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!
Zafora's route is the only one of the default starter routes that features someone possessed by a Fiend, and Vilio makes no bones about how someone who has been possessed cannot be saved, and he dispatches possessed people with a certainty that feels counter to his otherwise optimistic nature. You would expect someone like Vilio to hold out hope against all odds, but in this case he spares none.
Two of the background details that keep cropping up throughout the common route are the growing number of Fiends, which are born from humans' negative emotions, and the corresponding decrease in the amount of Chloris flowers blooming, which result from joy. Since none of the other four routes provide answers for these phenomena, and given Vilio's unusual knowledge of Fiends (compared to the general public), it's unsurprising they end up being a part of his story.
Vilio is the only member of CIRCUS who was not scouted by Jinnea, but was recruited by King Vigonia himself. He did not have to be the specific dragon to answer the request, but he asked his elders if he could be the one to go, since he wanted to get to know the world he would eventually be expected to sacrifice himself for.
Vilio gets his own version of the common route, which starts with his own prologue in Passio, the island home of the dragons, and then follows into more or less the same events as the default common route with added Vilio scenes. There are some differences, such as Tifalia's discovery of Radie's human form plays out in a different part of the camp and takes a little longer to resolve, but for the most part, the changes are minor. What is different is how they are portrayed.
Possibly because the designers did not want to bore the player by making them play through material they've already read, the shared portions of Vilio's common route are told in text-only summary or in an abbreviated fashion; enough to remind the player of what happened and how the characters were feeling, but not much more than that.
But the result was that I found most of the old scenes a boring retread because I already knew what happened and because this was new text as far as the game engine was concerned, I couldn't fast forward to the next choice. Most romance visual novels will allow players to fast forward or even immediately skip to next choice on replay, allowing players to quickly get to unplayed story branches. But Vilio's route is "new" so even though the content is a summary of things on the default common route, it hasn't been played yet and is therefore unskippable.
The most appealing part of the early chapters of Vilio's common route was seeing all of his new POV segments. Though he has town scenes with Tifalia just like all the other love interests, it's the POV segments with other members of CIRCUS that flesh Vilio out as more than the big dumb puppy he initially appears to be.
But it turns out the little details do matter and as a result Vilio's common route is somewhat incompatible with the default one. It's not just that in every other happy ending Vilio merrily goes off traveling without a care in the world (which is definitely not the future he's aiming for in his own route). For instance, after learning of Paschalia's arrangement with Vita, he outright asks King Vigonia if the Lacrima Earrings can be given to Paschalia to extend his life and the king agrees with minimal argument. In Pascalia's route, the earrings are raised as a potential solution by Colivus, and Colivus physically goes back to the capital to argue on Pascalia's behalf, which would have been unnecessary if Vilio had already acquired Vigonia's approval.
As I mentioned earlier, Vilio's story deals with the Fiends, the Chloris blooms, and by extension, how humanity is feeling since they're the source of both. And this ties into the older legends of King Artheir and the four Great Spirits that CIRCUS has been banging about in all their performances the entire common route. It's a pretty sneaky (but good!) way to make sure the player remembers all the lore.
Thus when Vilio brings up Ragules and points out that he disappears from the story, we already know at some point he's no longer a part of Artheir's legend, but not why (at least until Vilio's common route calls attention to it by modifying the Artheir performance to have Ragelus leave the stage during the epilogue). On the face of it, it's not an unreasonable thing to overlook as Theseus and Heracles were friends in Greek mythology, but it's not like they hung out together all the time. So it would be simple to assume Ragules was just not a part of those other adventures.
Vilio is an Archdragon, the only one of his generation, and only an Archdragon can permanently kill Fiends by literally devouring them and letting his body purify their cores. But the Fiends are multiplying faster than he can purify them so this is a losing battle.
And as it happens, the four core items played a part in all four of the previously available routes so we already know that Balto has both the Labyrinth Necklace and the Intaglio Ring at this point in the story, the Lacrima Earrings are in Oriens, and the Caritas Wand in Calida. Moreover, four vessels would need to stand in for the Great Spirits when using the items, and we have them in Zafora, Ion, Paschalia, and Radie, with most of them having a clear connection to the item; Zafora through his lineage, Radie because part of it is literally part of his body, and Ion from having been branded by the ring. Paschalia felt the weakest narratively since even though he's synchronized with a water spirit, Vita herself has no connection to the earrings or the Great Spirit Leve. It would be kind of like saying Tifalia should be able to use the fifth core item, the Rouquette Crown, because she's a human just like Artheir.
It might seem silly that I hadn't noticed that we have four love interests for four core items prior to this point of the story, but the thing is, Vilio is fire aligned and it's brought up multiple times, so the five love interests aren't a one-to-one connection with the items or even the elements since Zafora and Ion are normal humans without any magical connection. It's only after you remove Vilio from consideration and look at the stories of the remaining love interests that you can pair them off.
So CIRCUS sets out on a second tour, but now with three objectives: 1) contain the fiends, 2) help Colivus grow, and 3) retrieve the core items, which they plan to do as they hit each city on tour.
