really wanted to like this one, but nope, sorry, it's just boring as fuck. and i say this as someone who's read some decently long VNs before, this honestly would have worked way better if it was just linear instead of making you walk back and forth through the same 3 boring hallways trying to find the one item you need to progress. and also the "combat" sucks ass too, basically every instance of it is totally unnecessary and they only serve to pad the runtime. every attempt at shoving what one might be able to call "gameplay" into this is a massive fumble and the game woulda been better without it.

i died at the circle of light (place within like 20 minutes of the end) cuz i picked the wrong option (didn't even know you could die in this game up to this point) and the game just unceremoniously kicks you back to the veeryy start. safe to say i wasn't gonna go through the past 2 hours of slow text scroll and bullshit again (oh yeah, this game doesn't have a skip/ff option like 99% of other VNs do) so i just pulled up a longplay and watched the rest.

i'm glad I didn't play through it again since the ending is certainly not bad but still feels really derivative and trite imo. i feel like the whole game was building up to something and the ending just doesn't deliver anything all that resonant. sure, some vaguely "cool" things happen, but unless you wanna get really artsy (something I don't think this game was going for), there's gotta be some sort of catharsis and the story just does not deliver in that aspect. the last like 5 minutes of dialogue feels so generic, if you told me it was plucked right out of another RPG i'd believe you. the game clearly wants you to care about its leads but doesn't try like at all to make that happen, aside from just giving them basic character archetypes and hoping you like them.

maybe play this if you like reading the same 5 boxes of text over and over again? actually don't, don't do that. it gets points though for the music, which is pretty good all things considered