ゲームを楽しもう!

I'd been pretty late to the party for love and deepspace when it first came out, while I loved some of the mobile otome I'd played like Mystic messenger and tears of themis, I'd been let down by so much more. weather it's via shutdowns like with my beloved A3 and ICHU or just by storytelling I wasn't into and systems of monetization that hurt the core romance and story like with the ikemen series of games and paper games other title MR love. I was especially disappointed with ikevamp, despite how much I loved Arthur and theo. this made me weary to start another. I did end up caving eventually though after being inundated with ads for the games "catch 22" banner with its...... appealing designs and pretty impressive 3D models and I came away from it with some pretty mixed feelings. I think it has the potential to be something really special and I love that it's growing the genre to a wider audience, but I think it's attempts at mass appeal could cause more harm than good and it's systems and storytelling leave a lot to be desired.

the game does do well In some areas though. the boys themselves are mostly pretty great and there's someone here for almost everyone. Xavier is your protective, sleepy bodyguard type that reminds me a lot of kei Okazaki from collar x malice. He looks the most like a character from a CG cutscene in a final fantasy game and I think he's the most physically attractive of the LI's. there's Zayne, the corporate CEO jerk and probably the most tropey of the boys, but I mean that in a good way. he's really charming and of the basic 3 boys he's the one I tended to prefer the most. Rafael is a sensitive artist and the designated nice one. I'm just not into him, I think it's mostly his hairstyle but he's the most boring of the cast and he's the kind of nice that I just find a little bland. Post launch the game added 2 more. Sylus who is like a PG-13 version of one of the mafia bosses from piofiore. slightly yandere and a little crazy but not so crazy that he'd murder you in cold blood like a piofiore boy would. I like him a lot, though, he's pretty and charming and I think he makes for a great contrast to the other cast members, though I think his EN voice is a little too deep to the point that it's a little distracting.

the last boy that made it into the game when I stopped playing was Caleb. he's my favourite. he's like toma from amnesia if he had a military background and I love that. the military outfit, the kinda-incest, the full blown yandere implications. I was never not going to love a character like this and he's worth the price of admission alone. The characters also have tons of different costumes and the cards all have beautiful designs so if you like these guys. There's a lot of content to go through with them, assuming you have the money and the patience. their designs are almost universally good, too. I'm not into Rafael but the rest all look amazing. I love Xavier's white hair and that cool battle suit he has. Zayne has some amazing suits and I love how his hair looks. Sylus has really pretty silver hair and I love his leather jacket biker look, his evil powers are rad too! Caleb has probably the best look, I wish he had nicer hair but that military outfit sends me feral and that alone makes his design easily my favourite.

Sadly for as good as the guys are the quality of storytelling just isn't there in the main story. I think it's pretty boring for the most part. You get some basic introductions to the boys that are always really cute but so much of it is both too short and too filled with exposition that serves to just set up overtly complicated ideas for the world that aren't all that interesting and never really pan out. the main story scenes are very rarely ever all that romantic either, Sylus and Caleb aside and so much of it can feel like a whole lot of nothingy meandering padding that just never goes anywhere. Maybe I'm just too spoiled on console otome games and games like Tears of Themis but I was really disappointed by how the story was handled here. I know they can do better too because MR love, the developers previous gatcha otome game, had a much more interesting story than this and did much better with its plot and romance.

All of this is mostly because the game pushes it's romance and its more interesting stories into the events and the cards you have to unlock. I can't deny these are excellent. the catch 22 BDSM'y event cards and the cute cafe dates and all the fantasy stuff is all excellent and the game pushes its sexuality a lot more than most games like this, but I'm just not sure it's really enough for me with the slow rate at which you get these cards and the FOMO of it all. in other games like this, tears of themis being the big one. I could handle the romance being kept to those side stories and card stories because the main story you got still felt worthwhile. you had those cute moments with the boys and fun interactions and the story it told felt worth reading. it all went somewhere. with how lacking the writing is in the main campaign here it ends up feeling like a waste of time that's just there to tease me and funnel me into these romantic side stories that I need to pull for. that just doesn't feel good. At the very least I do like how varied these get though in terms of settings and scenarios, I think the degree of freedom the writers have with the setting and tone really does give them some interesting material to work with in these stories, so if you do go for them you're at least getting something of quality. the cute menu interactions too are also pretty great, I felt I learned more about the boys from those than I ever did the main storyline.

