Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly (2015)

This game initially felt like it had it all. Surprisingly interesting cast of guys? Check. Spooky setting with gothic art? Check. Excellent music and decent writing? Check!... However the flowchart nature of the game ultimately does it a disservice. In Psychedelica branching paths are mixed with separate side stories in a way that makes it difficult to complete character routes, which is too bad! Most visual novels with a long common route and multiple endings have difficulty managing replays of the common route alongside immersion, but here it's downright annoying.

Still, I had plenty of fun with most of the stories and thought Kagiha was excellently complex. The protagonist could have been a bit more assertive, but she was often sensible enough and sometimes quite likable. There are plenty of better structured otome games to play before this one, so consider skipping this unless you're not bothered by strictly following character guides.

I go back and forth on the "I don't like how these types play out."

I'm a sucker for anything that has a laid out timeline, but at the same time it makes it so you barely have any time with your chosen character. A lot of it is made up of the common route with small choices where you get about 5 minutes with a character of your chosing (at least if you're using a walkthrough, otherwise you might be choosing blind.)

I had a certain fondness for one character, but the rest I could take or leave. The story overall was decent though.

It's been about 3 months since I finished this, but I remember most of what I liked/disliked.

Story: The story itself was intriguing, but most of the endings were rushed, as the common route made up like 85% of the content. I'm used to VNs like Hakuoki and Code: Realize (which are done really, really well, so I try not to compare other VNs to them too often), where each character's story has major variations from the others', or could be considered a different story entirely. There was maybe one different answer choice for the different love interests in this game, and you could skip way ahead to almost the end in order to get them. That left me a little less invested because it didn't change anything about the overall story. There's also not really much romance at all, which was kind of a let down.

Mechanics: I really liked the side stories in the plot map. You have to read certain ones in order to unlock other pathways, but they added much more to the story than the actual main "paths." The story map itself made it much easier to get to certain scenes for other paths, but again, the downside to that is a lack of investment and not a lot of new material per path. The mini game of shooting the butterflies was also a fun concept, though it didn't impact much because it was easy to rack up points for the side stories. Other mechanics were pretty standard: speed through previously read text, text log, chapter select, etc.

Characters: The back story that you eventually unlock was what added the most depth to the characters. There's obviously a reason they're all locked together in this mansion, but finding out why was pretty twisty. I liked most of the characters and their different personalities, but Monshiro is definitely my favorite.

Overall, a pretty average visual novel. It's worth a playthrough if you like VNs, but I'm barely into Chapter 2 of the "sequel" and I'm enjoying it way more.