VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 3: Tyril

I probably should be glad I'm writing this two years after release instead of immediately after, because I'm sorry Tyril fans, he just didn't work for me. When I first got the game I thought he might, because his relationship with Anastasia has so much potential.

Tyril is an inquisitor whose job it is to ferret out witches and mete justice upon them. He's an uncompromising individual and known as the best in his organization. Since Anastasia's knowledge of future events due to her Fatal Rewind ability can make her seem like a witch, conflict between her and Tyril should be ripe with tension. If he found out, would he believe her? Or would he follow his duty and treat her as a witch?

While that fear is there from Anastasia's side of things, Tyril is entangled in an entirely different mess that ultimately did neither his route nor the main plot any favors. In fact many of the items I'm going to discuss in my later "dropped plot" thread originate in Tyril's route, and the result was that his route is very busy with details that end up going nowhere. And ultimately I had to question his competency as an inquisitor at all.

VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 2: Crius

I struggled over how best to write my Crius entry since I knew I wanted to discuss him as a character without making it specifically about his route. Part of it is because of how his route ends. I was flabbergasted and given the timelooping nature of even if Tempest I wondered if somehow we might pick up again from that ending and then move on to a happy one.

But how? Would there be a new story branch ahead where Anastastia could make a different decision?

As you probably know from my overview post or having played the game yourself, Anastasia experiences every rewind. Regardless of whether a given timeline still exists, she remembers it, and Lucien's route, being the final one, wraps up the overall story--for everyone.

So while I normally do a critique of each love interest's route, it just doesn't make sense for even if Tempest, and I knew that would be the case as soon as I finished Crius's ending. Spoilers ahead, but I have to say that dang I loved the end of his route.

VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2022

I was originally skeptical about playing even if Tempest because writer/director Ayane Ushio is the same person who wrote and directed Norn9: Var Commons, which struggled with its overly ambitious narrative, so I didn't pick it up until it was on sale. Now that I've finished it, I have to say it may well be one of my favorite visual novels of all time, with the caveat that I can still see signs of what were likely aborted plot threads.

Thankfully most of those are easy to overlook due to the strong central narrative, so I'll save the bulk of them for another post. For now, I'll just leave it at this: The story definitely changed during production, and the signs are there if you look, with the biggest indication being the fact that the title screen prominently depicts a monster holding Anatasia that never appears during the game itself. This is the title screen which you will see every time you start up the game, and a heck of a thing to leave in if it was never supposed to play a role.

But despite whatever changes may have been made, even if Tempest is an excellent dark fantasy of revenge, sacrifice, and discovering the truth no matter the cost. Though Anatasia's ability to rewind time by dying is occasionally played for a dark laugh, the deaths of others are never taken lightly, even if she theoretically can revive them if she rewinds far enough. In fact one of the burdens she carries is making sure that any sacrifices made can be corrected by the time she finally pulls free of the meat grinder she's trapped inside.

Half a Year Later and I Need to Rethink Radiant Tale

I usually don't spend much time thinking about a game after I'm done blogging about it. The writing itself is a way to let all my thoughts and feelings out, and even the things I didn't say usually exist in notes and excised paragraphs (since I like to keep posts to about 2000 words each). If Radiant Tale had been a one and done title my post would probably remain another mark checking off a game I had wanted to play.

But Radiant Tale Fanfare! is coming out at the end of June so I need to reckon with what I thought about the original. Fair warning, spoilers ahead.

The original Radiant Tale interested me because of the noblebright fantasy setting, but also because writers Nao Kojima and Sachi Arino were half the writing team for Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~, which I consider my gold standard for the genre, and Kojima had also written part of Cafe Enchante, which I still think fondly of.

So I was buoyed by expectations for how the story would work based on their past projects, which are particularly notable for their themes around found family, where the protagonists and her various love interests support each other through thick and thin. I like when the guys who aren't currently in a romance with the protagonist get to play an active part in the story and become buddies with the other men. It avoids looking like a harem situation when everyone has a reason for being there and it's not because the protagonist turns them on.

Radiant Tale was my most anticipated title of 2024. Perhaps unfairly, I had expectations. It didn't need to be perfect, Cafe Enchante definitely had things I didn't care for (like what happened to Kotone in Misyr's route), but I did expect the highs to outweigh the lows.

And overall I think they did, which is why I'm fussing over Fanfare. It's more like there are pieces of Radiant Tale that I really like, but it doesn't come together.

For instance, the found family thing. While Radiant Tale does have a reason for everyone to be together besides the protagonist (since Tifalia joins an already established group), and they do help each other when the chips are down, it feels more like a group of coworkers than found family. If you like your coworker you'll help them out, you might drive them home if they're sick, or do other things that are regular acts of kindness. But that doesn't mean you're both going bowling on Friday night.

And that's kind of what Radiant Tale gives us. After the halfway point when CIRCUS is finishing their first tour, they even expect to go their separate ways, never to reconvene again, and there's little to suggest their attitude changes after the actual end of the game. They send a few letters, but the band is not together nor planning to get together (barring Vilio's ending since he has the golden route that solves everyone's problems and caps it off with him and Tifalia getting married months later during one of their performances).

