Merry Christmas!

Normally I schedule my blog posts to go on up Mondays, and since this Monday is Christmas it seems a bit weird not to acknowledge it. So, I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate, or a good day if you don't.

Look back on this year there's a lot I didn't get done that I hoped I would have. For instance, I've embarrassingly have not finished any books this year. That isn't to say I haven't read any, but I haven't finished, which is a bit annoying. So when my Top 5 lists go up starting next week, there won't be one for books I've read, since even if I manage to squeeze one in this year, it doesn't see right to showcase just the one. I'll try for a fresh start in 2024.

Similarly, I want to get back into writing regularly again in 2024. To be honest I haven't been able to set a regular schedule for myself since the Covid pandemic, and I don't know if it's an artifact of the fact I'm still working at home or that I just haven't found my groove again after my stomach cancer. But again, that's something I hope to remedy.

I see how this post is starting to turn into a New Year's resolution post, so enough with that!

I'm currently enjoying even if Tempest for the Switch, which feels like an otome tailor made for me between the detective work, the romance, and the dark fantasy setting. I actually forgot I was playing an otome at one point because I was so engrossed in the witch trial portion of the game. It'll be fun trying to fit everything I want to say in the VN Talk for it, but I have a little time since I have other game posts scheduled go up after my Top 5 lists go through.

See you in the next year and have a good one!

Catching Up on an Online Story as a New or Lapsed Player

I used to play World of Warcraft like a lot of fantasy fans, and while I gradually became disenchanted with it over the years, what finally killed it for me was the one-two punch of my stomach cancer surgery, which prevented me from playing for months, and the sexual harassment scandal at Blizzard. The news broke literally the month I thought it was time to resubscribe.

This was during the Shadowlands expansion and I'd long since tired of raiding and grinding. I was mostly there for the ongoing story, and my favorite activity when I ran out of story on my main was making an alt of a different class and leveling through the story all over again.

After enough expansions, Blizzard understandably did not want everyone to play through an increasingly long leveling experience all over again with every character, nor did they want new players to spend too much time trying to catch up with their friends at end game.

So they introduced things like experience boosting heirloom gear to help people level up faster, or outright level skips that could come with the purchase of an expansion. I never used either because the point of my leveling a new character was to see all the stops along the way.

Eventually the leveling process went through so many expansions that they just overhauled the entire process, relegating all content older than Battle for Azeroth to being just "old content" and starting all new players off immediately with BfA as a new "Year 0." Older players could choose to timewalk and level in a different expansion of their choosing, but gone was the whole leveling through the entire story to understand the context of what happened before. I think that was about the time my interest in leveling alts really started to flag.

I actually came back for a few months of the latest expansion Dragonflight because a friend surprise gifted it to me along with a subscription so I could play with her. It was my first time coming back in the middle of an expansion, and I lacked any idea of what happened between the end of Shadowlands and the beginning of Dragonflight.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 5: Vilio

Vilio was the character whose route I most wanted to play. I don't always like the poster boys, but Vilio is such an unabashed ray of sunshine that he's actually billed in-universe as your friendly neighborhood dragon. (And his color scheme of red hair with red outfit gives me a bit of an Ys nostalgia vibe, if Adol Christin ever turned into an overenthusiastic dragon.) On other routes, if characters are feeling down or the odds look far too long, Vilio is often the one to give them an optimistic push, to remind them that they're CIRCUS and they'll find a way!

In many ways, I feel Vilio embodies the spirit of Radiant Tale the most. Why shouldn't a cheerful dragon be the poster boy of a game where we solve the world's problems by putting a smile on people's faces?

He can be a bit much, with his extroverted nature and the joy of seeing the world beyond his village combining into a person who is ready to go just about anywhere and do anything, but there's never a sense of abrasiveness about it. The common route and the routes of other love interests tend to play him fairly one note as an over the top curiosity seeker with the occasional shift to seriousness when the situation calls for it, which made me wonder why such an outwardly earnest guy would be the gated love interest. Looking back, it's really Zafora's route that gives the best inkling of what Vilio's actual route will be like.

Radiant Tale was only released a few months ago, so be warned there will be spoilers after the break!

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 4: Radie

Sometimes to get a jump on the blog writing I'll start a post before I'm done with a route. It's usually to get some initial thoughts down or to make sure I don't forget something important. It might also contain why a particular character ended up in the play order they did. Occasionally this results in some tweaking as I finish the route and new facts come to light, but Radie had given me a number of false starts and it's because the character I loved was not the one I romanced.

My impression of Radie kept changing from the common route to the first half of his route, to the second half, all the way up until the end. He occupies an unusual space in Tifalia's life since he's not human and has been with her since childhood. He's close enough to be considered family, but because he looks like a cute and cuddly fey beast most of the time (and Tifalia doesn't know any better until midway through Chapter 1 of the story) it's hard to say exactly what family role he occupies. He looks after her like a guardian, but his size and cuddliness suggests more of a pet.

And before I go much further, please realize that Radie's route, though available at the start, contains a fair amount of backstory that isn't covered on other routes and I'll be spoiling that here. While his route doesn't spoil other routes, since they all operate fairly independently of each other, you might be unable to keep that backstory knowledge out of the back of your mind while playing, and for me personally I might have ended up annoyed with Radie for the bulk of the game.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 3: Paschalia

Paschalia ended up being my third route by virtue of being leftover after Zafora and Ion's stories snagged my initial interest, Vilio being locked as the final route, and Radie being recommended for second to last. Also, I generally want to put what I expect to be the least appealing route in the middle, so I have something to look forward to if the middle ends up as less than appealing.

This doesn't mean that I disliked Paschalia, but he's a difficult character to get a feel for on the common route. He's described as being almost ethereal, and that's as apt a description as any. He's soft spoken and non-confrontational. He seems kind, but in practice rarely volunteers to do anything helpful. (The other guys will even mention he didn't help them set up their tents.) He's kind of like pretty wallpaper that happens to be able to do some magic.

We know from the prologue that Paschalia's flowing appearance and blue hair show that he's bonded with a powerful water spirit since the stronger the spirit the greater the mark they make on the person who forms a contract with them, but he seems reluctant to use water magic and wants to find another powerful water mage. But none of that is brought up again unless the player selects him during town events, so if you're not already aiming for Paschalia, he's left something of a gentle enigma.

Now, this is a relatively recent release so be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 2: Ion

Since I already had a save set up with Ion's first solo scene complete, it was easy to resume his route, and I already knew his was going to be the darkest of the initial four. How dark? Well, dark for a story where the joy of the common people can cause healing flowers to bloom. But in other games, it could just as well be business as usual.

I want to say that I liked Ion's route, because there's a lot that I did. Tifilia is wonderfully proactive. I love how she's the one who makes the first move and works hard to convince Ion it's worth having a future. His backstory is already covered in the common route, but once on his actual route the story squeezes an exquisite amount of drama from it. His past is never just a bit of color to flesh out the person he is, but actively affects his present. It constrains him throughout his route and the way the details, particularly the hurdles, are parceled out is at an excellent pace so it doesn't feel too heavy-handed or belatedly included.

But the emotional story between Tifilia and Ion, and Ion's personal journey, is about the only thing that's handled well. The rest of the time I felt like the writer(s) were hoping no one would look too closely and not realize that certain things didn't make sense.

This is a relatively recent release so be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 2: Zafora

I caught what seems to have been a cold that knocked me out on Sunday last week, which ordinarily would have been the day I prepared my post, so this is coming a little late. I'm definitely feeling better now, though I'm not over it entirely and I might not be for a while. This has been my first illness since my cancer treatment left me somewhat immunocompromised, so I don't have a good idea of how long it'll take me to fully get over other than it's longer than it used to be.

