We talked briefly about the otome game Mistonia when it was announced for localization, and it came out earlier this year as Mistonia’s Hope: The Lost Delight.
(The main character’s name was localized as Aprose, so that wasn’t as awkward as I feared.)
I finished Mistonia recently, so how did this otome game turn out?
For me, it’s a mixed bag, with some great high points but also some unfortunate low ones. It’s set in Grand Albion, ruled over by the fae queen. Aprose’s family was murdered on the queen’s orders when she was a child, and now Aprose infiltrates the house of one of the noble families so that she can learn the identities of the people responsible and get her revenge.
Aprose is a fun protagonist. She begins the story with revenge as her sole focus, so it’s enjoyable to watch her start to form bonds with the people around her and think about romance for the first time.
Most of the love interests are connected to the tragedy in one way or another, which sets up conflict right from the start. Not all of the routes take an enemies-to-lovers direction, but a lot have at least some of that flavor.
As is typical, it begins with a common route in which your choices determine whose route you end up on. The common route also has several exploration segments, where you pick rooms in the house to visit and gather information. I loved this on my first time through the common route… and got tired of it after that, because on later playthroughs it became a matter of selecting each room and skipping the read text, over and over, since there was no way to skip through the whole thing.
Once you’re on a character’s route, your choices lead to one of three endings: a good ending (Dawn), a bad ending (Clown), and an ending for picking responses favorable to a different love interest (Astray).
The Astray endings can be entertaining, as they have Aprose get involved in some way with the other love interest instead, which leads to some unique and unexpected scenarios. The Clown endings also stood out to me. Due to the nature of the plot, most of the Clown endings feature Aprose being unable to forgive the love interest and getting her revenge on him in a unique and often unhinged way.
Otome games don’t often have the MC be the one to go off the rails in the bad endings, so I enjoyed Mistonia committing to it (even if some of them were so wild that I was laughing through them).
When it comes to the characters, I mostly enjoyed the cast. Lucas was my favorite, followed unexpected by Ascot and then Linus. The others were also fine, but didn’t stand out to me as much as those three. Still, I enjoyed their routes enough that it was worth playing just for them.
Now, like many otome games, Mistonia also has a Truth Route that unlocks once you’ve finished all the character routes, and… it was just sort of boring. Yes, it resolves a few final unanswered mysteries, but I almost think it would have been better to incorporate those answers into other routes instead and just not have a Truth ending. It was significantly shorter than any other route, and it just didn’t have a compelling story.
Still, despite not enjoying the Truth route, finding the exploration section of the common route tedious on later playthroughs, and only really loving 3 out of the 6 love interests, Mistonia’s Hope: The Lost Delight still gave me a lot to enjoy and I’m glad I played it.
If you’re an otome fan and Mistonia sounds interesting to you, I’d recommend it, especially if you enjoy enemies-to-lovers routes and a heroine who can go a little crazy in bad ends.