the gameplay does make up for this, at least a little. it's a character action-lite where you control your hunter of choice in battle and fight alongside whichever boy you brought with you in encounters with enemies and bosses. it's a lot like devil may cry or a faster and deeper genshin impact and it's a lot of fun. you have a good few different weapons and all of the boys play differently with how they help you in battle with their cooldown moves. there's swords, big swords, staffs and guns, that last one was my personal favourite and i loved how they felt. it reminded me of something like how stark played in bleach: soul resurrection or magoichi saika in sengoku basara. there's stuff like perfect dodges and the boss patterns are all pretty fun and distinct. it's a solid enough combat system for mobile and while it's nowhere near the depth of other games in the genre, it's not even as deep or varied as some other husbando action games like touken Ranbu musou or sengoku basara, it's a solid enough system that kept me coming back to it even when the story was boring me. the RPG mechanics i don't feel too good on, though, it's too grindy for me and pretty pay to win, but that's just the nature of these kinds of games. i think this has real potential, I'd love to see a game like it on consoles that's more deep and focused. I'd imagine an action RPG like this with romance and shoujo style adventure would be really cool!

There's also the big elephant in the room, not valko, but I'll get to him. It's the games use of generative AI. it s difficult to say just what here is gen AI and what isn't. the little menu conversations and cooking recommendations could be, maybe even some of the story writing and very likely the backgrounds. I have to imagine stuff like the translation could also be, but I'm not confidant in calling this out as being AI. However when the game hits you with a full blown GPT generated dog that the game really wants you to think is a fox during one of the games story chapters, I'm not giving it the benefit of the doubt. that's the issue when you fill your game with this garbage, you lose my trust. I'm sure that there are lots of aspects of the game that are handcrafted and worth praising, but it's difficult to do that when I can't give you that trust. that's the big thing you lose when you do this and it's probably the worst thing you can lose because it makes the player have to constantly second guess everything else.

I did like these cute mechanical interactions though, I know it's almost what the game became known for but having that period tracker was really useful to me and having that comfort meant a lot to me in the moment. it's so nice to have a fictional guy really seem to care about that and to give you those reminders to stop and take care of yourself. I would love to see this as a more regular feature in games. even just something really basic, it doesn't need to be super customizable but if the next amnesia came out and had Toma giving me period products through the cage bars I think it would be game of the decade. there's lots of stuff like that you can do with them. You can take selfies, touch them for some funny reactions, hear his heartbeat and do some scheduling stuff with him. I enjoyed doing these but there was one thing I enjoyed the most out of it.

the food recommendation system! I'd liked this so much I even planned to make a whole article about it once. last year (during my first coverage of the Japan foundation film festival if it gives you any indication on when) when I went a whole week with every meal having been decided for me by Sylus and Zayne. it worked out pretty well, though they kept constantly recommending me shrimp even when I asked them not to. some of the meals were pretty standard like quiche, lasagna or udon. the kinds of things I would regularly make anyway, quiche especially I love making. some meals were fairly new to me, like trying to make my own garlic bread and vegan chicken nuggets, but ended up coming out well. that garlic bread went great with some pesto and vegan meatballs. it even had me trying my band at baking my own bread, both the garlic bread from before and some bruschetta and making a tiramisu, the latter of which has became a mainstay for me that I make a batch of every few weeks. one time I ended up taking the games advice and getting a burrito and due to some payment issues, ended up getting the whole meal for free! so thanks for that.

this is a segment you can skip if you wish, it won't even apply to most people and it's not a very pleasant topic to talk about. it's one I usually avoid for that very reason. I think hating on fandoms is just very bitter behavior and it's usually just an excuse to push cringe culture on people the writer usually doesn't like or finds weird. it's just an excuse for bullying. i think that's gross but this is one case where i do think it warrants talking about, from the viewpoint of someone who spent a lot of time in the otome fandom scene in the past. I'm a very offline person so the fact a lot of this somehow managed to reach me should be a testament to just how prevalent a lot of these issues can be and i think they should be addressed before the wider otome scene ends up having them too. love and deepspace had brought in a lot of people to the scene and with that a lot of people who usually wouldn't play these kinds of games. non-otaku and people who before this would never have given these kinds of Japanese inspired titles a second look. K-POP and k-drama fans and the kind of very online TikTok types that don't know or don't care for fandom etiquette or trying to understand the parts of media that can be difficult or different. some of these people did adapt and come to love the genre and what it has to offer and i will always say to welcome them with open arms. I strive to always push for more people to love the things i love and to try to enjoy art more and when i see people who do earnestly learn to enjoy these things, it warms my heart. It's the entire reason i made this site and it's why i write at all. With this game that wasn't always the case, though.