That said, back to my next post on Radiant Tale. Beware of spoilers ahead!

After my premature common route ending due to spreading my affection points across too many characters, I knew I wanted to choose between Zafora and Ion. The random Paschalia scenes I got didn't leave me feeling like I knew the character any better, and Zafora and Ion both had intriguing story hooks between Zafora trying to reclaim his father's title and Ion's past as a slave gladiator. I thought I might play through some of Ion's early scenes and then double back to Zafora if he ended up interesting me more, but after I finished my first city exploration with Ion on my second playthrough I knew.

I had to play Zafora. Not resolving his story was bugging the heck out of me, so I left the Ion save alone for a later playthrough and replayed through the common route more cautiously on a new save. This time I made different choices where I'd messed up before (which made up for all those times I accidentally wound up with Paschalia scenes), and finally was rewarded with the last chapter of the common route segueing into the Zafora specific route.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2023

Radiant Tale came to my attention for its bright fantasy setting, even though I was less keen on the circus motif. Oddly though, it is a motif rather than a genuine circus. In a rather Japanese fashion, the key members of the cast are part of a performance troupe called CIRCUS (where "Circus" is quite obviously said in English and the name is stylized in all caps for the English translation) and they have a large tent they perform in, but after the first chapter they're more of a theater production than a circus. The troupe is touring the kingdom in order to bring joy to the nation's major cities and cause the healing Chloris flowers to bloom in order to restore the magically stricken prince.

While I can't say this is a game with no evil or no bad guys, and multiple routes have a sense of life and death drama, it is definitely optimistic and the kind of world where the characters really can make things better for people purely by giving a performance that speaks to them.

Radiant Tale could easily have gone the route of having a generic medieval fantasy world found in a lot of anime these days, but I found I loved the worldbuilding in this one. In fact, while some otome games' glossaries feel rather superfluous, Radiant Tale's lore is not window dressing. It's stuffed with detail, and while you might wonder why you need to learn that mages are able to cast magic because they've formed a contract with an elemental spirit, it's all setup for when that knowledge is necessary. Though it can be overwhelming at first, the story is good enough to ensure you remember the important bits even if you're the type to ignore every codex entry that pops up for further reading.

This game is a recent release as of this writing, so please be aware there will be spoilers after the break.

Time Flies and the End of 2023 is Careening Towards Me

I often joke about how at the rate time moves my life will be over before I know it. It's hard to believe it's October already, so we're in the final quarter of 2023.

Most people probably save their retrospectives for December with their end of the year posts, and I usually do my own in January (largely because I don't post more often than once a week and I won't know what last minute books, games, and anime I'll squeeze in the last minute of December). So what October means for me is a general sense of running out of time.

How much did I write this year? Am I ready for another round of NaNoWriMo in November? Did I make any progress on my gaming backlog? Fall is the rush to squeeze in everything I've been putting off all year. I'm not one to make new year's resolutions in January so much as try to complete all of them in the rush to December.

Usually something gets missed. I keep trying new ways to track and manage my time, and I like my current time tracker, so when I wonder "Where did Friday go?" I can actually say "Yes, there was a doctor's appointment, I went grocery shopping afterward, I fell asleep the rest of the afternoon, chatted with gaming friends in the evening, and then played video games until bedtime." So I know what I'm doing. Managing it is still work in progress.

It's interesting being able to see where my time is going, and being able to skip month to month or days at a glance (I'm using a tabbed spreadsheet). Sometimes I use it for something completely unrelated to time management such as "When did I have my last MRI?" since I know I'll find it in there.

But still, time waits for no one and 2023 is already on its way out.

I expect to do NaNoWriMo in November, and I'm mentioning it now because I expect to start my VN Talk series for Radiant Tale next Monday and I'd like it to run uninterrupted for the six weeks it'll take to finish, which will take us midway into November, and a little late to be making NaNo announcements. I really enjoyed this game, it was my single must-play of the year, and though it has its share of things I'm going to complain about, I want to say that the reason I tend to point out the various things that didn't work for me in these various story-based "Talk" posts, is because I like these kinds of games and I wish they had done better. I only ever cover games I like enough to complete.

I'm not sure what will come after Radiant Tale on this blog, but I would like to finish at least one more otome visual novel and one RPG period before the end of the year, though depending on the kind of RPG it might not be post-worthy material. Etrian Odyssey III keeps giving me funny looks and it always bothers me when a game I'm partially through (and still plan to finish) comes out with an HD remake because my playthrough has taken that long.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 7: Finale

As you finish every best ending in the game, an old timey film plays with a countdown starting at 5 and counting down as each ending is achieved, with 0 heralding the finale. I was expecting a brand new route, but instead it branches off of Gilbert's with a few new scenes being added to the parts in common between them, which feels a bit weird, but I suppose makes sense given that the finale serves as an explanation for what was going on in Gilbert's route as well as a deeper dive into the backstory between the Key Maidens and the Falzone family.

If the player makes the right choices in the prologue and Gilbert's route (which are generally easy to spot because they are new), fake editions of a national newspaper show up announcing sordid crimes by the various mafia families that causes them to fall out of favor with the common people, and this comes to a head shortly after Gilbert and Liliana find out about the casino being in on the counterfeiting. Liliana's safety is Gilbert's priority, and since staying with any of the mafia now is decidedly not safe, she goes back to the church. Since this happens before she falls in love with Gilbert, the Finale branch proceeds with Liliana unattached to anyone.

If Gilbert's route felt like a golden route with everybody being at their action-packed best, the Finale is more like a fan disk, with lots of lower stakes and moments of warmth. Once Gilbert is no longer the primary male character in Liliana's life, Orlok takes up being her bodyguard (since he's unaffiliated with the mafia) and she gets scenes with all of the guys to varying degrees to reflect her lack of attachment. If not for the fact they are in a race against time to foil the casino direttore's plans and discover his identity, I would say that the route is quite fluffy, with most of the guys being kind to her.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 6: Gilbert

Throughout the game I was wondering why Gilbert was the final love interest, especially since Dante's route felt like it explains so much of the church storyline and Gilbert doesn't seem involved in that at all.

That said, starting his route was a lot of fun because the game knows the player has a certain baseline of information to work with, including the back stories of all the love interests aside from Gilbert, so even if Liliana is bewildered about a three way battle erupting in the church when Yang comes to kidnap her, it's laughingly business as usual to the player. The only thing that was a little weird is that after fighting breaks out between the Lao-Shu and Falzone, Orlok is the one to rescue Liliana from Yang and send her running out into the night clad in nothing but her nightgown while he tries to hold everyone else back.

So while everybody who is aware that she's a valuable person is fighting, who does she bump into but Gilbert Redford, who is out for a late night walk. And I was (probably unintentionally) amused that after offering her shelter and security, Gilbert declared that the safest place in Burlone is next to him. Considering that he is the one love interest who has been killed by every other love interest on at least one other route through the game, I probably would have felt safer with anyone else (barring Yang).

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 5: Orlok

Orlok's route is unlocked at the same time as Yang's, by the completion of Nicola or Dante's route, which at first felt like an unusual step, but once I discovered he and Liliana spend almost half the route with the Lao-Shu I could see some kind of logic behind it.

Nicola and Dante are both part of the Falzone, and their routes serve as an introduction to the status quo of the city and how the various characters and factions fit together. Yang and Orlok are a showcase of the Lao-Shu side of the story and why the tension in Burlone has come to a boiling point at this particular moment in time.

