Shiki is a bit boring personally, and when he isn't boring, he's real rapey. God there's so much rape in this, Nasu what were you thinking. Best thing about the game is getting to know the characters through their routes.

Wanted to come back to this review and flesh out my thoughts a bit more.

Honestly, I think the biggest draw backs of the game are the presentation and the large overlaps between routes. On the presentation front, the background cgs are just irl environments with a filter over them, which isn't bad in itself, but there's also a real lack of variety with the backgrounds. The ost is also insanely small, there's like only 10 tracks in the game and this is not hyperbole (also I can't remember if the game has a single sound effect besides the fight scene sharp clanking noise). The character portraits, while wonky looking at times, has a nice charm to them. The characters are really expressive in the portraits and that's endearing. Switching to the topic about the routes of the game, Ciel's route is really hampered by the fact that like 3/5 of the route is the same as Arc's. The far side routes also suffer from this, but not as much as Ciel's. I'd say only the first third of the far side routes really overlap with each other.

Smaller gripes I have with the game is the way how the dialogue is written in certain scenes. There are moments where characters are talking about concepts/lore about the world, and it lasts like 5 screens, but could've easily been shortened down to, like, 3 paragraphs. These aren't that big of a deal though since they're few and far between, but the pacing really drags in those parts.

Also I'm not against a story having rape in it. Like anything in any piece of media, it can be done well. The ways Tsukihime inserts rape in it's story feels forced, and could've been entirely cut and instead just be replace with 'wanting to kill X' or 'the urge to hurt Y'. There's only one instance in the story where I'd say it's used okay and felt sort of mandatory considering the context, and that's with a certain character's backstory. I can't really see any justification of the addition to rape in most of the scenes, and feels like it's only there for the sake of being 'mature'/edgy.

For a game that's set after a world ending event and takes place in an apocalypse, this game is probably the funniest Advance Wars game cause of the hint system. Characters will do some two man comedy bit talking about the most random shit like cooking rats or drawing doodles of tanks on war notes, and then the enemy CO will tell you the most optimal way to choke out their units.

Also shoutouts to the game only letting you play as the ranged CO specialist once in the campaign in a pre-deployed mission with no ranged units.

I've only played Bayonetta twice, once was my first time, and second was trying to replay the game as anyone should do with character action games, and boy, this game has a bunch of stuff I really hate. Instant death QTEs, unskippable scenes, walk and talk sections, the enemies feel over designed so everything feels like a visual clutter to me, absolutely terrible gimmick sections, a super obtuse way to get to the training stage that I never learned until i beat the game, everything has this yellow brown piss filter on it, the list goes on. There are also times where the game asks the player to do a button mash QTE, but there are so many times where I feel like I'm mashing as fast as possible and I just physically couldn't do it, and then I get punished for it by taking damage. Combat is fun, but the way how combos are, you have a really hard time figuring out what the purpose/benefits of certain combos are so you sort of just end up button mashing. I would love to revisit this game and give it another try and delve deeper into the combat system, but all of the complaints I listed before are really holding me from wanting to touch this game again.

The story didn't have that many hooks for me to latch on, and the playable characters don't really have any chemistry (like i get that's the point cause plot stuff but it didn't really make me care that much even after that plot point). None of the character had enough charisma IMO to carry a scene. This problem gets really bad later on after the halfway point where the character chemistry, is just between an angry character and a metal box. The world feels way to big for the amount of times you have to walk through it. I get the message at the end, but it didn't hit me as I see it did with other people. Also how is it possible for a character action game to not have a move list.

A very charming and cute visual novel with ludicrous amount of unique CGs, like god damn, I think I saw more unique CGs than actual character portraits. This game has the same energy as an anime OVA comedy series you might've watched back in the early 2010s with a run time of 5 minutes per episode that got turned into a visual novel. My main complaint with the game is that I felt certain characters monologue for a really long time, especially during emotional moments and it kinda drags for me in those parts. The main villain sucks, everything he says is like if an Ai was only fed fortune cookies. Terra and El Skeleton are my favorite characters. Also there's a subplot that's literally just an episode from season 2 of Rick and Morty

This game frequently had me flip flopping between thinking "Oh this is neat" and "Oh this is dumb." I found that a lot of the areas have a really not fun gimmick to them that makes traversing to them a huge slog (stuff such as water that makes you move really slowly through it, lava streams that take like 3 full seconds to disappear, invincible ghosts you can't dodge through while you have to fight several enemies etc.) There's also a bunch of really weird design decisions that I just don't get, one of the biggest ones that comes to mind is that to unlock fast travel between your save points, you have to donate like 10k of your currency to a random alter that gives no indication that it will give you that.

For a metroidvania, I'm kinda baffled that the game never really gives you any powers through the main quest that allows you to backtrack and unlock new places like most metroidvanias do, but instead all of the abilities to unlock new areas are completely optional. And these abilities are so binary and uninteresting that don't do anything to affect how you play, but instead it's basically a switch you flick on and off only meant for discovering new areas and that's it.

Combat is simple, but simple isn't bad, it's just the fact that as absolutely gorgeous the artwork is for the game, and especially the bosses, I'm let down by the fact that all of the bosses in the base game are insanely easy and pretty much the most memorable things about them are their designs. The only exception when it comes to this is a snake boss that was added in a DLC that is an absolute nightmare of a slog to get to and one shots me.

Overall even though this review is all complaints, I did enjoy exploring this game, it's just that a lot of the times the reward for exploring is very underwhelming and aside from the visuals, this kinda soured me to the point where I'm just not interested in doing any of the DLC or NG+ stuff even though the NG+ features seems like a super cool thing I would love on any other game than this.

Combat and story were ok. The most standout thing to me were the characters and how much everyone sort of sucked and was kind of an asshole in some way, and I mean this in a positive aspect . Junpei is the best bro character just for the fact he did the whole 'infighting' cliche in any media with a party of more than 4 characters, but he actually mans up and apologizes for his outburst without anyone telling him to do it.

Also I grinded until level 99 before the final boss because I heard it was hard, and then I one shot every phase of the boss with the generic attack.

My favorite visual novel of all time and this review is biased as hell. I love the found family relationship between Mizuki and Date, the routes are all varied and gives small hints towards the bigger picture, and the cast is small but super tight and it doesn't feel like there's a bit of fat on the game. The game uses all the characters to it's fullest and they all tie into the main plot in some significant way. (I will say I can understand why people would not like the story that much as I can understand how people wouldn't like how everyone is connected as it does have a lot of coincidences when it comes to character relationships) Also Date says some of the most out of pocket things that made me do a double take when first reading what he had to say. Date is the only character I know in fiction where I can say he is canonically into cuck porn.

I've seen other people say that this game being short is a positive as it means it doesn't overstay it's welcome, but personally for me with the game being so short, I feel doesn't fully explore the gameplay potential of a game where you control a hole. With other games I would be fine with them being super short and simple, but I feel like there's too much dialogue in between the levels that really halt the pacing to make it a smooth experience. Playing through the levels is like eating an appetizer where you're getting a tasty small taste, and then once you feel like you're gonna get a big hearty meal with more in depth mechanics, you get hit with the bill, and then you kind of repeat this for the entire game.