Gensou Kissa Enchante // All Other Routes and Final Thoughts

Unsurprisingly (surprisingly? maybe depending on perspective) it didn’t take all that long to finish this game. And to summarise my feelings: AAAAAAAAAAAaaaHHHHHHHHH.

Gensou Kissa Enchante oh how I have feels

Story

Synopsis below copied from my first post:

The story is about Awaki Kotone, who inherits her grandfather, Awaki Souan‘s cafe after his sudden death. Having experienced her fair share of early career hardships, she wonders what to do with her life and his cafe and discovers a strange door in the cafe that when opened, allows customers from other worlds to visit Cafe Enchante. At first not believing such a fantastical thing was possible, with the guidance of Souan’s long time customers, Miser Rex (for some reason his name is read as Michelle Alex in common English, CV: Akabane Kenji) the Demon King of the demon world Asmodia, Canus Espada (CV: Umehara Yuichiro) headless knight of the fairy world Medio, Il Fado de Rie (CV: Ishikawa Kaito) fallen angel of the heavenly world Caelm and Ignis Carbunculus the strongest of the magical beast world Beastia, she slowly comes to accept that Cafe Enchante is a place for patrons of other worlds to rest. As it turns out, the Japanese government is well aware that such otherworldly beings frequent Cafe Enchante as well other other parts of the country and have an unofficial branch dedicated to the observation of them, with Rindou Kaoru (CV: Suwabe Junichi) being assigned to Cafe Enchante. As Kotone decides to continue running Cafe Enchante, the game follows her growth and interactions with being from this world and others.

Click here to skip the spoilers completely to my spoiler-free thoughts

Gensou Kissa Enchante // Canus Route and Initial Thoughts

It’s been a surprisingly long time since my last actual otome game thoughts post. At first I looked at the time stamp on my Sanzen Sekai Yuugi post and thought “hey December last year isn’t that long” then looked at today’s date and yes, yes it has been a long time. For those who don’t care for my normal twitter/mobage banter, welcome back to a whole new console, since my last game was on the PS Vita (Beast Darling doesn’t really count to me because it’s a mobile game port).

Moving on, I finally got my hands on Gensou Kissa Enchante (roughly, Magical Cafe Enchante in English), my most anticipated announcement at Otomate Party. Its themes were: “cafe”, “other worlds” and “non-humans”. For those more well-versed in popular tropes in Japan at the moment, it’s an isekai themed otome game.

If the poster boy couldn’t be more obvious

The story is about Awaki Kotone, who inherits her grandfather, Awaki Souan‘s cafe after his sudden death. Having experienced her fair share of early career hardships, she wonders what to do with her life and his cafe and discovers a strange door in the cafe that when opened, allows customers from other worlds to visit Cafe Enchante. At first not believing such a fantastical thing was possible, with the guidance of Souan’s long time customers, Miser Rex (for some reason his name is read as Michelle Alex in common English, CV: Akabane Kenji) the Demon King of the demon world Asmodia, Canus Espada (CV: Umehara Yuichiro) headless knight of the fairy world Medio, Il Fado de Rie (CV: Ishikawa Kaito) fallen angel of the heavenly world Caelm and Ignis Carbunculus the strongest of the magical beast world Beastia, she slowly comes to accept that Cafe Enchante is a place for patrons of other worlds to rest. As it turns out, the Japanese government is well aware that such otherworldly beings frequent Cafe Enchante as well other other parts of the country and have an unofficial branch dedicated to the observation of them, with Rindou Kaoru (CV: Suwabe Junichi) being assigned to Cafe Enchante. As Kotone decides to continue running Cafe Enchante, the game follows her growth and interactions with being from this world and others.

Headless Knight, Dullahan, Canus EspadaAAAAAAAAAAAA

The whole game is a decent length from my first playthrough of Canus’ route, with a Prologue -> Common route (8 chaps, one focusing on each char) -> Char route (3 chaps) -> good/bad ending (1 chap) -> credits -> post credits scene. However I can forsee that after finishing one route, the rest of them are gonna be a breeze, perhaps with the exception of a “true” ending or whatnot.

Click here to skip the spoilers completely to my spoiler-free thoughts

QuinRose // A history lesson and some thoughts

Last Saturday at Otomate Party, a huge bombshell was announced that no one familiar with the otome game scene had ever expected: QuinRose was making its return as an Otomate label.