But just as the opening routes and the first set of unlocked routes can be grouped together by mafia family, you can group Nicola and Yang's routes as being completely secular and unrelated to the greater story, while Dante and Orlok's can't help but be tangled up by all the church intrigue. Thus, while I don't think it makes much of a difference whether Yang's route is played second, third, or fourth (with Gilbert being a mandatory fifth due to route-lock order), playing Orlok before Dante would be an incredibly different experience.

I don't think it would necessarily be a bad one, but the player would be working with a different set of assumptions for most of the route and I'd be curious how that changes the experience.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 4: Dante

It felt a bit odd playing Dante's route in the middle, because he's the poster boy (usually sharing the spot with Gilbert), but given that I got Nicola first and wasn't sure about doing back to back Falzone routes, this is how things played out. He was a conscious choice rather than a roleplaying one though, since the prologue doesn't introduce new choices with a second route completion and because I knew some spoilers I had a preference to play his route before Orlok's.

Dante is the dedicated boss of the Falzone family, and as such is intrinsically tied to Liliana's own story, and it's in Dante's route that we find out why. In fact his story is so tied to why everyone's fighting over her that some players are surprised he's one of the two routes available at the story of the game, as playing Nicola's route is a fairly straightforward mob story and Dante's shoots off into Da Vinci Code territory.

Though it starts in a similar fashion to other routes, with Liliana falling under Dante's protection and being hustled away to the Falzone manor, and then there's some sitting around at home while lots of mafia dealings are happening, there's a distinct change when the term "Key Maiden" comes up.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 3: Yang

After Nicola, I was a little ambivalent about which route to play next. I didn't outright dislike any of the characters, but neither were any of them jumping out at me as a person whose story I just had to see. I still had a bit of an inclination towards Dante, but I had just played through Nicola who was a Falzone so I wasn't sure I wanted to play a second route back to back from the perspective of the same crime family. Since I had completed a route though, Yang and Orlok had unlocked, so I decided to spin the wheel and role-play through the prologue again to see who I'd end up with.

With the newer, more expanded prologue, I kept all the same answers as last time, and winged it on the newer choices. As you can guess from the title and header of this post, I got Yang. Which meant that it was time to gird my loins and see if this mess was going to be as bad as I feared, because it was Yang's route that made me question whether I wanted to play this game.

Firstly, I can see why Yang is a divisive character among the fanbase. He's a charismatic but amoral man who is very much like a cat who plays with its food, and in this case, this food is Liliana. He makes it quite clear that her life is forfeit if she bores him, and though she is rightly terrified, she does her best to keep her wits about her because his goodwill demands that she does. Or at least she does in the beginning and occasionally in the middle. Other times she has bouts of making nice person appeals under the assumption he knows what compassion is, only to realize for the umpteenth time that he doesn't have any.

If you want to romance an unrepentant villain who doesn't become a better person through the power of love, then Yang isn't a bad pick. He's ruthless and cunning, competent but mercurial, and his habit of doing what he wants when the mood strikes him tends to work in his favor, except that I found it a little less believable when it comes to his treatment of Liliana, since I can't believe that being relatively nice to her is something he wouldn't find boring after a while.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 2: Nicola

As previously discussed, Piofiore: Fated Memories has a short prologue with only a few seemingly noncommittal decisions (only two of which can be made on first playthrough), so I wasn't entirely sure what set me on Nicola's route. I actually was hoping for Dante since Nicola's character design suggests someone disinclined to take things seriously, and he's a flirt, which is a character type that rarely works with me. Nicola didn't disappoint though.

Both Nicola and Dante are part of the leadership of the Falzone family, with Dante being the boss and his cousin Nicola being the underboss, and when Liliana nearly gets kidnapped by the Lao-Shu, they take her into protective custody. She doesn't know why, and Nicola's route doesn't go into the real reason, but she's fairly cooperative about it, understanding that whatever the reason, the Falzone are looking out for her, and the head nun of her church is agreeable to this plan of action.

Nicola's route is a nice pop culture showcase of how a mafia man can be a vicious killer, but also be the same guy who goes to church on Sundays and sets up soup kitchens for the poor. The goons who hang out at the family's residence with Liliana are all friendly to her, and in return she often cooks for them as a way to show her appreciation for handling her safety. Nicola ends up being her primary point of contact, though he's not particularly warm about it. That's not to say he isn't friendly, he certainly flirts with her, but you get the feeling it's an arm's length sort of congeniality. Lili herself takes his kindness at face value, but Nicola never masks the kind of person he is or the line of work he does. In fact it often feels like he's trying to warn her not to get emotionally invested in him.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2020

Piofiore: Fated Memories came out the same year as Cafe Enchante, and while I pre-ordered one of them, the other I did not, despite my love for anime-tinged mafia stories. And the reason for that is largely down to one route that I had read about from an import reviewer.

If you've read enough of my otome VN Talks, you know that I really don't like controlling love interests, particularly when it comes down to dubious consent or attempted sexual assault. I knew one route in this game would contain actual assault, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.

But as time passed and I absorbed more through osmosis from being around the general otome community, I realized that I probably knew enough that I could go in with a full suit of mental armor and if it really got uncomfortable, I would mash the autoplay button and just come back after the scene was over. So I picked up Piofiore during a sale and added it to my backlog, because I still really wanted a mafia game.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders and Piofiore VN Talk Delay

I'll talk about Piofiore: Fated Memories first since the intention was that I start my seven part VN Talk series (overview, 5 love interests, and finale) today, but after spending far too much time combing through screenshots on my Switch I realized I wasn't going to finish trimming my library down to a manageable level in time for posting.

When I first started blogging about games, there wasn't a lot of screen capture support, particularly for the portable units I favored, so it wasn't until I got my Vita that I could begin transferring things. At first it was just key scenes I thought I might use in my blog, but then I started taking screen caps of dialogue to use as plot references, screen caps of characters' last names or minor character names that might be hard to find online.

It started becoming relatively common for me to take a couple hundred screenshots per route (of which at most 5-6 will be added to the blog) and for some reason that I'm sure I'll understand once I get far enough through the gallery, I ended up taking several hundred (rough estimate of 700-800) of Piofiore's Finale route. I suspect most of that is plot material. Since the Finale isn't going up until seven weeks out, it might seem strange to postpone the first installment of the series while I clear out the entire library, but the thing is, when I have so many it becomes incredibly hard to figure out which are the best to use and I want the overview to be a look at the game as a whole. Which in a way is the opposite problem I had when I first started with Vita games, where it was more common for me to not have an appropriate screenshot at all.

Out of the 2300 screenshots, I started with, I only managed to get down to 2000 in the time I expected to do my blog editing. And it wasn't particularly hard to do either. I have a lot of stuff I don't need to save. One problem particular to Piofiore is that some of the details I screenshotted for reference turned out to be lies or misdirection so I ended up deleting what are the equivalent of my notes for plot points that don't actually matter. I'm about halfway through my third route, and as mentioned, the finale seems to be hogging the lion's share. By the time I'm done I expect they'll still be in the hundreds, but better than two thousand. Fingers crossed for next week.

Chinese Representation in Piofiore: Fated Memories

I've been playing Piofiore: Fated Memories for the past month or so, and I just finished this past weekend. The plan was to start this Monday off with my usual overview followed by a weekly breakdown of each route until I hit the end. But due to how the finale is and is not related to the overall plot, as well as how it's a sort of sub-route of Gilbert's, I realized that I needed a little more time to figure out which posts are going to cover what material so I don't end up repeating myself.