They're not a bad group of characters, I can't say anyone bored me, but they aren't as tight knit as I originally expected them to be. And to be frank Ion's good ending pissed me off with his possessiveness of Tifalia where he didn't want her spending as much time thinking about his friends as thinking about him (and I had liked him up until that point). Jealousy just ruins the found family dynamic when the intention is to restrict one family member from seeing the others.

And it's not just that. I disliked Paschalia's route because everyone in CIRCUS made potentially invasive plans to save Paschalia's life without running any of it by Paschalia himself. As someone who has survived two different cancers I was so mortified for the guy. I'd like to think if they really cared they would have let him decide the way he wanted to approach his illness; present the options but not push. A family should be supportive, rather than deciding support.

And then there was general plot stuff like the scripting at the scene of Balto's murder, Vilio's half-assed common route, what exactly were the circumstances around Radie's amnesia, etc.

I'm not here to nitpick individual instances, since most of this can be found in my 6-part VN Talk series, but the thing is my opinions of a game can change with time and perspective. I left Radiant Tale feeling that it was the weakest sibling of Code:Realize and Cafe Enchante, but would still probably make my Top 10 list of otome. I wanted to feel like I had enjoyed it. Now… I'm not so certain.

And with Fanfare coming stateside this summer, I need to figure out whether I'm going to get it. It used to be I'd clear my gaming schedule for a Code:Realize fan disc (what you'd probably call a stand alone expansion in another genre), and I would have done so for Cafe Enchante if it'd had one, but with Radiant Tale it's not that I hate the original, so much as I find myself disappointed.

I was listening to the even if Tempest soundtrack while working on my blog posts for it and it got me pumped, remembering some of my favorite parts of the game. Cafe Enchante's soundtrack was more hit or miss, but still there were very good tracks that reminded me of the best moments of the game. When I played Radiant Tale though, I just felt… bored. I like the opening song "Michi no Sekai e Fanfare," but none of the instrumental tracks sparked anything in me unless they used "Michi no Sekai e Fanfare" as a leitmotif. While that could be a fault of the composition, it also means that scenes never felt powerful enough to connect with the music.

I can't point to any one thing as a key factor that let me down, but in general I suppose it's more the sense that the package did not come together in a greater whole, and I'm not entirely sure if that's me and my outsized expectations or the game itself. I suspect that if I hadn't known the writing pedigree my expectations would have been lower, but I would likely have complained about the same things.

For perspective, I think Cafe Enchante, despite its problems, ultimately sits comfortably in my Top 5 otome because I felt the game came together well enough to overlook the flaws. Radiant Tale didn't have the magic to keep it together.

It wasn't all bad. Lack of a found family dynamic (and spotty plotting) aside, I liked Zafora and Vilio's story arcs. I liked the worldbuilding and how old tales used as parts of CIRCUS's performances later became critical lore for the final route. But I did dislike the ending to Paschalia and Radie's routes, and the jealousy line in Ion's. When I put it that way, I suppose I liked "half" the game, and I'm not sure that's enough to enjoy a fan disc, especially when there will be After Stories for the endings I didn't enjoy as much.

A fan disc is generally full of low stakes post-game epilogues and side stories so there's less of a chance the game will trip over itself with continuity errors or questionable plotting. The worst case is that it could be boring. And when it comes to it, I might not be interested in seeing what happens next. I could be proven wrong. I didn't like Impey's route in the original Code:Realize, but he won me over in the fan discs, so there's hope.

After writing all this, I think my conclusion is that I'm still interested, there are aspects of the game I'd like to revisit, but I'll wait for a sale. Which likely means I won't be covering it on my blog any time soon, but I've got plenty of backlog so I'm not hurting for material.

even if Tempest is a Fabulous Mystery Game

I love mystery games, as you may have noticed if you've spent any time reading here. My introduction to visual novels was the Ace Attorney series and since then I've enjoyed titles such as Danganronpa, Raging Loop, and Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happinesss. I also enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, which if it hadn't been in 3D may as well have been a visual novel. Getting to the bottom of a crime-laden mystery is something I enjoy.

But when I heard that even if Tempest had trials where you use evidence to ferret out the culprit, I assumed it would be a half-baked mechanic, mostly because it's otome. Perhaps that's an unfair assessment, that media aimed at women would phone it in, but most otome games that come to the US are visual novels and if there is any gameplay beyond making choices, it's a relatively easy activity so the player doesn't get frustrated when the main point of the game is playing out a romance.

Both Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly and Collar x Malice require the player to shoot a gun sometimes, but one is extremely forgiving and the other is more of a matter of having good timing than good aim. As someone with notoriously bad shooter skills, those examples were not a downside for me, but being a mystery lover, a half-assed murder trial would garner a sigh of boredom at best and ruin my immersion at worst.

I needn't have worried.

