Cupid Parasite

I had never played an Otome game before Cupid Parasite. Many visual novels, sure. Many many visual novels... but never have I attempted to woo a cabal of hot guys.

What first impressed me is the incredible presentation. This game has near perfect marks in that regard. Art style? Fantastic. Music? It blew me away. Though as the game goes on, a funny issue becomes more noticeable. All of the character art is stellar, but they clearly didn't have the budget to illustrate miscellaneous characters. It's okay though, it doesn't matter much, not even to knock a star off. The reason for that is, above all else, the writing is fan-freaking-tastic. I could hardly believe it at times! There's a surprising amount of nuance in how the characters think, behave around each other, etc. Special shout outs to Lynette, Raul, and a secret character. Such good writing. And it's FUNNY. Multiple times, I burst out laughing. Very good.

This game is at times alarmingly heteronormative, though something that I really enjoyed was how central Lynette's life and concerns were to her love interests. I was quite pleased. Like, I wouldn't exactly call this a feminist game, but it's very woman focused in multiple respects, which is cool. Haha, I'm looking forward to my next otome game.

Give this a shot, definitely try a couple storylines. If you don't want to follow all six, my personal recommendation is Shelby/Gill -> Raul -> Allan. I liked Ryuki, and his storyline is pretty interesting and fun in many respects, but if you had to only play a few, that's my recommendation. That being said, I played all six, and had a great time the whole time. Raul is my fave for sure tho. GREAT sound effects during particular scenes.

That's all, I loved it. Byeeeeee!

I took a break from other games and started this one up the other day. I'd been pretty excited about this and picked it up on a sale a while back, but after ending my summer with like four VNs, I'd been a little burnt out. I finished Shelby's route and I'm just...underwhelmed. I guess I was expecting it to be a little different, and it was kind of a slog.

The art is pretty, but the backgrounds and menus are very intense: really chaotic, clashing patterns and hyper-bright colors. The music is this weird jumble of like, bebop and more modern rock with vocals. Having vocal tracks in a VN is kinda weird to me; not everyone can focus on reading with that happening in the background. It was fine for me, but I just didn't like any of them except for Ryuki's.

The story is okay. Huge chunks of the common story were boring/dragged on and there was no real build-up to the specific route. It's one of those that's going to succumb to the "there's a true path that will have all of the details in it, so here's this half-assed story that only wraps up the romance." I think the "good" ending for Shelby was better than the best one. The bad endings were just a waste of time and really dumb. Like not even a, "You messed up; we're done!" kind of situation because you didn't pick the correct choices, or someone getting stabbed in an alley like VNs are wont to do with bad endings. There was a, "Hey, I'm interested in treasure hunting now, so I'm leaving for Greece today!" What.

I might drop this one for now. I'm just not feeling it. I never did finish Steam Prison, and I've had Collar x Malice -Unlimited- for a while. I kind of want to replay CxM if I play the fandisk, though, unless I can find a site with a good summary of each route.