straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2019-11-25 02:30 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2019-11-25 02:30 pm
217 | Cinderella Phenomenon
Guess who just accidentally dedicated her weekend to playing visual novels. First it was Lake of Voices, then it was Cinderella Phenomenon. Two very different games—but I enjoyed both. I will say that Cinderella Phenomenon was more like the usual otome experience—but seeing as I love those type of games, that wasn’t a problem for me.
(I should mention that this game is actually for free, both on Steam and itch.io.)
I played the routes in this order:
Rod -> Karma -> Rumpel -> Waltz -> Fritz
So, I fell in love with Lucette pretty much immediately. She’s very much not a great person in the beginning of the game, but I still found her incredibly sympathetic. I feel like the game did an excellent job of showing us why she was the way she was. I think the only thing that I disliked about her was about how she handled the servants and her rank, but even that made sense, considering how she was raised.
It was clear from the start that her mother had really fucked up her up, but Lucette herself doesn’t realize it, at least not in the beginning. She genuinely believes everything that her mother told her—that all people are only concerned with their own game, that acts of kindness only occur when people want something in return, that the only person who truly loved her was her mother. Her rejection of her stepfamily, for instance, makes her look cold and heartless from the outside, but from the perspective of Lucette’s internal world, it makes perfect sense, because she never believed their kindness to be genuine in the first place. Which is exactly the kind of complex characterization and familial relationships that I’m always here for.
Lucette is an incredibly lonely character, even if she neither sees it nor acknowledges it herself, and I feel like her loneliness was the most palpable when she dealt with her father. She keeps saying that she doesn’t care, that she’s given up on him and has accepted that the only person who loved and who will ever love her is her mother, but the pain she feels when he doesn’t recognize her after she’s been cursed makes it clear that that’s not the case at all.
I also can’t blame her for not seeing the love her father had for her; from the player’s perspective, her stepfamily’s kindness was obvious, but her father’s feelings for her were more shrouded. It’s not until many hours into that we find out why he left her so fully under her mother’s control. I was so struck by the revelation in Waltz’s route that it was he (her father) who arranged the secret birthday surprises during her childhood; despite knowing that Lucette’s perspective of her childhood wasn’t reliable, I’d very much accepted her belief that it was her mother who did it as fact, especially since they ended after Hildyr’s death.
It was excellently done, I think, particularly in showing the jarring contrast between how Lucette believed the world and her life and relationships to be, and how they actually were. Those gifts, which she took as a silent proof of how much her mother really loved her, were actually secret gestures of love from the father she believed didn’t care about her. Her father mishandled things badly with Lucette after her mother’s death, but I feel like that was very human: he might have cared for her deeply, but he spent her whole life forcefully separated from her, while she was trained to mask her feelings and distrust the care of others. It makes sense that he wouldn’t know how to read or deal with her, or how to see what she needs from him.
My sympathy for Lucette had the side-effect of making me really upset with Delora right up until I played through Rumpel’s route. Specifically, I was upset with her not because she cursed Lucette, but because of how she went about it. After she curses Lucette, she mocks her and treats her as though she has no redeeming features whatsoever—and, later in Rod and Karma’s route, also tells her later that she did it because she was worried that she’d be just as terrible as her mother.
If that had been coming from anyone else, I would have had no problem with it, because that is how Lucette came across from the outside. But Delora spent a year living as a doll in Lucette’s room, during which Lucette treated her as her only confidant. She should have known better than anyone else what her mother did to her and why Lucette acted in the way she did! I spent so much of Rod and Karma’s route feeling frustrated with her. And then I got to Rumpel’s route, and this happened:
Which, her acknowledging that went a long way in reconciling me to her, and by the end of the game I did like her. It’s clear that Delora (like Lucette’s father) meant well; it’s just that she didn’t necessarily go about it in the most ideal way, which is, again, very human.
It also helps that the game itself acknowledges in the everything-goes-wrong scenario that was Fritz’s route that Delora’s method had its flaws—not in the cursing of Lucette, which was the catalyst that Lucette needed, but rather in how Delora went about it afterwards. After all, it was Lucette remembering Delora’s initial treatment of her that led to her second-guessing Delora and the inhabitants of the Märchen’s* intentions and deciding to go back to the palace with Mythros when he tried to sow doubt within her.
(*I know that the game spells it without the umlaut, but I'm a German-speaker and the lack of umlaut looks really, really wrong to me, so I'm going to be spelling it the way the word "Märchen" is supposed to be spelled here.)
