Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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Otomate can always be trusted to find some way to repurpose the established otome formula for a visual novel that at least feels a little different, even if functionally it’s not. 9 R.I.P. lands at the perfect time for Halloween, and even though it’s Otomate playing it safe with the…
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I’ll never pass up an opportunity to play with Tohka. She is, of course, the very best of best girls, there’s no saying otherwise (unless you want to be wrong) and I won’t hear anything else of it. The point is that Date A Live: Ren Dystopia is an opportunity…
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What if Harry Potter was something that you could enjoy without the knowledge that every word you read came from someone who is deeply, aggressively hateful? What if you could jump into the body of a student of magic and fall in love with all the characters? That’s essentially where…
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Nintendo must have liked the response that its remake of the first two Detective Club titles got when it released them on the Switch a couple of years ago. Now, decades after those games got their first run back on the Famicom, we finally have an all-new entry in the…
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It’s amazing to think that this is the first time there has been an official release of Fate Stay/Night outside of Japan. This visual novel kicked off one of the biggest anime properties of all time, turned into one of the biggest free-to-play mobile games, and made the companies producing…
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Hakuoki was my first otome game, right back when it was released on the PlayStation 3. Actually, I think it might have been my very first visual novel. It seems hard to imagine now, but a decade ago, digital distribution wasn’t in the same place, and visual novels being released…
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It’s hard for us in the West to fully appreciate just how core idol companies and groups are in Japan. It’s not just about the music and performance, though that is certainly a big part of it. Idol groups act as talent feeder pools for just about every other part…
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There are conventional visual novels, and then there are the kinds of visual novels that Type-Moon produces. Tsukihime is a game that has a fearsome reputation, being one of the very first works of the company (it came before Fate/Stay Night, which has become the Type-Moon behemoth), and was essentially…
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I’m consistently surprised that these “fandisc sequels” to popular otome games get localised. Just recently we saw one for Cupid Parasite, and now there’s one for the excellent Radiant Tale. I would think that given how niche otome titles are, sequels to those otome titles would have an even more…
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