Arcadia Fallen

好便宜，文本量好多（可能是我被之前的文游坑死了吧）维多利亚冷脸萌，喜欢，mime萌萌，喜欢，不过就是后面结束有点草率？好吧我真的好好奇后面的剧情

Great visual novel! highly recommend

HIGHLY recommend this game !!! Was eating this story up at every turn. The characters are lovable (both your main group and the side characters who aren't as present are endearing!), the worldbuilding is coherent and intriguing and left me wanting to learn more, the alchemy gameplay is fun and makes your brain work for it but not in an overly frustrating way, and the dialogue is fun and the banter feels natural but at the same time the game knows when it needs to be serious to make a moment land. And when a moment lands, it LANDS. The ending ACTUALLY got a few tears out of me which is VERY hard for games to do. I also appreciate that the choices you make are marked with their tone, so I know in advance if a line I'm choosing is being spoken as genuine, a joke, or a complaint, and that romance lines are filed away in their own tab to prevent any stealthy wooing you didn't intend to happen. Very nice qol features for my neurodivergent brain that can sometimes be an issue in other VNs/choose your own story type games. Plus, I also really like how your impactful choices are usually not cut and dry "good guy" and "not as good guy" choices; all major choices are more or less arguable with no clear "right" or "wrong," especially when it comes to character paths, and I adore when media makes you stop and think for a moment about what choices you're making and why. Hugs for all the cast because they deserve it and I would also like a Mime plush asap she is so cuddleable. I will be buying the next installment I can tell and CHOMPING at the bit for the third one!

I gotta say, I was not expecting myself to like this game that much. I picked up on sale, expecting to get maybe half an hour in before I got bored and refunded it, charting it as "not for me" like most visual novels. Buuuuut, instead, I played the whole game. And honestly? It's great. Not perfect, but a solid 8/10 visual novel to me. The characters were likeable (or the exact right amount of hateable) which meant I never spent any time trying to avoid conversations. They were fun to read through, and the voice acting was pretty top notch. That being said, the ending was... well, the best way to describe it is "Rushed" We reach the last act, and barely 5 minutes later I'm doing the last puzzle, which is no harder than any of the other puzzles. Aaaaand we're done. Yeah, it sorta felt a bit rushed and left a bad taste in my mouth. That and well, the romance. God, I'm a sucker for good romance (and in case nobody could tell, I ended up liking Ann a normal amount) but... We get a couple cutesy scenes, one confession, and like, 4 total kisses. That... I know the game isn't super long, but that felt way too short. I wanted more! Yeah, overall, I liked the game, but it just needed an extra hour or so of runtime to slow the ending down slightly, and get to squeeze a couple more shipping moments throughout the plot.

Good enough VN with many choices to enable proper role play, but certainly isn’t anything groundbreaking. It ends right after it starts getting interesting, the story isn’t particularly deep nor does it have much to say - aside from the usual stuff of doing an allegory to show that bad things in our society are bad. Like sure it explores complex topics, but every other piece of media explores those same complex topics and some of them do it just plainly better. Same goes for word building - it’s largely mashing concepts we have already seen hundreds of times and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. And even the cast of characters falls into classical tropes - the law ignoring mage, the state sanctioned warrior conflicted about state, mysterious guy from far off land and so on. It works - no doubt helped by the voice acting, but it doesn’t push the genre forward and won’t leave a lasting impact. Last;y the romantic subplots are a token inclusion at best. Haven’t played any dating sim for a significant amount of time to know how it’s supposed to be done, but having like 5 “romantic” interactions (the quotes are doing some heavy lifting here) and finally getting a kiss just is off. And aside from those, the rest of the dialogue stays the same. Lastly the puzzle mechanics seem to be there just to have some change to the VN gameplay. I’ve never found them engaging, I would prefer if the devs just added an option to skip them, instead of forcing us to play this mobile game-esque puzzle game glued to an otherwise OK visual novel. I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and it does what it promised to do. Still if they cut the number of choices in half and made the game twice as long I think it would have been a better fit. Since as of now I’ve done my role play, but wasn’t that captivated to try different routes.

5

This's a visual novel and so it needs to be consumed as such. But as far as narratives go it is rich storytelling. An epic fantasy in visual novel form. And it has nuance, allowing you to explore complicated morality and complicated characters. It's not necessarily the easiest game to pick up at any given moment, but when you pick it up, it has substance, quality. It's like a really good book. Worth the while.

Really interesting game! Puzzles, stories and choices! I got lost in it easily!

I don't know why I refunded this game earlier, maybe I was in bad mood, now I'm enjoing it so far

A wonderful visual novel with beautiful art, an emotional storyline and excellent voice acting. I enjoyed the different paths one could take and the romances were very sweet and romantic. The background music is charming without being annoying even on the third playthrough. Highly recommended!