Instead I'm going to post what was originally going to be a follow-up to my VN Talk series for Piofiore. It has mild spoilers and is a bit of a personal bugbear so I knew it wasn't something I could discuss in either the Overview or Yang posts because it would take up too much space I needed to talk about the actual story rather than venting my frustrations about how the Chinese characters are handled.

When I started the game I was predisposed to dislike Yang, partially because I knew ahead of time that his characterization mostly consisted of being a terrible person, but also because I (unfortunately) dislike a lot of Chinese characters in Japanese media, for being exoticized and a general sense of most writers not knowing what they're doing. Chinese characters are not the exclusive target of this. Anyone who's watched a decent amount of anime has likely seen some strange American and/or European characters that look like they stepped out of a clearing house for stereotypes.

When your primary representation comes in the form of women with hair buns and both genders running around in qipao and changshan (which are not actually traditional Chinese clothing as they come from the Manchu minority) it gets a little tiring after a while. Admittedly this might be less of an issue (like how the funny Americans in anime never bother me) if I had access to more Chinese media, but I haven't found enough in translation that really clicks with me. A native Chinese speaker might look at Piofiore and be completely unbothered.

Anime Talk: Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion

I had heard good things about Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion, but I think I just wasn't in the mood for yet another girl/woman from our world reborn in another one story, so when it came out last spring, I didn't watch it in favor of my must-see weekly viewing of My Home Hero, in which a middle-aged married couple try to cover up the murder of their daughter's abusive boyfriend.

While I still liked My Home Hero, I suppose the fact I'm now writing about Raeliana shows which of the two I ultimately liked better. But that said, it never crossed my mind to write about My Home Hero (probably because I don't write contemporary crime dramas). I probably would have not written about Raeliana either if it had been a run-of-the-mill isekai anime, even if it was good, but it was more than good.

It was great, and I can see why people were talking about the manhwa (Korean comic) well before the anime was announced. There are slight name changes because the anime is a Japanese production and so the protagonist Eunha became Rinko for the Japanese audience, but for the most part this doesn't matter since Eunha/Rinko is pushed off a building, presumably falling to her death, in the opening minutes of the first episode. When she awakens, she is Raeliana, a minor character in a book she read, whose murder at the start of the book sparks the heroine's return to her home country from abroad.

Those aren't great circumstances to be reborn in! After dying already in one life, she's not ready to die again in the coming weeks/months, so in a fashion similar to other isekai where the destination world has a predetermined plot, the new Raeliana is determined to stave off death by any means possible by using the knowledge she has of the days to come.

This part is a little rote, but buoyed by excellent execution. Raeliana knows her murderer is her fiancé, who will kill her post-marriage and take advantage of her grieving parents' wealth, so she does everything she can to be as incompetent a fiancée as possible (including accidentally on purpose almost shooting him in the head) so as to break their engagement. She feels a little bad about it because her fiancé is old nobility who will add legitimacy and provide important connections for her "new money" family, the kind that became rich enough to just buy their noble title, but she's not willing to die just to keep the plot intact. And when her fiancé, who is not that stupid, cottons on to the fact she wants to break the engagement, he is furious with her.

Raeliana realizes that the only way she can successfully break the engagement without endangering herself and her family is to come under the protection of an even more powerful noble, which is… why Raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion.

Frostpunk - Yes, There's a Story Here

Platform: Windows (also on Mac, PS4, XB1)
Release: 2018 (Windows), 2019 (PS4, XB1), 2021 (Mac)

I originally wasn't going to write anything about Frostpunk since it doesn't contain much of a central narrative and no one would really sell it to a player as a "story-based" game, but one thing I love is when a game emotionally moves me. Frostpunk does that, and also it is an amazing example of showing (or experiencing, since this is a video game) rather than telling, so I figured it was worth discussing.

The basic premise of Frostpunk is that the world is facing a catastrophic winter likely caused by volcanic eruptions around the equator, but there may have been other extenuating factors as suggested by some of the lore nuggets you can uncover over the course of gameplay. All that's really necessary to know is that the game is set in an alternate history steampunk Victorian England and you take on the role of a captain in charge of a small group of survivors try to build a new home around one of the generators built as a last ditch haven for humanity survive a winter with no end in sight.

The game comes with four basic scenarios, each following a different group of people with differing circumstances, so I will mainly talk about "A New Home" since that is considered the main scenario and the one everyone has to start by default before unlocking the others.

My Next Life as a Villainess Game was Always Going to be Otome

Anime Expo takes place over the weekend including or closest to American Independance Day, and being one of the largest conventions in the country as well as near the US branches of many a Japanese company, it was not surprising that Idea Factory International chose that time to announce the English langauge release of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance-. (Yes, that's a long title, but that's what you get when you add a subtitle to an already long title with a subtitle.)

I've read a few of the books, watched both seasons of the anime, and wrote a little about the series, so when a game was announced I hoped it would eventually be localized given the series' popularity. But I was uncertain this would happen given that it was a licensed title, meaning more stakeholders would be involved, and this was an otome game, which is growing but still a rather niche genre in the US.

Because of that niche genre bit, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to raise a fuss over Catarina not being able to date women.

You see, in the series, Catarina is a high school girl reborn as a character in the otome game she was currently playing at the time of her unfortunate demise. She uses her knowledge of the game to avoid her character's inevitable death or exile (depending on the ending) and in the process makes the rest of the cast fall in love with her by being a nice person who encourages them and cares about their problems (though some of that was motivated by trying to avoid getting killed/exiled by them or their loved ones).

So even though the setting is that of an otome game and there is some lampooning of otome game tropes, Catarina's romantic interests includes both boys and girls. This is where the potential fan expectation mismatch comes in.

My Next Life as a Villainess introduced a lot of people to otome who had never given the genre a second thought, and as a result don't have a clear image of what is it or what the tropes are. For instance, the idea of having a villainess at all runs from extremely rare to non-existent, but because of the series, there are a number of fans who will ask around for otome games just like the one in the anime only to learn that no such game exists outside of possibly the indie scene.

Hearing that Catarina is having an all new adventure in an otome game, might lead such a player to assume that they will get to date any of Catarina's would-be love interests, leading to disappointment when they leave that only the male options are available.

Of course that's the case. Because this is an otome game.

The market for romance games is fairly segmented in Japan and each runs with their own tropes. There's BL and yuri for queer relationships, galge (or bishoujo) for male protagonists romancing women, and otome for female protagonists romancing men. You don't have everyone can romance everybody else games except possibly in the indie scene. (In the English speaking world, there is a small movement to create a new grouping called amare that covers that niche.)

On occasion there are otome that will include one same sex or non-binary romance option, but the majority will be male. That's the expectations of the audience. So when My Next Life as a Villainess was announced by Otomate, Idea Factory's otome label, everyone familiar with the market knew that it was going to be male options only. In the world of My Next Life as a Villainess Catarina's admirers are split between four boys and three girls, so there was no way to accomodate all seven of them and fit in genre convention, and trying to chase multiple audiences would likely result in a significant chunk of the players feeling they paid for content they don't care about.

Otome visual novels generally aren't like picking a romance option in Mass Effect or Fire Emblem where the romance consists of a few scenes wrapped around a larger central story. Depending on the game, as much as 90% or more of the path from start to finish can be unique to a particular love interest, which is why I often break out otome into multiple posts on my blog. There is such much that can be unique to each route and all the dialogue is voiced in a game that mostly consists of reading text.

