I'm not totally sure what people usually write about in blog posts since I've never actually written one until now but whatever, here goes. I suppose I'll write about what I've been most obsessed with recently. That being Neoromance (who would have guessed?).
I'll probably continue posting about Neoromance and maybe my other interests here. There won't be anything like reviews or anything. I'm not really that great at thinking critically about things, I usually never even notice stuff like plot holes. But I'd love an outlet to gush about how much I love these games. Hopefully my gushing may even spark interest for someone who may read my posts.
To start off with I guess I'll write about how I first got into the Neoromance games in the first place, which will also involve diving just a little bit into how I got into otome games as a whole. I've been playing otome games for god knows how many years now. The first VN I played was a BL game, but as I got into reading more VNs my interest was more peaked by otome than BL. I still remember not being able to read Japanese at all at that point and turning to reading freeware original English otome VNs I'd find on sites like the Lemmasoft forums.
Even though I couldn't read the Japanese language only games yet, I would hear things about them a lot. I've been frequently the otome and BL games 4chan general for many many years (I still do). So I would often see people who could read Japanese discussing them. Because of those threads I've been aware of the existence of the Neoromance games for many years, just vaguely. As my Japanese studies progressed I started playing more and more Japanese language otome games, the first otome game I ever played in Japanese was Black Wolves Saga: Bloody Nightmare. The order of how I learned Japanese was very weird in that I knew a lot of grammar and a good bit of vocabulary at that point, but I couldn't read anything at all. I was just clinging on to the voiced lines for dear life trying to understand what the heck was going on just by listening. I actually learned how to read hiragana by "reading" that game.
Moving back on track, I'd been meaning to try playing the Neoromance games for a while but had been putting it off. Partly because I had been wanting to wait until my Japanese was better to start playing them, and the other part being I'm lazy and getting into a whole new thing is pretty intimidating. But at about mid January of this year I was bored and finally thought, "heck it" and I tried playing Angelique Retour, my first Neoromance game.
Here's where Angelique stuff starts
Angelique Retour is a full remake of the first Angelique game. I really fell in love with it while playing it. Something I find very weird about the Angelique series is that despite being the first otome games, and having been a big hit, as far as I'm aware there's no other games like them. What I fell in love with about the game is how while playing the game, it just... it feels like I'm playing a video game. I guess in Japanese I could describe it as like ゲーム性 or something but in English I'm not totally sure. The gameplay itself isn't complex at all. I suppose you could call it a stat raiser(?) although it's pretty different to the kind of stat raising in Tokimeki Memorial: Girl's Side for example. I think it's the way that the game and storytelling is structured that makes it feel more game-like to me.
There's scarcely any continuous plot in the first two Angelique games aside from the queen candidate scenes with the queen (original/Special and Special 2). The way world building is conveyed in the game is largely through events with each individual Guardian (the romantic interests). If I had to compare how this way of storytelling makes me feel, I would have to compare it to Touken Ranbu. The information given in the game is scarce, but it gives as much information as you need to gain an understanding of the characters and a base understanding of the world they live in. After that all that's left is to let your imagine run wild with possibilities, and believe me it really does, at least in my case.
And let's not forget the amazing cast of veteran voice actors. Voice actors who are barely in any other otome games at all. The earlier games unfortunately are only partial voice, but Retour features glorious full voice acting for every line. I normally never play games that only have partial voice, but for Angelique it's completely worth struggling to read everything.
I feel like there's way more that I could say about Angelique and Neoromance as a whole, but I think this is a long enough post already so I'll just end it here. I'm struggling to think of any more to say off the top of my head.
In conclusion: I love my husband!!
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