In general, I really liked how Fritz’s route handled Lucette’s relationship with Delora? It’s the one that delves the most deeply into Delora’s mistakes—I loved this moment when Lucette calls her out on it—
—but it’s also the route where, imo, Delora and Lucette’s relationship is the strongest, because it’s the only one where they really acknowledge and work through the problems and miscommunication between them
...As I write this, it occurs to me that the routes where Lucette really works through and fixes her relationships with the important adult figures who mishandled their relationships with her (her father in Waltz’s route, Delora in Fritz’s) are also the only routes in which that same adult figure dies.
I went with Rod’s route first because, as the tl;dr above might suggest, I was very invested in Lucette’s complicated relationship with her family and wanted to see her work through it.And also because Rod is her stepbrother and I have an incest thing. /shot I left it with some mixed, but overall positive feelings. Lucette’s character growth was incredibly satisfying to watch in this route, and it was also the route where the good deeds she achieves feel both the most satisfying and the most natural.
I loved watching grow to realize that her stepfamily’s kindness is a genuine kindness. Again, seeing Emelaigne and Ophelia treat her just as well when they believed her to be nothing more than a maid as when they knew her to be the crown princess and their step-sister/daughter, and watching Lucette slowly start to believe in that kindness… it was very satisfying.
I also loved how each of her good deeds was linked to each member of her stepfamily: first Emelaigne, then Ophelia, and finally, of course Rod. And, again, it was so naturally done! Lucette choosing to help Emelaigne, Lucette defending Ophelia when those noblewomen spoke so poorly about her, and finally, her throwing herself in harm’s way at the end—each of those choices felt like the most natural thing Lucette could have done in the moment, which is not something I can say about all of the good deeds in the other routes.
I think the only thing that didn’t entirely work for me was how Rod’s changing opinion of her was handled. I liked their relationship, and I liked watching them grow closer, but so much of it was predicated on Rod seeing how she changed. Which, is true! Lucette does change, does grow to be more open and to believe in the kindness of others—but at no point does the route deal with him understanding why she acted the way she did before.
He has very little idea of what Lucette went through under her mother, and rather than his seeing Lucette’s journey as her slowly peeling away her mother’s teaching and uncovering the goodness that was already there within her, it feels more like he’s seeing it as her growing from a terrible person into a good one. He’s the LI who starts off with the worst opinion of her (for good reason!), and I just feel like the route would have been more satisfying if it had been about both of them figuring out that there was more to the other’s side than they realized, rather than it just being about Lucette realizing that and Rod remarking on how “she’s changed”.
But, that aside, I did ultimately really like this route—including the ending. I like how the game actually acknowledges that the barriers that their being step-siblings puts on their relationship, and the open nature of the “secretly together for now, but who knows what will happen in the future with this potential scandal hanging over our heads” really worked for me.
After Rod’s route, I went for Karma’s, partially because I was intrigued by the swordsman + crossdressing combination and partially because… I just liked him? He feels like the character type that I probably should have outgrown at this point, but nope, I’m still just as weak to it as I was when I was a teenager. (Though I did get frustrated with his attitude near the end of the route, which I probably wouldn’t have as a teenager, so maybe that counts as my character growth? Idk.)
I really liked how the game made it explicit that, while he might have started the crossdressing only because he was trying to mitigate the (frankly, kind of terrifying) effects of his curse, it’s not actually something that he’s ashamed of. That is, he might not like being mistaken as a woman, but he doesn’t have any problem with dressing up as a woman. At one point, there was a line about how he genuinely likes the dresses and seeking out new ones, and I really liked that. Also, on a more shallow note, that scene where he has Lucette do his make-up for him was just… *_* I loved the tension there!
More shallowness: the sword-fighting bits were hot. I loved how talented he was, and I also liked how the push and pull between him and Lucette where he wants to protect her, while she wants to grow stronger so that he doesn’t have to risk getting hurt protecting her, was handled.
In general, I liked the contrast between his “princely” traits (charming, good at swordfighting, ready to rescue and protect) with his flaws (vain, moody, selfish), and how those flaws are very much presented as being flaws. On a similar note, I liked the connection he drew between himself and Lucette, in that they’re both nobles who were cursed for their selfishness.
Finally, I have to say, after Rod’s route, I was so relieved to have that moment near the beginning when Lucette reveals a little bit about her childhood/how she sees the world, only to not understand why Karma found it so sad. This particular route doesn’t delve into it with any real depth, but it was still a comfort to me to have that aspect of Lucette acknowledged and recognized by an LI.
