This is going to be a hard game to review, I'll tell you that.
First off I'm going to say. Wow, Did getting to review this game take me awhile. For one, I was planning to review it in the month of May. It is currently September writing this. A four month gap. I wasn't exactly dedicated to playing the game through, but I honestly didn't expect it to take that LONG. The 100+ hours of content touted on the games website is definitely no lie. I, at the end of my run, had almost 700 save files. Seven HUNDRED. And I had only done one characters route! If there's one thing this game has, it's content. However, there are a ton of flaws with the game that makes it impossible for me to recommend buying this game, especially with it costing so much in sight of these errors. But I'll save that for the end of this review.
You play as Scheherazade Keating, a young wealthy daughter of two famous archaeologists. Apparently, her parents have been missing for years, and Sadie as she's called, spent most of her childhood raised by her aunt Evelyn instead. One of the Main story goals is to guide Sadie in her journey around the world as an archaeology major in college, and find out how her parents disappeared. The writing here is a bit of a mixed cake. At the start of the game I was simply confused about what in the bloody hell was going on until about halfway through the trip to Egypt. It may have just been I wasn't paying attention, but it was weird.
The game employs a stat raising system where, usually, you are given three times a day to do activities. This is very reminiscent of the school life sequences of the later Persona games, where you can choose to either raise an attributes stat, or do social links with characters. Most main characters have an affection gauge, and doing events with them will heighten their affection for Sadie. You have affection for all five persuable guys, and then one for her aunt and best friend Anna. I never was sure what Evelyn and Anna's affection actually did, so I'm assuming it's for the default Dream of Family storyline. The game has six endings, five for each guy you can romance, and a default Dream of Family, where Sadie pursues finding her parents over love. So yes, if you choose to date a character, you give up Sadies pursuit of her parents in favor for some sweet lovin'. I've only done one route in this game, which was Felix's. And I don't think I will come back to play any other route purely because a huge problem I have with the game.
Back to stats, every event with a character will have sequences that require you to have a certain amount of one trait, if you don't, not only will you not get a stat increase or relationship increase, but you will increase Sadies stress meter. The stress meter makes it even harder to do good in these sequences so it's best to come in prepared. You may think that might take some trait grinding just to do one event, but the game also has these cards called Influences. They can give you huge boosts to a stat, and I actually recommend to collect Influences of whatever stat you need, as it will take up less time to get them than stat raising.
One thing I will say about this game is, The writer of the game is really good. Rightfully so, if a 100+ hour visual novel doesn't have an excellent writer, then no matter how you'll look at it, it's crap. The writer did such a good job, that if I found out they'd written their own novels, I would go out and buy them posthaste. I have a slight nitpick about the text though, in that it will use script format for actions during talking.
An example of what I mean is something like this. "I agree. This gem is very valuable" (moves to the box)
I think it'd be better to either eliminate those types of action descriptions, or to put it in it's own text box without having it next to a spoken line, but that's just a personal nitpick of mine, and not so terrible it ruins the game for me or anything.
The art is... Well, It's not the worst and it's not the best. It did it's job. Also, mad props to the artist, as there are a TON of characters to draw sprites for, and Sadie on top of that has a ton of outfits to wear during the course of the game, usually for disguises. A big complaint I have in the visual department is the backgrounds.
An example: No matter where you are in the storyline, whether it's in Sadies house, at her college, or in some ruin of New York, if you are in New York, you will only have a BG of some buildings. It's just plain weird to read them moving places, but the background is the same all the time. There are only one background for every place in the world. It would be much better for atmosphere if they'd at least do a few separate backgrounds for key places.
Now, in general, I had a very fun time playing this game. It is one of the better written visual novels out on the market. And it is so long! Twenty Five dollars for the amount of content you get doesn't seem so bad! But, there's something so terrible about this game that makes it IMPOSSIBLE for me to recommend this game to anyone in it's current state. And that's it's coding.
For one, I can't tell you how many times I'd gotten an error while loading something, resulting in the game crashing. That's not a huge issue to me, so I thought it fine to overlook that error, as it's a huge game done in Ren'py, and as someone that's messed with Ren'py I know how hard it is to make sure everythings running fine. However, for a commercial game thats now out on Steam as well, I find the next error unacceptable.
I had done Felix's route, meaning I'd given up Dream of Family for Dream of Felix. Everything had been going fine right until the end. Sadie was going to confess her feelings for Felix and everything was going to be okay. And yet... for some reason. I had gotten the ending with her Professor. When she had left to see Felix, it skipped to her talking to her teacher, and getting a CG of them together. Why? That is such a huge coding flaw, to the point it makes me not want to play the other routes, or this game ever again for that matter.
Let me put it in retrospect here. Say you had gotten Chrom to S Rank in Fire Emblem Awakening, and are watching his S Rank conversation. You're fully expecting to marry Chrom, when all of a sudden, when Chroms confession scene is about to play, you instead get Henrys confession theme. It's confusing, it's ridiculous, and now you're married to Henry instead. If you want to marry Chrom, now you have to do something different with your game, and usually that requires you starting over from the beginning.
This is such a huge and frustrating flaw for such a well written, long otome game. I wanted so badly to write this review as I was playing in a positive light and recommend it, but that error completely ruined it.
I cannot, in it's current state, recommend this game to anyone at all. It's a shame, as I've said playing the game was a blast, as it was well written and to the brim with things to do. I really wanted to give this a positive review, but I just cant. I cannot recommend anyone to pay $25 dollars with a huge error in it's script like this. If the game gets an update that fixes it's script errors, then I would recommend it most definitely, but do not buy this game in it's current state.
