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Although a significant portion of VNs produced in the West is published for free on platforms such as Steam or Itch.io, most of them are very short and simple projects, often made by starting-out developers or as quickly put-together entries for contents such as Yuri Game Jam. Still, from time to time, it’s possible to find a VNs on a completely different scale also available as free-to-play releases – AIRIS, created by Ebullience Games for NaNoRenO OELVN event and published on April 2017, is definitely among the most expansive games of this kind, with proper route structure and impressive story variation, that will require you many hours to fully experience. While at first glance this otome might look like a generic fantasy romance, it offers a few fairly unique ideas (which I will not spoil in the review) – and those go far beyond its loudly advertised inclusivity, expressed through various LGBT+ themes. While not straying far from the typical formula of the genre, AIRIS indeed offers both a fully-fledged yuri romance route and another one focused on a non-binary character. More importantly though, it takes the somewhat overused trope of MMORPG and gives it an amusing spin – one which created some really interesting storytelling opportunities, even if their execution often left something to be desired. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

First, I'll give you links to my observations of the first three chapters of this game. Contains Chapter 3 Chapters 1 and 2 Now for Chapter 4... as I said in my post on Chapter 3, the bottom line for this is that if you liked the first three chapters, you'll like this one. It is humorous, it is bloody, and it contains an odd mix of the grim and abnormal slice-of-life. I laughed out loud - literally - several times while playing this game, and I honestly liked the insights on Chris's character that this gave. This chapter also serves as an excellent 'settling in' chapter for Gumi and Maki, as Chapter 3 was focused too much outside of the normal daily setting to get a picture of how she was dealing with her change in situation. The introduction of yet another (female) character has me feeling a bit exasperated, but since Taiga fits pretty well with the crew, I didn't feel any irritation. The combat scenes in this are pretty much just one-sided 'pow-pow, the enemy dies' one-sided massacres, except for one of them. I'm going to be blunt... in six months, they probably could have done two chapters like this, so I can't help but wonder why they insist on separating this game into such tiny chapters. While I won't say that the first two chapters (released together) were 'satisfying' in that sense, I nonetheless felt like I'd spent good money, rather than throwing it away. Unfortunately, at the price they are offering these chapters, I would much rather pay seven times as much for a full game two years from now than be forced to wait for each chapter.