The Radiants

I play a lot of otome/romance/story games, so I'm pretty picky about what I play, and to its credit The Radiants did hold my attention for 13 hours as of this writing. However, I doubt very much I'll go back to it in the future. On the surface, this game looks like it should work. It's an academia romance with a bit of a mystery. But the more time you spend in the universe the more the game unravels to show there's little underneath it. First issue is the writing. There is so much exposition in every conversation that it slows the game down to a crawl. While I understand there are limitations to the genre where most of the story needs to be told via inner monologue or dialogue, it doesn't excuse the huge amount of text you need to go through just to know what's going on. The world is not revealed for you through story events or through the dynamics of the characters, but it's literally told to you explicitly in a dialogue that may or may not be related. The game takes place in another world/plane of existence where all the people around you aren't human but are some kind of "fairy tale creature" like sirens, dryads, kitsune, etc. However, all the radiants look human, an…

Pretty solid experience, I'd give it a 7/10. TLDR; amazing art, decent story, great characters and endings, plenty of glitches, unbalanced number of cgs per LI. The game has an obvious favourite guy, with Grey having twice the cgs Arien or Kai do...who both in turn have twice the cgs any of the secrets routes have. That's fine though. Arien is my favourite, but Grey is cool too (despite his HILARIOUS similarity with Gray from Tailor Tales). The main story is servicable, I enjoyed it the first time but having to go through it on subsequent rounds was a bit of a chore given the skip system sometimes didn't work when upgrading skills and the romance is relagted to side instances scattered throughout the main story. The different clubs and again with the scattered story beats makes it engaging to replay though! The art for the character sprites is GORGEOUS! And watching them blink, wink, and change expressions makes the game so much more lively and dynamic. My favourite is Arien's face contorting into the most beauticious smile known to man as he shifts his head and does the double blink. 10/10 small details, amazing character rigging right there! The glitches...oh the glitches. G…

A nice fantasy romance novel. Strengths: - beautiful character sprites and backgrounds - interesting LIs and fun secret romances - the world is intriguing (although the worldbuilding doesn't go that deep, I widh there was more) - the MC can hold her own and is not a bag of potatos to be tossed around by romantic partners - multiple endings and nice epilogues with your significant other Weaknesses: - the main plot is a bit predictable - encoutnered a few bugs, but nothing game-breaking

This is a really good game that does not require a walkthrough for a happy ending. If you want to end up with a specific career, you will want to look up the requirements for that (dev has posted it somewhere). The only downside is there's a few places in the game that have not been polished. The main dialogue box for the MC was messed up for the whole game for me. That was annoying, but I also got used to it and put over 36 hours in the game.

Super cute! And its not very complicated, in a good way. The game makes it very easy yo turn my brain off and just vibe.

Good art. Interesting story. Other-worldly setting. The stat raising mechanics are mixed with random encounters, making finding the ending you want difficult at times. But there are so many different available endings, there's no reason not to start a new game and try again.