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A) Choose to go with her to Velden and you have a few scenes there with her. The ending scene is a few months later with both of you returning to visit your friends/family on Earth or
B) She decides to give up the crown and come live a normal life with you on Earth by going back and having her Aunt give someone else the crown. Although Idk if this is possible, since PixelFade didn't go into a great deal of detail about her family situation, which is another criticism I have.
C) Would obviously be if you became friends/never romanced her, in which she just goes back to Velden and you go back to business as usual. (Kinda defeats the purpose of playing this game, but oh well.)
And frankly I agree with you on Kira as well. Her whole arc felt like it just pulled you away from everyone else. She needed to be more inlcuded. A good route they could have taken would be to have Kira start to open up about her family to the WHOLE group instead of being Kira route exclusive, and a major area of character development for her AND Erilynn would be to have Erilynn try to help Kira out by being her friend, while Kira helps Erilynn out with some of the things you mentioned. Erilynn learns how to look after other people besides herself, and Kira comes to understand that not everyone is after her money/status.
The shared romance scenes were kinda lazy too. For example, the waterfall scene at the hotsprings made perfect sense for Erilynn. She loves nature and the beauty of the falls. It felt out of place for Kira to want to do something like that.
The last thing I'll mention is how, if you want to pursue a relationship route in the game, you spend NEARLY ALL of your time with that character, Kira/Erilynn, which locks off a lot of events or info about the others, including Mina and Kosei as well. IE, my first playthrough, I went with Erilynn's route, and I knew NOTHING of Kira's family status, and Vice Versa with the Kira route, you miss a lot of info on Erilynn and everyone else because you're forced to spend all your time with Kira.
All in all, i DID enjoy the game, I'm not trying to whine, I'm trying to offer constructive criticism for PixelFade. As a romantic myself though, I have a hard time getting behind that ending. Saying goodbye to Erilynn, arguably the best character in the game, was brutal, and even the romance ending with Erilynn was hard to swallow. Please, never again PixelFade.
Yeah Mappingway I 100% agree with everything you said! I did not like the shared romance scenes ether it felt out of place for Kira and I wanted to get to know the others more like you said as well if your going to romance you have to spend all your time with them to make sure that you get them. And I as well enjoyed the game and just wanted to provide some input to help make it better thanks for your input as well!
But Kira's route also had a second problem in that it felt really disconnected from everything...including itself. That VR game that was set up for two scenes? Never mentioned again. That cat you're forced to have Kira adopt and buy stuff for. I don't recall seeing it mentioned again when you spend the night at her house. Nobody comments on the giant stuffed bear she wins from limbo, even though that seems like it'd be hard to miss. (Also, why is the character extremely nervous around Kira, but not in any other situation?)
On the other hand, Erilynn's scenes are often full of callbacks. The sandwich at the end was a nice touch, Denna showed up in a few more scenes (even for the non-Erilynn route, though her introduction there was a bit abrupt), etc. It felt much more like a complete arc.
The clubs also suffered from the same problem. I know they were a kickstarter reward and written after chapter two was completed, but it would've helped to do a story pass to go back and add a few lines to integrate them better. After all, two scenes after you're recruited into the Student Vigilan-I mean Good Samaritan club, you're standing up to the lunch bullies, which would've been a perfect tie-in with the new club. As it is, the clubs are just four mini scenes off to the side with no bearing on anything else.
The main story also had some issues. I felt the marketing was a bit misleading, promising more of a mystery, but after the first chapter the characters just kinda give up and wait for clues to fall into their lap. It ended up about 85% slice of life school story, 15% Velden mystery (less if you're on Kira's route), which wouldn't be inherently wrong, but I don't think it's what the premise seemed to offer. Erilynn does grow as a character, but Velden itself is hardly relevant. And since all the revelations come to us instead of us seeking them out, it makes it seem like the main cast doesn't really care (outside of her occasionally breaking down or feeling sad).
That being said, I did enjoy the game. But I do feel it was the weakest of their three. Main recommendation is to make sure all the parts are integrated better in the next game. I know kickstarter rewards are tricky to make work and timelines get complicated, but I think a quick pass over the story chapters (even after the first few parts were released), would reveal opportunities to easily tie in some of the stuff that was developed later and make it seem like it was there all along. And I think their stories work better when the main cast has more agency and involvement in the overarching plotline.
