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.
