, because he's so afraid that other people will steal his amazing ideas. This means that nobody has ever play-tested the game, and that he's had absolutely no outside input into whether certain puzzles are any good, whether "what do I do now?" is ever unclear, etc. This is a very, very bad thing to do. People heavily invested in a game's development can no longer give it an objective look, and just watching some inexperienced people attempt to play the game can point out many fundamental problems. He has not done this at all, so I can guarantee that there are many, many fundamental problems that he has blinded himself to.

Combine all these issues (and many others, I could go on for a while), and you're not looking at any sort of success.

Despite Bob taking every possible opportunity to point out that the game was built by only himself, over 5 years, that isn't actually a selling point. The average consumer doesn't care how many people made a game, or how long it took them. They only care whether it's ANY GOOD. Absolutely nothing shown so far has indicated that this game will be.

Games with no combat have succeeded before (see Phoenix Wright), but it's extremely dependent on the quality of the writing and the other gameplay mechanics. Between the "Yuu" crap and the "I'm the end-boss of my own game!" garbage, I'm confident that the writing is awful, and he hasn't shown a single gameplay mechanic that anyone will find interesting or impressive for more than about 10 seconds.

This game is going to bomb.