One quibble with this route’s writing: I still have no idea what the second good deed Lucette performed was supposed to have been, considering the timing of when she got the piece of the pendant. Flaws aside, though, I really liked this route overall.
The next route I did was Rumpel’s, which… sigh. I decided to do his route third for two reasons: first, I figured it’d be best to save the locked routes for last, and second, I… really disliked Rumpel, and when playing through otome games, I try to sandwich the characters I don’t like as much somewhere in the middle so that I don’t have to start or end on a bad note.
I went into this route with very little expectations, beyond a faint hope that maybe Rumpel would surprise me (hey, it’s happened with many a visual novel before!), but… nope. I really disliked him, and none of the revelations in this route did anything to change that. I did appreciate how he liked Lucette for who she was and how he appreciated her blunt honesty, but I just could never get past my intense dislike of his over-the-top flirting, nor could I understand why Lucette fell for him.
I cringed when Bria appeared on the screen—villainous, jealous, one-note love rivals are such a strong Do Not Want for me, and that whole arc was so painful to get through. That being said, I have to give the game some credit, in that Bria actually ended up being handled with some nuance, albeit only in her final scene. Still, I’ll take it. I liked how Lucette saw her as that one-note “bad woman” who cheated on Rumpel, but once she actually sat down and talked to her, she realized that she actually understood her and where she was coming from. That bit where she tries to extend to Bria what she herself has learned about trusting people was very nice, I think.
I also appreciated her and the game’s perspective on Rumpel, namely in their statement about how too much selflessness can become selfishness. It’s both an interesting idea and character flaw to explore. That being said, I have a hard time buying the game’s claims about how kind Rumpel is as a person, mostly because I can’t see how a truly kind person would continue to constantly flirt with a woman after she expressed her dislike for it, which in turn made the exploration of those ideas fall a little flat for me. Still, I do appreciate the ideas there.
By far my favorite part about this route was Lucette’s reaction to the truth about her mother. When I was playing through Rod and Karma’s routes, I was a little dissatisfied with how easily Lucette accepted the truth about her mother. There were some nods to her working through it (i.e., how she asks Ophelia and the other servants in the palace about what Queen Hildyr’s rule was like in Rod’s route), but overall, she takes it fairly well, which I had a hard time buying. This route, on the other hand, really delves into her struggle to bridge the gap between what she thought she knew about her mother and childhood and the person Hildyr really was, and I was very much here for that. I only wish that character arc had been attached to the route of an LI who I actually liked.
After that, I moved on to the locked character routes: Waltz and Fritz. I played Waltz’s first, mainly because I try to end on a high note, and I had low expectation for Waltz’s route and high ones for Fritz’s, but after playing both, I wish I’d done it the other way around.
First, I want to say that I do really appreciate how these two routes are foils for one another. Waltz’s route is where Lucette unlocks her full potential, while Fritz’s route is where that potential is squandered. In Waltz’s route, Lucette gains independence, freedom, and the ability to take care of herself, while the atmosphere is Fritz’s route is much more insular and suffocating, and Lucette herself more powerless and helpless. Waltz’s route is the one where you see Lucette smiling the most, the one where she forms the deepest bonds with the Märchen, and the one where we really get to see her embrace her role both as a queen and the bearer of the Tenebrarum Crystal. Fritz’s route is the one where she stays the most closed off and clings the most tightly to her mother’s love and ideals, the only route where she doesn’t break the curse on her own (she gets one good deed in before her eighteenth birthday breaks it for her), the one where she spends the most time pushing the Märchen away and only really sees the townspeople while sitting on the sidelines, horrified, as she watches Hildyr make them suffer, and where, ultimately, magic is erased from the world and the role she could have played in the world erased with it.
On top of all of that, Waltz and Fritz are also mirrored as characters, in that they’re the two LIs who care about and unconditionally support Lucette from the very beginning. Waltz saw how she suffered while being raised by her mother and was the only person who was really there for her before her memories of him were erased, while Fritz witnessed her struggles in the years after and became the only person Lucette could open up herself enough to to trust—and both of them are very intimately aware of the loneliness Lucette feels, even when she doesn’t acknowledge it herself.
It’s a really interesting set-up with a lot of potential but, unfortunately, Fritz’s route wasn’t written well-enough for it to land quite as it should have. The pacing is off, and Lucette spends so much time ping-ponging between locations. Frequently, she manages to escape back to the Märchen, but then almost immediately turns around and goes back to the palace or Fritz’s place. Outside of her relationship with Delora, the development of her relationships with the inhabitants of the Märchen was also poorly handled.
