Pale Spectrum - Part Two of the Book of Gray Magic

If you haven't played this, you need to. Get the first one. Get this one. Both are clever, well written stories with great characters (Hec is the best, btw). Buy them, love them, and pray for more.

Unfinished, underdeveloped, unsatisfying, and seemingly come undone since it appears the devs have dropped this series. This is a real shame since the first book, Brilliant Shadows, was so enjoyable. Plotlines go seemingly nowhere, characters are brought back to do essentially nothing, there's an unjustifiable surplus of new characters who do not add anything to the story, and the pacing is jumpier than an anxiety-riddled frog during an earthquake. Even the justified new characters who DO serve to drive the narrative are one dimensional, or just unexplained and fleshed out poorly. There's simply too many ideas here that are delivered to you at a breakneck pace with inadequate time to digest them. I fell in love with the world I was slowly discovering in the first book, the second just unravelled any interest I had in seeing where it all leads. I struggle to think of how long it would take to wrap up all the ideas and plotlines that have been set in motion here, and in a clean way. Narrowing of scope would have helped here. I wanted to like this, I really did.

This is easily one of my most favorite games ever and I really truly hope that there is a third game in the future! I had so much fun with the story and making decisions for the different characters.

I love this game. You can tell they spent a great deal of time world building to develop their complex magic system and the how the relationship between the characters. there are quite a few endings, though i the ingame chart of all of the endings and options were more explict in letting you know how many other paths can still be taken. I'm still not 100% sure that I have taken every ending. As for the ending themselves one ending path feels more like a true ending than most of then the others. I really would love to see the next part of this game and see how it all resolves itself.

I liked the first part, so it goes without saying that I waited for this. Was it worth the wait? Yes, probably. Is it flawless? Not by a long shot, no. First, some positives. Music is very nice. CGs are pretty, in general. Backgrounds are pretty too. Graphics in general are very nice, although there are one or two odd ones. Branching is very decent, although I have some gripes with it. Story is at least half-decent, although I have some gripes with it as well. So, my first gripe is the story lacks focus. A lot of stuff is crammed into the package, but it becomes a bit of a mess and hard to keep track of. There are, in total, three major story branches with a lot of more or less minor variations along the way. Two of those are particularly insufferable in that sense because they keep jumping around between two locations where separate groups of characters are each doing their own thing, with almost no intersection. What's worse, story in one of those locations is pretty much the same no matter what branch you're on (well, to be fair, it has some branching of it's own). My second gripe is apparent lack of polish. I was playing on Linux, so YMMV, but I experienced a number of misplaced voice clips that, while usually at least match the character, don't match the text -- usually voice clip happens to be one screen ahead or behind the text. If nothing else, it's immersion-breaking. Also, there are some places (a couple rather lengthy) where voice acting is missing altogether, some of which are definitely bugs, other's I'm not too sure. Also, as I mentioned, some graphics look like sketches, and while this makes sense in most cases (quick-paced scenes, inserts, etc), in some cases it doesn't make any sense to me. Not sure if it's a creative direction I don't quite understand or some prerelease graphics left in by accident. Last gripe, there's more than a bit deus ex machina in the story. I'll try to avoid major spoilers here, but some branches are worse than others in this regard. Still, there's fair amount of said dei overall. It was easy enough for me do distract myself from those, most of the time, but... using [spoiler]an immortal and virtually omnipotent demigod[/spoiler] as a plot device is in poor taste. One more thing, which might not be apparent immediately. This is not a complete story, it's a single arc, more or less. So it's not "finished". Devs talk of "final chapter DLC", but to be honest, I couldn't imagine how everything could possibly be resolved in a single chapter, so fingers crossed they don't botch it. So... it might seem like I'm being very negative. That wasn't really the point though. The VN is very good, leagues better than some ...other... VNs I've seen recently. It could've been better though. So don't expect a flawless masterpiece. All in all, I find that current asking price is more or less justified. I hope bugs will be fixed at some point, but there's nothing game-breaking, so while distracting, those are not something to be too concerned about. And one can get a lot of enjoyment from this. Well... unless you're uncomfortable with LGBT, because there's [i]a lot[/i] of that. All very sweet and believable, and not [i]too[/i] in your face, but... well, yeah, [i]a lot[/i]

I love the story and art! Also extra points for including different kinds of people in so many levels <3

A fantastic sequel to Brilliant Shadows, and with the multitude of choices to make I know I've going to be playing this several times over. The music, voice acting and writing is beautiful and comes together to make a great visual novel.