My firs otome game.

I died again and again, this was not as easy as I expected.

I watched the anime long long ago.

The heroine was too weak in every "world" The helping spirit made her even more HELPLESS.

1. Shin "weak Agatha Christie" world They should have made the investigation more interesting, but I guess that would have been a lot of work.
2. Ikki I just couldn't take this victim playboy thing seriously.
3. Kent I just didn't care.
4. Toma I wanted to get through quickly just like Kent but OH MAN! I don't know if this is a cautionary tale or brainwashing girls to be OK with TOXIC relationships.

This was very disturbing. He put the heroine in a cage!(◣_◢) I was considering if the good end is killing Toma! SICK.

Bunus Ukyo Second love interest with a mental illness. I was most curious about him because he has multiple personality disorder. wiki Frequency‎: ‎~1.5–2% of people ((° □°;)) I kinda liked the mythology how they explained that it was him in all previous worlds and the cold weather.

It was not what I expected, I feel emptiness, after more than 20 hours - dear god -Long ago when I saw the anime something grabbed my attention, and this didn't give me much more.

The whole game has Japanese voice I did not expect that, the pictures... well I guess the voice was expensive.

The characters didn't feel real.

I really enjoyed the art style (and aesthetic in general) of this one - it had a very specific, unique sort of vibe right down to the way the date looks in the top left corner. The characters being themed around both colours and card suits is interesting and hits on some tropes I love, and the visuals and art in general were pretty gorgeous; some of the proportions on the hands in certain CGs were questionable (and Kent's sprite makes his left arm look 50 metres long for some reason), but other than that they were great.

In the order that I did the routes:

KENT: I enjoyed this one way more than I thought I would. My general pattern with dating sims is to go for the one that least interests me first to a) get it out of the way, b) balance that out with the interest of seeing the story unfold for the first time, and c) save the best ones for last, but I think Kent might actually be my favourite of the options looking back on the game as a whole. He's endearing and very unintentionally funny in that sort of deadpan, dry way I love in my characters, and he's also very definitely a fellow autistic. This route was pretty sweet and low-drama from what I can recall, with the issues mostly centering around figuring out your communication with Kent, your amnesia, and how you'll approach him moving away at the end of the month.

IKKI: As a counterpoint to Kent's, I thought I'd like his route more than I did. The latter half of it somewhat made up for it, but the first half was pretty uncomfortable and wasn't particularly making me root for the relationship at all. I'm not a huge fan of Ikki's whole superpowered eyes thing he has going on - it might sound strange to say it considering there are other fantastical elements in the game, but it felt a little out-of-step with the tone of the rest of the story. His fan club is also cartoonishly evil and malicious, not just in his own route but in others too.

TOMA: Unfortunately I kind of knew the spoilers around this one before going into it thanks to recognising his name. Part of me wishes I hadn't so I could've experienced it blind, but there were still elements of it that surprised me, so I'm not too bothered by it. I'm pretty open to dark and toxic elements to fictional relationships - in fact, it'll probably pique my interest more than the alternative - but I will admit there were moments in this route that pushed a little too far into discomfort than I was anticipating. I'm not sure I buy his good ending and having him be forgiven so easily, but that's otome protagonists for you, I suppose.

SHIN: This one was genuinely pretty interesting. Each route has a slightly different genre focus - I'd say Kent's is more slice-of-life, Ikki's is romantic drama with some horror elements in the back half, and Toma's turns psychological thriller - and Shin's kicks off a heavier 'murder' mystery/detective angle that I thought was neat. I'm not entirely sure why he's so focused on in marketing and on the cover because there was nothing that made his route feel more 'canon' than the others, especially in comparison to Ukyo, but there were some good twists in here and I love Shin's design. He really was an asshole, though - there were a few things he said to the protagonist that were too far IMO and frankly crossed the line into verbal abuse for me.

UKYO: There's a lot I could say about the harmful and incredibly inaccurate depiction of DID here, but it's a game from 2013, so I'll try not to fixate on it (plus that would devolve into an entire generalised rant about its portrayal in media and I'm trying to keep this review more focused than that). This was a very different take than the other routes, which was to be expected, and I can see why he's a popular favourite, though he didn't quite take that spot for me. The ending ran into the same "forgiven far too easily" issue I had with Toma, but the good ending did actually make me pretty emotional (it was seeing Nhil and Orion in the human world that got me), so it was a pretty good beat to end on. It does leave some questions unanswered, though - to my knowledge, it's never specified whether 'the other Ukyo' is gone or not; there's no reason he would be, but he's never brought up again and it's treated as an uncomplicatedly happy ending with no more relationship issues, so is he no longer around? Is it not an obstacle anymore?

The only other criticism I have of this game is the frequency of the... I guess I have to call them loading screens? They're not there to actually load anything in, because they're instantly skippable, but for some reason the game has these fade-in fade-out screens pop up whenever a location changes or a new day begins, which sometimes results in you getting past a screen, reading 5-10 lines of dialogue, and immediately dealing with another screen, which gets especially irritating once the art on them starts to repeat as well. That's a minor nitpick, though, and once I figured out they responded to the skip function it was much less of an issue.

The minigames are pretty much nothing modes - it's a pretty tedious rock-paper-scissors game (that does admittedly get slightly more engaging once it speeds up, I believe once you've beaten 3 characters) and a clunky but minimally more fun air hockey contest. I'd only really advise doing them if you're going for the 100% like I was.

The soundtrack is also pretty ignorable - had some nice tracks, most notably the softer piano that played during more emotional moments and the more eerie chords that played during some scenes with Ukyo, Rika, or Toma, but it was mostly just inoffensive background tunes.