I finally finished Virche Evermore! I didn’t 100% it, but I got most of all the CGs and was eager to move on to another game, so I will consider it done for now and move on to the next game. I’m playing Angelique Luminarise, which I thought would be a cakewalk after playing literally every other Angelique game, but… I’m not sure if I’m going to win this time 😭 But I’m having fun! Even if the queen exam is making me lose my mind. I’ve been liveblogging it on my personal site, if I’m allowed to self-promo.

I’ve been so busy with the semester finishing up that I’m still playing the Virche FD. I was hoping I’d have something new to announce finally this week, but alas… At the very least, I was starting to convince myself that Virche isn’t even that good, but all the Ankou stuff in the FD changed my mind again. It’s good. Ankou is very good. Lucas is my favorite character, but he got treated so dirty I may change my mind… and I mean, it’s only fair, but comparing his route to the others will make you feel bitter, LOL. I know why everyone else gets to be happy, but I don’t have to love it. (Or maybe I’m not the target audience? And there are people out there who actually enjoy their boyfriend oheavat va uryy sbe rgreavgl*. I shouldn’t judge.)

*ROT13

Oh, I wasn’t thinking “naive bully victim,” more like “classic otaku,” which can be done without being bothered at school or anything. Like by having really good grades that diverts attention from her obsession with [insert thing here], or by not being a student at all. 😁 Or someone alt would be called a loser by some people too, but if she has friends from the same/a similar subculture shielding her or is too tough-skinned to even entertain haters, bullying won’t be prominent either.

I can vouch for Obscura. If you can handle every trigger warning in the world, it’s peak. I’m interested in Royal Order… I may be buying.

It’s funny it’s rare for otome games to have a protag with such a hairstyle because. Well. Surely that’s at least 30% of the player base over there. A genius MC would be cool, but to me what I want is a nerdy/geeky protag who looks it too. Meganekko MCs please!! If she’s great at school that’d be great (I was like that too), but I wouldn’t mind a loser-type MC either. I mean loser in a highly complimentary way, of course. I guess I’d like a girl who was more than “unremarkable beyond being kind and pretty cute.”

I actually really enjoyed Ayumu and wished the game was longer, because not often do I get guys with pretty hair who also hate me! :DD And maybe if the game was longer it’d be better… and they’d use the extended time to explore gender, because the game’s setup being what it is but there being no gender talks or yuri teases made my jaw drop. What the heck. Completely wasted concept. But yea, if I talk about Ayumu too long it’ll be clear I have M tendencies–

Can I know some games that you think have strong art direction? I’m wondering if we have the same definition of “generic.”

Top 4 I can think of are

1. Probably most common, the playboy. I used to love these, but over time I’ve started to grow tired of men who are keenly aware of how good-looking they are and use it to their advantage 😭 so now it depends on their motivations and how aggressive they are in their flirting whether I like them or not.
2. A calm guy who seems like the shining example of nobility or even divinity. Can be boring easily, I’m not gonna lie, but the eye candy will at least be good.
3. Cold, mysterious emo(/goth/some other third thing) guy, aka Peak. My fave here. And the trope the guy in my icon falls under. and last but certainly not least
4. Crossdressing guy who is flamboyant and you’d normally assume is gay. It’s tricky because if the writer(s) are still a little homo/transphobic I’ll get pissed off, but when done right it’s 😙👌🏾 to me. My second fave. #bisexualitywin

Firstly, I won’t play anything that doesn’t have an LI with long hair. If he exists but his personality sucks, then I won’t play - but I like many kinds of personalities, and having long hair comes with its own usual tropes I’m familiar with, so not often do they have the looks but not personality. This also is an art thing. If the art style is so -_- it distracts me from imagining him as hot in my head, I’ll pass.

Once that’s covered, I look at the setting. I don’t care that much about organized crime (even if historical), contemporary corporate culture, or … most other regular contemporary settings. I like historical and fantasy stuff (low fantasy too). I can be won over by things set in this normal world if the basic circumstances are something that probably won’t happen to me, like a death game.

Writing makes or breaks a game for me, but previews can only tell you about word choice and diction, not how the story comes together or how the characters are developed… sigh.

I don’t mind! I like to talk a lot about the things I like, and have barely anything to say on anything else.

I want to write a blog post somewhere when I’m finished with Angelique about it, so I’ve been thinking about where I first heard about it. But I really don’t remember. I can guess and say that after I played my first otome game in 2020, Hakuoki, I likely read about the subgenre and found out about Angelique that way, because that would be such a me thing to do. If someone asked how I found out about Hakuoki I would have no clue at all*, as I didn’t know it had an anime or anything. Anyways, I know I had the game on hand for literal years. The first time I tried to play it the Japanese was too hard and I didn’t make it past the opening tutorial. Same the second time. For some reason in May of this year I was compelled to try one more time… and after powering through the wordy tutorial, it was pretty easy to understand! Studying pays off! And as you can see, I’ve basically gone through the entire series in half a year because the first game was that intriguing. I hesitate to say “good” because if it was good enough to make me play the rest of the games so quickly someone might think it was amazing, but it wasn’t. It just felt like it had the makings of something that COULD be amazing. And I was correct; after a few tries they made a games that were ALMOST. ALMOST 10/10s. Nothing’s perfect, so I’m not upset or anything. I’m very happy with the time I spent! ^_

Between obsessively playing my games where I balance the affects of 9~18 emotionally unstable men, I would be on VNDB looking through the otome tag. Otome and RPG, Otome and SRPG, Otome and Sim, Otome and Map Movement, lots of things in hopes of finding more. And I looked at Ruby Party’s list of games too, plus other games by other studios I found that I liked or thought sounded interesting… My backlog is huge. I’m eager to play them all, but I do wonder if I’m going to lose touch with the broader gaming community 😭 Oh well!

