this game is absolutely bonkers, off the wall, insane. it's highly problematic. it's also POWERFULLY ICONIC. the otome community simply would not be where it is today without it.

i see a few current reviews complaining about how much money you have to spend. the fact that i'm not able to relate is basically thanks to day one privilege. i played this game on release, holding no expectations that it would flourish the way it did, and especially not so immediately - back then, i was in the firm belief that the western otome community was destined for obscurity. clearly, cheritz thought the same, because their servers were not prepared for the extraordinary influx of players on day one. everything crashed. it was carnage. only the chosen ones were able to actually log in and start playing, and the rest of us suckers were stuck staring hopelessly at the eternal loading screens or server error messages. it took a solid two days for them to fix this initial issue, followed by weeks of frantic updates to fix bugs, crashes, glitches, even more server problems, the works.

let me tell you, it was a wild ride. but it was a wild ride that came with a lot of free hourglasses. in those early days, cheritz was handing them out like candy with every update as compensation, and i hoarded the hell out of them. i only ever spent them on phone calls; i adored the immersion of playing in real time, so i never bought access to future days, and i was already a depressed teenager with no life and a horrible sleep pattern, so i rarely missed chatrooms. hell, i was so obsessed with the game that i accidentally subconsciously trained my body to wake itself up consistently around 2-3am just so that I could nab that late-night chatroom and then put the phone down and conk back out. like many others, i had this terribly unhealthy art honed to a fine degree. sure, it wasn't good practice, but there was a sense of comradery the community shared over it, and i was so thrilled to have a community to share anything with at all that i cherished this experience.

the chatroom mechanic itself was revolutionary. never before had i seen so many choices and so many CGs in an otoge. everything about it was built to be addictive and the chokehold it had on me was painfully real. the amount of time i spent just sitting around waiting for the next chatroom to open up was pathetic.

and wow, was the story absurd. if you play in recommended order, you go from 'help the only sane character work up the courage to quit her job' to 'help this secret agent recover his secret twin brother who's been drugged and indoctrinated into a cult which is run by the former leader and friend of the RFA who everyone thought was dead'. it had an unapologetically dramatised portrayal of mental illness and treatment and it very much required you to turn part of your brain off in order to embrace the insanity. yet, despite all of this, the game was oozing with charming personalities and gut wrenching moments with deeply flawed characters that against all odds, i wanted to root for. 707 had my heart from the very first announcement and still holds a piece of it to this day. i never actually played yoosung's route, though. sorry yoosung.

this game took over my life and i'm not even mad about it. all things considered, the mysme experience wasn't exactly unlike being brainwashed into a cult.

coming back to this game over a year later to play the dlc was a whole new experience. gone was the player who once knew how to play this game, who had spent hours painstakingly devising the most efficient system of farming every resource. gone was the player who carefully memorised her process of elimination method to discover all the new recipes. gone was the player who knew where literally anything was.

in her place was a shallow, clueless version of her former self. this new me had one simple goal - to finish the game - and one simple gameplan - to wing it. specifically by doing as little as humanly possible. if past me thought i was going to take the time to relearn my old system, to willingly throw myself back into the endless minigame menagerie that was the base game, she was mistaken. knowing everything is boring; knowing nothing is to be free.

thankfully, my past self had been kind enough to build up a small buffer of meals and materials before she left this world. which meant this was no longer a game of cozy management and making friends - this was a game of survival. this was a race to the finish line before i ran out of food to prevent the resident freeloader buck from starving to death.

and thank god for that buffer, because i'm not built for speedrunning. it took me an hour to accidentally hit the left trigger and consequently remember there's a dash button in this game. and then i kept getting lost because every location on the map is shaped like a nondescript lumpy circle. do you know how many times i struggled to find overbrook on the map??? do you??? and why can i never find my passengers on my ship?? why did they make beverly so tiny????

the pager jackie gave me really added to that sense of urgency too. one second i'm racing across the ocean, having just left overbrook, and the next second i'm turning this ship right back around because DARIA NEEDS ME HOLD ON GIRL I'M COMIN. and in all the frenzy, i'm cutting corners and either upsetting beverly by skipping out (it was an accident i promise) on the super saver discount book or i'm dashing past my abandoned sunflower field and belatedly noticing that a sheep i'd left to starve has broken in to take matters into her own hands. i can only commend her for her willingness to take initiative in her own survival.

