Otome Game Review: Taisho Alice -all in one-

This is the review for the Vita port of Taisho Alice but there’s actually no differences from the PC game. The Vita port just combines all the disks in one making it an easy seamless playthrough of the the entire story. Our story is about Arisu Yurika who finds herself in various “worlds” where she interacts with a gender swapped fairy tale heroines.  There’s a truth behind the entire game though which I will talk about in my review so as usual, avoid spoilers by jumping to my final thoughts!

Cinderella – Mandarella is the oldest brother who runs a cafe and is to be wed to Yurika….but she wants to scope him out before this happens to see what kind of person he is. Unfortunately unlike the actual Cinderella, this one pretends to be a rich douchey snob. The cafe he runs is just a side thing where all they serve is Gretel’s sweets and the tea that Yurika pours when she begins to live & work there. So then Cinderella gets bored one day and says he wants to actually run a decent cafe, the best there ever was. Yurika agrees to help him out because she just wants to have fun and they begin to plan to really redo the way they run the business. So eventually the cafe does well and Yurika gets closer to Cinderella. He even buys her a custom made uniform. Things start to get awkward though because he starts to have feelings for her, not knowing that she’s his fiance (or so Yurika thinks). One night he tells her he is supposed to marry some girl he never met but he never bothered to look at the “photo” of the omiai pamphlet – not realizing his fiance is Yurika. 😂 Yurika encourages him to “marry” because what if that person might turn out good?? But instead Cinderella just burns it, goes to his dad and says he doesn’t wanna marry someone he “never even met. ” After this they get even closer and he even begins to teach her how to make glass sculptures. So then Yurika finds out that the reason Cinderella even has a lot of money is he’s actually harboring a huge loan from the yakuza. She finds this out on her own by single handedly forcing the loan shark to spill the beans.

He tells her that Cinderella used to be rich cause his dad had a big company that went bankrupt and he racked up a lot of loans trying save it. On top of that Cinderella was the heir to the company so the loans are on him now. Despite having a ton of loans Cinderella continued to waste money on dumb shit. Apparently Yurika and Cinderella’s dads were friends who met overseas and set up the marriage between the kids…which was all to get money from Yurika’s family. After this Yurika decides to confess to Cinderella who she is – only to discover that he knew all along. He decided to take her lie to his advantage so he could get to know her. He planned to use her to pay of his family debt and soon the deadline for his repayment will come up. Yurika asks what he wants from her now, and he admits he let her stay at first for shits & giggles until he actually fell in love with her…so now he wants her heart. He starts crying that now it’s  all over but she is like no bby I love u & kisses him.  Yurika offers to help sell of junk he doesn’t need and they agree to start paying off his debt a bit at a time.  They also tell his brothers the truth as well but Gretel apparently never knew about it. Gretel and Shirayuki decide to go live with their mom but Cinderella feels bad so he decides to stay with the dad (their parents are divorced ). Before leaving though Gretel kisses Yurika on the cheek in front of Cinderella 😂.

Unfortunately they’re not just alone to cuddle all day cause Man-Alice is still living there as a NEET xDDD. Eventually they continue the restaurant but decide to come talk to Yurika’s father together. Yurika papa says that he let her stay with Cinderella to ‘test him out’ because Yurika fell in love at first sight with him. He asks if Cinderella will “come into their household” so he could help him out but Cinderella refuses because he says he won’t marry her.  He says he came to meet the father because he wanted to return Yurika to her family and apologize for everything. He mentions his loan and Yurika-papa says that if he comes into their family and breaks ties with his father, the loan will be off his back. Cinderella says that the guilt of “using” Yurika and her family upsets him and then he babbles that he isn’t sure if he loves her or loves her money. Because he feels unstable he feels he’s unfit to be Yurika’s husband. Yurika is like wtf dude and he just wangsts about how if he’s too dependant on her he’ll become even more pathetic than he is now. ┐(´д｀)┌　And so like the real Cinderella, he leaves her house and disappears from her life. Kaguya tells her that Cinderella’s dad ran away overseas somewhere.