She spends most of the time at the palace (I think she only spent about a month at the Märchen in total, and there’s a line covering a “a few months went by, now time for Lucette’s 18th birthday!” timeskip during her stay at the palace), yet the game tries to still have those same deep bonds between her and the Märchen that she developed in Karma, Rumpel, and Waltz’s routes. I could definitely buy Delora and Parfait caring about her, and Rod and Emelaigne made sense too, considering how Lucette saved them during the route, and of course Waltz is a given, but Garlan and Jurien? Karma and Rumpel? I can’t help but feel like the game was trying to lean on already having developed those relationships in those other routes, but in this case, it didn’t make sense to me.
But what bothered me the most was Fritz. Or, more precisely, the lack of him. This is supposed to be his route, but we end up spending much more time on Varg and the development of his growing weakness for Lucette.
The main reason why I was drawn to his route was because of that moment in the common route at the beginning of the game when Lucette thinks about how he’s the only person she can trust. Considering how much her mother damaged her ability to believe in other people, I was very struck by that, and became even more so the more I played through this game and learned the full extent of what her mother did to her.
I did like how the game played with that idea, in that the existence of Varg forced Lucette to question her trust of Fritz, which in turn made her so much more vulnerable to Mythros’ (and her mother’s) machinations. It worked very well as a contrast with Waltz’s route—there, she has many people to rely on; here, she has no one—but the problem is that there’s basically no relationship building between her and Fritz to bring them back up from that low point. We hear from Varg about Fritz’s regrets about the situation, but we don’t see Lucette and Fritz working through it.
The ultimate resolution to their relationship—including the kiss—ends up feeling very unearned because of that. Which is a shame, because they had such an excellent base to work up from! Fritz starts off the game as someone who is incredibly important to Lucette, but that’s true in all of the routes, and his route did very little to show me how those feelings developed into romantic love. I feel like it’s a similar flaw here as it was with Lucette’s relationship with the Märchen, in that the game ended up relying too much on what it had set up before (in this case, Lucette already caring about him) instead of actually building the relationship(s) within the route itself.
Finally, there’s Waltz’s route. I’ve already touched on most of what I have to say about this, first when talking about Lucette’s relationship with her family, and then when discussing it as a foil to Fritz’s route, but there is one thing which I haven’t yet talked about, namely: Waltz himself.
I mentioned above that I had low expectations for this route, and my reasons why can be summed up in a single word: shouta. Waltz is under the Neverland Curse, which prevents him from aging, so although he’s actually 22, he looks like he’s about 12, which is squick central for me, and the reason why I didn’t save his route for last, though I probably should have.
To the game’s credit:
1) he doesn’t act childish at all; I actually really like his personality, and it doesn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the “young-looking characters” in otome games that I hate so much
and
2) his curse breaks about halfway through the story (which is the earliest breaking point for any of the curses in the game), so he only spends half of the story looking like a child.
But still. Shouta.
What frustrates me the most about this is that I actually really love the set-up for his story! How Lucette was the one bright point in Waltz’s life as Hildyr’s apprentice, how he tried to ease her own loneliness and how they brought comfort to one another before Lucette’s memories of him were forcefully erased… Their reunion as adults, with Lucette not remembering and Waltz trying to protect her and bring joy to her life in a way he hadn’t been able to when they were children… Like, I’m into it! I’m very into it!
But unfortunately, Waltz being a child (at least in terms of appearance) for that part of their reunion really marrs it for me. There’s one scene where, if you choose the right option, Lucette finally allows herself to cry. It’s honestly a great moment, since her mother had taught her that tears were a weakness and she has difficulties making herself vulnerable or expressing her pain. But unfortunately, Waltz still looked like a child at that moment, which turned the relationship development aspects of that scene from something that I’d be really into, to squick squick squick squick.
(Side-note: the reveal of the “little star” nickname suddenly makes Delora’s singing of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while cursing Lucette take on a whole new meaning—and also makes her comment in Fritz’s route about how her singing it again in the Märchen was meant to motivate her, not frighten her make more sense.)
I did enjoy what we got of their relationship after his curse was broken, but I can’t help but wish that it’d happened even sooner. Especially since his curse being broken also coincided with when the plot got rolling, which meant that most of the relationship-building aspects of the route got front-loaded into the front half. Don’t get me wrong—there’s still relationship development in the second half, and I do think this route was well-written and well-paced. I liked the story and I loved how it handled Lucette’s developing relationship with her father, as I already touched on earlier in this entry.
