Collar x Malice: Unlimited

Seeing as the general Giant Bomb community is probably somewhat unacquainted with and perhaps uninterested in otome games as a genre, I offer the following TLDR review:

This is a fandisc, which means it is for fans! And it certainly is. If you played the original Collar x Malice and enjoyed it, it's likely you already played this, but if not I will keep this relatively spoiler free. If you played the original and didn't finish it or didn't care for a majority of the routes, this will not change your mind as its quality fluctuates and it is focused on continuing routes, not the X-Day story line.

If you are a total newbie who stumbled upon this, I generally recommend the original Collar x Malice for otome newcomers. It's a crime story pitting the main character--a low ranked community support based cop--and several handsome eligible anime men against a mysterious terrorist organization in a quarantined Shinjuku. There is moderate violence and mature themes but the plot is fun, most of the main characters are likable, and none of the romances are totally out of wack (as in, there's no yanderes/total creepers/surprise I am your brother scenarios). This isn't a review for that game though so if that interests you check one of those out! It's well-regarded in the otome community for the most part and I am all for people trying this genre.

Two other things of interest before the review proper:

1. There is some controversy over the main artist of the game possibly tracing work made by other artists at Otomate, and that Otomate in fact encourages tracing. To be honest I don't know where I fall on this, while there are similarities in some of the evidence it's hard to see where anime drawing tropes end and tracing begins, and I also think there is just some artist snottiness involved (imagine forcing a colleague to replicate their art in front of a lawyer), but also the artist might've harassed right back and... it's a mess. Here is a blog post that overviews the entire situation more than I'd care to. Either way it's a shame that this happened and it definitely tempered my desire to play this game last year. Well, this and...

2. The main character of this game is a cop, and in general the police are involved. Shockingly, in August of 2020, I didn't know if I could properly separate my enjoyment of this from you know, current events. Having played it a year later I can say that yes, there is police stuff in it (the worst incident being one of the characters going overboard on a purse snatcher who pulls a knife so it's oh-so-totally justified in game), but for the most part the game focuses on romance and I think it's tolerable but can't say definitively for others. It's simply YMMV on this one. For fun I named the main character Bastard which was a great idea.

That was a long preamble but hopefully those caveats will keep the rest of it briefer. The game can be easily (as in, there's literally menus for each one) split into 5 sections.

a. A prologue thing: You must start here. This is a scenario set before the end of CxM, where a client, Tachibana, comes to Yanagi's office to hire them to search for his missing friend who he believes is involved with Adonis. I think this might be my favorite part even though it's just a fun way to unlock the love interest's routes. You have to solve a puzzle and use some detective skills to successfully do so, and there's more than one bad ending if you make a mistake. It's simple but you can see the team at work, and I like the idea of solving a case that isn't X-Day.

My biggest problem is actually Tachibana, being that... I don't understand why he's not a route. It seems strange, or almost lazy to introduce another eligible handsome (ok he dresses like an idiot but the overall design is fine) anime man who barely makes another appearance. When I finished everything in the game I could only think... wait, really? You don't unlock a secret route for him or anything? I don't know if he was planned to have one and it was scrapped or what, but it was an odd choice.

b. The expanded routes from the first game: Your typical fandisc material. Personally, these are a mixed bag. Okazaki's is too similar to his original route and some of his actions make me actually dislike him. Enomoto and Yanagi are solidly cute and offer some new directions for the characters but don't go far enough. Shiraishi's is a good end cap to his role in the first game. Sasazuka is my boy and my bias but I genuinely think his is the best at dealing with his hangups and moving ahead. The general theme (as can be gleaned from the US cover) is the MC and love interest getting married or engaged. It's nice to see their relationships move forward and it can get fairly horny. Unfortunately the MC remains a stick in the mud whenever possible; it's usual in otome games but means in almost every route there's some kind of tired bickering eg, "don't hold my hand in public it's so embarrassing uwu" back and forth between her and the love interest.

Additionally, as Aksys is wont to do, much of the writing in this section in particular is stiff, overly repetitive, has errors, or otherwise seems poorly translated. This is well known by this point but I thought CxM was an improvement so it's unfortunate to see this quality drop.

c. The Adonis section: Basically this is an AU from the first game--what if the MC, having lost everything, joined the terrorists? Conceptually it sounds awesome, in reality it only threatens to be interesting. CxM did well in introducing the known members of Adonis as wronged people. You sympathized with them even though their actions were unjustifiable (to a degree, since some are sociopaths after all). In this, you get to know them personally through little vignettes, which are basically... fluff. It's bizarre to hang out with a dude who killed 17 people and find out he loves ramen, but I appreciate the strangeness and his honestly feels like it was made for otome game weirdos, who I love. However, it feels mostly inconsequential, aside from...

"The Zero Route" is what I could call it. (Kentucky is not involved.) I'd guess this is what they made this AU story for. Zero's relationship with the MC (and Mikuni) is dark material that calls back to the harsher aspects of CxM. Both ends are pretty interesting, more so the good end. It's impossible to say without spoilers but I think they did this "route" the way it should be done.

d. Some random shit: These are all fairly short stories. The best one's about the MC's brother (you don't date him I promise) and his relationship with music and his best friend, which isn't strictly necessary but is sweet. One is about Minegishi, a higher up police... guy of some kind idk dating the MC and I don't see the point of it. His dating style is like, playful jerk megane I... guess, but it overlaps the worst qualities of other characters and is unappealing. Maybe I'm just mad they picked Minegishi over Morioka, cause I'd rather date hot single dad detective who loves dogs. (I am.) The last one features Yoshinari, who is such an inoffensively cute guy his story makes fun of it, but that doesn't make him not bland. I wish they'd rethought these entirely.

e. The metric ton of content in Extras: Each main route plus a few other characters collected have their own section of extras. For love interests this includes not only a gallery, but; a voice recorder, which has several fully voiced paragraphs where the dudes talk about various MC related topics; a short story, which is usually from the guy's point of view and is usually horny; and "Leaf", which is a cute format where you see some domestic text exchanges with each guy. A few other characters have short stories and voice recorders, none of them are necessary but this section is jam packed with Content and worth mentioning. Definitely engineered towards people who are invested in voice actors talking "directly" at you.

All in all, there is really a lot here. Overall I don't regret playing it, but the thing is, I feel like this game is not the sum of its parts. It's all fractured pieces so nothing feels important, there's nothing gluing everything together. Imagining your own ending to the route of your choice would probably be more fulfilling than what they came up with, and I think it's ok to desire better side content that doesn't feel like a whole lot of filler. In my opinion, otome games are often overrated because people will be happy to get anything translated into English, and I think that mentality should be reigned back at some point with fairly leveled criticism. There are much better fandiscs out there and this one is a slight disservice to the original game. You don't want to play a game and wonder what degree of it was a crash grab vs the writers wanting to continue the story lines they created.