One night she goes to visit Cinderella’s old place at the cafe and finds he made a glass slipper that perfectly fits her foot. Just then the wizard shows up and says he can use magic to grant her wish for a price. Yurika wishes to see Cinderella. Good end: Yurika buys Cinderella’s restaurant and invites him for the grand re-opening. She hires his brothers to work there again cause they’re bored sitting at home anyway. She has a “ball” where she invites a bunch of people and him, and he gives her the other glass slipper. As they dance together he says that he’s been working as a glass maker’s apprentice slowly paying off his father’s debt – since daddy vanished and left it all on him. The clock strikes 12 and he tries to leave but Yurika holds him back saying she’ll go after him no matter how many times he runs from her. He finally gives up admits his love & asks her to be his fiance.  The wizard then shows up outside and reveals that the payment was the first glass piece Cinderella’s ever made which was originally a gift for Yurika. In the epilogue they get married by signing some papers and he gives her a glass slipper instead of a ring lol. He says they’ll have a real ceremony later but Yurika says it’s not necessary. All the bad ends are just Yurika making the wrong decision and being forced to “start over” to get a happy ending. (This will be relevant later.)

Akazukin – Aka MAN riding hood. In this story he’s a police detective and Yurika calls on him for help due to receiving a threatening letter and feeling like someone’s been stalking her. To make sure she is safe,  Akazukin says he’s gonna monitor her 24/7 from now on.  😂 In this tale Yurika lives alone so Akazukin becomes almost like her butler lol. He’s very serious and his cold responses send shivers down Yurika’s spine. He also refuses to let her touch him in any way or sit next to him. His mother worked as a florist and would rarely be home.  She would just leave money for him to buy food etc. He was lonely until he met with Ookami kun’s grandma who gave him the red hooded robe. One day when he and Ookami were playing in the woods,  a man came over telling them that grandma had been hospitalized. Just then Ookami fell into the river and began to drown. The man (who you later find out is Yurika’s brother) jumped in to save him and told Akazukin to run to grandma at the hospital. When he got there grandma could no longer see and kept calling him Ookami. Akazukin was hurt but pretended to be Ookami anyway. When Akazukin got home,  his mother gave him a cold stare and never returned home after that night because she was angry that he had “left” the house. What’s not revealed until later in the game though – is his mother was actually dead. Akazukin was so traumatized he ended up running away and was left alone the rest of his life.  😭 Even though nobody lived at grandma’s house anymore,  Akazukin continued to visit it and place fresh carnations at the doorstep. So one day Akazukin and Yurika are by the lake and her attempts at body contact fail…until she almost slips into the water. He catches her until he realized ZOMG I’M TOUCHING A GIRL,  shits bricks and pushes her into the lake. When her clothes get wet,  he freaks out some more and throws his red cape to cover her up.  😂😂😂

Yurika ends up getting sick so Akazukin tries to take care of her as best he can without having a meltdown lmfao. He has one anyway when trying to give her some porridge he made. It turns out Akazukin is just a closet pervert shy boy so his fantasies go wild with any kind of female contact/interaction. Eventually Akazukin catches her cold and passes out in her bed.  When she wakes up she finds him cuddling with her like a body pillow. She decides to just roll with it until he wakes up and freaks out and nosebleeds everywhere.  A few days later while the two are out, someone breaks into Yurika’s house and messes up her room & hallway. Yurika is upset that the carnation vase Akazukin gave her ends up on the floor. A ball comes flying through her window with a death threat letter. Eventually Yurika confesses her feelings to Akazukin and he’s so stunned he stands there silently nose bleeding until he passes out. A few days later Yurika cuts class to go on a date with Akazukin and they plan to visit her friend Ookami who had been sick. When they get to his house, turns out it’s indeed the house of Ookami and Akazukin’s beloved grandma. There’s even fresh carnations at the door.  Yurika opens the door only to be dragged in and captured by her brother Ryoushi. He says that Yurika is a hostage and then brings in Alice to monitor her 😂.