some of the issues were already there, for sure. it's not like the otome fandom hasn't had issues with things like purity testing media with games like period cube, 7scarlet or diabolik lovers and my several permabans from the otome subreddit stands as a testament to that. Something about L&DS just exacerbated this though, while I'd been banned from spaces and considered a troll for my love of problematic characters like Toma and Poyo Poyo before, I'd never had the kinds of treatment that spawned from people getting angry at Caleb and his fans. It's pretty shocking to see the amount of hate and anger over this character and his fans because of his nature as a yandere brocon. people lost their minds as if this was the worst thing to happen to humanity, despite this being a well known trope for anyone who knows anything about otome games. it's not difficult to find other examples in some of the most popular otome of all time, hell, one of the biggest PSP and vita otome games was even called "brothers conflict" and it's a pretty great game. it was even big enough to get its own anime adaptation. even beyond this it's not like anime and games are a stranger to it, it's as tropey as tropes get by now so it shouldn't have came as a shock to anyone. this is because these people mostly weren't fans of things like anime or RPG's or even games before this and for some people, who refused to adapt, they lashed out with hostility. all of this then came to a head with Valko. two already clashing sides, neglected love interests and a character just weren't into leading to fandom infighting so bad the character got outright cancelled. it's not like i don't empathise with some Valko haters, while i have no issues with him, I'm just not that into him. That's nothing new though, i also wasn't into Rafael but i never wanted him outright removed from the game. but none of this is how otome games work, you don't just get to remove a character because he's not your type and most actual otome fans got this, they weren't into him maybe but understood that this is the nature of otome games. you won't always have a flawless cast you adore every member of.

so you have the new people who didn't get that, plus the veterans scared that the new, more western fans were influencing the game too much and pushing for too much inclusion (such as accusations Valko was made for gay men and OELVN fans which is a little silly. a lot of the fans of things like OELVN's would still find him to be too conventionally attractive and femme compared to the beard dads and realistic looking masculine guys that they're more interested in and gay men were probably never going to care about otome as a genre already for largely the same reasons, on top of the fact it would never make sense for an otome game to target such an audiance.) and it led to something that was big enough that it hit even mainstream gaming sites and brought a lot of anger and scrutiny towards otome games on the whole as well as the women who played them. Before this we'd mostly been left alone but this brought us into the spotlight and with that a lot of hate and mockery from both mainstream gamers and people who just had a bone to pick with women that were into games, both of whom had already been attacking fans of the game due to it's already immense popularity. For me it was the final straw that got me to quit almost every remaining net space i was in up until that point. i just couldn't handle seeing so much hate towards a genre i loved, i think that's mostly why i wanted to talk about it. things did calm down, angry people quit for other things, the outside haters found new targets and the controversy died down but for me the whole thing had already taken its toll. This is mostly a vent more than anything else, it hurt to see something i loved come under attack like that. it's something that happened to me a lot on the net as someone with tastes in games that can lean in towards more derided titles, but something about this felt just so much meaner, more targeted. i hope that people can learn to grow from it, to become better people. i think that's the best outcome.

the game can be played for free on mobile and PC both, so far there isn't a console port and I'm not sure it'll get one at this rate, it's also not available physically and you can't play it offline. i would prefer to be able to play it on my switch 2 or my ps5 but i do understand that this isn't the kind of game that would thrive on there. papergames are also no stranger to the genre, having worked on MR love before this. i played a ton of that game and i even have the nendoroid dolls they made for it, plus a blu ray of the anime adaptation. i liked it a lot at the time, though it's since been shut down. overall it's a difficult game for me to recommend with all my heart, but it's one that i do still at least advise you to check out. it's not as good as most of the console otome games on the market and i would always say to go for those over it, but it's undeniable that it has some really impressive production values and i think the combat system is solid. if you've been curious to try an otome game but you want something more gamey, i think this could be worth trying. there is some good here buried under all the issues, it's just up to you if you can do that digging.

+ a little song reccomendation for those who stuck around until the end!