Just finished the "winter" nakadashi event.

VERY strong opening. You're immediately thrown into an unknown situation, where the characters seemed to act all normal at first, before being explained of what's going on. Then comes Tomie, the story then immediately establishes just what kind of person she is. A benevolent gaoler who praises good behavior, which of course, is interpreted as brainwashing by the nakadashis. I was hooked right away when Tomie came in humming the St. Theresa anthem.

The back-and-forth between Mercurius Foundation and the nakadashis were enjoyable. The latter thinking the former was being silly by building a resort so deep in the mountains was funny. They kept going from "they are dumb", to "oh. maybe not" to "yeah, definitely dumb" was amusing to see.

The entire is story is written around Mercurius Foundation asking the nakadashis to make an advertisement video for the resort, one that would be a hit with the zoomers. It was fun seeing them kept getting shot down by Maria and Chloe's orbiters when they asked for feedback. It was nice to see them not satisfied even when the video was approved because it didn't really resonate with them. I think that was supposed to be the "serious" moment of this story.

One thing though, I wish Tomie played a larger role here. After the prologue, she kinda just disappeared, and then reappearing to tie in the boss fight with the story. This is probably my fault though, since I skipped the pre-boss fight dialouge. I've been skipping all of these becasuse I just want to get all gameplay crap out of the way, and reading without the message log is a pain in the ass. I know, it's a bit hypocritical since I keep blabbing about how NPCs shouldn't overshadow the established characters, that's why I'm not docking any points for this. If they had to choose between focusing on nakadashi vs on Tomie, I'd rather have them choose the former. I was expecting Tomie to run into the resort and then smash the machine with that bat of hers instead of the nakadashis shitting on the poor engineer to the point of nervous and machinery breakdown. It's a bit of a dick move on their part, but it's fun and in-character.

As expected, the story was a gauntlet to get through because of its sheer lenght. It wasn't as bad as I expected, though. Think of the XPeco event, but instead of 2 "break" episodes, it's only 1. Also, I didn't have too much trouble understanding Yuni. She slowed me down, but it wasn't too bad. Nephi = Nera still filters me harder. The pool stream was cute, but only the special parts were voiced. This is more of a technical issue, but I didn't like how the dialogue advances on its own instead of waiting for you to click it. This wasn't a thing on the Criminal Rookies event, so I don't know why they made it like this.

Next up, the Christmas sex demons event. I took a peek at the prologue, and it looks to be incredibly short. At least, when compared to this. The twins and Ravi also look to have simple speech, so this event will be the perfect respite after going through this absolute endurance trial.