Turns out that Akazukin had been lying to Yurika all along.  He targeted her to get revenge on Ryoushi, her brother, because of that lake incident with Ookami and grandma. He wanted to blame Ryoushi for confusing which boy was the real grandson. He had nothing personal against Yurika and she believed his lies about being a police detective there to protect her.  However,  spending time with her, Akazukin realized she’s lonely just like him and began to fall in love with her. He runs into Alice who tells him that Yurika is by the lake. Good end: When Akazukin gets to the lake he finds Yurika being held at knife point by Ookami. He tells Akazukin to take off his red hood if he wants Yurika freed. When he takes his hood off, he reveals a pair of wolf ears underneath and Ookami says that he’s really the true wolf in sheep’s clothing! He admits to Yurika that he’s not a policeman but a big bad wolf. Ookami then reveals that he’s Akazukin’s old friend – the friend Akazukin pretended to be when his grandma was dying.  Akazukin begs for forgiveness but Ookami is mad that his friend didn’t even recognize him, and left him to drown back then. He also says that Akazukin doesn’t really love Yurika and he’s just projecting his feelings for his neglectful mother just like he did to Ookami’s grandma. Just as Akazukin tries to free Yurika all 3 fall into the lake but Akazukin rescues both of them.

He then starts crying and apologizing to Yurika for deceiving her. Just then Yurika’s bro Ryoushi shows up and everyone decides that they’re all friends cause the whole thing was a prank 😂. Ookami shows that the knife he was using is a toy and that he’s the one who messed up Yurika’s house lolol. So it turns out Yurika, Ryoushi and Ookami were deceiving Akazukin to show that he’s not all alone and there are people who care about him 😂 lol. Ookami says he had to move away back then because of surgery due to his poor health. His health got a lot better but he moved back to these boonies to reunite with his bff Akazukin.  (*σ´∀`)σ He adds that Ookami was able to meet his grandma after that incident and that she was sick but has not died immediately. She asked Ookami to tell Akazukin thanks for the flowers. Ryoushi wanted to save Akazukin from being a cold hearted emotionless robot so he decided to set up this entire thing to help him open up to someone,  aka Yurika. So they were the ones who sent the fake threats and Yurika apologizes for deceiving him.  He says he forgives her and forgives himself so Yurika jumps and hugs him.  She says she loves him a lot not caring that oniichan and Ookami are right there but Akazukin shits bricks freaking out that he’s gonna nosebleed again.  😂😂😂 Ookami also reveals that when he and Akazukin were kids they would hide from grandma and read porno mags 😂😂😂😂. (And Yurika now realizes why he’s such a closet perv lololol.) After Ryoushi leaves and takes Ookami with him, Yurika grabs Akazukin and kisses him and when she’s like come eat me you big bad wolf he nose bleeds and passes out 😂😂😂😂😂. In the epilogue, after many attempts, Akazukin finally confesses his love to Yurika and gives her a brief kiss.

Kaguya – Based off the Kaguya hime tale but sadly this is where the game starts to hint at the true darkness within. In this route, Yurika is working once again as a waitress at Cinderella’s cafe. Her meeting with Kaguya is some angry girl slapping and dumping him at the cafe. After Yurika hands him a cold towel for his slapped face, he immediately looks at her and asks her to go out with him. Yurika is like “lol ok sure” and everyone around (including Cinderella) shits bricks. 😂 After this Cinderella lectures Yurika telling her that Kaguya is a manwhore who changes women like he changes socks. During one of their dates one of his other girlfriends bumps into him and rages at him for being a manwhore. Yurika asks the angry girl to punch her for “stealing” her man but the girl punches Kaguya instead lol. Eventually  they get Kaguya to live and work at the cafe as well and Yurika decides to do an exchange diary with him cause he’s the first guy she’s ever dated.  After Kaguya kisses her one night, Yurika has a meltdown. She avoids him until she finds out Cindarella punched him thinking that Kaguya and Yurika had sex. 😂 EventuallyKaguya admits to Yurika that he has amnesia. Or rather he can’t seem to hold memories on for too long, so that’s why often girls would dump him because he’d forget he was dating them lol. His name Kaguya was because someone referred to him as that rather than because he remembered his own name. Yurika says she wants to help him find his lost memories, even if it means he might become a different person. (This is a huge hint to the plot which I didn’t pick upon until after the fact.)

