I want to preface this review by saying that I'd love to see these devs continue to improve and make more vns, and that I'm leaving a "recommended" rating in support of the devs, rather than in support of this game specifically. At the end of the day, this is a *free* visual novel that, despite my gripes with the writing, has clearly had an enormous amount of love and effort put into it.
To start with the biggest strengths of the vn, the music and visuals are quite good. While some character sprites are a bit rough-looking, they are still very charming and have a unique art style that fits the atmosphere of the vn. Some characters introduced later have a more polished art style, so it seems like it may be halfway through some form of revamp, but it looks good regardless, and the mismatched sprites don't stick out as much as you'd expect. There's also a very hefty amount of animation, especially during fight scenes; it's some of the most involved animations I've ever seen in a visual novel, and they are honestly very impressive, both from a technical standpoint and a visual polish standpoint. The music is also quite good, and although it's not exactly my cup of tea, it's all very competently made; it fits the mood perfectly and is unique among typical visual novel soundtracks. My one and only complaint about the visuals is that the menus and gui could use some slight animations. All the art assets and design of the menus are very nice, but some slight hover-over animations would take the production value beyond even the realm of high budget commercial vns. (This is more of a nitpicky piece of advice than an actual complaint/issue)
Unfortunately, the writing and pacing are flat out not good. There are a lot of scenes that felt torturously overlong, and seemingly the only editing that was done was a find-and-replace pass with a thesaurus, with no regard to the actual flow of the text. This mostly comes in the form of rambly monologues, which manage to not say very much at all despite their length, only really vaguely gesturing at something grand about life. There are also several moments of large plot dumps that are hard to keep track of, especially with how convoluted the magic systems and political structures are, and doubly so when almost everything with a proper noun in the story also has 2 or more other names that are used interchangeably. Even with the reference menu that gives you a quick rundown of all the people and events and places you've learned about, it very quickly becomes overwhelming to manage.
Outside of these moments, the dialogues are generally passable, although nearly every character has the same type of smug, sarcastic, teenage attitude to the point that character interactions aren't actually very interesting to read beyond their relevance to the plot, and there's exceedingly few scenes of character building to make you actually care about any of these characters in the first place. In fact, by the end there's really only 2 characters who I felt any kind of investment in at all.
This isn't to say the writing has no redeeming qualities however—there are a few scenes that excel in their drowsy-but-comfy atmosphere and do a good job drawing you into what's happening (the shira and loui coffee scene and the getting lost scenes come to mind). Additionally, even as someone who generally does not care for fight scenes, many of the fights here are well written and well paced, with the notable exception being the ending, which consists of 5(!) back to back 1 on 1 fight scenes, almost all of which end up being entirely inconsequential and taking up about 20% of the runtime of the entire vn. And while I did make fun of the ironic disposition of the cast earlier, it can occasionally be appealing in a sort of comedic self-aware way.
The plot itself is a bit harder to judge, both because this is only arc I of a larger work, and also because there are quite a few elements that feel in place as part of a chuunige plot, but may turn off readers who are unfamiliar or unwilling to excuse those elements. For instance, about halfway through, our main character becomes literally immortal. There are hints of adverse effects, both in the sense of mechanical drawbacks to this ability and in the implication of how this ties into the opening scene, but it does make it feel like the protagonist no longer has any real danger, given that the primary form of conflict is that a guy will show up to try and kill him. This also feels at odds with the main character's motivations, given that he doesn't really have much investment in any of what's happening around him. None of the political conspiracy, conflict between the gods, or murder mysteries really involve or matter to him; his primary concern is pretty explicitly his group of friends and their ability to continue their otherwise easygoing daily lives, and until about 60% of the way into the story, he could (at least to his and the reader's knowledge), just walk away at any point and live his desired average life.
For the rest of the cast, motivations are a bit more tumultuous; many characters have seemingly no motivations beyond simply helping to move the plot forward, only for a sudden monologue in the final hour to twist everyone into working on some 4d chess level of thought with 20 different layers of convoluted deception. It ends up not really making sense in universe to the characters, nor is it an interesting plot device to encourage the reader to try re-reading with a new lens, it mostly just sort of happens last minute.
Additionally, many plot points are brought up only to be resolved without any satisfaction or relevance later. The biggest example are the Visage Lock cases, which are introduced to the reader as a series of bizarre mystery murders following an esoteric pattern, that are so difficult to solve that they are included as part of an ongoing phenomenon of impossible-to-solve murder cases. The culprit is suddenly revealed to the reader during a completely unrelated chapter of the story, with no relevance between the culprit and any of the details of the murders. Furthermore, there's no consequence of the culprit being revealed since they are a previously unintroduced character, whose murder methods have no bearing on the plot besides the weapon they attack with in battle (they get into action scenes now instead of doing more serial killing).
I really, really wish I could like this vn. As I said at the start, there's clearly an enormous amount of love and effort put into this and that's made even more clear by the several major overhauls the game has received before, and despite being an OELVN there's clearly a lot of passion for the medium as a whole radiating from the devs through this work. Despite what I see as major flaws with the writing, I will probably still continue reading future works from this team and I hope to see them improve over time. Unfortunately, for a medium where 90% of your engagement with a work is through reading, having such poor writing makes it hard to actually recommend this.
