>>720733479
The gameplay is very fun, and a lot of the characters are fun/solidly written, outside of the main story. Within the main story, Diamant and Ivy are very well written, and I think in a better game they'd be the main characters.

The main story is somehow worse than Fates', and every character has at least one "what the fuck? why?" moment where they act totally out of character, or cringe and faggy, or otherwise have a bad showing. Every Alear Support (besides the DLC ones) are cringe and focus on how much the character loves the smell of Alear's asshole. Everything Alear does is embarrassing. They're all the worst tropes in anime MCs put into one. They spend a whole scene standing there impotently crying and begging a small child to stop bullying them, it's really shockingly embarrassing stuff. And it doesn't even hit top 5 most egregious, "if my parents walked in on this I'd die of shame" level moments in the story.

In spite of that I think it's very good. I'm a storyfag but even in that complete absence, it won me over.

I recommend emulating it, and playing it modded. There's a wide suite of options that you can use to un-fuck the designs, or make cuter girls, or do anything you'd like. And despite some very solid performances, I'd recommend the game in Japanese, because a lot of characters have terrible dub voices that genuinely ruin the character (like Amber).