My only problem with the game is the actual gameplay itself.
On your first playthrough, planning out classes and trying to balance Elodie's mood seem like super interesting mechanics and if you're into the aesthetic of the game and the stuff you saw in, like, the Steam trailer and screenshots, you'll be thinking it's like the greatest game ever. The writing is great, the way taking classes shows you a brief overview of the progressively more advanced topics you're learning in a given subject is neat, and man, like everything about the presentation of the game itself is fantastic.
You notice as you play along that you're failing like every single skill check. You might even be like "aw man, I missed this Poisons check? Better bone up on Poisons" — only to find that you'll like never need Poisons again for the rest of the game. (Disclaimer: I have yet to complete a successful runthrough of the game, but have spent over three hours of time in the game according to Steam.) Then you'll die from something out of nowhere that you could've never seen coming and prepared for on your first time through.
"Okay," you think, "I'll give it another shot. This is clearly just a mechanics'd up visual novel, anyways, so I guess I should've expected hell of Bad Ends." On your subsequent playthroughs, you'll attempt to adjust your class schedules accordingly such as to allow you to pass checks for events that you now know are coming up from your previous playthroughs. Then, when you train for a key class, you'll get little-to-no skill points from it because you weren't watching your mood. Or worse yet, you were watching your mood and thought to make your princess as happy as possible because she starts the game all sad and depressed over the death of her mother, but as it turns out some class you wanted to take does barely anything or nothing at all for you because of the mood you're in. You search around the UI and try and find some sort of reasoning for which classes are affected by which moods — and it turns out that there is no such thing (although they [mostly] follow some sort of logic). Instead, you must either figure out which classes are affected by which moods on your own and write them down in a grid on a piece of paper... or just check the top-rated Steam guide for the game.
Basically, in the end, the game becomes more of an exercise in replaying the game over and over and learning from your failures, taking notes on what worked and what didn't, in order to come up with a plan to make a successful run through the game. If this sounds appealing to you, that's fine; I was hoping for a much more role-playing-oriented experience out of the game, myself. Again, I understand that it's a relatively short game once you have the path for "the right run" down, and the length of the experience comes from the act of replaying it over and over again, and also it's just a more mechanically-dense visual novel, when it comes down to it. These things are all fine, but it's just not quite what I hoped for given the promise of the game from the outset and the great writing the game has and such.
In summary, I feel like the game has a great setup, great art, great writing, average sound and music, and great mechanical premise... but just kind of crappy actual mechanics in the end. It's still worth playing if the theme and setting and stuff interests you, and even more so if you're willing to put up with the visual novel tropes that make several, several playthroughs a must if you want to see a non-death ending... but at the end of the day, I personally wound up finding the core gameplay systems to be frustrating and poorly thought-out.
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