I’m sure for those newer to the otome game scene (cough came in after 2016 cough), they’re all wondering so what? So I’m here to catch everyone up to what exactly QuinRose is/what happened to them.

whats a quinrose

A few of the major types of female fans // a focus on yumejoshi

A few nights ago when the A3! anime was announced, out of morbid curiosity I looked up reactions to whether or not Izumi would appear. A vast majority were begging the producers/creator/whoever is in charge to let her appear because otherwise there would be no story. Personally I feel the same way about Ensemble Stars but the manga and stage play seems to think not, so as fans we never know what’ll happen.

A common reaction I saw from the Japanese fandom was condescension or a general expectation of “yumejoshi are going to riot”, to whether or not Izumi will appear. This made me wonder, why? Aren’t heroines meant to be self-inserts for the player in most cases? Why wouldn’t they want to see their heroine interact with their favourite chars?

Waht

I did some research into the notion of “yumejoshi” and present to you my findings.

Sanzen Sekai Yuugi ~Re Multi Universe Myself~ (vita) // Overall Thoughts

I said I can never go back but I did. And by I did, I mean my god Koyasu Takehito dragged me back to the vita once I found out he was in this porn game that I never paid attention to. That being said I didn’t expect it to be in this way.

Sanzen Sekai Yuugi ~Re Multi Universe Myself~ was originally a porn game from Girl’s Dynamics released at the end of 2013, and this year had it’s porn removed and ported to the Vita by dramatic create. It’s falls into weird mix of sci-fi and crime and honestly I had no idea what to expect aside from CV: Koyasu (if you can’t tell by now, I’m probably going to be fairly biased when it comes to him).

what the heck is “re multi universe myself” even meant to mean

Unfortunately I never played the original because I didn’t kn0w Koyasu was in it, so this is my thoughts on the game for the first time.

Story

In a futuristic Japan, where crime is rampant and technology has advanced as far as proving the existence of 11 dimensions, Nakahara Tomoe (CV: Nakajima Saki) is a bounty hunter who takes pride in her sword skills. An incident between her brother and parents 10 years ago left her on her own. Filled with rage, Tomoe seeks to avenge her parents by killing her brother, Nakahara Raikou (CV: Koyasu Takehito), who she thinks was their murderer. One day on a bounty hunting job, Tomoe single handedly takes out a cult but carelessly lets one member survive. That person escapes to a parallel world in an attempt to take revenge on her. It is then that Tomoe learns of the existence of top secret government equipment that allows members of one world to travel to another and that in this other world, there are parallel versions of themselves also living out their lives. If this parallel version of themselves die in the other world, the current version will also die. To stop the cult member from murdering the parallel version of Tomoe, she and the policeman entrusted to her division, Kira Seishirou (CV: Higuchi Tomoyuki & Kitayama Kyousuke) set off to this parallel world to hunt him down. Meanwhile another bounty hunter, Orion Drednaught (CV: Kawahara Yoshihisa) and the terrorist Geoffroy Felix (CV: Oda Hisafumi) have also been employed to kill her. Tomoe takes all these challenges face on and intends to get to the bottom of the case.

I’m not gonna summarise the story because I rushed through the game to get to CV: Koyasu so I didn’t take notes. But I will discuss some things in the spoilery side of things and cry. Mainly cry.

Click here to skip the spoilers completely

Beast Darling ~Kemonomimi Danshi to Himitsu no Ryou~ // Overall Thoughts

With the otome game world currently seeing lots of change, I decided to pick up Beast Darling for my brand new(ish now?) Switch to see how games play, as well as to get a feel for how games will work from now on. Honestly I expected to finish this way earlier so I could also talk about what the otome game experience on Switch is like albeit with a subpar game which I expected to be pretty subpar to begin with. Needless to say I was too slow and now Cendrillon palikA is out so I dunno how useful this opinion would be, but whatever, moving on.

