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I've been a bit depressed lately, and Mystic Messenger is for various reasons not doing a great job of getting me out of my head. So while I am still finishing the Zen route of Mystic Messenger, I've also started Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, a Gothic visual novel by Otomate, creators of Hakuoki and Code Realize.
It's apparently got romance elements but is more of a drama/mystery, which will be an interesting change.
I've not played a lot of it yet but so far it's enjoyably gothic and strange!
Once again they haven't bothered changing any of the UI from the console version, and it took me some experimenting to figure out that "enter" is the autoplay key.
Anyway!
Sadly it won't stream from the Windows machine to my Mac laptop, so playing it, taking screenshots, and writing up summaries is a bit of a pain. I eventually wrote my summary into an email I sent to myself. Before that, I described it like this to a friend:
the protag wakes from a dream about an abyss
with no memory
in a strange, dark, gothic, butterfly themed mansion
she sees a young girl and goes to talk to her
but the girl is wearing a scary goat mask
and then turns into a giant monster and starts to chase protag
she runs and is pulled into a dark corner by red dude
who is also an amnesiac
dark butterflies float around the front door
and it refuses to open
more monsters attack and a man in a fox mask appears and shoots them
the monsters turn into butterflies and get swallowed by his necklace, then he vanishes
another man, green dude, appears, and says he woke up here a few days ago and has found a nice safe room protected by white butterflies
but protag hears someone screaming and goes to try to save them
(with zero combat skills but a lot of pluck)
she sees two men being attacked and thinks
"I wish I had a gun like the man with the fox mask"
and a MAGIC GUN MANIFESTS IN HER HANDS
and then
SUDDENLY IT'S A SHOOTING GAME
WHERE I HAVE TO KILL BLACK BUTTERFLIES
WHICH I AM VERY BAD AT
I got a C
So yes! That all happened! A first person shooter inside a dating sim is certainly...something. But I am very much down for the protagonist protecting two love interests using a magic gun that manifested via the strength of her desire to shoot things :D
To begin with, since noone knows their own name, the game uses epithets. But they get names later, so I'll just use those from the start for clarity. Everyone has a very obvious colour scheme, too, and is wearing a small black-and-rainbow stained-glass-ish butterfly shaped clip. They all wake up with a cell phone showing an impossible time like 82:65, and a single text message.
You don't meet everyone at once, but here's the main characters. I've listed them as name, colour, epithet, and the message they get.
Hikage, red, "Two moled man", "There is only one way to leave the manor"
Yamato, blue and white, "Harsh eyed man", "Complete the kaleidoscope"
Beniyuri, black, "Me", "Locate the kaleidoscope shards"
Karasuba, yellow, "pierced man", "The key to the memory lies in the manor"
Kagiha, green, "Droopy eyed man", "The weapon is in your hands"
(I may have gotten Karasuba and Yamato's messages mixed up, but it's not clear if who got what message actually matters)
There's also a white themed guy in a fox mask who hasn't shown up much yet but gives off Secret Route vibes. You can see him hiding behind Beniyuri's hair.
Note that everyone's hair kinda matches their colour scheme, except Beniyuri and Hikage, who match each other. Hikage is very prominent on the title screen too, he seems to be the default love interest. You can't see it here but he has two little moles under his right eye.
I find the art style a bit weird but it's growing on me.
The game lets me choose the protagonist's name, and I stuck with the default of Ai, which means love. Interestingly, as you can see this is NOT "Beniyuri", the name she gets referred to by in the game so far. So I guess she finds out her real name later?
Anyway! As above: Beniyuri falls into an abyss, then wakes with no memory in a dark mansion. She sees a girl in a goat skull mask on the stairs, but when she approaches the girl turns into a huge monster and tries to attack her.
Beniyuri runs, and just as the monster is about to get her she is pulled into a dark corner by Hikage. He also woke recently with no memory.
He's a bit grumpily tsundere, but basically sensible and decent. He has a tendency to throw himself into danger to protect Beniyuri while calling her an idiot.
