There was so so much I loved about this game.

To start, Ichiban is one of the most wonderful AAA protagonists I have ever seen. It was so refreshing not to be in the mindset of a grizzled and cynical man, but instead with a character who is enthusiastic and so openly feels joy, love, rage, and grief.

All of the party members won me over too, and the dynamics in party chats and table talks delighted me from start to finish.

I am a self-professed minigame ignorer, but I had so much fun trying out all the minigames and sinking probably 10 hours into the management sim alone.

My nitpicks have to do with the finicky combat movement, the chapter 12 difficulty spike, and general turn-based rpg fussiness. I was so happy to hear that most (if not all) of these problems have been solved in Infinite Wealth and I cannot wait to play it.

I can't rate this game because I have so many mixed feelings about it.

VNs are hard from me, because I read a lot more than I game, so I am PICKY when it comes to writing.

The Good: the music is incredible, the women are written with complexity and depth, Beatrice is here. I had to skim the gore/violence sections because they were so viscerally written. Up there with McCarthy in terms of being able to turn my stomach.

The Mediocre: every scene is like 20-30% too long, in my opinion. Ryukishi07 has this habit of telling me 10 times what I read and learned just fine when I read it the first time. Please, trust me, Ryukishi07 I promise I understood Shannon's character development in this volume. It's better here than in Higurashi though.

The bad: the tea party scenes are so self-indulgent and are so so so long.

Will I keep reading? Maybe. Maybe.

You know, looking back, I have played so many games that write women so poorly. Playing this back to back with Dave the Diver was the impetus for me realizing just how much in Dave the Diver was rubbing me the wrong way because of the covert sexism in that game. Misericorde's cast is (for now, I'm expecting some gender stuff in volume 2) primarily women. Flawed, silly, heroic, villanous, and so so human. The art design helps capture that, utilizing presentation that gets across the uniformity of their nuns' habits to strike fear into the reader and then seamlessly showing through posture and gesture how they each wear it a little differently.

I believed in every single character in the game, even the ones I didn't like, and Hedwig is a perfect protagonist. I admit, at the start, I expected Hedwig's fish-out-of-water story to be background, but it is the foreground. We are hearing Hedwig's story with all the biases and missing moments you would expect of a profoundly self-loathing and self-righteous woman who has been isolated all of her life.

The music is an absolute gift. Over 100 tracks for a game a tenth of that length, and I have listened to it often while writing or working.

I cannot wait for volume 2 and all future volumes!