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It looks like Love365 will be the game of the month at otome_games, so as a good mod I decided to try out all the free games for February. Alas, I didn't like any of them (except Dui, who I'd already played), but they generally weren't objectively bad, just not my jam, so hopefully this will still help people find something they like.

Here's my general Voltage/Love365 post. Links below lead to my reactions posts, where I've written one.

Note that there's some variation in when these games are free for, and what "free" means.

Irresistible Mistakes: Shunichiro: The protagonist wakes up realising she had a drunken one night stand she can't remember with one of her coworkers. Shunichiro is her cheerfully hedonistic boss, it glossed over the consent issues too much for me but he had a certain skeezy charm. This seems to be permanently free.

Irresistible Mistakes: Yukihasa: a brilliant but emotionless doctor who thinks love is a delusion and just wants to be friends with benefits. I had complicated feelings on him as a character, but the route seemed to be going in a "fix the neuro-atypical person with loving sex" direction which, no. Free for February.

Butler Until Midnight: Yuma: The protagonist finds out she's the daughter of a prestigious man and is bullied into letting a butler train her to be a refined lady. They were so manipulative and mean in the prologue it felt more like a butler themed horror game, but it's probably fun if you like domineering butlers? I've heard there's a lot of fat shaming, though. Yuma is apparently extra mean to start with but becomes nicer. Free for February.

Star-crossed: Dui This is a cute romance with the god of the star-sign Gemini, who has two sides to his personality. Free with ads until February 11.

Destind: Araya: the protagonist matches via a dating app with a younger friend from highschool who's been pining over her. He's rapey and manipulative and I'm not sure the game even saw it as a flaw D: It's "Love Choice" which means the good choices, leading to the super happy end, cost money. Normally you'd also have to wait or pay to read the episodes, and that part seems to be permanently free, but unlocking the super happy ending still costs like $30 and even people who liked the route gave it a low score for the poor value for money.

A little more spoilery detail about the routes with no posts of their own under the cut. I made it like 3 episodes in to all of them before giving up. I describe Destind: Araya at the end, and mark where it's going to start.
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An aspiring screenwriter ends up the secret ghostwriter for a boyband full of utter assholes. The free route is for Nagito, who is the friendliest but also super skeevy, making a lot of "jokes" that are basically sexual harassment.

My non-spoilery review is that it was compelling but pretty cheesy, and I didn't end up entirely shipping the main pairing.

And now, my spoilery reactions, because it was a Journey.

Content note: incest, sexual harassment
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This is another Voltage romance game on the Love365 phone app.

The premise of After School Affairs is that the protagonist's sports-focussed boys school has merged with an academics-focused girls school, and two of the conditions of the merger are (a) Teachers from her school have to work with the "better" teachers to raise the boy's grades (b) DATING IS FORBIDDEN.

And of course all the potential teaching partners are HOT DUDES.

The uptight, cold maths teacher Shinichi was free for January, and looked like my sort of thing, so I gave him a go.

And it was sort of my sort of thing? But I got bored three chapters in and skipped to the end. I didn't like the "Climactic" ending that much, but the "Amorous" one was cute. EDIT: I went back and played all the scenes, and enjoyed it!

Also it hit a squick of mine, which I'll go into under the cut.

I'll definitely keep the app in mind for when I want a cheesy romance, and might even give this one another go later in January if the mood hits me. But I'm not sure I'll ever pay for a route, unless it jumps out at me way more than any of the ones I've seen.

Below: Spoilers, mention of sexualisation of teenaged characters.
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This is a game on Lovestruck, Voltage USA's Dating Game App. I installed it ages ago and it crashed, but I gave it another go and it's been working fine ever since, hooray! Here's my post explaining how this app works. These games are freemium: You can play for free, but it involves a lot of waiting and you don't get to see everything.

Th specific game I chose, Love and Legends, is about a 25 year old woman from Chicago who suddenly finds herself in a fantasy kingdom recovering from a war with a Witch Queen. She is captured by people working for the local king, and at first they're suspicious, especially since the witch queen's minions seem interested in her. But eventually she becomes a trusted friend and falls in love with one of the group (or one of the bad guys!) There's male and female love interests.

I played the first Chapter and a bit of the female wizard Altea. It's pretty sweet, a standard but entertaining fantasy romance, and I had a moderate amount of Feels. Most f/f paths are really bland but this is about as complex and engaging as a moderately good m/f path.

The story never quite resolves everything at once. Individual episodes often end in a fairly calm, happy place, but there's always hanging threads to keep you coming back for One More Episode, and Chapter 1 ended on a cliffhanger. I've currently read up to Chapter 2 Episode 2 and it was an ok-ish place to stop.
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I need to update my Media For When I Am Bored list in general, but I've realised this is a category it doesn't have, and I often need.

Opinions on any I haven't played are welcome!
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The pretty art drew me back into trying Julian's route and...well! I can articulate why I didn't like that, and suspect that freemium dating sims of this sort aren't ever going to work for me. I went in not expecting to like it very much and was still disappointed.

The story is basically linear, choices affect the player's experience and the ending but the optional scenes don't contain any real plot. And the really appealing, fanservicey, romantic moments cost money. A lot of money.

Not only is the basic, free story unsatisfying, but I'm pretty sure that even if I paid the HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS required to see all the paid scenes, the story wouldn't hold together emotionally. I only saw one paid scene, but it feels unavoidable that since they can't affect anything plotwise they are emotionally static, bursts of romantic candy devoid of any further value to the story.

Which is frustrating because I really liked Julian's character. He's a self-hating cursed masochistic bi plague doctor inspired by Jeff Goldblum, and suffers beautifully.

Finally: even though the player character's gender is customisable, and I was playing mine as masculine leaning non binary, the dynamic drew heavily on het romance tropes. Fun tropes, mostly, and nothing contradicted the PC being a guy or non binary. And obviously this is fine for anyone playing a woman. But it made me feel a little weird. (You would think I'd enjoy the female LIs more, but they seemed very...toothless f/f as written by het writers)

Spoilery discussion of Julian's route below the cut. I only played through the first two and a half chapters of fourteen.
( Spoilers for Julian's route )

Time to try out this cheesy micro-transaction riddled vampire dating sim in the hopes of smooching a cute lady vampire.
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Helix Waltz is a mobile game where the main mechanic is constructing outfits to wear to balls.

I've found a bunch of useful guides, but I needed a more simple and methodical approach. This has gotten me to level 51, at the start of Chapter 5, I don't know if it's much help past that point. Also, just because it's more intuitive for me doesn't mean it will be for you, there's other guides out there that might suit better.

Anyway! Here's how I make outfits.
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