In short, if it hadn’t been for the Neverland Curse, I would have easily called Waltz’s route it the best route in the game. As it stands, though, I find it flawed, but full of interesting ideas and still enjoyable, which is also the same way how I’d summarize this game as a whole.
(I should mention that this game is actually for free, both on Steam and itch.io.)
I played the routes in this order:
Rod -> Karma -> Rumpel -> Waltz -> Fritz
So, I fell in love with Lucette pretty much immediately. She’s very much not a great person in the beginning of the game, but I still found her incredibly sympathetic. I feel like the game did an excellent job of showing us why she was the way she was. I think the only thing that I disliked about her was about how she handled the servants and her rank, but even that made sense, considering how she was raised.
It was clear from the start that her mother had really fucked up her up, but Lucette herself doesn’t realize it, at least not in the beginning. She genuinely believes everything that her mother told her—that all people are only concerned with their own game, that acts of kindness only occur when people want something in return, that the only person who truly loved her was her mother. Her rejection of her stepfamily, for instance, makes her look cold and heartless from the outside, but from the perspective of Lucette’s internal world, it makes perfect sense, because she never believed their kindness to be genuine in the first place. Which is exactly the kind of complex characterization and familial relationships that I’m always here for.
Lucette is an incredibly lonely character, even if she neither sees it nor acknowledges it herself, and I feel like her loneliness was the most palpable when she dealt with her father. She keeps saying that she doesn’t care, that she’s given up on him and has accepted that the only person who loved and who will ever love her is her mother, but the pain she feels when he doesn’t recognize her after she’s been cursed makes it clear that that’s not the case at all.
I also can’t blame her for not seeing the love her father had for her; from the player’s perspective, her stepfamily’s kindness was obvious, but her father’s feelings for her were more shrouded. It’s not until many hours into that we find out why he left her so fully under her mother’s control. I was so struck by the revelation in Waltz’s route that it was he (her father) who arranged the secret birthday surprises during her childhood; despite knowing that Lucette’s perspective of her childhood wasn’t reliable, I’d very much accepted her belief that it was her mother who did it as fact, especially since they ended after Hildyr’s death.
It was excellently done, I think, particularly in showing the jarring contrast between how Lucette believed the world and her life and relationships to be, and how they actually were. Those gifts, which she took as a silent proof of how much her mother really loved her, were actually secret gestures of love from the father she believed didn’t care about her. Her father mishandled things badly with Lucette after her mother’s death, but I feel like that was very human: he might have cared for her deeply, but he spent her whole life forcefully separated from her, while she was trained to mask her feelings and distrust the care of others. It makes sense that he wouldn’t know how to read or deal with her, or how to see what she needs from him.
My sympathy for Lucette had the side-effect of making me really upset with Delora right up until I played through Rumpel’s route. Specifically, I was upset with her not because she cursed Lucette, but because of how she went about it. After she curses Lucette, she mocks her and treats her as though she has no redeeming features whatsoever—and, later in Rod and Karma’s route, also tells her later that she did it because she was worried that she’d be just as terrible as her mother.
If that had been coming from anyone else, I would have had no problem with it, because that is how Lucette came across from the outside. But Delora spent a year living as a doll in Lucette’s room, during which Lucette treated her as her only confidant. She should have known better than anyone else what her mother did to her and why Lucette acted in the way she did! I spent so much of Rod and Karma’s route feeling frustrated with her. And then I got to Rumpel’s route, and this happened:
Which, her acknowledging that went a long way in reconciling me to her, and by the end of the game I did like her. It’s clear that Delora (like Lucette’s father) meant well; it’s just that she didn’t necessarily go about it in the most ideal way, which is, again, very human.
It also helps that the game itself acknowledges in the everything-goes-wrong scenario that was Fritz’s route that Delora’s method had its flaws—not in the cursing of Lucette, which was the catalyst that Lucette needed, but rather in how Delora went about it afterwards. After all, it was Lucette remembering Delora’s initial treatment of her that led to her second-guessing Delora and the inhabitants of the Märchen’s* intentions and deciding to go back to the palace with Mythros when he tried to sow doubt within her.
(*I know that the game spells it without the umlaut, but I'm a German-speaker and the lack of umlaut looks really, really wrong to me, so I'm going to be spelling it the way the word "Märchen" is supposed to be spelled here.)