*Now that I’m thinking really hard about it, I think Steam recommended Hakuoki to me because I had played games with romance/dating in them and visual novels. I bought it nigh-instantly because Hijikata looked like my type, I like history, and I think anything with swords must be cool.

And to answer a question from earlier… I played Angelique (1994, SNES) and all PS1 games on my 3DS, the DS game on my DSi, and all other games on PS2 or Vita PC emulators. The Switch game will be played on my Switch.

They kind of fused Rosalia, various mean girls and bullies, and other rich girls from older manga (like from Aim for the Ace or Oniisama e or Glass Mask, who were sometimes bullies, sometimes rivals, sometimes role models and allies). Threw in the aesthetics of The Rose of Versailles and misc European nobility too. I think it’s strange it presents itself as a parody of something that doesn’t quite exist, but people really like those stories! I could be missing out, but I’m usually too focused on history to check out a lot of new things.

A lot of those games are on my backlog, but I have to get through all Ruby Party games first. Just doing that will knock out a lot of those, but there’s other interesting games I’m excited for too. For example, Dear My Sun!! is a game where you have to raise twins while romancing men. Princess Debut is a rhythm otome that made it overseas, and I feel I missed out by not playing it when it was new. Back then the games I played were up to my parents’ whims at the store, but now the gaming world is my oyster…

Love and Deepspace doesn’t have a guy who is my type, but I’m glad it doesn’t because I would cry if a game that was so interactive and had my type in it existed but was a gacha. I hate gacha games. I don’t even like blind bags. Someone needs to make these things illegal internationally. I don’t read “otome” manga on principle, but it’s funny they made up an idea of what otome games are and everyone has followed suit. I don’t even read Villainess stuff, and after playing Angelique I feel even crazier seeing them because Rosalia, the rival character supposedly spawning the villainess phenomena, is nothing like that. … More people who aren’t Ruby Party should make otome RPGs though. Earnest ones with unique settings, no parodies or anything.

None of them have English releases; I know Japanese well enough to get around. Most of Ruby Party’s games are otome - Angelique, Harukanaru Toki no Naka de, and La Corda d’Oro are all otome. Some other games they made that stand alone are otome, but some aren’t (like, they were the ones mainly in charge of Touken Ranbu Warriors), and some are romantic but too focused on something else to solidly be otome.

The games I was going to skip I don’t regret playing. I’m glad I tried them! The board game one made me look up how to complete any slide puzzle because of a minigame where you have to complete a slide puzzle in 5 minutes of a picture they show you for half a second 😭 New skill obtained! The one for Game Boy Color was like a really cute school AU, and I appreciated any more time spent with my boys. And the RPG one… well, I’m excited to see how they refined the groundwork they laid there to kick off a new series of games, the Haruka series.

How did I play it? Definitely not with the most legal methods, I’ll tell you what. But I believe anything that isn’t on the market in a way where the people who made it would get the money is free real estate. So only Angelique Luminarise for Nintendo Switch (which has a free demo, but you need to have access to the JP eshop) I paid for like a normal law-abiding citizen.

But!! They recently added Angelique, the first game, the game to Japan’s Nintendo Switch online. If you make a Nintendo account where your region is Japan, you can go on the JP eshop with it and download Super Famicom online. Then you can open the app just fine with your account that has a NSO membership. Of course, it’s in Japanese… If you’re really dedicated, you could hold Google Translate camera up to your screen for every dialogue box. Even if you don’t want to play an entire game like that, if you have NSO I think it’d be nice just to try and see what the first otome game played like for a bit. It’s kind of made me less excited to play visual novel games when other types of gameplay existed for otome games existed in the early age. But I like reading, so I swear I haven’t abandoned VNs or anything.

I also preordered the first game and played it on release, because it seemed right up my alley. Gothic fiction with beautiful art? I had to cop. It has super good reviews, but honestly in retrospect I think it was… too melodramatic? Like, it had too many plot twists or something. But I still like it. :]

The queue thing is that for a while I’ve been on a mission to play every Angelique game. I was playing them mostly in order, but there was some hopping around as I decided to not play certain games but then reversed my decisions and decided I was going to play EVERY Angelique game, even if it’s just “[game title] but better,” or “AU board game.” I have one last Angelique game to go, and then my new mission is to play every Ruby Party (the Koei studio who created Angelique and in charge of many other games aimed at women, mostly romance games) game in release order. Minus the games that are part of the Angelique series. Because I’ll have already played those. :P

It would be so easy for a genie to grant in a way that sucks for me, but that blue-violet sounds really good right now. The world would be the world of Angelique :D Which is nigh-utopian (if you live on the right planet)

I figured out how to see posts on here!! I didn’t have the right language selected 🫠 I got Epic Lycoris a day early, so I’m playing that now. I was doing a thing called “no starting any new games until I finish everything I have to do,” but I can’t not just play the shiny new game delivered to my front door. And since I’ve given up on my promise to myself to play Virche, I know what I’ll be starting next week (I have a very structured queue going on right now)