While there is certainly a subset people who would play every route in the game no matter which gender the love interest is, the otome player who is more an otome fan than a Villainess fan might be disappointed when half the routes aren't something they would be interested in playing. Similarly, fans who want to set up Catarina with one of the girls might not be interested in having the boys as options at all. It's a big ask for someone to pay full price for a romance game when they know don't care about half the love interests before they even get started.

And the thing is, Otomate is its own label for a reason. Everything it makes is otome and there are annual events in Japan like Otomate Party which are dedicated to fans of its games. It's a brand. If a game comes out of Otomate, it had better have female protagonists romancing male love interests or it has no business being there. I know of one blogger who bought the Japanese version of the Pirates of the Disturbance game without having watched the Villainess anime or read the books because playing otome games is something she does. Otomate would not win points with its core audience's expectations by deviating from their brand.

So, one might ask, why didn't the IP holders go with someone else?

I'm sure they considered the possibility of giving Catarina a chance to have a happy ending with everyone, but there are two things I think that made it inevitable any romance game for My Next Life as a Villainess was going to be otome. First, there's the fact that it's a parody of otome, and a creative team that works within the genre will likely be able to lampoon it with love better than an outsider. And second, it's just not a good fit anywhere else. Galge tends to be the closest romance subgenre to mass market (the venerable Fate stay/night and all its spin-offs started as an adults-only galge), but Catarina is not male nor does she fit the self-insert nature of most galge protagonists. Yuri is even more niche than otome, leaving otome as the only pre-established option.

As for going it alone, I suspect that the cost of advertising a romance game to the general masses would be too much for the amount of people who would likely buy it (who again, likely have their own romantic preferences). Even if it meant cutting out half the would-be lovers to make sure that Otomate could also release it to its regular fans who are fans of the genre rather than Villainess itself, it would allow the game to remain closer in spirit to its source material (while being financially viable) than anything else.

The anime stakeholders, and quite likely author Satoru Yamaguchi himself, signed off on the deal so everyone knew going in what the concessions were going to be.

Would I have played all the options if they were put in? Sure! I like the characters and I find the in-fighting in Catarina's "harem" entertaining. But I have my romance game preferences too, and if half the love interests were women in a game I had no prior connection to, the hurdle to get me to play that game versus another otome would be much higher. It would have to be a game that's recommended to me by a friend, or the developer reached out to me as with Kiss the Demiurge. And it's likely the stakeholders were cognizant of that.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 6: Mizuki

I left Mizuki for last, not out of a sense of saving the best (or second best) for last as I sometimes do, but because I didn't know what to make of him and sometimes seeing a character on someone else's route is what I need to pique my interest.

Unfortunately, I still didn't know what to make of him by the time he was the only one of the initial five routes left. We know from the prologue that he's a former pop star who decided to change careers and become a bodyguard, which is a little weird, and for someone who must have spent a lot of time in front of crowds and cameras, he comes off as a rather muted personality. If there was a vote for bodyguard most likely to fade into the background, the winner would be Mizuki.

He has no prior connection to the MC, he's not in the command chain, and he's not outgoing enough to make an impression. For much of the game he occupied a nebulous space in my mind as "that fifth guy" which made me a little hesitant to buy his route, but since the series was on sale I figured it would be roughly equivalent to losing $3 if I didn't like it, so I picked it up.

And Mizuki is initially weird... really weird. He immediately comes off as serious about his job, and directly tells the MC not to fall in love with him, but then he's also talking to animals like a fairy tale princess, which is probably one of the last things I'd expect of a crack bodyguard. (He says he can't really talk to animals because that would be silly, but even if he can't literally talk to them, he can get them to do some very non-instinctive things for him.)

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 5: Sora

I was looking forward to Sora's route since he's a bright and optimistic personality on the other routes, even if he tends to get a little too huggy with the MC, but by the time I finished it, I wasn't sure I liked him as much anymore. It wasn't that he turned out to be a secret jerk, but there were two things about him that bothered me on his route.

The MC meets Sora first out of all the bodyguards during her rescue in the prologue, but she thinks she's being helped by another woman, who turns out to be Sora, who sometimes crossdresses as a disguise. He looks really good as a woman, and given his upbeat personality and that he's even enthusiastic about it on other routes, I assumed he was fine with it. And I actually think that he is fine with it, and proud of how well he passes, since he even has a photo album of him in his disguises which he admits are all of him dressed as a woman.

Given his protests on his own route, I suspect the problem is that Sora doesn't want to look feminine in front of a woman he's attracted to, but even if the MC is nothing but supportive he always feels resistant about it. It's not until the ending when the MC tells him his disguise is what allowed them to meet that he kind of dials it back, but it doesn't feel like there was a solid resolution on how he really feels about it and I didn't like the "I can't look girly in front of my woman" vibe I was getting.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 4: Subaru

Subaru, though seemingly the poster boy of My Sweet Bodyguard, actually pissed me off in the prologue for being rude and arrogant, so I wasn't inclined to like him, but he becomes a lot more tolerable later in Katsuragi and Kaiji's routes, which softened my impression of him. I especially liked seeing him discombobulated by Kaiji's sisters, which showed that he wasn't as put-together as he pretended to be. (And his freak out expression is a nice contrast to his usual smug one.)

It admittedly helps that the MC's internal commentary after choosing him is full of snark. She's impressed by his resume (Harvard grad, studied in Paris, professional accolades, etc.), but not his personality, which makes it a little weird when she starts falling for him about a third of the way in. There is the "there's only one bed" trope which results in them awkwardly sharing it, and unlike the other love interests, he passes himself off as the MC's boyfriend to cover for his need to shadow her 24/7. This produces some expected emotional confusion, but he doesn't act terribly boyfriend-like other than physical proximity.

I guess it's nice that he cleans her place and cooks for her (because those are always boyfriend points), but the way he does it suggests more that he thinks her standards are below what he can tolerate if he's going to be living with her. It's like no good deed he does comes without a put down, but the MC is attracted to him anyway. In universe multiple people comment on how attractive he is so I suppose it's possible the MC just can't get over how gorgeous he is, but as the player I think his character design is just "okay" and not obviously more attractive than the other love interests.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 3: Kaiji

As I mentioned in last week's My Sweet Bodyguard post, I was leaning towards choosing Kaiji as a love interest for being a similar age to the MC, and also being a childhood friend, which I thought could make for a more interesting dynamic than the other characters who are all strangers.

I thought it was off to a promising start. People who knew each other as children and then separated as they went to different schools, only to randomly meet each other again later in life is a thing that happens. So I wasn't bothered by the MC not remembering certain aspects of their childhood friendship, and though their romance does include a childhood marriage proposal, that's pretty much par for the course. I expect to be running into tropes in this game, so there's no harm in feeding the player the candy they're here for.

But even though I thought we were off to a promising start with the two getting reacquainted after an uncertain number of years (I think the MC moved away when she was about eleven, but the exact age is unclear), I found I didn't like their dynamic that much. Kaiji has a lot of fun teasing her due to their shared history, but otherwise spends a lot of time telling other characters how he's not interested in her. And meanwhile the MC spends a lot of time noting evidence that supports her theory that Kaiji hates women (he actually never says anything of the sort).

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 2: Katsuragi

Picking Daichi Katsuragi first was a "me choice" rather than seeing who the protagonist seemed to mesh with the best. Voltage protagonists are never named, though they often come with their own personality, so they aren't completely blank slates. But when I first started messing around with the Love 365 app I didn't think about it so much as looking for a story with a love interest that I would find interesting. So those early days were a lot of hopscotching through the various titles to use my free reading time as much as possible before I had to pay.

