While Full Service offers us with a highly enjoyable artwork and meaty hot scenes, it does not deliver a full service due to its constant lackadaisical writing, sleep-inducing gameplay, and below-par storyline.

When we talk about games with big, beefy, chiseled hunks, there are some several games you can choose from. But if we narrow down our kinks here, what if we want games with big, beefy hunks that can “service” us? Is there such a game in the vast ocean that is the internet? Fortunate for us, there is but it is not what you expect it to be in terms of quality. Created by Herculion Studio, formerly known as Black Monkey Studio, Full Service is one of the first Boys’ Love visual novel games that was released in 2020. Unlike its predecessors, Bacchikoi and Sleepover, Full Service’s storyline and worldbuilding are clearly more fleshed out and the artwork has improved. However, Full Service still falls into mediocre territory thanks to its constant lackadaisical writing, sleep-inducing gameplay, and below-par storyline.

            The game introduces us to Tomoki Nakamoto, a burn-out workaholic desperate for a 'life-changing event', who gets an invitation card to visit a spa from a person on the street. Curious to see what "Full Service" has to offer, he decides to go to the spa and experience its potential. He then meets with a wide range of kinks—well-built characters who are designed to fulfill any fantasy players might have. First, there is Sota Kobayashi, a high school student with a desperate need for money; Remy Svesson, an attractive male model; Kovit Chaiyarit, the incessant, passionate pervert who lusts over our protagonist; Rald Schwarz, Tomoki’s caring boss; Lenga Valentine, a mysterious guy who suffers from temporally graded retrograde amnesia; Oki and Okan Ardana, identical twins; Hisami Kondo, Tomoki’s co-worker. These characters are dateable in-game and they have a lot of potential to be characters the players can love and cherish. Unfortunately, the writing in Full Service is half-baked to the point that we may presume that this is the reason why these characters feel like they are a mere hollow shell of a person rather than complex, fully-realized characters. There are questionable if not bizarre dialogues in Full Service. One of the dialogues which raises red flag about the writing occurs when Hisami invites Tomoki to have a “luxurious dinner.” The conversation is as follows:

Hisami: Congrats, man! Let’s go have a luxurious dinner! Your treat.

Tomoki: So shameless, are you really my best friend?

Hisami: Hahaha!

Tomoki: Well… I’m not in the mood for dinner either.

Hisami: Awww…

Tomoki: I’m just too tired. I feel like I’m going to die.

This conversation raises so many questions—Why is Hisami so unresponsive to Tomoki’s question about his relationship as a friend? Instead of answering in a reassuring tone, he just… laughs? It is so absurd and unrealistic that it just seems like the writer does not bother to write a comprehensible sentence but rather decides to put a bunch of hehes and hahas to fill in the word limit—and this game does not even have a word limit, mind you. While it is true that there might be someone who talks like Hisami in real life, I highly doubt that this kind of conversation is normal. One might defend that we should focus more on the bright side—that it could be the writer’s intention to write horribly. As much as I would like to believe this, this is not the only time Full Service has delivered nonsensical sentences to torture its players. To make matters worse, the description of the surrounding that we expect in this game is non-existent. The absence of the description leaves players to their own demise—failing to materialize the surroundings in their mind. A writer should help readers create the world, not abandon them and leave them to construct the environment on their own.

            Since we have gotten a glimpse on the characters and the writing aspect of Full Service, it is time to delve into the gameplay. Full Service, after all, is a game about building relationships with the masseurs in the game—to get a happy-ending whether literal or metaphorical. In order to increase the relationship with the characters, a floating elephant mascot, Kacha, explains that it can be done through 'capitalism': gift-giving. By giving gifts, players will raise the affection of the characters. This problem, however, is that Full Service never once gives a hint as to which gifts to give. What typically happens afterwards is players will then resort to trial-and-error: trying giving every gift available in the game to see the characters’ reaction towards it. This trial-and-error reflects the game writers’ half-hearted attempt to mold the characters’ personalities. When one gives a present in real life, one has to at least know about the other’s personality—this applies to any game as well. Without context, info, or hints about characters’ likes and dislikes, players will be oblivious as to what they should do with gifts, let alone deciding who they want to give gifts to.

Choose any gifts you would like to buy for your beloved characters, but the game is not going to give you any hints.

            As the players progress into the game, there are important decisions they will have to make. These choices fall into two categories: “what to answer” decisions and “who to be with” decisions. While the choices of “who to be with” matters since players expect to win access to carefully constructed lewd scenes by Mazjojo, the Bara artist, the rest of the choices have a little to almost no impact to the story. The game offers a lot of faux-choices in an attempt to give the players the illusion of control which undeniably fails to even do so. A notorious example is when we meet dateable characters in the spa for the first time and we have an option to choose to have a 'happy ending' with them after the massage. Unfortunately, we are not able to because we do not have enough money as the narrative itself prevents us from having money in the first day we encounter the masseurs. In this case, it would be better to not give us this choice at all because no matter what choices we choose, it would not make any difference.

Rald asking Tomoki for 1000 Mani. Too bad the narrative prevents Tomoki to have a happy ending with his boss.

            Although there are no any game-breaking bugs, the mini-game (click-the-falling-rectangle game to increase your in-game money) in Full Service is filled with boredom. You might enjoy it for at first, but then you realize that it has only one purpose: to increase in-game money. Not only is the mini-game mind-numbingly repetitive, it also bombards us with itself every day the protagonist goes to work—that is until you disable it. If players don’t disable the mini-game, they will find themselves in a perpetual hell—playing the mini-game over and over. There is, however, a blessing to those who play this game after a 1.14 patch update since the patch tweaks the phase change screen to be skipped. (Yes, those who play before 1.14 would see the phase change screen every time the protagonist has to work because it can not be skipped.) The game creator could have produced different varieties of the mini-game to keep the players engaged, but they did not and this is the final product players get.

Ah, yes, the notorious mini-game.

            To summarize what I have been writing into one final, short paragraph, Full Service is a game filled with half-baked writing, underdeveloped characters, and exhausting gameplay. It is certainly not the game for someone who wants to discover complexities and nuances in the writing and gameplay aspect because there is few to none in Full Service. Other than the erotic, hypermasculine artwork that should be praised for, the game is left to be desired and improved. Full Service is now available in Steam and itch.io for 469 baht. If you want to buy because of the artwork, go for it, but do not expect that the writing will be as good as the artwork.