The windows cannot be broken, and all they can see outside is an impenetrable, unchanging fog. The cellphone says the time is something impossible like 82:65, and the rest of the clocks in the mansion are broken.
THIS IS SO WEIRD AND I LOVE IT
They try to break open the locked front door to no avail. Beniyuri notices etherial black butterflies fluttering around the door just as TWO monsters attack. Hikage gets hurt defending her but can't do anything to stop them, and all seems lost when...
The mysterious man in the white fox mask shows up and shoots the monsters! They dissolve into black butterflies.
And then the man leaves, without saying a word.
Beniyuri sees an opalescent crystal shard on the ground and picks it up. Is this to do with the "kaleidoscope"?
Not long after that they encounter the gentle, kind Kagiha, who says he woke a few days ago and managed to find a safe place to stay. He's noticed that the black butterflies are a bad omen, but any place filled with white butterflies is safe from the monsters.
Beniyuri thinks: normal butterflies are attracted to nectar. What attracts these etherial ones?
The base has a lounge, bedrooms, and a stocked kitchen. Just as they're settling in they hear a scream! Beniyuri immediately rushes off to try and save whoever it is, while Hikage grumpily follows behind telling her she's being a dumbass.
They see Karasuba telling the monsters to eat the meatier Yamato, who is understandably displeased.
Beniyuri: I wish I had a gun like that man in the fox mask, then I could protect them.
AND LO:
:D :D
Hikage successfully summons his own Imagination Gun and there's a shooting minigame! That I was very bad at, but didn't actually fail, and that's what matters. You can see what it looks like on the Steam page.
They all return to base, and there's some mutual suspicion until Beniyuri summons the power of friendship to encourage everyone to be nakama (which the game translates like 3 different ways as friends/comrades etc) Karasuba is an energetic troll, while Yamato is snappishly aggressive and stand-offish.
They realise the bedroom doors have nameplates, so with no better options choose names that way.
As Beniyuri sits alone in her room, she hears it start to rain. She feels a chill, and has a memory of being very cold before falling into the abyss of sleep.
IS SHE REMEMBERING HER OWN DEATH??? I am naturally hoping that she's actually some sort of monster herself but am not sure that lightning will strike twice.
End of prologue!
I will end the summary there even though it's early, since it's a neat place to stop. I played a bit more, which I will post later, then explored the main menu.
There's now a "minigame" option, which lets me FIGHT THE BUTTERFLIES AGAIN. I can grind for points, hallelujah! I have no idea what effect the points have yet, but I can get as many as I need, so don't need to stress about my grades while I'm playing. (Why do so many otome games make me stress about my grades? Isn't this meant to be escapism for teenage girls??)
I can choose who to fight beside but right now my only option is Hikage, I guess since he's the only other character to have had a Brain Gun moment with Beniyuri so far.
There's also a gallery that not only lets me look at seen CGs, but takes me back to the scene where they played. This is very useful for taking screenshots I was too focused on the story to think of at the time. Unusually, it lists the same CG under multiple categories, eg the scene where Beniyuri and Hikage meet fox mask guy is listed under Hikage, fox mask guy (currently called "??") and "Other".
The in-game menu lets you remap controls but doesn't tell you what, say, "start button" actually does. It also has a "flowchart" which shows where you're at in the story and I think might let you navigate between sections? Right now there's just a single line from "prologue 1" to "prologue 2" etc.
Beniyuri is very much a Nice Otome Heroine, very polite and kind and never getting annoyed, but she's brave and not annoying and hopefully will develop some more personality as we go. Also she's voiced! It's a very Anime Heroine voice but nice enough. The other voice actors are pretty good too. And ha, I was right! Karasuba is Kakihara Tetsuya, who played Victor in Code Realize and Shin in Amnesia. This is a very different role again, I guess they like him over at Otomate!
Also looks like fox mask guy's name is Monshiro, and there's ANOTHER FEMALE CHARACTER, called Usagi, played by Naganawa Maria who was the cute little girl dragon in Dragon Maid. And now it's time to stop looking things up before I get spoiled any more!
