3/5 ★ – theurbanavian's review of VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action.

VA-11 Hall-A has the foundation to be one of the best VN experiences I have had the pleasure of playing, but unfortunately comes short on delivering its experience. Valhalla has an incredible atmosphere and roster of characters you interact with, its central mechanic is more or less a set dressing to the character interaction however there is something really personal about it. A lot of visual novel games I’ve played kind of reward pressing dialogue buttons with pieces of personal character information. “This is X’s favorite color”, and eventually you fill out a checklist about a character, without really knowing anything about them. In Valhalla you organically get these personally pieces about characters that you just know because of the drink mechanic, you know that Donovan’s always going to want a beer when he comes in, that a Piano Women will cheer Dorothy up if she’s sad, or that Alma’s favorite drink is a Brandtini. There’s no checklists in this game. Where it falls short however are its payoffs, its capstone story moments need more. A cutscene, a personal piece of dialogue, some kind of closure. I found myself unsatisfied with a lot of the important story moments because it felt as if they had ended abruptly, without properly closing out. Christmas in particular felt like the worst one, where before the party even really starts you take a smoke break with Alma and then it just ends. I think that for a game that has such a captivating cast of characters, and manages to circumvent a lot of the more egregious problems that VNs can run into where you don’t really get to know the characters you are interacting with, the pay-off for those in game relationships wasn’t substantial enough.