LostPomegranate's Reviews and Recommendations

Even if you liked Sorcery Jokers, if you liked it at least partially for its narrative, then this game will be trash to you.  There is no narration in this game, meaning the entirety of the game is expressed through dialogue, sprites, sound, and CGs.  While the quality of the CG and motion is better than previous games, it is not so much better as to justify getting rid of narration entirely (if anything, decent narration would have turned a mediocre game into an excellent one).  The sound (whether bgm or sound effects) is about the same or slightly lower in quality than previous 3rdeye games. Dialogue is no better or worse than previous games, save that there is slightly more exposition and meaningful pauses than there would have been in most games.  Visually, the sprites are approximately the same as Sorcery Jokers and Gensou no Idea.

Now, this is something that wasn't touched upon in the review overhead... setting and presentation.  The setting is so poorly presented as to be incomprehensible unless you spend a lot of time backtracking through the crappy notes/encyclopedia section, and presentation-wise, the lack of narration leaves you guessing at most of the story's key points and not in a good old-fashioned mindf**k way.  The former is a sign of just how poor a choice cutting out narration is for this type of game, as most fantasy/drama (or chuunige as we call it) are highly dependent on narration to inform the reader about the setting, and an encyclopedia is a lazy writer's choice as a replacement (theoretically, encyclopedia functions should be used for clarification, not outright explaining everything).  

All in all, the game leaves behind a poor impression, barely worthy of being considered a visual novel, much less a good one.

The setting was presented well enough to understand everything without touching the encyclopedia section, I did not have any issues understanding the setting, all the characters, and the important bits of what their powers did based on context and what was shown on screen. I'm not saying this was a particularly great visual novel by any means, but you shouldn't claim a complete lack of something that was there. It's not without narration entirely, but there is less of it. You can see narration just a few minutes into the game in fact - to get this screengrab I just clicked on the second section of Chapter 1 Act 1.

https://imgur.com/a/TQXHjD0

Edited 22 hours ago by LostPomegranate