After I finished my first high tension witch trial, during which I was afraid I'd screwed up so badly my protagonist Anastasia was going to be burned at the stake, I was actually discombobulated to come to the next scene and be greeted by Anastasia's love interest. In the midst of all the investigation, sussing people out, and going through my evidence list at the trial itself I'd somehow forgotten which genre of game I was playing.

After the initial surprise, I realized that this is a game that feels particularly geared towards me. I like Anastasia as a heroine. She's willing to do the years of hard work to forge herself into the person she wants to be. She plans ahead. She knows the object of her revenge and how to expose him, and she is willing to do whatever it takes to save the person closest to being family that she has.

So when Anastasia needs to bring down the Witch of Ruin as part of the bargain for her friend's life and her revenge, she barrels into the witch trial like hell on wheels.

Which is to say, she's a lot more action oriented than most otome protagonists, and clearly takes the lead in the investigations, even if her current man is tagging along. This makes her work well as the protagonist for a mystery game and she's just as motivated as the player to get these murders solved.

And from a game mechanics perspective, I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, which also allow the player to visit a variety of locations, there is a limited amount of time to hunt down clues, which prevents the player from starting the trial with a full suite of information. You have a set of suspects marked by the Witch of Ruin, but only one of them has been turned into the witch's plaything, and I was given 11 hours until the trial began (appropriately at midnight). Each avenue of investigation had a time cost associated with it, so I wouldn't be able to follow all of them before the trial began, which as a mystery game veteran was rather unsettling.

It's okay to proceed without all the clues? I can't have all the clues? What madness is this?

And then the trial itself isn't really about establishing evidence or pointing out the flaws in another person's logic, though that can help. The witch trial is decided in the court of public opinion so even if you're completely correct, it won't mean anything if Anastasia is pissing off the 300 jurors so much that they're unwilling to believe her.

Though I don't think the trials are as freeform as they initially appear, I found I loved the format. Knowing that the right answer might not actually exist in my evidence because I didn't do that investigation added an edge to the presentation, and presenting the wrong answer usually doesn't result in the player being thrown back to the evidence list until they find the right answer. Instead, most of the time the game will acknowledge you chose poorly and the trial will move on, with failure being the result of multiple decisions over the course of the trial rather than a failing to present an obscure piece of evidence five times in a row at a single point in time. (I do like Ace Attorney but I don't like feeling obligated to save right before presenting evidence because I don't know which item out of twenty is the one I need.)

The trial even has decision points where you can choose to focus the debate around a particular person, and there is more than one option that will satisfactorily end the trial with the correct culprit being identified. As long as Anastasia does enough to shift the blame where she wants it to go (because it's court of public opinion), it's a win.

There are only two things that bothered me. The first is that when the game transitions to the evidence list, it doesn't let you back up and read the last line of dialogue regarding what you are trying to prove or disprove. Since most of the time the penalty is just a reputation hit and the trial moves on, it's not horrible, but being able to read the last line of dialogue lets you compare the evidence to what was just said and that's not possible here. Most other games with a trial system will let you do this. Worse, on the rare occasion you really have to pick a specific piece of evidence before the game will move on, you might find yourself stabbing in the dark for your second or third picks because you can't remember what you're supporting or disproving.

The second issue is that I think it's actually possible to hose yourself going into the witch trial on Zenn's route. (And spoilers ahead for the rest of this paragraph and the next.) I often went into witch trials with missing pieces of evidence, so I didn't think anything of it when I entered the Zenn route trial with the intention to falsely convict Crius of being the Membrum. But the problem was, I got far enough that Anatasia was ready for the killing blow that would "prove" his guilt and I didn't have anything. I kept trying one thing after another and none of my evidence seemed to be working. After about five tries using increasingly absurd pieces of evidence (eiT is not as obtuse as AA can be) and taking constant reputation hits, I finally gave up and loaded an older save.

I think there are only two ways to falsely convict Crius, either by revealing that he knew the first victim, or providing a motivation for killing the second. There are only four investigation leads at this point in the game, and the player has time for three, so in theory there's no way the player can leave without at least one piece of evidence to earn a conviction unless they purposely stop investigating early, but it's possible to do one of the investigations and not get the evidence based on a dialogue choice, which is what I'd done. I don't mind not having all the evidence necessary for a perfect trial, but having to restart the game from an earlier point in time because I can't finish the trial at all shouldn't happen.

End spoilers.

When the witch trials came to an end, there was still more story to go, but I realized I was a little sad that it was not likely many fans of mystery games (who aren't also part of otome fandom) would bother to play this game. The non-linear trial system that accepts multiple answers and provides multiple investigation routes without losing the thread of the story is quite frankly an amazing experience and I hope to see something like it again in another game. Unfortunately, with even if Tempest being an otome and the story wrapping up so witch trials will no longer happen, this is not a case where we would expect a sequel with those mechanics back in action, and Voltage, the publisher and developer, has never developed anything outside of otome so it's unlikely this mechanic would return in an unrelated title.

If you're interested in a game that will give you three solid trials and a pretty engrossing mystery that sometimes has romantic overtones, then I absolutely recommend this. It's a novel spin on the investigation and trial system.

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.

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.

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.

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.