Recent reviews by Ausfalia

Advancing up to a capture point with my squad
We spot enemies on the right
Squad engages while I try and sneak around
Squad wipes the enemies and I turn to return to them
Artillery strike blows my entire squad up
Squad leaders limb-less corpse hits me in the face
It was friendly artillery

10/10

Caused journalists to meltdown but didn't melt down my pc. 10/10

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I really wanted to give this game the thumbs up as I loved Ace Academy, enjoyed Kaori After Story (seriously pixel fade either release Ace Academy 2 or do some other after stories), skipped over their last game (I did buy it and play it but stopped after realizing there was only one romance option and I had not been pursuing it) but Ethereal Enigma just had two fatal flaws for me.

Let us start with the good:
- As usual the voice acting is great. There are one or two bad lines but these are from side characters we see maybe once or twice so that is forgivable. The main cast however is great all round, Minami's delivery is great (especially during the bakery flirting scene), Kosei's voice actor has great delivery with his jokes and gags, even Kira's deadpan voice has emotion in it where it is needed. Erilynn's voice work is great....but I will save my issue with the character for later.
- The character models are excellent. Pixel Fade has come a long way since Kaori After Story where they first used it. Models move more smoothly, facial animations are more varied and it seems like PixelFade has found a good way to stand out a bit from other visual novels.
- Characters, for the most part, are enjoyable. Minami is great and reminds me of Nikki without being a carbon copy, Kosei is enjoyable and though the butt of the jokes does have some depth to him I enjoyed, Kira is great and Erilynn.... I will get to her.
- The CG's were nicely drawn, and the backgrounds are nice and somehow work well with the 3D character models.

The bad:
- Erilynn. If you like her that is fine, to each their own but I found her insufferable. I wanted to get her back to her home so she would be gone from this story. This is also a problem as without her there is no story. Erilynn is supposed to be the spoiled princess cliche; arrogant, used to having people do everything for her etc etc. I was expecting her to be humbled, learn how good she has it and all the cliche stuff you would expect but...no, she remains an arrogant, insufferable character throughout. What is worse is she is extremely competent in almost everything meaning there is no scene where she gets humbled and shown she isn't the centre of the universe. They do try and make her likeable and show she can be generous but it feels backhanded and there is little to no character development with her. Maybe this wil lchange considering the cliffhanger of episode 3 but I will not hold my breath.

-The story is kind of...off. The whole start of the story feels very hamfisted, hell I got the early ending where Erilynn isn't summoned to the world simply due to how I was playing my character. Did you play your MC as someone who was slightly cynical and grounded? Well to bad because if you do not make the out of character wish the game wants you to the story does not start. I feel like just having Erilynn plop in would have been fine. Also this links back to not liking Eriilynn, it is hard to get invested in a story where I have no liking for the character who is central to the plot.

Kira also feels weird in this plot. I liked Kira and romanced her but her inclusion seems very arbitrary, she just kind of wanders into the story by mere chance. I feel like there was a missed opportunity here to have Kira be another Princess, maybe belonging to a rival Kingdom to Veldin and you have to keep the peace between these two princesses who dislike one another but need to work together to get home and maybe learn to respect and even like one another as friends. As it stands it feels like the game is pulling in two different directions, wanting to be a slice of life high school story but also wanting to be a magical story and is unwilling to commit to either leaving it kind of wonky and swaying between the two.

-It is clearly unfinished. This isn't horrible as it is an episodic game but there is one part that stands out. The clubs. See they intend to add school clubs in the future, and mention this when the clubs are first mentioned...and then again whenever the clubs are mentioned. This only happens three times but having the game screech to a halt to tell me clubs are not in this build of the game took me out of the experience. A simple fade to black during these moments would have felt more natural after the first mention, or simply removing mention of clubs until they were ready.

All in all I would say I would not recommend this game but it is a soft no. It does nothing horrid, it isnt a broken mess or insulting. It is just very subpar considering Ace Academy had a great story, 4 romance options (and a bromance option) that were all likeable and didn't seem to be suffering an identity crisis.