laura smith on the cover wishes she was as cute as the actual mc. fire the executive on the marketing team who thought they had a good idea

after all these years I still can't believe this series of, like, extremely vapid simulators just dropped this hidden gem of a visual novel out of nowhere. Why was it like this? Why did the characters have so much depth? Why was the costuming so intricate? There were multiple endings!!!! Sometimes I still go back and play this. I want so badly to have been a fly on the wall at Ubisoft while this game was in development. What the hell happened here?

will literally never get over how in a series full of shallow, mediocre, patronizing games which attempted and largely failed to capture the then untapped tween girl demographic, we got a full-blown 3-route visual novel with gameplay that managed to stress 11 year old me out to a concerning extent