In general, I really liked how Fritz’s route handled Lucette’s relationship with Delora? It’s the one that delves the most deeply into Delora’s mistakes—I loved this moment when Lucette calls her out on it—
—but it’s also the route where, imo, Delora and Lucette’s relationship is the strongest, because it’s the only one where they really acknowledge and work through the problems and miscommunication between them
...As I write this, it occurs to me that the routes where Lucette really works through and fixes her relationships with the important adult figures who mishandled their relationships with her (her father in Waltz’s route, Delora in Fritz’s) are also the only routes in which that same adult figure dies.
I went with Rod’s route first because, as the tl;dr above might suggest, I was very invested in Lucette’s complicated relationship with her family and wanted to see her work through it.
I loved watching grow to realize that her stepfamily’s kindness is a genuine kindness. Again, seeing Emelaigne and Ophelia treat her just as well when they believed her to be nothing more than a maid as when they knew her to be the crown princess and their step-sister/daughter, and watching Lucette slowly start to believe in that kindness… it was very satisfying.
I also loved how each of her good deeds was linked to each member of her stepfamily: first Emelaigne, then Ophelia, and finally, of course Rod. And, again, it was so naturally done! Lucette choosing to help Emelaigne, Lucette defending Ophelia when those noblewomen spoke so poorly about her, and finally, her throwing herself in harm’s way at the end—each of those choices felt like the most natural thing Lucette could have done in the moment, which is not something I can say about all of the good deeds in the other routes.
I think the only thing that didn’t entirely work for me was how Rod’s changing opinion of her was handled. I liked their relationship, and I liked watching them grow closer, but so much of it was predicated on Rod seeing how she changed. Which, is true! Lucette does change, does grow to be more open and to believe in the kindness of others—but at no point does the route deal with him understanding why she acted the way she did before.
He has very little idea of what Lucette went through under her mother, and rather than his seeing Lucette’s journey as her slowly peeling away her mother’s teaching and uncovering the goodness that was already there within her, it feels more like he’s seeing it as her growing from a terrible person into a good one. He’s the LI who starts off with the worst opinion of her (for good reason!), and I just feel like the route would have been more satisfying if it had been about both of them figuring out that there was more to the other’s side than they realized, rather than it just being about Lucette realizing that and Rod remarking on how “she’s changed”.
But, that aside, I did ultimately really like this route—including the ending. I like how the game actually acknowledges that the barriers that their being step-siblings puts on their relationship, and the open nature of the “secretly together for now, but who knows what will happen in the future with this potential scandal hanging over our heads” really worked for me.
After Rod’s route, I went for Karma’s, partially because I was intrigued by the swordsman + crossdressing combination and partially because… I just liked him? He feels like the character type that I probably should have outgrown at this point, but nope, I’m still just as weak to it as I was when I was a teenager. (Though I did get frustrated with his attitude near the end of the route, which I probably wouldn’t have as a teenager, so maybe that counts as my character growth? Idk.)
I really liked how the game made it explicit that, while he might have started the crossdressing only because he was trying to mitigate the (frankly, kind of terrifying) effects of his curse, it’s not actually something that he’s ashamed of. That is, he might not like being mistaken as a woman, but he doesn’t have any problem with dressing up as a woman. At one point, there was a line about how he genuinely likes the dresses and seeking out new ones, and I really liked that. Also, on a more shallow note, that scene where he has Lucette do his make-up for him was just… *_* I loved the tension there!
More shallowness: the sword-fighting bits were hot. I loved how talented he was, and I also liked how the push and pull between him and Lucette where he wants to protect her, while she wants to grow stronger so that he doesn’t have to risk getting hurt protecting her, was handled.
In general, I liked the contrast between his “princely” traits (charming, good at swordfighting, ready to rescue and protect) with his flaws (vain, moody, selfish), and how those flaws are very much presented as being flaws. On a similar note, I liked the connection he drew between himself and Lucette, in that they’re both nobles who were cursed for their selfishness.
Finally, I have to say, after Rod’s route, I was so relieved to have that moment near the beginning when Lucette reveals a little bit about her childhood/how she sees the world, only to not understand why Karma found it so sad. This particular route doesn’t delve into it with any real depth, but it was still a comfort to me to have that aspect of Lucette acknowledged and recognized by an LI.
One quibble with this route’s writing: I still have no idea what the second good deed Lucette performed was supposed to have been, considering the timing of when she got the piece of the pendant. Flaws aside, though, I really liked this route overall.