I've been a bit depressed lately, and Mystic Messenger is for various reasons not doing a great job of getting me out of my head. So while I am still finishing the Zen route of Mystic Messenger, I've also started Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, a Gothic visual novel by Otomate, creators of Hakuoki and Code Realize.
It's apparently got romance elements but is more of a drama/mystery, which will be an interesting change.
I've not played a lot of it yet but so far it's enjoyably gothic and strange!
Once again they haven't bothered changing any of the UI from the console version, and it took me some experimenting to figure out that "enter" is the autoplay key.
Anyway!
Sadly it won't stream from the Windows machine to my Mac laptop, so playing it, taking screenshots, and writing up summaries is a bit of a pain. I eventually wrote my summary into an email I sent to myself. Before that, I described it like this to a friend:
the protag wakes from a dream about an abyss
with no memory
in a strange, dark, gothic, butterfly themed mansion
she sees a young girl and goes to talk to her
but the girl is wearing a scary goat mask
and then turns into a giant monster and starts to chase protag
she runs and is pulled into a dark corner by red dude
who is also an amnesiac
dark butterflies float around the front door
and it refuses to open
more monsters attack and a man in a fox mask appears and shoots them
the monsters turn into butterflies and get swallowed by his necklace, then he vanishes
another man, green dude, appears, and says he woke up here a few days ago and has found a nice safe room protected by white butterflies
but protag hears someone screaming and goes to try to save them
(with zero combat skills but a lot of pluck)
she sees two men being attacked and thinks
"I wish I had a gun like the man with the fox mask"
and a MAGIC GUN MANIFESTS IN HER HANDS
and then
SUDDENLY IT'S A SHOOTING GAME
WHERE I HAVE TO KILL BLACK BUTTERFLIES
WHICH I AM VERY BAD AT
I got a C
So yes! That all happened! A first person shooter inside a dating sim is certainly...something. But I am very much down for the protagonist protecting two love interests using a magic gun that manifested via the strength of her desire to shoot things :D
To begin with, since noone knows their own name, the game uses epithets. But they get names later, so I'll just use those from the start for clarity. Everyone has a very obvious colour scheme, too, and is wearing a small black-and-rainbow stained-glass-ish butterfly shaped clip. They all wake up with a cell phone showing an impossible time like 82:65, and a single text message.
You don't meet everyone at once, but here's the main characters. I've listed them as name, colour, epithet, and the message they get.
Hikage, red, "Two moled man", "There is only one way to leave the manor"
Yamato, blue and white, "Harsh eyed man", "Complete the kaleidoscope"
Beniyuri, black, "Me", "Locate the kaleidoscope shards"
Karasuba, yellow, "pierced man", "The key to the memory lies in the manor"
Kagiha, green, "Droopy eyed man", "The weapon is in your hands"
(I may have gotten Karasuba and Yamato's messages mixed up, but it's not clear if who got what message actually matters)
There's also a white themed guy in a fox mask who hasn't shown up much yet but gives off Secret Route vibes. You can see him hiding behind Beniyuri's hair.
Note that everyone's hair kinda matches their colour scheme, except Beniyuri and Hikage, who match each other. Hikage is very prominent on the title screen too, he seems to be the default love interest. You can't see it here but he has two little moles under his right eye.
I find the art style a bit weird but it's growing on me.
The game lets me choose the protagonist's name, and I stuck with the default of Ai, which means love. Interestingly, as you can see this is NOT "Beniyuri", the name she gets referred to by in the game so far. So I guess she finds out her real name later?
Anyway! As above: Beniyuri falls into an abyss, then wakes with no memory in a dark mansion. She sees a girl in a goat skull mask on the stairs, but when she approaches the girl turns into a huge monster and tries to attack her.
Beniyuri runs, and just as the monster is about to get her she is pulled into a dark corner by Hikage. He also woke recently with no memory.
He's a bit grumpily tsundere, but basically sensible and decent. He has a tendency to throw himself into danger to protect Beniyuri while calling her an idiot.
