Otome Games

I don’t have enough hourglasses for V and Saeran routes :sob:

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I’m going to quickly jump here to ask if anyone knows of any good otome game where you can rol play freely without the fear to get lock out from the romance route because you must play a certain personality.

Basically, I’m looking for something like Aloners, or the demo of Queen’s Crowns, or Wilder.

So far from the Japanese otome VN list, you have to act on a certain way so we have tough luck there. =(

Have you tried Sera’s Lady’s Choice? I heard it was good.

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Lady’s choice is not bad. You get a few choices how you want to play your character and choose the RO path after a little introduction. Little manko is just that depending on how you play your character the game at times jarringly contradicts your choices considering personality. Those moments are rare however and in comparison to other visual novels the choices you get for playing the MC are impressive. (and the MC gets a bit damseled, what may or may not be frustrating depending on preferences)

Queen at arms (steam), (itchio) I think doesn’t allow as much free roleplay as the Lady’s choice if I remember that corretly, but for this game it mostly depends on you spending time with the ROs besides some obvious no gos for certain ROs (and I mean really obvious stuff). And it’s just a very good game, just keep in mind that the MC starts as canonical a bit shy (best to try out the demo , however character development is big part of the game). But while MC is always afab you indeed can technically play as nb or male character (indeed, one of the male ROs is only open to be romanced with male MCs), bad is just that the choice to clarify this comes very late in the game (something to keep in mind, also the later chapters adapt a bit “meh” to it, but it’s more as typical for the medium…at least considering nb MC I know one other visual novel, but that one isn’t very romantic and a bit of a downer…). Anyway, for me this game is basically leading the top three of “otome” games together with Aloners and Wilder. (… it just hits all my favorite tropes okay? Including the ROs)

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I have play everything from Sera haha. But I haven’t play queen at arms, so I will give it a go. Thanks!

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*cracks knuckles * this was a topic made for me and the horrible hours i spend into playing visual novels
a lot of good ones were mentioned already so i’ll try to avoid repeats – the lemmasoft forums are a good place to find otome games…as already mentioned lol

also the arcana, the arcana, the arcanaaaaaa

Otome Games
  • lovestruck, the app, has a lot
  • Soulset – I loved this game, there’s also f/f options but I do think the f/m romance is more the focus. and hey look, it’s on sale right now!
  • XOXO Droplets – there’s a free and a paid version of this game, and it was a lot of fun, i’ll admit. GBPatch has some other games worth checking out too
  • Blind Griffin – pay what you want and also super cool
  • Hustle Cat – heard it was good, haven’t played it. I think the gender of the MC can be picked?
  • Long story
  • any of the tokimeki memorial girl’s side games – i don’t think any of them were released in america but there are english patches online that are super easy to work with and im serious these games were my life
  • and though it’s not an otome game, I’d recommend Persona 3 Portable (or any of the persona games, really) because they’re just so good
  • and uh…that’s it I guess…i thought I had more lol

for my lesbian folk there’s this handy steam curator and of course if you haven’t played Butterfly Soup yet go get on that
and for us LGBTQ+ folk there’s also this
there’s also a steam curator for otome games I now realize as I search. and I believe steam also has an otome section/tag?

edit: i remembered that itch.io has a otome tag too that probably has some gems on there

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I have played Ray’s route in Mystic Messenger. It’s like a reflection of Seven’s route. They’re pushing the twin thing hard. :joy: I enjoyed it alot and got emotional at some parts. :joy:
I like The Arcana too, but it might be expensive for some people…

Still hoping for a complete version for a cheaper price - instead of paying for all choices and books on their own- to be published one day…

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I am waiting for the whole set for Arcana as well since I heard good things about it.

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Arcana is alright content wise. Pricing is still on the expensive side (but more mangeable now) and frankly if the fans hadn’t complained am highkey sure they wouldn’t have changed it

Just…stay away from the fandom and the devs are also on the sketchy end (the pricing issue is already iffy enough, if you dig deeper into the kickstarter promises yikes and that’s the tip of the iceberg of the problems)

[Literal war flashbacks over the drama]

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Hm, not suprised to hear this honestly. :T The actually crazy pricing policy (to have basically the majority of romance content behind a paywell in a romance game really is… something else) paired with the significant weaker chapters following the prolouge made it likely. I still hope it will get better or at least that after the story is finished we will get a complete and after that may a rewritten version that owns up to the promises. I’m an optimist I guess.

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I remember I played Arcana a few months ago and it wasn’t that interesting. The story was really short at that point, about 3 chapters or so (and they weren’t that good either). Most of the ROs/characters didn’t even appear yet.

All ROs appear in the prolog, it’s just really only those three. :T Other paths are a maybe dlc content by now (what is a shame because Portia). But yeah pacing is not the best, even with later chapters. (also because it suffers a bit through waiting times compared to the actual lenght of the chapters. It gains much by playing all three paths, but why should anybody do that who is at most interested in one of the ROs)
Completely honest I was also not happy with the way 2/3 of the ROs’ paths did unfold (Nadia I think gets the most organic storyline in my opinion, Asra’s which I was most interested in on the other hand fell partly flat for me), but that’s clearly a taste thing at work.

Like I said: I hope the final product will get polished again and then published as a complete version hopefully.

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Oh but I remember there was this mode where you see character scenes and there were like 8 different characters or something.

Oh yeah, that one! I remember it. Was a bit misleading, only the main three are ROs by now… The others are in talk to be ROs one day in a far away future, but yeah…far away future. (and introduction to them…yeah…the mentioned pacing and lenght issues with the chapters I think we at least get a glimpse at the last character of the main cast in chapter 4, but…yeah…only a glance in some cases)
(no guarantees for the chapter numbers…replaying the first 5 chapters is not really worth it, cog did spoil me to expect consintency and consequences to choices I fear)

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So the only ROs are your teacher(is he a guy or non-binary?), the noble woman and the mysterious doctor fugitive?

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Yup (and yeah, officially Asra is nonbinary but it gets nowhere mentioned in game, not even in the character bio, what is a bit disappointing).

I wonder why is the game rated so highly on google play though.
To be honest most mobile otome games seem kinda bad, they are either boring with a dumb MC (like the Love Story Games series) or have a very greedy payment system with waiting and coins and things like that.
The only games that I found to be good and free are the Hanabi Media ones (though they are a bit short)

It’s because there are normally two kinds of people giving ratings on Google: (hardcore) fans that want to push their favorite thing with 5 star ratings or people that probably should better tell the support about the reason they gave only 1 star.
The Arcana actually has a comparable high number of mediocore ratings based on the pricing policy, but generally only those that are pissed about it will give a worse rating based on it (literally. I saw people give 5 stars, while mentioning the pricing issues, it’s not enough to give the favorite thing a “bad” rating, because there seems to be this thought that 1. everything less than 5 stars means terrible on google and 2. bad ratings unfairly destroy businesses).
So it’s most likely more because of the general problems with the rating system and the huge fandom the game amassed through tumblr.

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Yeah I think usually the Steam ratings are more accurate than google. In steam 75-80/100 is still a good game while in google play everything with an average of below 4 stars looks bad.

I even saw some of these greedy companies give you in-game coins for giving them a 5 star reviews to boost their rating, and when you went into the game’s page you saw people complaining and the top reviews gave 1 star.

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