What I'm getting at, is I was lured to My Sweet Bodyguard due to its premise (a lot of Voltage games are exactly what the name says on the tin) and then chose Katsuragi to be my protagonist's bodyguard because I thought if I was going to read a romance with any of these guys, I wanted the boss, who's older and more experienced than the others. (Might also be my own age talking.) I played about halfway through his story before my free time ran out and then set the game aside as I played other things.

Coming back after all this time, and having bought a bunch of other My Sweet Bodyguard routes while they were on sale, I restarted from the prologue and found I almost wanted to set up the protagonist with either Kaiji or Subaru, just so their age would be closer. Katsuragi's age isn't given anywhere to my knowledge, but since he's the only love interest who goes by his family name instead of his given one, he's probably several years older so they would not be able to address each other as peers. My personal guess is he's in his thirties since there are other love interests in Love 365 who are canonically in their forties and they look older than Katsuragi.

VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: iOS (also on Android)
Release: 2013

My Sweet Bodyguard is a Love 365 title, which means that it's a part of Voltage's pay-per-route otome library app. Though I don't usually gravitate towards a particular trope in my otome gaming, on seeing this title I was actually surprised that the bodyguard trope hadn't already been exploited left and right, and arguably hasn't since. (Shout out to Variable Barricade's Nayuta though for being the one otome bodyguard I like who isn't in this game.)

With a title like My Sweet Bodyguard I expected a guilty pleasure sort of game, being in general the otome-flavored opportunity to live out Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard. The game even name drops the movie in one route, when the main character's friend finds out about her situation. And in that respect it delivers.

My Sweet Bodyguard does not take itself seriously. The villains are often cartoony, the situations unrealistic, but all the game really wants to do is give the player a good time that involves the main character and her chosen bodyguard falling in love. Normally I prefer heavier stories, but I found the irreverence charming, and even the more contrived situations (like the ever popular faceplanting into a kiss) are just right when in search of popcorn fare.

As I did previously, this blog post series will only cover the first of what Love 365 calls the "Main Story" for each route, which is the falling in love part of the romance. There is fandisc-ish material that follows the relationship as it progresses, but it's unequally distributed among the guys due to the modular way mobile content tends to get updated and My Sweet Bodyguard seems to have wrapped up. At the moment, I'll only be covering the first five love interests, though I may add others at a later date if I get around to them.

VN Talk: Kiss the Demiurge

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

Platform: Windows (also on Mac and Linux)
Release: 2022

Kiss the Demiurge is an unusual visual novel for me to play since it's yuri (lesbian romance) and usually if I look for a romance game I gravitate towards otome or RPGs with romance elements. But the developer of KtD, Studio YuriEureka, asked if I would cover it on my blog and provided a free copy of the game. It looked to be a supernatural themed plot and I like to try out indie games when I can, so I agreed.

The game follows Minori, a girl who accidentally made a contract with a demon as a child, costing her her parents, and the experience has forged her into a harsh and uncompromising teenager who works for a secret organization to hunt demons. She's actually a bit of a pill in the opening moments of the game, being so uptight that it borders on caricature, but surprisingly her zeal in saving the muggles from the realities of magic is exactly what makes her entertaining.

This game was released within the past year and is still fairly new, so this is a fair warning that this post will include spoilers after the cut.

VN Talk: Buried Stars

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

Platform: Switch (also on PS4 and PC)
Release: 2020 (Switch, PS4), 2021 (Windows)

Buried Stars is a mystery game, but placed in a very odd setting for the genre. It takes place in a recently renovated building being used to film the titular TV show, Buried Stars, which is described as a survival audition show where performing contestants move on to subsequent rounds based on the amount of votes they get and the lowest ranked is eliminated at the end of each episode.

At the start of the game, the contestants have been whittled down to the Top 5 and by the time voting wraps up they'll be reduced to the Top 4. Each of the five performers are introduced and given a little spiel about who they are and commentary on how their fans have responded to them, resulting in their current placement. Just after that, the stage begins to shake and the building around them collapses.

Following the collapse, the Top 5 and the floor director are trapped in an intact space in the rubble and cut off from the outside world (making them quite literally buried stars). This results in a much different cast of characters than you'd normally have in a genre more frequently populated by detectives and high school students. It was a little weird at first when the deduction mechanics start popping up before it's apparent any crime has taken place, but by the end I didn't even notice.

Anime Talk: The Fire Hunter

There were a couple of good concept shows this past winter anime season, both of which I had high hopes for, only to end up frustrated by their progress. I don't know if I'll finish the second one, but the first is The Fire Hunter, based on the novel series by Rieko Hinata, and since it's proper novel series as opposed to the light novels anime is more commonly based on, it's less likely that it will get picked up for English translation, but I'm hopeful, because the worldbuilding is fascinating and just the right mix of strange and familiar that I want to know more.

The world of The Fire Hunter appears to be roughly equivalent to Taisho era Japan, with many people living in rural communities, but there is also the existence of an industrialized capital city with factories. This doesn't appear to be an alternate Japan so much as a far future one after something happened that caused humans to burst into flames if they tried to interact with conventional fire or the objects made by or made use of it. This caused civilization to collapse until humans learned to hunt the fire fiends whose blood can be used an an alternate source of fire.

What exactly caused this malady, where the fiends came from, and the origin of the gods that now watch over the city aren't revealed by the end of the first season, and I'd love to know more, because it feels like a setting I could happily dive into. The antagonists looming in the near future are a clan knows as the "spiders," who are humans who have somehow managed to remaster fire without setting themselves alight. Why? How?

I don't mind not knowing, because these are things that I expect will be revealed as the story progresses, but the worldbuilding is the best part of The Fire Hunter.

Where it falls down is in the presentation. From my understanding, large chunks of the story are being rushed through without exploration, which makes it hard to understand the characters and their motivations. In the last episode something crazy happens to one of the dual protagonists' sister and the household that is sheltering them. Rather than asking anything in regards to what he just witnessed he just sends his dog after his sister and then business (so far as we can tell) resumes as usual, even when he's talking to the head of the household who likely knows exactly what went down that night.

I suppose he could be biding his time, but we never get any internal thoughts belonging to these characters and they tend to wear neutral and/or slightly nervous expressions no matter the situation, from being attacked by monsters to eating a meal. I'm not sure if that was an artistic choice or a holdover from the novel's narrative style, but it doesn't make for good viewing.

That and the animation is pretty sketchy. I don't need to see butter smooth animation, and the general style is likely an intentional throwback to the early aughts, but the flat shading and poor frames of animation in the convey attack were pretty bad, to the point where I was certain it passed from stylistic choice to just trying to get the animation done before deadline.

Given how anyone not interested in the world building aspect probably checking out early on, I was a little surrpised to see that a second season has already been greenlit. I might end up watching it, depending on what its competition ends up being at the time is airs, but I'm hoping they fix the adapation issues, since I can feel that there's a good story there. I'm just not getting it.

My Top 10 Otome - Refresh for March 2023

The end of March seems a bit of an odd time of year to be doing a Top 10 list, but the last time I did one of these I kept it to a Top 5, and a lot of games have come out in the two and a half years since. While undoubtedly I'll get a few more otome under my belt before the end of the year, I figure this list isn't likely to change too much. And in any case, I tend to feel uneasy about listing something I played too recently, as my love of a game can fade with time, as we'll see one of the games that was previously in my Top 5 has actually fallen.

