Recent attempts at otome game reviews

light‑hearted banter Games / Entertainment
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The main post is a negative review, and the positive review of JackJeanne is at https://xjtu.app/t/topic/14536/12:

Recently I tried some otome games, but they always felt lacking, so I’m just leaving a brief comment as a record.

Koi to Deep Space is like a second‑type game, with combat sections. Its presentation is more straightforward, offering a direct dating feature you can choose. The dialogue writing is decent, with many details in the speech. However, the main storyline is almost nonexistent; a single section is probably under a thousand words.

Taisho Symmetry Alice is a Japanese‑style otome game. It flips fairy‑tale elements like the Gray Prince and Little Red Riding Hood, weaving them together with a main plot—an interesting narrative idea. Yet its quality and flaws feel similar to those of Mirage Hall. In short, the short stories often lack detail and contain some illogical elements; you can excuse this by saying it’s a fairy‑tale or fable, but readers don’t need a story at a fairy‑tale level.

E.Plojecta (Elite Engineering) was once an Orange Light game. I bought it on Aifadian. The character writing is indeed delicate, but the plot design feels somewhat failed. It tells of a world divided between people with superpowers and ordinary humans; the heroine, a human spy, infiltrates a class of super‑powered people, initially possessing only the super‑powered people’s memories. The story branches into retaining either human or super‑powered memories, forming white, gray, and black lines.

Perhaps spreading the narrative across so many endings makes each line feel short, even though the total word count exceeds 1 million. It lacks a single, absolute core. It might also be that, during its time on Orange Light, the author wrote three separate parts, resulting in different main ideas—e.g., the gray line introduces some time‑travel element. I used to be confused by tree‑like narrative structures, but after seeing this, I think the degree of freedom must not be too large. If you really want multiple lines, you might need to study something like Sea Sand Storm, which revolves around a central event at a specific place and time.

Actually, the opening is written quite nicely, showing the author has skill, but it’s a pity. Some say Orange Light games are only Infiltration of the Red Path and Tangdi’s Splendor, each claiming half the market. It’s hard for an individual author to produce something outstanding. Ironically, both of those games are now unplayable on the surface.

I might still try JackJeanne, which seems to be a musical. I’ll see.

I originally thought that, in theory, otome games are just about turning a Gal (female) character into a male, so there should be good examples, but that doesn’t seem achievable yet. Maybe it’s a first‑move advantage? After all, if a Gal has already written a story, turning the female into a male and rewriting it would be repetitive, and the core of each excellent work isn’t really about gender.

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The psychological considerations for men and women can be quite different, and there are hardly any men commenting on these game videos in Bilibili’s comment sections.
As a man playing these games, you should understand the customer’s needs from a product manager’s (rather than a consumer’s) perspective.

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I’m somewhat curious how the OP knows about this relatively niche game.

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Search online for recommendations using keywords, then choose the ones with high overlap; it seems I saw two people mention this. As for personal works, the level of completion is already very high.

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Actually, I’m also very curious about this question: what caused the otaku male community back then not to be satisfied with cute female characters, but instead to expand into a market for story masterpieces? Nowadays, not only otome games are still at a stage where they can make money as long as they provide emotional value, but even male‑oriented secondary games have begun to follow this trend, and the storyline has become the most insignificant factor.

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Recently, the incense at the temple has been burning even more vigorously.

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《E.Plojecta》 gives me the feeling of a solo game (?), in short,

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Since that’s the case, are there any plot‑driven masterpiece romance gal game recommendations?

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I only played one a long time ago; my real life is too fulfilling
It really feels like a shallow passing, not very meaningful

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Okay, I’ll try it when I get the chance. Gal’s recommendation online is everywhere, so I won’t repeat it, for example my post at 【ADV】Gal 个人生涯表 - #5 by hoist.

For personal projects I want to recommend “kirakira 煌煌舞台”. I greatly admire the author’s skill; it feels that future generations will find it hard to surpass such band writing. Each performance took a lot of effort to write, and each was approached from a different angle; only the first, the opening performance, directly depicts the music, while the others use various side perspectives to render it. I also especially like a passage describing scenery: in the morning looking at the sea, the female lead walks over to chat, but the sun rises from the mountain behind. Truly there are endless details.

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Added to favorites :face_savoring_food: I happen to be very interested in band-themed topics

Actually, I have a deep grudge against

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“JackJeanne” is a youth‑focused, hot‑blooded coming‑of‑age drama that relies on stage plays. The plot is classic, but the highlight also lies in its stage‑play format. Throughout the story there are five stage plays, showing that the author put a lot of effort into them. “Insomniac King, the love of an employee of the Grand Voyage Company, puppeteer Mary Jane, the City of Desire Hawinna, Border Performance Circus”—small as a sparrow yet complete in all five parts, the production quality is quite high, and there are also dance and music (as rhythm‑game elements), which clearly demonstrate the author’s considerable work.

However, the important point is that the script can be revised during rehearsals; as the protagonists deepen their understanding of the script and themselves, adding changes to the original script makes it more flavorful and varied, and at the same time it aids the protagonists’ growth. I think stage plays are a very useful and direct tool. In the script you can directly insert the author’s guidance and prompts for the characters’ development. For example, in the fourth play “Hawinna,” the heroine plays a woman who sells mugwort while hiding her true identity. This mirrors the heroine’s concealment of her female identity and her inner struggle between yearning to get close and refusing to expose herself. The stage play corresponds one‑to‑one with reality, and continuous rehearsals reveal the heroine’s mindset, moving from resistance, confusion, and despair to letting go of everything.

Moreover, a stage play itself has no constraints, so you can create freely, shaping the plot to guide the protagonists. In works like “Lord of the Mysteries,” special potion‑upgrade conditions have to be designed to steer the protagonist, whereas a stage play can directly convey what the author wants to say. The same applies to “The Magician on Paper,” which forces the performance of stories from the book, aligning the book with reality and allowing the small stories to loop with the main storyline. This is far more effective than the amnesiac side story in “Great Symmetry Alice and the Mirage Hall.”

A drawback of the script is that the secondary characters are sketched too thinly, almost like background props. Performances from other classes contain only a few side descriptions and fail to provide any real contrast.

The most serious problem is that the heroine speaks too little; about 90 % of the text consists of interjections and other characters’ names to fill in dialogue. The heroine is like a shrine, illuminating those around her with her supreme talent, yet she remains motionless and receives no direct description. Although she does grow, during the summer performance she seems merely pulled along by others to learn. Using the author’s own technique to critique, the “vessel” in the work isn’t well written, so how can it highlight the beauty of the flower? Black Gate says to Zuo‑Wei: “Being with you,

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Wow, turns out you also play kirakira, truly a masterpiece.

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Although it’s a bit old, there are still occasional recommendations. I really feel like I’ve found a treasure.