The next route I did was Rumpel’s, which… sigh. I decided to do his route third for two reasons: first, I figured it’d be best to save the locked routes for last, and second, I… really disliked Rumpel, and when playing through otome games, I try to sandwich the characters I don’t like as much somewhere in the middle so that I don’t have to start or end on a bad note.
I went into this route with very little expectations, beyond a faint hope that maybe Rumpel would surprise me (hey, it’s happened with many a visual novel before!), but… nope. I really disliked him, and none of the revelations in this route did anything to change that. I did appreciate how he liked Lucette for who she was and how he appreciated her blunt honesty, but I just could never get past my intense dislike of his over-the-top flirting, nor could I understand why Lucette fell for him.
I cringed when Bria appeared on the screen—villainous, jealous, one-note love rivals are such a strong Do Not Want for me, and that whole arc was so painful to get through. That being said, I have to give the game some credit, in that Bria actually ended up being handled with some nuance, albeit only in her final scene. Still, I’ll take it. I liked how Lucette saw her as that one-note “bad woman” who cheated on Rumpel, but once she actually sat down and talked to her, she realized that she actually understood her and where she was coming from. That bit where she tries to extend to Bria what she herself has learned about trusting people was very nice, I think.
I also appreciated her and the game’s perspective on Rumpel, namely in their statement about how too much selflessness can become selfishness. It’s both an interesting idea and character flaw to explore. That being said, I have a hard time buying the game’s claims about how kind Rumpel is as a person, mostly because I can’t see how a truly kind person would continue to constantly flirt with a woman after she expressed her dislike for it, which in turn made the exploration of those ideas fall a little flat for me. Still, I do appreciate the ideas there.
By far my favorite part about this route was Lucette’s reaction to the truth about her mother. When I was playing through Rod and Karma’s routes, I was a little dissatisfied with how easily Lucette accepted the truth about her mother. There were some nods to her working through it (i.e., how she asks Ophelia and the other servants in the palace about what Queen Hildyr’s rule was like in Rod’s route), but overall, she takes it fairly well, which I had a hard time buying. This route, on the other hand, really delves into her struggle to bridge the gap between what she thought she knew about her mother and childhood and the person Hildyr really was, and I was very much here for that. I only wish that character arc had been attached to the route of an LI who I actually liked.
After that, I moved on to the locked character routes: Waltz and Fritz. I played Waltz’s first, mainly because I try to end on a high note, and I had low expectation for Waltz’s route and high ones for Fritz’s, but after playing both, I wish I’d done it the other way around.
First, I want to say that I do really appreciate how these two routes are foils for one another. Waltz’s route is where Lucette unlocks her full potential, while Fritz’s route is where that potential is squandered. In Waltz’s route, Lucette gains independence, freedom, and the ability to take care of herself, while the atmosphere is Fritz’s route is much more insular and suffocating, and Lucette herself more powerless and helpless. Waltz’s route is the one where you see Lucette smiling the most, the one where she forms the deepest bonds with the Märchen, and the one where we really get to see her embrace her role both as a queen and the bearer of the Tenebrarum Crystal. Fritz’s route is the one where she stays the most closed off and clings the most tightly to her mother’s love and ideals, the only route where she doesn’t break the curse on her own (she gets one good deed in before her eighteenth birthday breaks it for her), the one where she spends the most time pushing the Märchen away and only really sees the townspeople while sitting on the sidelines, horrified, as she watches Hildyr make them suffer, and where, ultimately, magic is erased from the world and the role she could have played in the world erased with it.
On top of all of that, Waltz and Fritz are also mirrored as characters, in that they’re the two LIs who care about and unconditionally support Lucette from the very beginning. Waltz saw how she suffered while being raised by her mother and was the only person who was really there for her before her memories of him were erased, while Fritz witnessed her struggles in the years after and became the only person Lucette could open up herself enough to to trust—and both of them are very intimately aware of the loneliness Lucette feels, even when she doesn’t acknowledge it herself.
It’s a really interesting set-up with a lot of potential but, unfortunately, Fritz’s route wasn’t written well-enough for it to land quite as it should have. The pacing is off, and Lucette spends so much time ping-ponging between locations. Frequently, she manages to escape back to the Märchen, but then almost immediately turns around and goes back to the palace or Fritz’s place. Outside of her relationship with Delora, the development of her relationships with the inhabitants of the Märchen was also poorly handled.