Kaguya’s parents died when he was a child and nobody wanted to adopt him. So Cinderella throws a party in hopes Kaguya’s ex gfs will show up so they can find out more info about his past. Instead they just all end up fighting over him. 😅 So Shirayuki proposes that all his ex gfs bring an item to try to make him remember and whoever makes him remember will be his true lover. So the next day they start bringing items to try to get him to remember things but nothing works. Later that night Yurika and Kaguya take a walk and run into an old lady who knew him. She reveals that he used to be in an orphanage and suddenly Kaguya starts screaming and grabbing his head until he passes out. Yurika finds out from the lady that Kaguya  had a traumatic event where he saw one of his orphanage friends jump off a roof in suicide. So after he wakes up and is recovering he tries to hide his true feelings from Yurika. She gets upset that he’s walled his heart from her so she intentionally acts friendly with other guys at the cafe and Cinderella,  in hopes to get him to be honest with his feelings. Well it’s super effective cause he snaps and gets really mad at her flirting with other guys.  He says he knew what she was doing all along and he’s not as dumb as she thinks.  😔 Turns out he’s gotten his memory back but he refuses to tell her and even Cinderella knows this.

Kaguya ends up admitting to Cinderella that he wants Yurika so bad now but he feels so impure and has to return to the moon. (Aka die) In addition Kaguya has been slitting his wrists but Shirayuki says that he did that cause he didn’t really want to die…otherwise he would have found a more direct suicide approach. He couldn’t go through with it because he saw someone dying in front of him.Shirayuki drives the point home how he’s no different from anyone else and not some celestial being. That night Kaguya disappears from the cafe house leaving behind a diary entry detailing his past. After his parents died, he was thrown around various foster parents. When he finally thought he found a good home,  there was a house fire and the other kids in the house blamed him for it. In his next house, the kids forced him to go look for an item they lost in the river. He knew it was a lie but pretended to look anyway. After it began to rain the kids went home and left him behind.  He found a piece of broken glass and while looking up at the moon he sliced his wrist. After this he was taken to an orphanage but he couldn’t really befriend anyone there except the pet rabbit they kept. He made friends with one girl who talked about celestial beings on the moon.  Some time passed and the girl got pregnant somehow so Kaguya gave her a good luck charm for the baby. Little did he know that she was raped,  and one night she brought him to a rooftop to kill herself so she could leave her “impure body” behind. She asked him to come with her and that’s when he noticed the cuts on her wrist and realized she was planning to die.

Kaguya got scared and ran away from her and found out she died the next day. After this Kaguya’s PTSD sealed off all his memories. He then would try to find girls who would be a replacement for his friend but once he’d find out all the negative sides of them,  he would cut his wrist to block any time spent out of his mind.  He would then move on to the next girl and that’s why he had all these women who claimed they were his lovers. He knew wrist cutting won’t kill him but it helped him forget. Yurika finds hidden text in the back of the diary where Kaguya basically tells her how much he loves and wants her all to himself. Yurika runs to the lake where Kaguya plans to drown and slaps him right in the face. She yells at him saying he’s greatly underestimating her. She says she figured he’d be here cause it’s a great open view of the moon. She also tells him to stop with the going back to the moon shit and just come out straight that he’s gonna kill himself. To remind him that death is real and she is tired of him rejecting her, she takes a kitchen knife and stabs herself in the stomach right in front of him. She says this is all for him and he babbles that if she dies this hurts him even more.