The windows cannot be broken, and all they can see outside is an impenetrable, unchanging fog. The cellphone says the time is something impossible like 82:65, and the rest of the clocks in the mansion are broken.
THIS IS SO WEIRD AND I LOVE IT
They try to break open the locked front door to no avail. Beniyuri notices etherial black butterflies fluttering around the door just as TWO monsters attack. Hikage gets hurt defending her but can't do anything to stop them, and all seems lost when...
The mysterious man in the white fox mask shows up and shoots the monsters! They dissolve into black butterflies.
And then the man leaves, without saying a word.
Beniyuri sees an opalescent crystal shard on the ground and picks it up. Is this to do with the "kaleidoscope"?
Not long after that they encounter the gentle, kind Kagiha, who says he woke a few days ago and managed to find a safe place to stay. He's noticed that the black butterflies are a bad omen, but any place filled with white butterflies is safe from the monsters.
Beniyuri thinks: normal butterflies are attracted to nectar. What attracts these etherial ones?
The base has a lounge, bedrooms, and a stocked kitchen. Just as they're settling in they hear a scream! Beniyuri immediately rushes off to try and save whoever it is, while Hikage grumpily follows behind telling her she's being a dumbass.
They see Karasuba telling the monsters to eat the meatier Yamato, who is understandably displeased.
Beniyuri: I wish I had a gun like that man in the fox mask, then I could protect them.
AND LO:
:D :D
Hikage successfully summons his own Imagination Gun and there's a shooting minigame! That I was very bad at, but didn't actually fail, and that's what matters. You can see what it looks like on the Steam page.
They all return to base, and there's some mutual suspicion until Beniyuri summons the power of friendship to encourage everyone to be nakama (which the game translates like 3 different ways as friends/comrades etc) Karasuba is an energetic troll, while Yamato is snappishly aggressive and stand-offish.
They realise the bedroom doors have nameplates, so with no better options choose names that way.
As Beniyuri sits alone in her room, she hears it start to rain. She feels a chill, and has a memory of being very cold before falling into the abyss of sleep.
IS SHE REMEMBERING HER OWN DEATH??? I am naturally hoping that she's actually some sort of monster herself but am not sure that lightning will strike twice.
End of prologue!
I will end the summary there even though it's early, since it's a neat place to stop. I played a bit more, which I will post later, then explored the main menu.
There's now a "minigame" option, which lets me FIGHT THE BUTTERFLIES AGAIN. I can grind for points, hallelujah! I have no idea what effect the points have yet, but I can get as many as I need, so don't need to stress about my grades while I'm playing. (Why do so many otome games make me stress about my grades? Isn't this meant to be escapism for teenage girls??)
I can choose who to fight beside but right now my only option is Hikage, I guess since he's the only other character to have had a Brain Gun moment with Beniyuri so far.
There's also a gallery that not only lets me look at seen CGs, but takes me back to the scene where they played. This is very useful for taking screenshots I was too focused on the story to think of at the time. Unusually, it lists the same CG under multiple categories, eg the scene where Beniyuri and Hikage meet fox mask guy is listed under Hikage, fox mask guy (currently called "??") and "Other".
The in-game menu lets you remap controls but doesn't tell you what, say, "start button" actually does. It also has a "flowchart" which shows where you're at in the story and I think might let you navigate between sections? Right now there's just a single line from "prologue 1" to "prologue 2" etc.
Beniyuri is very much a Nice Otome Heroine, very polite and kind and never getting annoyed, but she's brave and not annoying and hopefully will develop some more personality as we go. Also she's voiced! It's a very Anime Heroine voice but nice enough. The other voice actors are pretty good too. And ha, I was right! Karasuba is Kakihara Tetsuya, who played Victor in Code Realize and Shin in Amnesia. This is a very different role again, I guess they like him over at Otomate!
Also looks like fox mask guy's name is Monshiro, and there's ANOTHER FEMALE CHARACTER, called Usagi, played by Naganawa Maria who was the cute little girl dragon in Dragon Maid. And now it's time to stop looking things up before I get spoiled any more!
