This is definitely related to the overall length of the game (a single playthrough should take you just a little bit over two hours), but leaves you with a feeling of lost potential – the teddy bears just turns into beautiful princes a bit too fast. I also have to mention that the initial premise, with all the characters being toys and sufferings connected to that curse, is pretty quickly forgone. Here, the two heirs and their butler could probably start a k-pop group without even changing their haircuts Obviously, every guy in an otomege has to be not just handsome, but beautiful. This irritating trope actually plagued another western otome I’ve played in the past, Michaela Laws’s Seduce Me, and I can’t say I was ever motivated to unlock those “true” endings.
This makes a lot of choices, many of which don’t lead to any interesting scenes or pieces of dialogue, very much meaningless, apart from being part of the cryptic, frustrating puzzle of finding that “one true path”. In effect, there’s pretty much nothing you can do wrong – literally every path will lead you to a positive, romantic conclusion. After a tiny common route, which decides (in a somewhat unpredictable way) with whom of the three teddy bears/bachelors you’ll be locked in a romance route, the choices only matter by occasionally unlocking hidden CGs or, if you find the “perfect” combination, leading you to the alternative “best ending” with that specific character. What I might complain about a bit is the structure of the story.
That’s actually one of the tropes in Western otome games that I very much enjoy – protagonists in them are usually much more than just empty silhouettes that the player can insert him/herself into. The protagonist, Aura, might be slightly less fleshed-out, but still presents enough of girlish silliness and stubbornness, combined with life experience derived from her tragic childhood, to be a compelling character. The routes also complement each other well, showing the story of the d'Lockes family from different perspectives and constantly adding new details about all the characters involved in it. While they all appear as clear archetypes at first, it’s easy to realize there’s some actual depth to all three of them – this makes the interactions with them and the (admittedly very timid) romance enjoyable to read. The living toys you meet at the beginning of the story are genuinely cute and there's a lot of fun moments connected to them – to the point it feels like a bit of a shame how quickly they're goneĪs cliched as this sounds, the details of the story and the bachelors themselves make it quite enjoyable – while the main “twist” is very much predictable, the stories and secrets of the heroes are interesting and written in a convincing way.
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