Well……………

Beast Darling follows the heroine, Kazuki (Katsuki?) Kazuha, who from a young age has always had the uncontrollable ability of attracting animals. For as long as she could remember, this has caused her to be a societal outcast, without even attention from her own parents. One day her parents move overseas, but instead of following them, Kazuha decides to stay in Japan, living and working while studying. However, due to her ability, she’s kicked out of her home and job. When her pet cat, Futaba, brings her a pamphlet for Gaou Academy, she goes to have a look after being attracted by the dorms. When she arrives, she’s immediately attacked by a violent boy with lion ears. She learns that everyone at that dorm carry animal curses, which make them sprout animal ears and take on that animals’ traits. There she learns that her animal attracting ability is also able to calm the onset of the curses in these boys. After seeing a little too much, she’s forced to transfer to Gaou Academy and stay in the dorms with the boys. To make sure their secret isn’t spilled, one of the five trouble-making boys are assigned to watch over her.

Beast Darling for Switch is a port of the mobile game of the same name, without all the ticket/mission BS…And honestly it really is just that.

System

There are no story dependent choices in the game and there is always at least two choices in each chapter, just like a normal ticketed game, which increases the affection of your dude. When the affection is a certain level, you unlock the happy end, or the beast (bad) end if its not high enough. Because of this, it also means you have to restart from the beginning or however many bad choices earlier to get the beast end because there’s no affection gauge, so its impossible to tell which end you’re heading for. The only way I knew I was getting the happy end was because there’s an indicator that you chose the choice that made your dude happy every time (a love catch). There’s also no extra content for full comping (getting the happy end and the good end) so that kind of sucked.

Important

At the end of most chapters, a GAO chat screen pops up, which is like an in-game version of Line. Sometimes there’s a voiced message from your dude as well right at the end, which is sweet but er, mainly gimmicky and serves no real purpose honestly.

Sound

The Switch version is part voiced, I assume just like the mobile version, because every other feature is also just as a mobile game would be.

At first, the prologue is fully voiced (save for heroine and side chars) so I was tricked into thinking it was a voiced game, but come the actual individual char routes, it was very sparsely voiced. Most of the time you’re sitting there listening to the same three BGMs playing and it gets tiring.

I should’ve known it wouldn’t be fully voiced since the price was sort of cheap compared to say, the OperaHouse games which are all fully voiced and probably about the same quality. I normally don’t mind unvoiced games, but when they market the game with chars voiced by Kaji Yuki, KENN, Sakai Koudai, Shirai Yuusuke and Jinya Haruka…………you kinda expect to hear their voices for more than 5 minutes in total, you know? It’s the fact that they weren’t really upfront about this info at all that kind of got me annoyed.

Story

Without spoiling, it’s kind of ordinary. Not super good, deep or interesting, but not particularly horrible. It really doesn’t leave much of an impression because it’s one of those games that brings up interesting plot points, but never quite fleshes them out and everything is resolved quite simply.

For example………………………..

Click here to skip the spoilers completely

Urakata Hakuouki // Summary and Overall Thoughts

By now I’m sure everyone interested in otome games would have an idea of what Hakuouki is, but for those less familiar, here’s a quick run down of what it is. Hakuouki is about a girl who goes to Kyoto looking for her missing father and is drawn into the historical political intrigue between the Shinsengumi and the Bakufu mixed with a dose of fantasy. Urakata Hakuouki is a spin-off game that follows the same vein as the original, unsurprisingly.

aka. time to milk that dead cow some more

Urakata Hakuouki is about Kirishima Kozue who lives in Kyoto with her only living blood relative, her brother Kirishima Sousuke. Together they run a dojo teaching children swordsmanship. One day they’re both attacked by a group of Shinsengumi members with white hair and red eyes. Desperately trying to seek help, Kozue runs into Katsura Kogorou (CV: KENN), one of her brother’s friends, and they go back to her where they were attacked. Leaving only a sea of blood and his sword behind, Kozue’s brother nor his attackers are no where to be found. Takechi Zuisan, her brother’s mentor, offers to help Kozue in her search for her brother and along with Katsura and his associates, samurai Takasugi Shinsaku (CV: Sugita Tomokazu), Western merchant Glover (CV: Sakurai Takahiro) and samurai Okada Izou (CV: Suzumura Kenichi). In the search, she is drawn into the anti-Bakufu activities of the Tosa and Choushuu loyalists in the attempts to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Me the entire time @ the history

Quick summary of routes over the jump. I’m not super familiar with Japanese history but I’ll try my best to explain what I did get from the game (and from gleaming wiki lmfao).

 

Click here to skip the spoilers completely