VN Talk: Valentines Otome

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PC/Mac
Release: 2018

I usually try to play an indie visual novel every year off Itch.io ever since I discovered the number of indie games people have been making with Ren'Py. Ren'Py is a fairly easy to use, easy to learn visual novel engine that is free for use, and since its release it's enabled a number of small teams to make visual novels without having to get deep into programming.

One of the games I picked up a few years ago was called Halloween Otome. A two person job (one writer/programmer and one artist), it was clearly an amateur effect, but it had a lot of heart, and shortly afterwards the duo announced that they would do sequel, Valentines Otome (yes, there is no apostrophe). As per usual for a romance series, this would pair off the previous heroine's best friend.

Valentines Otome is a pay-what-you-want visual novel/dating sim that just came out last week on the appropriate holiday. Prior knowledge of Halloween Otome is not necessary, though the player is asked to choose who Emma ended up with at the end of the first game and those who played HO will probably get more out of it.

Because this is a hot off the press release, seriously watch out for spoilers below. I will talk about endings.

Incorporating the player's previous choices from Halloween Otome was amazing, considering how much more work that must have been. There are three loves interests in Valentines and three in Halloween, making for a possible combination of nine different starting circumstances for the game and which eventually take the player to a total of eighteen endings (six for each VO love interest). I'm not sure even more professional endeavors would have done this, but the duo at Synokoria did, which is impressive.

Valentines start off with Mira, Emma's best friend, trying to drag Emma out to a bar on Valentine's Day. All Emma's boyfriend options are celebrity types who have work they can't get away from, so they've arranged for Mira to drag Emma out there where she can receive her special Valentine's Day gift. And Mira, being a party girl, is all up for going to a bar.

While there, Emma gets her very public present and celebration, and Mira gets drunk. Like really drunk.

She wakes and finds out that she's married one of the three men she had met in the bar (player's choice), and that is the proper start of the game!

This is a novel scenario for an otome. Usually it's all about the courtship, but in this case, we skip straight to a surprise marriage. For one reason or another, Mira and her new husband are advised not to immediately break up the marriage, usually because it would cause some irreparable harm to her husband's reputation (losing his job, losing face, etc.) and she agrees to put up with it in exchange for banking on his reputation to promote her business, since she's the owner/designer of a clothing boutique.

There is a lot of text in this game. It's substantial for an indie effort, though it doesn't quite feel like it's professional. As I mentioned, it has a lot of heart, so if you go in without expecting a certain layer of polish, you'll probably have a lot of fun. In fact, I'd go as far as to say if you're a heterosexual otome fan on a budget, you're probably not going to find anything better.

But it's also uneven. There is a stat-raising component of the game, and if you're not using the a guide chances are your first time through the game is not going to showcase its best side, which is too bad since first playthrough is so much a part of first impression. Fortunately Synokoria does have the walkthrough available for free, but using it also takes away the fun that comes with discovery. I would use suggest doing the first playthrough blind, expecting that you will not get the best ending, and use the walkthrough later.

In a way it's a shame that there are so many endings and the game is so walkthrough dependant, because chances are most of the player base is not going to view most of them. I imagine most players will get one or two bad or less than ideal endings before giving up and using the guide. It's usually what I do for games, and I didn't bother getting the other endings once I got the best for each love interest, which means that out of the sixteen I only viewed five.

Going back to the unevenness, since the game is reliant on stats to trigger things, story events can happen in a somewhat haphazard order. You might have weeks with lots of events due to a confluence of plot required stuff and stat triggered stuff, or you might have weeks of nothing due to a lull in both. Managing the stats properly makes for a fulfilling experience, but the game won't tell you inside the game itself what stats to focus on during a given playthrough. In an era when instruction manuals are a thing of the past that's a little annoying. I don't mind failing because it's my fault for making bad dialogue choices (and like most otome there are a number of them), but I don't like failing because I don't know how to allocate my stats.

That said, after using the walkthrough, the heart that I expected to be there is very much there, which is why I recommend using it, at least enough to know where to put your stats, and maybe which dialogue choices to make on later playthroughs.

There are three love interests in Valentines Otome, which is a good number for an indie game like this. It allows each of them to have a fairly deep storyline and each playthrough will probably take most of an afternoon and evening.

The three guys are named Zane, Daire, and Kiron, which I found rather amusing as they feel very much like names for romance leads rather than names found in the real world, which is odd because Halloween Otome had Erik, Landon, and Tyler, which are comparatively more normal.

Despite the developer's suggested play order, I would actually recommend Kiron, Zane, and then Daire, because Kiron has a substantial event that happens at the end of his route that appears in Zane and Daire's as well, but in a glossed over form. It's very odd having a kidnapping, which is obviously a major event, be a footnote in any given playthrough. It matters the most on Kiron's route, doesn't matter at all on Zane's (though it is mentioned), and sets the stage for the ending of Daire's.

If this had been an Otomate game, Daire most likely would have been route-locked, not because he's the golden route, but because his route relies on having played Kiron's and it'll be easier to understand if you do. Zane can be skipped entirely.

As far as the different routes go, I enjoyed Kiron and Daire very much, but I had trouble with Zane's largely because Zane is a writer, and knowing something about how authors, I found his route too riddled with errors to be believable. It's something it's true of Valentines Otome in general--it's an overdramatized version of the real world where 90% of the population has ridiculously fancy names and you can take on well-armed goons with a large dog--but I found it much harder to buy into Zane just because being an author hit too close to home.