Moving the number up to ten also gives me space to add a few indie titles, which can't match the production values of a dedicated company willing to shell out for recognizable talent in voice, art, and music.

I'd also like to give honorable mentions to two titles: Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossoms, for being my first otome and covering a part of history I find fascinating, and to Bad Apple Wars, for giving second chances to those most willing to fight for it. I thought maybe when I expanded to a Top 10 I might be able to fit them in, but couldn't.

10) Halloween Otome

Halloween Otome is a bit of a sentimental favorite in the English speaking otome community. It was made several years ago when indie projects were much fewer and less often complete. The artwork, while adequate for a free game released nine years ago, would not generate much enthusiasm in today's indie pool, but what I like about Halloween Otome is that it's just sincere fun. Emma Cee is fabulously lucky, and it's worked right into the story as she finds herself with a free ticket to a costume party for the rich and famous. There is no danger. Just people having fun and trying to win a contest put on by their host. The characters are entertaining and it's nice seeing them cameo in the Valentines Otome sequel/spin-off.

You can find this one on the popular indie site Itch.io, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

9) My Vow to My Liege

My Vow to My Liege is probably the direct opposite of Halloween Otome, being full of war and betrayal. I wasn't sure exactly where I'd put in the bottom half of my Top 10, but settled on #9 because to be honest, I only really liked half of the love interests. What makes it for me personally is the attention to historical and folklorical detail (once past the part where King Fuchai is actually a younger sister crossdressing as her deceased older brother in order to maintain a hold on her kingdom's power). Fuchai is quite possibly one of my favorite otome protagonists ever. She is king in a time of war and the game lets her do everything a king in ancient times could do, from leading an army to torturing prisoners for information. If you need a more aggressive protagonist than most, Fuchai is your girl.

I believe this one is Windows only, and can be found on Steam.

8) Pre-Odyssey: Odysseus, Penelope, and Her Ducks

The most recent otome on this list in terms of release, I just adored this very sweet and funny story about the courtship of Penelope by Odysseus. It was entirely a one person dev team, so there are rough spots where it shows, but the ducks add a note of levity to what could otherwise be a very serious story, and the nods to the original Greek mythology are top notch. I don't usually talk about the ending credits to a game, or the bonus material, but they're genuinely worth it for this game, since anyone familiar with the mythology knows what happens to these two in the future and the extra material is entertaining commentary from the characters themselves.

The dev also has you covered when it comes to being able to play. Aside from supporting Windows, Mac, and Android, there is a web version that requires no download at all. The game can be found in Itch.io.

7) The Blind Griffin

Though not without its flaws, I think The Blind Griffin is still my sentimental favorite indie, for combining two things I have never see in a game before: 1) being set in the 1920s and 2) starring a Chinese American protagonist. Though the protagonist is player-named, she has her own identity as a Chinese American child from a large family in a time when the Chinese were not particularly welcome. Having come from earlier generations of Chinese immigrants, I knew what sort of history she likely had (for instance, she was more than likely Taishanese, like my own family) and being able to combine that with my general interest in early 20th century history, was pure catnip.

The Blind Griffin can be found for PC, Mac, and Linux on Itch.io.

6) Norn9: Var Commons

The reason I originally justified this in my previous Top 5 is that it emotionally moved me in a way that lower ranked games did not. Norn9 certainly isn't perfect, and the non-romance portion of the plot was a complete mess, but what it did, it did well, and chances are you will like someone in the cast, even if it's not who you originally thought it would be. It's like a bag of jelly beans. You might not like every single bean in the bag, but there are enough of the good ones (assuming you like jelly beans) that it's still worth buying the bag in the first place.

Also, Norn9: Var Commons has now been ported to Switch and in fact is coming out in English this week! So there's no longer a need to own a Vita to play it. The translation has been updated and the fan disk Lost Ark is coming out in English for the first time later this year, so now is a good time to get into the first game.

5) 7'scarlet

Despite being a little light on the romance, I was never not engaged in trying to figure out the mystery of Okunezato in 7'scarlet, and I love a good mystery, but when I looked at its competition I realized that there are a few flaws that really bothered me; mainly the half-baked brother route at the end, but also that there were inconsistencies between routes (such as Sosuke's level of knowledge about the town secrets) that didn't make any sense. I also don't like yandere romance options, though not badly enough that it affects my ranking.

Though this was originally a Vita release, it can be found on Steam where it's often on sale.

4) Collar x Malice

This is the game that probably dropped the most, having been previously at #2. While I did really enjoy the investigation and liked (slightly) over half the romance options, I still don't like the plot problems in Shiraishi's route and even though I bought the fan disk, the longer I go without playing it the more I realize that I'm not quite as in love with it as I originally thought. Still, I really love that Ichika has a social life outside of her interactions with love interests, and especially that she has other women to both hang out with and back her up. It's still a good blend of action and romance that other games don't quite hit.

It originally came out for Vita, but is also available on Switch.

3) Cafe Enchante

I had just gotten Cafe Enchante at the time of my last ranking, so I wasn't sure where it would fall, but after some time and distance I've decided that I really still like it. It's aided by an excellent cast, one of the few where I can say I genuinely liked every guy, including the one I thought I would be ambivalent about. Though it suffers from a lack of quality checking (names are sometimes translated differently, and the dubious translation of "hako oshi" introduced a whole new term to the English speaking fandom), I still like the directions the story was willing to go, making this a surprisingly poignant game by the time I finished.

Cafe Enchante is only available on Switch.

2) Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly was originally my #3, but was bumped up by the fall of Collar x Malice. It's still not a traditional otome in that the common route (with its own ending) is more or less the canon ending with everything else being either "in addition to" or "instead of," but I love the mystery and the shared story of the cast. The primary characters wake up in a mansion with no memories of how they got there, but the more they learn about their true circumstances, the more painful regaining their memories becomes. Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly gets its placement for having amazing plot twists and a non-linear method of storytelling to show how everything came to be. Romance is much weaker in this game than others due to the nature of it, but it's still a solid game.

Though it was initially released on Vita, it's also been ported to Steam!

1) Code:Realize (series)

And now for my favorite, which is unlikely to be toppled anytime soon, and that is Code:Realize. Spanning three games, Cardia's story of falling in love and finding a way to touch another person without harming them still resonates with me. She's fully capable of facing bad guys with or without her man and the men themselves form a formidable band of friends who work together, so the game is never just a one-on-one with Cardia and a pretty face. Many of the best moments are watching the guys interacting with each other, making them full fledged characters with lives outside the romance, and in turn, that makes the romance better, because when the chips are down it feels like the rest of the cast is 100% behind the couple. They're all friends. Why wouldn't they be? Add in a gorgeous steampunk London, hidden organizations, and the philosopher's stone and you've got quite a combination!

Code:Realize and its sequels were originally released on Vita, but have since come out on PS4 and Switch.

Ambition: A Minuet in Power

Platform: Switch (also on Windows)
Release: 2022 (Switch), 2021 (Windows)

Ambition: A Minuet in Power is more of a social sim than something with a conventional plot to it, but there is a story nonetheless. You play as Yvette Decaux, a commoner woman who has come to Paris on the eve of the French Revolution at the behest of her fiancé, Armand, a baron. We don't know much about Yvette other than she was most likely in love with Armand (I think it's possible to avoid ever implying she was in love with him, but it's hard) so this was not a marriage of convenience. In fact, she expresses disappointment at how readily her elated parents packed her off to Paris to join him.