She spends most of the time at the palace (I think she only spent about a month at the Märchen in total, and there’s a line covering a “a few months went by, now time for Lucette’s 18th birthday!” timeskip during her stay at the palace), yet the game tries to still have those same deep bonds between her and the Märchen that she developed in Karma, Rumpel, and Waltz’s routes. I could definitely buy Delora and Parfait caring about her, and Rod and Emelaigne made sense too, considering how Lucette saved them during the route, and of course Waltz is a given, but Garlan and Jurien? Karma and Rumpel? I can’t help but feel like the game was trying to lean on already having developed those relationships in those other routes, but in this case, it didn’t make sense to me.
But what bothered me the most was Fritz. Or, more precisely, the lack of him. This is supposed to be his route, but we end up spending much more time on Varg and the development of his growing weakness for Lucette.
The main reason why I was drawn to his route was because of that moment in the common route at the beginning of the game when Lucette thinks about how he’s the only person she can trust. Considering how much her mother damaged her ability to believe in other people, I was very struck by that, and became even more so the more I played through this game and learned the full extent of what her mother did to her.
I did like how the game played with that idea, in that the existence of Varg forced Lucette to question her trust of Fritz, which in turn made her so much more vulnerable to Mythros’ (and her mother’s) machinations. It worked very well as a contrast with Waltz’s route—there, she has many people to rely on; here, she has no one—but the problem is that there’s basically no relationship building between her and Fritz to bring them back up from that low point. We hear from Varg about Fritz’s regrets about the situation, but we don’t see Lucette and Fritz working through it.
The ultimate resolution to their relationship—including the kiss—ends up feeling very unearned because of that. Which is a shame, because they had such an excellent base to work up from! Fritz starts off the game as someone who is incredibly important to Lucette, but that’s true in all of the routes, and his route did very little to show me how those feelings developed into romantic love. I feel like it’s a similar flaw here as it was with Lucette’s relationship with the Märchen, in that the game ended up relying too much on what it had set up before (in this case, Lucette already caring about him) instead of actually building the relationship(s) within the route itself.
Finally, there’s Waltz’s route. I’ve already touched on most of what I have to say about this, first when talking about Lucette’s relationship with her family, and then when discussing it as a foil to Fritz’s route, but there is one thing which I haven’t yet talked about, namely: Waltz himself.
I mentioned above that I had low expectations for this route, and my reasons why can be summed up in a single word: shouta. Waltz is under the Neverland Curse, which prevents him from aging, so although he’s actually 22, he looks like he’s about 12, which is squick central for me, and the reason why I didn’t save his route for last, though I probably should have.
To the game’s credit:
1) he doesn’t act childish at all; I actually really like his personality, and it doesn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the “young-looking characters” in otome games that I hate so much
and
2) his curse breaks about halfway through the story (which is the earliest breaking point for any of the curses in the game), so he only spends half of the story looking like a child.
But still. Shouta.
What frustrates me the most about this is that I actually really love the set-up for his story! How Lucette was the one bright point in Waltz’s life as Hildyr’s apprentice, how he tried to ease her own loneliness and how they brought comfort to one another before Lucette’s memories of him were forcefully erased… Their reunion as adults, with Lucette not remembering and Waltz trying to protect her and bring joy to her life in a way he hadn’t been able to when they were children… Like, I’m into it! I’m very into it!
But unfortunately, Waltz being a child (at least in terms of appearance) for that part of their reunion really marrs it for me. There’s one scene where, if you choose the right option, Lucette finally allows herself to cry. It’s honestly a great moment, since her mother had taught her that tears were a weakness and she has difficulties making herself vulnerable or expressing her pain. But unfortunately, Waltz still looked like a child at that moment, which turned the relationship development aspects of that scene from something that I’d be really into, to squick squick squick squick.
(Side-note: the reveal of the “little star” nickname suddenly makes Delora’s singing of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while cursing Lucette take on a whole new meaning—and also makes her comment in Fritz’s route about how her singing it again in the Märchen was meant to motivate her, not frighten her make more sense.)
I did enjoy what we got of their relationship after his curse was broken, but I can’t help but wish that it’d happened even sooner. Especially since his curse being broken also coincided with when the plot got rolling, which meant that most of the relationship-building aspects of the route got front-loaded into the front half. Don’t get me wrong—there’s still relationship development in the second half, and I do think this route was well-written and well-paced. I liked the story and I loved how it handled Lucette’s developing relationship with her father, as I already touched on earlier in this entry.
In short, if it hadn’t been for the Neverland Curse, I would have easily called Waltz’s route it the best route in the game. As it stands, though, I find it flawed, but full of interesting ideas and still enjoyable, which is also the same way how I’d summarize this game as a whole.