Recent reviews by The marquis de Carabas

Most people's immediate impression upon seeing this game's title screen would be to assume it's some sort of hentai game. In reality, the closest it comes to that is that a few of the stat-boosting outfits look like the one on said title screen, and the actual gameplay is more or less equivalent to a choose-your-own-adventure book with skill checks. The story, briefly summarized and spoiler-free, is that you are a princess, your mother just died, and you are trying to live until your coronation. If you enjoy games of that sort and can get over/ignore the art design, then this game is easily worth the asking price.

The character creation at the beginning of the game is very promising; it's one of the best I've seen. Unfortunately, that's the peak of the game. That's not to say the rest of the game is terrible, but there are numerous flaws that completely killed my enjoyment. The first notable problem is the writing. It isn't remotely realistic, because in this game, you are inexplicably the center of the universe, and every non-villain's priority is to lavish praise on you for no particular reason. The second problem is the game's "difficulty". Instead of making a genuinely challenging experience, whenever the game wants to make a section hard, they just pile a huge number of the area's strongest enemies into a single room, which prevents you from using any real strategy. This wouldn't be too big a problem, but the AI is terrible: while the combat system is similar to FFXII's "gambit" system, which was my favorite combat system of all time, the problem is that the AI often fails to follow the gambits correctly. For instance, when I set one of my charaters to use a light AOE attacking ability whenever there were 3 or more enemies surrounding them, they just froze in place trying to use it constantly--even when there were no enemies in sight--and wouldn't move until I turned that gambit off. When I set them to instead use it on any enemy, they decided that this meant to use it whenever they saw an enemy, despite the fact that it was a melee attack and the enemy was across the room. Aside from generaly misinterpreting their set gambits, they also invariably attack or heal the worst targets, due to the lack of FFXII's "attack party leader's target" option, or even an option to attack the strongest, weakest, or closest available target. Thanks to all this, entering a room that you aren't overleveled for is nearly certain death unless you have a large number of healing items (which will chew through said healing items, weakening this "strategy" for later rooms) or have some nearby doors to repeatedly close to prevent extra enemies from attacking you. Admittedly, if the enemies are spread out enough that you don't alert them all at once, you can sometimes deal with them by having all your melee characters wait a good distance away so they don't Leeroy Jenkins the room and get you killed.

If you can get over the writing and the combat, the game isn't too bad, but I really can't.