Operation Backlog Completion 2025
Feb 072024
 

While looking through games for this year’s romance celebration, I came across a visual novel called Belong that I had picked up in a bundle.

Belong lets you customize your protagonist and pursue routes with three love interests, two male and one female.

While it starts out with a short prologue to introduce the protagonist, it then asks you to choose which route to follow before you even have an idea of what the characters are like. I would have preferred to get to know all the love interests naturally in the story first, but unfortunately that’s not how it’s set up.

Once you pick a character, the route begins. Chapters are extremely short, only lasting a few minutes. This was probably done so that each route could have 10 chapters, but I think it would have benefited from fewer chapters with a longer runtime to not feel like the already-fast pace is even more accelerated.

Unfortunately, that fast pace is seen in the writing, as well. Routes progressed so fast that sometimes I was surprised by conflicts because the build-up only occurred in a couple lines, or confused by a sudden emotional scene because of how quickly it cropped up. One route in particular had several moments that were very cute and would have worked really well if it had slower pacing.

There aren’t too many choices within a route, only a couple that lead to worse endings. After finishing a route, if you play it again, you can find stickers that unlock new scenes from the love interest’s point of view, as well as trivia.

These alternate POV scenes were the most interesting part to me, and I wish they had been included naturally in the route instead of requiring a replay to find them. They felt like they had much better pacing than the main routes, and they fleshed them out nicely.

I was hoping for a cute romance story with Belong, but the pacing held it back from what it could have been. Nevertheless, it at least had some nice moments on each of the routes.

  6 Responses to “Celebrating All Things Romantic: Belong”

  1. Protagonist customization: Yay!
    Choose your route before you know the love interest: Boooo…

    Honestly, from how you describe the writing of the game, I’m surprised you went back in for replays after your initial go-through!

    • Well it was so short that I figured I had nothing to lose, and since games can vary from route to route, I wanted to give it another chance. I enjoyed my second route more than the first, so that did improve my opinion of it.

  2. Choosing a route before you even meet the characters, wow, I don’t think I’ve heard of that before… the closest I can think of is Fire Emblem Three Houses, where at least you get a single mission to meet each of the house heads!

    • You do meet one of the love interests ahead of time, but the other two are just shown briefly with no dialogue until you start the route.

      I think the most extreme example I’ve seen is Amnesia: Memories, where it tells you to just pick a world based on card suits with no indication at all of who the love interest will be.

  3. The whole game kind of sounds like a speedrun, kind of strange to make each chapter so short but I agree with you in wanting longer chapters so the whole experience doesn’t feel rushed.
    But hey there’s customization that’s always neat!

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