I have to hand it to Virche for its sheer confidence in itself: it expected me to complete over 50 hours of reading, a full repeat of the game’s lengthy introduction, and all routes before giving me a single good ending. And clearly, I did that. I played this game to the point of viewing all endings, CGs, and text.

My impression was lukewarm at the start — even quite negative at times — but the big and little mysteries and their assorted clues that started piling up kept my attention. It really does give you just about everything you need to guess what the truths are behind the story, and I respect that too. I picked up on a lot of them, but I was very pleasantly surprised that I missed things and eventually got caught off guard as well.

Virche does rely a lot on pseudoscience, however. If you try to predict the story based on real-world facts, good luck. It’s best to just roll your eyes and move on when these things come up, considering it threatened to take me out of the story several times. The world of Virche does whatever the hell it wants with terms and biological realities, and you’re just along for the ride!

While it’s common for otome games, I have to voice my usual problem: where are the girls and women? Why doesn’t the protagonist get a female friend/acquaintance her age? There are so many recurring male characters with sprites, including non-love interests, and only two female characters. The female characters that do exist, sprite or not, get quite the unpleasant treatment by the narrative. While they suffer plenty too, the male characters get far more agency to work with.

The protagonist is one of those suffering, struggling girls, and she may or may not make the experience tough for you. To be blunt, she’s a deeply depressed doormat. Her backstory justifies her willingness to accept a lot of abuse, but it could be unpleasant to watch for certain players. And she gets a lot of abuse from so many characters (including love interests, whether they want to do it or not), from verbal abuse to physical violence to murder.

The romance may also be hit-or-miss. The love interest could be a lot older than the protagonist, or someone she calls her brother, or this or that other questionable spoiler thing. They are heavy romances, to be sure, filled with suffering and very little sweetness or spice, but still a whole lot of devotion to the protagonist. As dark tales (rather than something to dream of), they work.

I have mixed feelings on Virche’s approach to love and how people feel it, but I do give it two thumbs up for including a significant male character with feelings for another male character that is never the target of homophobic abuse. They all have bigger problems, fortunately(?).

As for my experience physically playing the game, there were only scattered typos in the text that didn’t intrude much, and it generally flowed well. I hated the way the screen would go bright white before and after every flashback, though; I probably already remembered what happened in the past and didn’t need to get blinded while being reminded of it. Getting different endings was often more tedious than it needed to be, sometimes seemingly requiring the entire route to be skipped through again to enable a different one to happen.

I appreciated the skip-to-choice button, as slow as it could be sometimes; the easy to access and understand flowchart; the gorgeous CGs; and the clear, definitive “you’re headed for a bad ending” screen effect it did most of the time that was going to happen. It makes the screen all glitchy for a few seconds, which is really difficult to miss.

The music deserves an honorable mention as well. While not something I’d listen to outside of the game, it really works in context.

My recommendation: play Virche Evermore if you want some truly wild and tragic times with beautiful male characters.

Death Mark II dares to ask the question we’ve all been wondering: what if, after improving the series with NG, they made a Spirit Hunter entry where everything got worse?

Amateurish sidescrolling environments and character animations instead of the spooky, heavily detailed visual novel screens of the previous two games?

Live or Die situations but your chances of succeeding, even if you pick the right choice, are randomly generated?

Spirit encounters where your options are so limited it’s easy to pick the right one, but far more boring than the Death Mark and NG encounters because of it?

Sidelining new characters for the sake of using the Mark Bearers as the protagonist’s partners?

Constant back-and-forth exploitation of the misery (for player discomfort) and physical bodies (for player horniness) of teenage girls?

I can’t even say I was ever really scared as a player or absorbed by the intense atmosphere of the game, so everything I loved about Death Mark is out, and everything I found distasteful is in. Although the first Death Mark could get very horny about female bodies in horror situations, somehow they made it feel even worse in this game. It doesn’t help that almost all of these exploited bodies are of high schoolers.

Only one of the spirits in the game is male. His body is only a source of terror, and his backstory is the least explored. The rest are used for as much misery as possible, definitely adequately explaining their grudges, but also going over the top in depicting what someone with the role of “girl” in society can go through and (of course) resolving it with the violent deaths that made them a spirit.

Plus, if there’s a situation where they can make a living or dead female body sexy while they’re suffering, you can bet they’re going for it in this game. More than once the protagonist was about to see something “scary” and I could immediately predict how undressed the victims were going to be. I don’t know — it felt consistently disrespectful of situations they wanted to call terrible, scary violations of human rights. After NG went waaaay down on the horror-horny, I had decent hopes for this game that were crushed early and decisively.

At least I’ll always have the first two games to go back to. As for Death Mark II, I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone. It sufficiently made me feel gross, but never afraid.

After clearing two routes (Black Eagles, Golden Deer) at 290 hours, I feel like I can properly talk about this.

It's a good game. After the rather weak political struggle in Fates, 3H goes hard on crafting an intricate and morally layered conflict that splits into four paths to follow. The story has its problems, but it puts its whole heart into what it's got, making it easier to miss or forgive the flaws. It's also got good visual presentation and endearing characters to recruit.

I think the most likely experience with the four routes is that the first one will feel like your real story, while any further playthroughs will have more ideal armies, thanks to the New Game Plus features. They let you continue a completed save file with various things, like your Renown, and allow you to spend that Renown to automatically raise a character's skill level to S or level their support with Byleth to A. You'll also have a better idea of how to teach your units the second time around, probably. I got through Black Eagles just fine, but my 10 fliers in Golden Deer were another story entirely.

The biggest problem with the four route system is that a significant chunk of every single one of them is exactly the same. If you feel like playing several or all of them, White Clouds may just drive you nuts. After that, though, there was enough story variation between the two I completed that it felt worth it. There were plot revelations in each that didn't come up in the other one.

This is definitely the most dense FE I've played, and that was to its detriment at times. Sometimes it felt really padded out that one chapter's main battle didn't just lead into the next one (especially at the end of Golden Deer!), and even spending the month on Skip doesn't make it go by that quickly. Prepare to either not think much and not recruit many characters, or spend a lot of time deciding how to teach your units and bonding with them around the monastery. Maybe that'll even be more fun to you than the chapter finales?

I liked it a lot, ultimately, when I felt like it wasn't just wasting my time. I would love to know how much of my 290 hours was just waiting on loading screens, though. I'm sure it'd be horrific.