On one hand, it is very gorgeous. The character portraits are beautiful, the scenes are well designed, and the interface is pretty. The Phantom himself is frankly the best Leroux designed Phantom I'd ever seen outside of Lon Chaney's. The face is 11/10. Even the incidental characters (little Jammes for instance) are nice to look at.
On the other hand, the mobile phone interface that the game originally ran with is a big hindrance on the computer. I really do not want to click and wait on the characters to move slowly to their spots. I wish there was some sort of keyboard interface where it wasn't constant clicking to get the characters where you need to go to. The collectibles are in places you have no reason to go into, so you're walking around slow as molasses to pick up a tidbit of information like "The Opera Ganier opened in 1875." And then although the little chibi versions of the character do have their cuteness, you start to get annoyed looking at them move their way slowly to where they need to go, or to do a limited animation loop before you get the next dialogue option. It also doesn't help to accommodate its free to play mobile phone version, that the game is sectioned into a bunch of episodes which run even slower than a soap opera (I'm in the middle of rewatching one, so the comparison is fresh).
Lastly, the story they take odd liberties with the source material. I haven't seen the extent of the liberties since I haven't completed it (sentiment from the community from what I've heard is not good), but I am aware that they made the Phantom pretty despicable in this. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me (if you recognize the icon, you can see potentially why), but all they really had to do was tell the Leroux story accurately and this game would've been praised to high heaven and back by Phans. It just seems so weird to take a perfectly acceptable narrative and then alter it to make it less good for no inherent reason. Its one thing to dial the romance up or the violence up, but I'm not sure who was asking for this change in the narrative. Nobody particularly wants Christine to girlboss into the sun, or Raoul to be a jerk, or the Phantom to be irredeemable. We just want the original narrative, if possible, or at least an acceptable alternative (give us a good romance, a good slasher, heck, anything).
Overall, I think the game would be better if they had released this as a purely menu based visual novel. The portraits are good, they'd only need to make a few for non-essential NPCs, cut out a lot of the random plot elements (like the strike), tidy up the narrative, and return it more closely to Leroux and you'd have the perfect game. You could even have two plots, one that sticks as closely to the novel as it can, and a 'redux' version that is for, I dunno, modern sensibilities? I really don't know what they were going for. As it is however, even as a big Phan and a person who plays visual novels, I can't recommend it. I just can't. I'm trying to complete it purely for completion's sake, but it might be just easier to watch Dario Argento's Phantom of the Opera film 5x in a row than finish this.