it was a chaotic experience to be sure, and even though i was admittedly speedreading through the dialogue a little too much, it was a refreshing and fun new way to approach a form of gameplay that i was otherwise dreading returning to. i also got to appreciate taking the dlc characters to the everdoor in a new light - it was the only part of the game in which i was forced to slow down, to take my hands off the controllers and truly immerse myself in the drifting journey along the river styx. i even allowed jackie's departure to bring a single tear to my eye before it was back to the race.

sure, i probably left my ship in shambles, and alex the bus driver's theme tune may be permanently burned into my brain now, but there's a lot to be said for the emotional weight this game holds - regardless of how much of a moron i'm enabling myself to be while playing it. and despite all the mayhem, i still made sure everyone got as many hugs as I could give. especially daffodil.

if i had a nickel for every otome game i've played that features an aspiring screenwriter protagonist who is inexperienced at writing romance and who works alongside her love interests - who are all part of the entertainment industry and have varying degrees of daddy issues and eventually show her how to both fall in love and write about love - i'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

the other game i'm referencing is scandal in the spotlight, one of many mobile otome games published by voltage and one of my earliest experiences ever with otome. i don't fully recall if it was my first - i have a feeling the amnesia fan-translation came before it, which i watched on youtube, and diabolik lovers: haunted dark bridal also likely trumped it, in which i have spotty memories of scouring tumblr and google for the sparse fragments of english translations that the internet was able to offer me. but scandal in the spotlight was maybe the first otome i ever actually played. so, for all its many flaws, it means a lot to me! i still return to it every now and then just to reread all the kyohei stories i amassed and bask in the nostalgia of it all.

fast forward a few years, when this localisation gets announced and i read the synopsis and think 'huh. this sounds familiar'. naturally, i'm excited for it! of course, it's its own game, completely unrelated to scandal in the spotlight, but i'm already attached to it by nostalgic association, and after reading a couple of positive reviews for the game i'm super optimistic. i thought for sure it'd be a release day purchase for me - but of course, my brain decides in december that actually, it doesn't fancy playing any otome games right now, so i put off buying it for a couple months. it makes sense that the craving returns in full force right as valentine's day is coming up.

and, wowie, for all the anticipation i had, it did not disappoint. the otome i typically favour is either fantasy or action-heavy, but it was a breath of fresh air to play something so much more grounded in reality. notably, since the setting was more grounded, the love interest's character arcs followed suit, which is one of my favourite things about this game. now, i love my escapism stories, and i like to think i have a high tolerance for silliness and shenanigans, and as such, realism isn't really high up in my list of priorities. but there was just something about its steady presence in this game that i appreciated so much. maybe it's that a lot of the characters' struggles really hit home for me.

for example, harumi's internalised shame over his love of anime, and his journey towards learning to embrace and take pride in it? oof, yeah, been there. i'm an otome player, of course i've been there. for me, and doubtlessly for SO many others, my love for otome games was a source of guilt and embarrassment that i spent so many years locking away and refusing to expose to my family and friends. i perceived so much stigma about otome players being sad and pathetic and needing to get a life, and though it never stopped me enjoying these games, i spent so long feeling terrible for liking them at all. if you ask me, the writers were very aware of this stigma when they wrote harumi's route, and even though i'm already so much more comfortable openly expressing my love of these games nowadays, it was still very validating to read through his route. plus, he's absolutely adorable, and the scene where we were cosplaying together and stumbled upon the other love interests had me cackling.

