Feb 132023
Welcome back to Celebrating All Things Romantic 2023. Today we’ll be discussing Taisho x Alice, an otome visual novel available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
It is split into 4 episodes, each with its own love interests, but that doesn’t mean you can play the episodes in any order you want.
No, the Taisho x Alice episode order is there for a reason. While you might get away with skipping episode 1, playing through the episodes in order is important to the overarching story.
The story begins when you find yourself in darkness. While trying to find your way out, you meet a young man named Alice who calls you Arisu. The two of you find a strange mirror, and you fall through into the Looking-Glass World where your prince awaits.
If you haven’t already guessed, it has a fairytale theme. The love interests, though all men, are named after classic fairytale heroines like Cinderella, Snow White, etc., and this plays into their stories as well. That’s about all the detail I can go into about the plot, because this is the sort of story that’s difficult to discuss without spoilers.
Episode 1 was pretty lighthearted, with a lot of humor and wacky dialogue (and while some people criticize the jokey and meme-y dialogue that shows up at times, apparently that’s true of the Japanese script as well, so the translation kept the same tone). Episode 2 got much more serious and significantly darker, and then Episode 3 and the Epilogue left me marveling over the story.
It’s an unusual one where I find myself not feeling too strongly about several of the love interests (Red Riding Hood and the Wizard are my favorites, although I enjoyed every route), but the story as a whole is enough to overcome that and make it a favorite.
I also absolutely love the opening theme song, to the point where I let the intro play every time I started up the game.
I haven’t played the fandisc yet, but that’s something I’ll want to check out someday.
Taisho x Alice is the sort of story you want to experience for yourself, as long as you won’t be put off by the sometimes-quite-dark subject matter. Even if you aren’t a big fan of otome games, I’d still recommend this one for the story itself.
In fact, since I enjoyed Taisho x Alice so much, I’ve added its episodes to the list of prizes you can win in this year’s contest! Meanwhile, Idea Factory has announced an otome live stream for tomorrow, so here’s hoping we have some exciting news to discuss soon!
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Might be a silly question, but it’ll count toward my comments for your contest!
…what’s an otome game? ^^;;
Not a silly question, no worries. An otome game is when you play as female protagonist with male love interests. (Sometimes an otome will have a female love interest, but the majority of the love interests should be male for it to be classified as otome.)
I have always enjoyed new takes of fairy tales, interesting that they gender-bent the fairy tale characters without changing their names… And yes, the opening theme song works great, really feels like it captures the theme of the game.
The names took a little while for me to get used to, but after eventually they started to feel normal to me (in fact, I briefly forgot Gretel is a girl’s name since I associate it more closely with the Taisho x Alice character now).
Ah yes, this brings those classic stories to mind. Little Red, Cinderella, Snow White… Wizard. I for the life of me have no idea what Wizard is supposed to be. I at least heard of Kaguya. Is it… Yen Sid? Is this what he does when he isn’t in KH?
The game looks interesting. It kind of makes me wish for some type of RPG with an Alice in Wonderland aesthetic.
It’d be something if right after this, Idea Factory announced something about their Alice in the Country of Spades games.
The Wizard is a little different than the other love interests, so it might be intentional that he doesn’t match a clear fairytale character. Trying to explain that in any more detail would be hard without spoilers, though, so I definitely recommend you give it a try if it sounds interesting.
Oh my gawww
Genderbent fairy tale characters? Sign me up!
More or less, yes, although there’s more going on beyond that.