P.S. Did I miss it or is there a reason the MC can't go to Velden? Mina and her aunt were invited, do you have to be part-Velden or something? Or is there some political thing where Erilynn can't be seen with a commoner from an inferior foreign realm? We barely got to learn much about Velden, so it's hard to know.
You know you really did bring up quite a lot of points that I had not thought about earlier. For example the fact the VR game and the Teddy bear were never brought up again. That would have been a perfect way to make Kira's route feel more meaning full. I honestly don't even remember if you get to play the game or not its been a while since I read it. However, if you did not get to play it you should have been given the chance to play it while you were at the beach house when you stay behind with her as some extra stuff leading up to you giving your feelings for her. At that point it would have been good to have everything brought back up again the teddy bear, VR game, and the cat saying something along the lines of... "After looking back on everything I've done with Kira trying out cool VR games, taking care of cats, or even winning teddy bears. Nothing compares to the time I spend with her and I would want nothing more than to be with her.". I think that would have made the bridge between the read and Kira a lot smoother and more relatable. This would create more feelings for Kira similar to the sandwich with Erilynn. But yeah I 100% agree with you on everything you said about Kira's route!
With the clubs honestly I didn't pay to much attention to them. But now that you brought it up this would have been a perfect way to met Risa and give her a love path as well. I know that she is a grade younger and not in the high school. But for each club you could have a day where you went to do something and since Risa knows about you through Kosei it would make sense that she would find out your doing these events and go with Kosei to watch you and get closer to you. For example if you do the Kendo club you go to a Kendo fight and help with the work around the event and Risa goes with Kosei there. Kosei sees another member from the soccer team and leaves you two to talk with them for a bit and during this time Risa gets closer to you eventually becoming a full route.
Yeah I 100% agree as well that the marketing was a little weird but the story should have been similar to Crystalline in the fact that we should have been pretty much always trying to get her home the lack of that in the Visual Novel really makes it just feel like a dating sim with a story tacked on the end.
I'm not to sure if the MC could not go to Velden or not but your idea of not being able to go because of politics would have been very nice to hear in the story and made a lot of sense. As I was reading I really wanted to go to Velden even if it was just for a little bit at the very end of the story. This also made me think that during the play through Erilynn should have explained more about Velden because there could be possible clues as to where to look for a way home in her stories about Velden it would have been a great way for us to learn more about Velden while helping the main story move as well.
Thanks for you input I definitely enjoyed playing the game as well although I'm just so sad because I felt like it could have been so much better.
If they go with slice of life, take out all the tension. What I mean is, like in ACE, your choices ultimately don't matter, it doesn't matter if you comfort Kaori after the battle with Mei, it doesn't matter if you beat Akira. You still get an enjoyable resolution, with a sequel bate ending. In EE, unless you go with Eri's route, you LOSE Eri. Imagine how different ACE would have been if Kaori quit the team after the Mei battle unless you went down Kaori's romance path and were unable to comfort her. (IMO this would make ACE a much worse game.) That is my chief issue with EE. They can have conflict, but it needs to be resolved by the ending, in a satisfactory way, like convincing Erilynn to stay, or being able to visit her in Velden, either because it's scripted that way, or they have player chosen interactions that allow such an ending, and one that isn't path exclusive.
The obvious other route is similar to Crystalline's, something a bit more linear, but very story rich, and one in which your choices MATTER. Almost EVERY choice in Crystalline mattered. And the narrative was AMAZING, which is why I honestly like Crystalline more than ACE, even though I gave both a 9/10. EE had amazing characters, Erilynn is honestly fighting with Kaori as my 2nd/3rd favorite character by Pixelfade. Which is what makes EE so disappointing, it had the same 9/10 potential, but falls to a 7/10 for me because of poor execution and poor writing. People complained about Crystalline because of the solo romance path, but they failed to see how AMAZING the path was BECAUSE there was only one path. They were able to build the story around that one path, and because of that, it was so much more in depth, and fleshed out. It's like comparing the romance in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC and SC to the romances in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 1-4. Or Mass Effect. Were the romances in ToCS and ME good? Yes. But they paled to the romance told in Trails in the Sky. Because the romance was linear in that game, and it was CENTRAL to the plot, and FLESHED OUT because of it, and, IMO of course, absolutely beautiful.
I really don't remember specific details about Risa or Erilynn's route as it's been awhile to be quite honest. Although I was pretty happy overall with Erilynn's. however I totally agree about Kira, her route was just horribly done with so many dropped and missed opportunities and even forgotten events with you MC it was mind blowingly frustrating. It made you wonder why you wasted time running the route beyond the gathering of the achievements just to be a completionist on this.