and then there's kazuma. i played his route first, because i was prewarned that his route was a bit of a train wreck, which, yeah. it was. i'd like to clarify that when i said this game was grounded, that doesn't prevent it from having its exceptions, and the most glaring and off-putting one was the 'surprise! kazuma got bonked by a car and wow, did someone say they wanted him to get amnesia?'. no, no one said that. no one wanted this weird abrupt amnesia arc.
but that's not to say the route didn't have potential. the other aspect that i've seen many people hating was the part where it turns out that all these years, kazuma has secretly resented chiyuki's successes and wants her to fail because he keeps comparing her achievements to his own. i don't blame these people at all, but as someone who also struggles with low self esteem and has a lot of inferiority complexes, i relate to this a lot and think it could've been such an interesting topic to explore. for me, the main issue with as it stands is how late into the story this plot point comes into play, and subsequently how swiftly it both reaches its boiling point and then gets resolved. had the writers just scrapped the amnesia plotline entirely, i believe there would've been enough room for this much more intriguing character arc and i reckon it would've been much more palatable to the general audience as a result. if you'd given it its due runtime, it would've been compelling enough to carry kazuma's route, i promise!

i've saved the best two routes for last, which is a bold statement given how controversial our resident trash man riku's route was. hell, i didn't even think this game was gonna have a trash man at all! so consider my delightful surprise when riku, who i thought was going to be a relatively boring, straight-laced yanagi or dante-type route, turned out to be an absolute gremlin. it's totally understandable why people hate him - i mean, the hidden camera blackmail fiasco is v much an unforgiveable act, and that doesn't even cover this man's numerous other crimes. but the 'public menace' love interest archetype is my absolute favourite and i was eating all of his shenanigans up without an ounce of shame. on top of that, this route was especially tropey in comparison to the others, and i had a blast with it.

yukito, however, is were the writing really shined. he was amazing from start to finish, and out of all the characters, it was by far the most satisfying to watch him grow and mature over the course of his route. the way he uses his playboy persona to his benefit in the industry, his sharp perception of other people, his strong desire to break into the acting world and the clever steps he took towards making that transition possible - it all felt so unique to me, and even though i knew i was gonna love him before i started his route, i was still blown away by how genuine and delightful he came across. the writers really said 'lets get ourselves a flirty archetype but make it different' and then they did. plus, this route has kirari, the seemingly cliche 'overly and unjustifiably territorial fangirl' who is simply not that at all. they gave her so much more dimension than that, and she's the best and i love her and i'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

eiichirou's route is a big old Yikes and deserves to be thrown out of a window, but at least it's barely a route at all. i can't believe a game with such an emphasis on family jumped through a gazillion contrived loopholes just so that they could force this tiny, clunky romantic plotline between chiyuki and her 'tecnhically not a brother'. listen here buddy - in the wise words of klaus hargreeves: 'if you have to say 'technically', you're already in trouble'. what a missed opportunity to forge a really sweet family bond between them after solving the Big Mystery of chiyuki's father. the Big Mystery, might i remind you, that was such an integral, pervading element of the whole game.

big old Yikes aside, i consumed this game in three days and thoroughly adored it. given the association with my humble otome beginnings, it's also rather special in the way it prompts me to look back at the otome community and how far its come - the me of 2012 would never have believed that ten years down the line, otome english releases would be rolling in at a dime a dozen and would have a prospering, dedicated fanbase surrounding them. i think she'd go into shock if she saw the present me sitting on the sofa with my friends, none of whom play otome games, and introducing them to each of the initial love interests so that they can indulge me with their initial impressions of each character. there's a warm fuzziness attached to this game, related to both its contents and my nostalgia, and i'd love to see it get more attention.

when i caught my first pokemon and they did that funky lil animation of the pokedex entry clicking satisfyingly into its bookshelf slot, i knew they'd gotten me hook line and sinker

AND THEN they introduced me to all the characters?? and the whole area zero plot??? and they had a whole cutscene where we all jumped off the cliff w koraidon into the foggy unknown and we were flying through the air with only arven's inhuman strength keeping us from falling straight to our death???? i felt like a child again, rediscovering my love of pokemon after so many years of vague disillusion. peak designs, memorable personalities and a super fun story

i gotta ask though, gamefreak: what's your prejudice against ginger hair about. you're telling me my hair can be ASH PURPLE but not orange?? what did the copper tops ever do to you

also here's the obligatory 'stop releasing your games before they're finished gamefreak we're begging you' plea because regardless of how much fun it is, the sheer amount of jank is insane