Moe Era is a free visual novel that just came out recently on Steam, so I decided to take a look at it for our romance celebration.
You start out in a strange room where four girls talk about how your life story is empty and you need to make a change.
Then you wake up from an apparent dream in the real world, where you attend school with those same four girls, three of whom are classmates while the other is your teacher.
For a while, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. It felt like a slice-of-life romance story, albeit with an unusual emphasis on introducing the player to things like classic works of literature and famous composers, but it also had surreal aspects that make me wonder just what was going on.
It was hard not to draw comparisons to a certain other slice-of-life-but-not-really visual novel, except I’d seen the developer explicitly say Moe Era wasn’t horror.
And that is accurate. While it isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface, it is not horror.
Instead, it’s actually quite a motivational story. I won’t go into details, because it’s fairly short and I don’t want to spoil it, but Moe Era left me feeling inspired and motivated.
It has cute moments and funny moments and just a positive message in general. The graphics are good, and it has a surprising number of CGs despite taking less than 3 hours to finish. It also handles its routes in a very player-friendly way, although I’d recommend keeping an extra save to make it easier to see all the content (such as the non-romance route, which is also resolved well in its good ending).
Moe Era is just an all-around nice visual novel, so if you’re looking for something cute and sweet with depth that goes beyond that, Moe Era is available now for the low, low price of free.