Like, plotwise the sum total of her contribution to the narrative as far as I recall is "has a beach house that the party can stay at for their vacation." She doesn't provide any unique insights into the goal of getting Erilynn back home, her family doesn't have any impact on the plot - I kept expecting them to show up as antagonists trying to capture Erilynn to get access to Velden technology for profit or something, or even just have them provide a method of helping Erilynn get home with their cutting edge technology, simply because otherwise Kira just exists but has no real impact on the narrative. Once I heard that Kira's family owned a huge corporation who sells cutting edge technology, I immediately went "a-ha! Clearly there's some connection to Velden here since Velden also has really advanced technology! This is going to be important in the future!" And it just... Wasn't. I felt like something was being foreshadowed here, only to turn out to be totally irrelevant. Which was disappointing, because what the devs foreshadowed was a lot more interesting and compelling than what we got. :(
Kira could have been made into a totally average girl rather than a wealthy tech heiress and it wouldn't have changed her role in the plot at all. Heck, it didn't even really provide her with any scenes where she connected with Erilynn over their shared circumstances. I mean, a wealthy heiress is basically the closest Earthling society has to a princess, Kira should have been one of the people who understood and bonded with Erilynn the most simply because she's the only one who experienced anything even remotely similar. But I don't recall any scenes where they spoke with one another about how hard parental expectations were, even though they both felt such pressures acutely.
And since Kira had no such connection to the plot, I honestly felt like her inclusion and route was kind of a matter of PF taking the wrong message from the general "Crystalline's good, but I didn't like how I couldn't romance Kara" feedback. What people liked about Kara was that she was playful, fun, and integrated into the narrative. but it felt like the developers took that to mean "single route bad, multiple routes good" and didn't go further to internalize why people were so interested in romancing Kara.
Which, I mean, multiple routes isn't bad as an idea, I especially liked the routes in Ace Academy, but for a game marketed with a hook of finding the mystery of how Space Princess Erilynn arrived and how to get her back - so much so that it's even in the name of the game - Kira felt like a distraction from the main plot instead of a participant in her own right.
What gets me is that I can think of plenty of ways that she could have participated more even without a major change to the narrative like making her family antagonists. Kira could have potentially used her family connections in the tech industry to find out there's some ~mysterious energy reading~ coinciding with the time Erilynn arrived, and then from there discovered that other Veldens were already here to foreshadow the bodyguard's revelation and the MC's parentage... While also giving Erilynn a reason to participate in all these slice of life hijinks (ie, Erilynn knowing for certain other Veldens are around and trying to find them to ask if they have a way home. This would've given Erilynn more agency in her own plot in addition to making Kira feel less like a prop by letting her help solve the plot's central thread.)
I'm hoping PF's new space mercenary VN has the routes better integrated into the central narrative, whatever that ends up being. And a bit less slice of life, a bit more plot and serious character development. I generally think PF's writing is at its best when it leans more towards the plot and characterization while only using the Slice of Life as garnish, rather than the other way around as here. Both Ace Academy and Crystalline were like this, and both of them were better, IMO, than this game. I'll still buy the Space Merc VN simply because one "good but not great" flop isn't enough to take away the brand loyalty I built up from Ace/Crystalline/Kaori After Story, but I'm hoping PF's writing team has learned from the missteps with this game.
Ace Academy had the plot with the main character's mech as well as the competition, then the slice of life like the halloween party and hotsprings vacation added flavor and charming character interactions for a more compelling whole.
Crystalline had the plot with the main character trying to get home and find out why he had those magic powers, along with the Kara/Zack subplot, then the slice of life like the pizza discussion or the beach episode added more flavor.
Ethereal Enigma wanted to have the plot with Erilynn trying to get home and learning to respect everyone, but it felt like the "Erilynn phone home" plot was put on the backburner 80% of the game and even Erilynn herself didn't feel like she cared about it a lot of the time. There were a few humanizing moments when she felt sad and despaired at how she wouldn't ever go home, but they were few and far between. And, of course, Kira was just there.
I liked Kira, but she was a bit uninteresting vs Erilynn. Ordinary girl vs girl who poofs into our realm from another dimension made me far more interested in exploring Erilynn's route, which was kinda unfair to Kira.
To each their own. I was far more interested in Kira than in Erilynn from the get-go, and it didn't change throughout the game. It's not a person's origin that makes them special, but the person themselves.