Once in Paris though, everything goes wrong. Armand doesn't pick her up from the tavern where they were supposed to meet and people shun her when asking about him. After she finds his home the maid is happy to let her stay but has no idea where her master is, and on top of that, when Yvette attends a party in Armand's stead, the host humiliates her in place of her fiancé and tosses her out.

Things are not off to a good start for our heroine, but even though she came to Paris for Armand, she has ambition and has no intention of returning to her village in disgrace, so Yvette decides to tough it out and make her way into Parisian high society.

Eating More

This is gonna be one of my health update posts for those who inquire from time to time. I don't think I'll ever be 100% of what I was prior to my bout with stomach cancer, but I continue to improve.

Ever since my surgery I've tracked what I eat with a goal of hitting 1600 calories a day, which was enough to maintain my weight, but not really enough to gain, and the entire thing was derailed by my shingles episode last year. I had a "nice" weight I was maintaining, but lost almost ten pounds that I didn't have when the shingles was so bad I didn't want to eat. (The shingles was on my head and gave me incredible eye and headaches.)

Though it eventually got better (mostly, I'm still on pain medication for the nerve damage it caused), I've spent the past year trying to play catch up, and I still have not gotten back to my early February 2022 weight. But, things are getting better.

My capacity to eat will never be what it used to be (no stomach equals less space to store incoming food), but I'm getting better at identifying what digests quickly for the amount of calories provided and I added a calorie column to my food tracker so I can track long term how much I'm eating. When I can, I try to add in a little more, pushing my intake to 1700 or 1800 by the end of the day.

My oncologist thinks that it may be best for me not to push myself too hard and focus more on maintaining than gaining, and I think I'm doing at least that.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong

Platform: Switch (also on Windows and iOS)
Release: 2022 (enhanced), 2021 (original)

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is the first I played in the OPUS series, but serves as a stand alone story in an anthology that seems primarily connected by mood and narrative genre (science fiction) and not necessary by the type of games they are. I was drawn to it mostly due to the trailer for the enhanced version, which promised a heart rending love story set in space with the newly added voice acting. And the music is lovely. I have the soundtrack playing as I write this.

Though it's more of a space exploration game from a mechanics perspective (think of games where you're constantly looking for new resources to sell so you can buy fuel and upgrades for your ship), it's heavily story based, with most of the narrative delivered through visual novel style dialogue boxes and artwork stills for cut scenes. Incidental events and encounters flesh out the worldbuilding.

The game interestingly enough doesn't have a title screen, with simply the option to start, bringing the player in for a landing as an elderly man exits his spacecraft on some strange world because of a task he will not entrust to anyone else. We learn that his name is Jun, and he is here because of Eda, who he has not seen in 66 years. At this point in his life he has retired from his duties as clan leader and it's clear that he is not without some regret.

With elderly Jun serving as our narrator and the frame story, we go back to when he first arrives in the star system of Thousand Peaks.

Anime Talk: Psycho-Pass: The Movie

I've talked about Psycho-Pass numerous times on my blog before, having come to the series late and then catching up in a semi-haphazard manner. I watched all three TV seasons, which was relatively easy since they're often simulcast and thus quickly picked up by streaming services, but the thing I was missing was the four movies; the original The Movie and the Sinners in the System trilogy.

When Funimation acquired Cruchyroll and the two biggest anime streaming services merged, Funimation's titles gradually started appearing (or reappearing in some cases) on Cruchyroll. Psycho-Pass had been a Funimation license up until the third season, which Amazon picked up during its exclusivity deal with the Noitamina programming block which produces the series. The Movie had streamed on Funimation, but hadn't appeared on other platforms like Hulu where they would sometimes share content, and me being unwilling to shell out a sub just for one movie, I didn't watch it until finally... I noticed the other day that it had popped up on post-acquisition Crunchyroll.

Watching day had come.

If you've read my previous Psycho-Pass posts, you know that one of the things I'm really keen on is how future stories build on the foundations and limitations of the Sibyl System established in the first season. A "good" continuation will provide tension while expanding on how crime can still happen in a world where the probability of a person commiting a crime can be analyzed down to a number, and without resorting to the asymptomatic trick that was used in the first season (where a person for whatever reason simply cannot be read).

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative

Platform: Switch (also on PS4, XB1, and Windows)
Release: 2022

I didn't think that 2019's AI: The Somnium Files needed a sequel, but I wasn't opposed to one either, so when AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative was announced my biggest concern was that they changed protagonists, introducing Date's daughter Mizuki as the new lead (and later announcing newcomer Ryuki as co-protogonist). After all, it was the charm of Date and Aiba's working relationship that really made the game for me, and seeing Aiba with Mizuki left the question of: What happened to Date?

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which I'm going to abbreviate to AINI for sanity's sake, is still a relatively recent release, so this is your spoiler warning that I'll be covering everything up to the ending of both this game and the first one as well. Spoilers will appear after the break.

My Top 5 Blog Posts of 2022

I'm not sure I'll do one of these every year going forward, but I was looking over my stats for the past year and I figured. Sure, why not?

I'll provide a link to the top 5 posts of the year with the #1 post being last along with a little commentary on why I think a particular post got as many views as it did.

#5 - RPG Talk: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse

Though its ranking is probably boosted a bit by virtue of being posted in January of last year, allowing it more time to be picked up by searches, SMTIV:A is also one of the more off-beat entries of the franchise, being a pseudo-sequel to a 3DS entry rather than a console installment of the series. This means that it hasn't gotten the same amount of love as other entries and there just aren't many places to get information on it, let alone another person's commentary.

#4 - Betrayal Legacy Board Game

Considering I rarely write about the adventures of my tabletop gaming group, I'm assuming this surfed up to the top 5 by virtue of Betrayal Legacy's popularity. And it's a good game! If you can find a regular group to play it to completion like I did, it can be an amazing experience. Doing so is time-consuming, it took us years (which was not helped by the pandemic), but the group that finished was almost entirely the same group that started, and that helped a lot. By the end we had so many shared memories of things we'd done to each other, but that's all part of the fun.

#3 - VN Talk: Pre-Odyssey: Odysseus, Penelope, and her Ducks

Pre-Odyssey is not the only indie otome game I've covered on my blog, but what it is... is a recent release, which you'll see is a trend with the remaining two posts that placed above it. I discovered Pre-Odyssey within a month of its release, and while it was still new-ish, I was plugging it to anyone who would listen to me. It doesn't have high visibility in the otome community, so I suspect that anyone who wanted to know more about the game or wanted to read another person's take in the aftermath (am I the only person who likes reading reviews after finishing a game?) inevitably ended up here.

#2 - VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 6: True Route

Variable Barricade was a 2022 release so it's not surprising that people looking for spoilers about the true route would find my post dedicated specifically to it. Seriously, this one post almost had more views than all my other Variable Barricade posts combined. People want their spoilers. I'm not someone who usually looks for spoiler-specific posts, so I'm not sure visitors got specifically what they were looking for, but I definitely spoiled.

#1 - VN Talk: Billionaire Lovers

This was my #1 post of 2022. Billionaire Lovers launched in English with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam thanks to blowing up in China well before its translation. But this left English coverage of a popular indie title lacking, and as with Pre-Odyssey, I played this both very close to launch and posted my story breakdown soon after. To be frank, I'm not surprised this was my most popular post of the year, given the subject matter. It's otome-adjacent, but appeals to a wider audience. I just happened to get in early.

And that about covers it! I'm not sure I'm going to go quite as hard on the indies again this year. It's really unusual for me to play something so close to launch, but we'll see.