One of the best raising sim games I've ever played. I think the animation style might come off as uncanny to some people, but I personally very much like it. The entire game is quite pretty. Of the 7 romance options (4 girls, 3 guys), I find 6 of them compelling--although unfortunately there is no harem route, which strikes me as quite odd given the fact that you're allowed to individually romance multiple characters to Lover or even "The One", yet you simply end up with a single one of them in the end, which you can't even directly choose. Personally I think it's a little cowardly, given how intimate you naturally become with multiple characters, to leave that unaddressed. In all honesty all of the endings are a little lacking, but there are 50 of them, and also without getting into spoilers, the ending isn't really the point.
I would say the gameplay is quite decent. There aren't nearly so many stats as something like Long Live The Queen, and frankly they don't seem to matter very much outside of combat or making passing grades. It never comes up in dialogue what type of stats your character has, and everything can remain somewhat frustratingly vague when referring to your girl, sometimes even ill-fitting. There are multiple times where my S-rank intelligence high morality daughteru was referred to as having trouble with basic studies and being more of a rebel than a good girl, which were always a little jarring. In that way, the gameplay is often kind of separate from the narrative, which is disappointing. But the gameplay itself is engaging in that one-more-turn kind of way, with a vast array of activities to do and ways to train or make money.
The combat in this game is odd. Any non-mandatory combat is completely unforgiving. You need to be running a highly minmaxed character with perfect strategy and a large amount of good RNG in order to make it through even mid-range optional fights. If you do that, and then go to the mandatory story battles, they will seem comically easy. Every bossfight in the main story is a complete pushover, I was never even vaguely threatened. Meanwhile, optional bosses remained unconquerable until very late into my second playthrough, playing an extremely optimized character that benefitted a lot from NG+ bonuses. I also wouldn't call it the world's most engaging combat. It's standard for a JRPG.
In general, I liked the writing, and the characters. Even throwaway background characters were memorable and adorable. I have a special love for the black market shopkeeper, Beignet...
The voice acting was very good, and the translation is...acceptable. It's very localized. If you know basic spoken Japanese you will often find that the English text does not even resemble what the characters are saying in a literal sense, though it effects the same outcome. Stuff like a character simply saying "arigato" after being handed a sweetbun being translated as "Wow, this is delicious! I'm really glad you came. I hope we can do this again some time!", it gets egregious at times and makes certain characters who are supposed to be softspoken and quiet appear way more wordy than they are. Despite that, I didn't catch any time in which the localization recounted something *counter* to what the character said, and it doesn't seem to be particularly westernized; there's no jelly doughnuts or weird out of place political messaging.
The "father" character who you theoretically play as in a raising sim is, like in many raising sims, rather absent and forgettable. You have a short conversation with him every turn where you choose his dialogue instead of hers, sure, but you really are playing the daughter 99% of the time, not the father. He ends up being important to the story, but due to the insistence on keeping him a literally faceless self-insert character, his position in the story is kind of flacid and lame, and it deflates a big story moment near the true end of the game.
All in all, I think this may have the longest playtime of any raising sim I've ever played without including any filler or replays, and has some of the most satisfying romance progressions I've seen in a VN, has the prettiest graphics I've seen in a raising sim, has decent gameplay, and good voice acting for every line. It has its fair share of problems, but the total package is something that can't be denied. Highly recommend.