I don't really want to catalog everything that bugged me about Zane's route, but it's pretty obvious that the developer either doesn't know or doesn't care to be realistic about the publishing industry. For the vast majority of the player base this is probably okay, Zane's storyline is good if you want to have a turbulent romance with make-up sex (not graphic), but if you're a writer who knows anything about the publishing industry, going through his route is a lot of constant wincing.

I will say though, that the conversation about not reading your own book reviews is a spot-on and hilarious.

Kiron's route turned out to be a highlight, because his story does something unusual. I've never played an otome before where my love interest was crushing on another woman.

Basically, Kiron got drunk and married Mira, and he totally freaks out when he wakes up because he's actually in love with another woman, who turns out to be incredibly happy to hear he's gotten married. (Seriously, Anabelle shipping Kiron and Mira, and constantly torpedoing Kiron's dream and Mira's hopes to hook the the two of them up, is a source of great amusement.) Because Kiron is a nice guy he and Mira get along during their sham marriage, with the plan being to divorce in six months where it doesn't look as bad (as annulling the day after). They live together, in separate rooms, no sex, but he's otherwise a fantastic roommate and genuinely a good person who becomes friends with and encourages Mira.

The problem is that gradually he gets used to Mira being his wife, which causes all kinds of inner conflict because he doesn't understand why or how he came be in love with two different people.

The climax of his story is a bit odd because it has nothing to do with him personally, or Mira for that matter. One of his students is the target of a kidnapping attempt that ends up grabbing her, Anabelle (also one of her teachers), and Mira since they happened to be together at the same time. But even though he's just a high school teacher, he has a rather dangerous friend who is able to get them weapons and stuff so they can storm the kidnappers and rescue everyone. A large dog factors into this. It's silly, but because the amazing size of the dog and ability for said dog to pin people beneath it is telegraphed ahead of time, it's at least moderately believable that the rescue could succeed.

Kiron's realization that he loves Mira is also well done here, as he stops thinking about Anabelle almost entirely when the three are kidnapped. Nearly all of his headspace is dedicated to Mira and he doesn't even stop to think about why. It's only in the epilogue bit that Kiron realizes that he was in love with an ideal rather than a person, and even though Mira is far from the kind of person he would have been interested in, she's become the one he loves.

Daire's route is lot weirder and I suspect Synokoria was trying to stretch their legs. It's a romance with a laconic CEO who doesn't use a sentence when a word would do, and no words at all if he can get away with it. (If you liked Hajime Saitou in Hakuoki I think you'll like Daire.) The reason I feel his route is a little weirder is that I can feel that Synokoria was trying to do something more than a romance.

While Zane and Kiron's routes have unexpectedly violent climaxes, Daire actually invites a lot of his danger, and Mira is unaware of most of it, which is annoying since she's the protagonist. Daire has the most complicated backstory of the three and in a nutshell, his dad was killed in a literally hostile attempt to take over the company and he has six months to prove himself as a CEO otherwise he will be ousted by the board. Because of these six months he can't annul his marriage to Mira because it would be a PR disaster for him to have drunk married someone.

The climax of Daire's route focuses on him building a case to throw out the backstabbing board members and solidify his grip on his company, which is trying to deal with a potential alliance with a second company and a potential takeover from a third. Yes, it is complicated, and he is not the protagonist, and thirdly, this is a romance game, not a thriller.

Dabbling in another genre isn't bad, and many otome have mixed action and romance in the past, but the climax of Daire's route and his desire to avenge his father is so patently different from tone from the other two that it really stands out. There's even an epilogue tease with a gray morality character that hints at a potential third game and he's the final character seen on the Daire/Mira romance, not the romantic couple or their happy ending.

I also don't think action scenes are really Synokoria's strength. They do heart and sweetness very well. The romance is excellent. But fight scenes, not so much, and they're hard to do well in a visual novel since there is no movement on the screen. It also did not help that the seventeen-year-old lawyer happens to be a superman who packs heat as well as he writes contracts. Seriously, the kidnappers on both Kiron's and Daire's route are only solved because somebody called a teenager.

(Which is retrospect is really weird, because I think the audience is intended to be composed primarily of adults. All the love interests are in their late twenties and presumably Mira is around that age too.)

As far as Mira goes, she's a fun protagonist with a lot of personality. She's very comfortable with who she is and the idea of hooking up with guys that she has no intentions of staying with, which makes her a much different character from the vast majority of otome heroines. Prior to finding out that she got drunk married, her reaction to waking up in bed with a stranger is that she got lucky!

But as I was writing this, I realized that though she is the protagonist in name, she's really isn't far as the story is concerned. All the plot lines revolve around the men, which is unfortunate, because it would have been nice if there something she had to deal with that needed resolution by the end of the story. She does have problems, her disapproving parents show every route, but even when they get involved in trying to disrupt her marriage, facing them is never the ultimate test of the relationship. Instead it's a stalker, or a kidnapper, and nothing to do with her personally.

One thing that I do want to bring up though, is that Mira's approach to relationships is never frowned on by any of her love interests. She's a woman who doesn't date so much as she has friends with benefits or one night stands. But Daire, Zane, and Kiron are completely fine with that and never try to slut shame her. Daire even publicly defends her when someone tries to cast aspirations on their marriage because of it.

Overall, this was a very good indie effort. It's not flawless, but for the price it can't be beat and I think perhaps with more exposure and experience Synokoria could make something really good for their next game. And if you like their work, they say any donations for the game will go towards backgrounds (they license their background art), music expenses, and further games.

And I will say their music is top notch. I wish they had a downloadable soundtrack available.

Valentines Otome can be downloaded here and it's definitely worth checking out.