But rather than stick to a retread of the same tour, things go belly up with Vilio nearing his limit sooner than expected, so the tour is put on hold while he lays in recovery. Most of our cast splits up to get the core items from Cultura and Oriens, leaving just Tifalia and Vilio back in Calida, where they can continue being two ships passing in the night.
On the other hand, it's harder to figure out when Vilio develops feelings for her, even with his numerous POV segments, because being the friendly guy that he is, it's easy to read his attempts not to worry her as just being considerate. I also suspect that knowing that he intended to die, he would have refrained from thinking about what he expected would never happen.
But this route gives us a new legend of the Dragon's Bride, telling us of a human and dragon who fell in love, and the dragon shared his power so that the human would possess half his power and live as long as him. I like the introduction of this legend, as it would cleanly solve the lifespan issue other routes have tied themselves in knots over, but felt like it could have been handled better, as it comes up before the second Calida performance as "there's this old story…" and then after the second Calida performance while Vilio is lying in recovery Tifalia talks to him about it as if she first heard about it a long time ago and not a couple days before.
Tifalia knows she's in love with Vilio, even though she shouldn't be, because he's going to die, but she wants to ease his burden and suggests becoming his Dragon Bride so she could use her share of his power to help him out. Vilio gives her a sad look saying that it's not a good idea and anyway they can't do it unless the two involved have mutual feelings for each other. She tries to hide how much that hurt her, and it's not until the Vilio POV after this that we finally hear from Vilio himself that he does love her, but he assumes she made the offer because she was trying to be nice.
To be fair, she didn't say she loved him, just that she wanted to be helpful and carry some of his burden. So when he replied that giving her half his power would just weaken him and she would gain no Fiend devouring abilities of her own, he only answered in terms of costs and benefits. Oddly he also suggests that it's not a good idea to become a Dragon's Bride, as if there's a hidden cost to it (besides the obvious outliving everyone other than your dragon spouse), but Tifalia seems to manage fine regardless of which ending the player gets.
With the two of them unwilling to bring up how they actually feel, the narrative forces the issue through a Fiend attack on Tifalia while she is away from camp. The thing about Fiend possession is that it's not like the Fiend wears the person like a mindless puppet. Balto was able to converse perfectly fine as a human being to the point that Zafora has no idea when he was possessed, whether it was years ago before he killed his parents, or much more recently. So when Tifalia is possessed, she is still something like herself, and staggers back to Vilio.
And since she is somewhat coherent, Vilio realizes that their feelings are mutual, so he performs the ritual to make her his bride (which seems to be just kissing her when it sounded more elaborate when he talked about it earlier), and then we get a short time skip of about a week to set up for the finale.
It was pretty fun to read though. I liked Tifalia's arrival on Passio and that the clan chief was welcoming of her when I thought he was going to be disgusted with the Archdragon choosing a human mate, and I liked that it's Tifalia who undergoes the trials to reach Ragules's grave and obtain the crystal of pure mana that formed when his body finally finished the purification long after his death. I like that Tifalia gets to tell the ghost of Artheir that his solution for the fiend problem years ago didn't actually solve anything since they're now in a cycle where a new Archdragon will have to die to save humanity from the Fiends whenever they get out of control. I like that she, not Colivus who is traveling with her, is the one to declare that they will use the mana crystal to exterminate the fiends.
(Granted, Colivus is the one who will actually do it since he's the mage, but at least she's the one doing all the talking, as she should since by dragon custom she's Vilio's wife now and it's her husband whose life is on the line.)
While she's taking care of getting the crystal, everyone else has regrouped with the core items and is trying to get to Ferus based on the sightings they're received about a black dragon flying around the kingdom in a very clear extermination pattern with Ferus being the last place he needs to hit. When they get there, Vilio is clearly at his limit, but that's when Tifalia and Colivus arrived and Colivus (who grew up towards the end of the trials in Passio) is able to use the crystal and the core items to make a sword of light that will kill only fiends.
He swings it, and it smites all the fiends inside Vilio into a billion pieces where they then fly back to the humans they originally came from, because a small bit of sadness and pain borne by thousands is better than one person shouldering the entire burden. Tifalia even puts an optimistic bow on it pointing out that sometimes it's the negative feelings that push people to do better the next time around.
Also, I found it really strange that Vilio would go on his final "I'm about to die" binge feeding and just count on his friends being ready when he hit his limit. When he last saw Colivus he still had the body of a child, and this was a problem no one had a guaranteed solution for, and Vilio needs the grown-up Colivus to perform the sealing, so what was he going to do if Colivus was still a child after everyone regrouped? I know Vilio is often portrayed as dumb, but it's more an artifact of his childlike enthusiasm rather than an actual intelligence issue and we know he takes his job seriously, so not having a failsafe feels more like the writers hoped no one would notice so they could amp up the drama.
Either way, Vilio survives, and at least for the present day and possibly centuries to come, the world doesn't have to worry about Fiends. Perhaps because they're already technically married, Vilio's route ends with one more CIRCUS performance that climaxes in Vilio and Tifalia's wedding reception. And it felt very on brand for his ending to be the one where the two remain a part of CIRCUS and continue to perform across the land of Escholtia.
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