This World Unknown

Some parts of this game were interesting, however, most of it was boring. I hated Asa the most. He disgusted me. I hated the fact that we play as a 17 year old girl and yet we can date a man in his late twenties!? It made me so uncomfortable. I finished the entire game just for the achievements.

Val's route was my first route and it was pretty decent, as a straight male I still adore the romance within this route, despite some dragging, unnecessarily long storytelling, it was still fine. But then my second route went with Garrett's, and the dragging writing started to affect the experience, it is so bad that I skipped through the latter part, and even lost my interest playing the remaining 2 routes but instead skipping them just for the Steam achievements. I really feel bad to have done so when Dev's note mentioned that Garrett's route was their probably least fav, and i was supposed to play Val's at last, which was like slapping in my face and telling me that I am playing it in a totally wrong and opposite way, really unfortunate.

Restart for all ending achievement.

A short little VN that uses lots of stock photos, but I feel it helps pull you into focusing more onto the plot and the characters, I would say give it a try.

I've read and enjoyed a fair few Ebihime VNs by this point, but I can't really recommend this one. Store page says it's a medieval fantasy but there's nothing medieval about it -- certainly not the character art nor the backgrounds. The worldbuilding is quite generic, and better background art could have done a lot of the heavylifting in terms of making the world feel real. The use of photos for backgrounds with extremely stylised sprites is a visually unpleasant combination in my opinion, particularly since no effort was made to remove obviously modern touches from the backgrounds. It's very anime inspired -- you can see it in the character tropes, behaviour, and even the sound effects used in their speech. With how disjointed this visual novel was, it just added another layer of confusion to a rather jumbled mixture of elements. I did like how different routes revealed different bits of information about the events in the first part of the game. I found some of the characters obnoxious, and the dialogue tedious at times. All in all, this one's kind of a miss for me.

Garrett's and Valerian's routes are my favorites. Asa's and Luca's routes felt like they focused more on female side characters, which is fine, but not what I was expecting.