Fata Morgana is a very intricate visual novel. There are few stories in recent memory where I can say that i remember every chapter, every scene clearly and that they are all positive contributions to the story. Yet at the same time, Fata Morgana's pacing is undeniably slow, to the point where the actual conflicts of the story itself (and not the stories within the story) have barely even started around 12 hours in.

It's both a byproduct of the VN's structure - starting with some short stories before developing a narrative around those stories and the staging - and that Fata Morgana is probably the most immersive VN i've played.

There's such a fantastic sense of "place" in this VN. Which is pretty important when the story is about a single location, but there's more to it than that. For one, the music is absolutely brilliant, balancing the tightrope of punctuating moments in the plot and providing background noise better than any of it's contempories that i've played.

It's also down to the amount of time each character gets. Each short story is essentially about 2-4 characters with minor side ones, and every single one gets lots of time and dialogue - which is typically strong and well translated - which is used to establish their characters and conflicts very well. Each of the short stories is told terrifically well in general, and stand pretty well on their own as self-contained horror/tragedies. Which is fortunate, because otherwise the game would be wasting an awful lot of your time if they weren't.

Arguably the game's biggest mistake is giving you the impression that the game is almost over after these stories are finished, when it's really closer to halfway done - I think having that knowledge beforehand would have helped me feel a bit less burned out by the end, so I'd encourage all those to play to bear that in mind.

Because when the game then spends the next 10 hours putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, it's so damn good. The final hours of the game are particularly rewarding, unravelling all the possible threads in fantastic fashion. After a mid-game slump, the game ends on a very high note, which is something I see rarely in this style of thing.

It's not perfect. As I said, the pacing is maybe too slow, but maybe the biggest issue the game has is that of budget. As good as the art gets in Fata Morgana, it's very limited, with most chapters likely having only 1 or 2 pieces of unique full-screen art and most characters having a single portrait with maybe 2 facial expressions, and it makes the scenes of people just talking feel a little less engaging than it could be.

It's also a very, very grim, emotionally heavy story for 90% of it's runtime, and whilst i'm totally into that shit, the near complete lack of levity for long periods and how grim it gets I feel is liable to wear people out.

But for what it's going for and what it's trying to achieve, I feel Fata Morgana nails it. A slow story with constraints, but the moments where it hits it's emotional peaks are almost unmatched in any VN i've played.

Easy 9/10 for me, but probably 8/10 for people that are less into constant sadness

Sidenote: the representation of LGBT stuff in this game is well handled and the topics it approaches are pretty unique in any fictional media I've consumed The protagonist's struggle with gender identity in particular feels very well handled. I feel it deserves props for that.

Yes, imagine a world, where you could pay $40 and in return, you receive six years of a team feverishly writing, illustrating, and orchestrating a tight, devastating, incredible tome of a story. Well, you can, so tldr, this is an incredible package.

I've written previous reviews for The House in Fata Morgana and A Requiem for Innocence, so I'll focus on the new content here. That being said, I did not replay those two games, I first experienced them in 4:3, but I'm sure the new widescreen art is excellent. I think there's also new side stories in here, but I haven't delved into those yet. I think I've read everything up until this release, I just can't speak to any new side stories.

Reincarnation is wild. If you make it through A Requiem for Innocence, it would be a little foolish to not top it off with this great epilogue. And that's kind of what it is. There's new stuff here, story wise, but this entire Reincarnation story is basically an epilogue. But it's very good! I was surprised by how okay I was with the new art direction, which works well for this story. The voice acting was surprisingly good too. Like, really really good. I only know smatterings of Japanese, but the voice actors are clearly putting a lot of love into their roles. The way they decided to do music is pretty special. If you've had any fondness at all for the previous game soundtracks, you're in for a nostalgic treat.

So if you're new to the series? This is a great game. New to visual novels? Hands down, this is my favorite set of visual novels. Uh, consider reading a no spoiler set of content warnings though. There's a bunch of messed up stuff in these stories, but I thought they did a great job with just about all of it. Just... dang, go play this game.