Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Romantic: Taisho x Alice

 Celebrating All Things Romantic, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
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.

Click for Taisho x Alice spoilers
I was pleasantly surprised that everyone got a happy ending, too, although I still feel sad for the Wizard.

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!

Celebrating All Things Romantic: Doodle Date

 Celebrating All Things Romantic, Reviews, Video games  15 Responses »  Tagged with:
Feb 082023
 

Today we’re going to talk about an unusual indie game I picked up in a bundle, Doodle Date.

Doodle Date has a unique central gimmick: you draw the character you’re dating.

After being pulled into the world of your sketchbook, you are asked to draw your ideal date. You draw several different expressions/poses for this character, who is then named Sketchy and goes on a date with you. At certain points in the game, you have to draw other things, as well, like your waiter at a restaurant.

The drawing gimmick is entertaining, and I liked seeing how it was implemented at various points. My terrible artwork just made it funnier.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d actually call this a romance. It’s a short game, taking about 30 minutes for one playthrough, and the romantic development generally consists of being told you’re going on dates with Sketchy and growing closer. Instead of developing a romance, it spends more time playing into the darker implications of entering a world of sketches and creating someone to fall in love with you.

Click for Doodle Date spoilers
In the Sketchy route, you become upset that Sketchy won’t have sex with you and learn that Sketchy is distressed over every aspect of their existence being created for your benefit. You get a divorce.

It’s also possible to instead end up with Claire, the pre-existing sketch who tells you how the sketch world works. In that route, you get her pregnant, and the implications of a human-sketch hybrid baby are apparently so horrifying that she tries to kill you, so you kill her. Then the baby shows up years later and kills you in revenge.

Doodle Date is a romance game in the same way Doki Doki Literature Club could be seen as one, except that game devotes a greater amount of time to developing the character relationships first.

That’s a shame, because drawing your own love interest for a visual novel is a fun idea that I would have liked to see played out in earnest instead of from this meta perspective. It’s still interesting, but not what I was expecting.

Update: By popular demand, I’ve uploaded my drawn Sketchy.

So far this February I’ve reviewed a Nekopara game that focuses more on personal growth, and now a meta horror take on visual novels. At least Wintertide Miracles was a good romance story! Friday’s post has a good chance of being supplanted by Nintendo Direct news (fingers crossed), so let’s hope I manage to find another genuine romance for our review on Monday!

Celebrating All Things Romantic: Code Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~

 Celebrating All Things Romantic, Reviews, Video games  5 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 062023
 

After discussing the otome visual novel Code: Realize two years ago and its fandisc Future Blessings last year, now we’ll be talking about the second fandisc, Wintertide Miracles.

(As a reminder, a fandisc can be seen as an extended epilogue game, or a sequel that builds on your happy ending.)

Like its predecessor, Wintertide Miracles contains several different types of stories.

One entertaining inclusion are the “triangle dates,” scenes that feature the main protagonist Cardia with two of the other characters. While not explicitly dates like the name would suggest, most of them feature the love interests vying for her interest with some comedic antics along the way.

The triangle dates aren’t just restricted to love interests, though, and those additional scenarios might be the funniest of all.

(Nemo is a treasure, and he’s at his best in Wintertide Miracles.)

Now let’s talk about the character routes, the game’s core content. These are set at Christmas, making this otome a great choice to read around the holidays. Instead of following each character’s ending from the original game, however, all the Christmas stories follow the ending of Finis’s route from Future Blessings. Essentially, it treats that as an extended common route so that the romances can develop from there.

They’re quite cute and sweet, with an emphasis on romance and holiday cheer instead of high stakes, a lovely way to revisit these characters.

But if you need a break from the winter setting, each character also has a bonus short story set at the beach that unlocks when you complete that character’s route.

Since Future Blessings included a new route for Herlock Sholmes, as well as the platonic Finis route, both of those characters get their own follow-up stories as well, with higher stakes and more dramatic plotlines than those found in the Christmas stories. There is also another side story set during the original game’s common route, in which Cardia befriends a songstress named Cantarella and becomes entangled in a new plot. Despite its slow start, I ended up enjoying this story quite a bit.

Finally, once you finish playing everything else (except the beach stories, which are optional), you unlock special epilogues for each of the main love interests. These do follow their individual Future Blessings routes and are fairly low-stakes stories showing the characters happy and in love.

I greatly enjoyed Code: Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~. Going into it, I worried it might feel stretched for content, being the second fandisc. However, I enjoyed it just as much as Future Blessings. Maybe it’s heavier on the fluff than on serious conflict, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re a Code: Realize fan, you definitely should check out Wintertide Miracles – especially around the holidays.

(Personally, I wouldn’t mind a third Code: Realize fandisc. Maybe with Nemo and Hansel routes? I can dream.)

 Older Entries  Newer Entries