He promises to believe her love and she drops her knife saying he knows now how she feels. He then grabs her and runs to a hospital to treat her stab wound before it’s too late. Because the drugs he took make him sleepy he has to stab his leg to cause pain to keep himself awake. Yurika admits the reason she wanted him to remember everything is so he would realize she only loves him and wouldn’t be another throw away girlfriend. Good end: Yurika wakes up in the hospital with Kaguya dozing off beside her. He tells her they did surgery to seal her wound and she’s been asleep for 5 days. As she recovers he admits that while she was sleeping he’s “cleaned” her body 😂😂😂. He’s also super possessive, even taking flowers other guys bring for her xD. The wizard comments how Kaguya didn’t go back to the moon cause it’s a place with no love and he didn’t want to give up his love for Yurika. In the epilogue, Yurika is released from the hospital and she asks him to give her his rabbit mask as proof that she knows his true self. Kaguya’s route is a huge hint on the true plot of the story but when playing it it was really hard to grasp this concept. Looking back now I realize how vital a lot of the hints in this route are, and how relevant they are to the ultimate truth.

Gretel – Another dark route which I almost did not see coming because none of the prior routes to it hinted at it at all. That said, HOORAY YANDERE OTOUTOKUNS. Somehow their weakness for nee-san makes them better than yandere oniichans. 😂 You know shit’s bad because the route begins with Gretel tying Yurika up and refusing to let go lol. He eventually unites her legs but not her arms. Their love shack also has a giant uguu cage of love and Yurika is afraid that yandere otoutokun might lock her in there if she says the wrong thing. Yurika also appears to have no memories how or why she got here with him in the first place – so you know drugs are probably involved. Gretel and Yurika  loved in the apartment above the cafe that Yurika’s parents bought and abandoned cause they couldn’t be assed to take care of it. The parents never really come home so Gretel and Yurika have been living alone together for a while and she’s become a huge brocon. They constantly get into fights cause Yurika eats his sweets and he’s a massive sweets otaku. Yurika has no memories of why she’s alone in the woods with Gretel but every night she has dreams of the past events. Yurika’s real older brother is Ryoushi and Gretel is the adopted bro. Ryoushi doesn’t trust Gretel so when he does get home once in awhile Gretel becomes silent and tries to avoid time with him outside of dinner. One day Gretel got into a serious fight beating up a delinquent  at the school,  so Ryoushi decided to lock him up in a cabin in the woods.

The reason is cause the kid called Gretel a hentai who has lewd thoughts of his non blood related sister (which is true so he shouldn’t even get so mad!) 😅 This made him really depressed and despite Yurika’s protests to stop this or see him, Ryoushi wouldn’t let her. Gretel then realized he has to suck  it up and pretend to act normal or he’d never see Yurika again who became his reason for living. Eventually he was released  but the gang of delinquents was really but mad that he beat up their  friend. They instead targeted Yurika and tricked her  into going to the woods with them where they nearly raped her. Fortunately Akazukin was in the area, and saved her but she got kicked and punched by the boys so he tended to her wound at her house.  She was hoping to hide all this from Gretel, afraid he’d go crazy and do something even worse if he found out his neesan was hurt. Unfortunately Gretel shows up at home that night and he’s maaaaad. His anger is further aggravated because Yurika keeps lying about what happened and he knows she’s not telling him the truth that someone beat her up. He kisses her and slips a drug that makes her fall asleep before leaving the house. She wakes up at the hospital with Ryoushi telling her that Akazukin called the police and that Gretel prolly went to take revenge on the guys who hurt her. She sneaks out of the hospital to the woods to find Gretel before he murders everyone and gets locked up. Unfortunately she finds him dousing the guys in alcohol ready to set them on fire after beating the living shit out of them. Yurika tries to stop him but he rages that trash like them don’t deserve to live. Ryoushi shows up telling him to stop and saying he’ll call an ambulance for them. To be honest,  I gotta take Gretel’s side here and the rapists should have been set on fire. （╬ಠ益ಠ)

Gretel starts crying that he has no family and knew that no one gave any fucks about him but he didn’t want Yurika to abandon him.  Yurika realizes how hurt her bby is so she kisses him on the cheek,  grabs his hand and runs into the woods with him – abandoning her family.  They run upon some shack and that’s where they’ve been living since. Back to the present,  he finally untied her arms when she wanted to take a bath…but decided to “help her remove her clothes” and somehow it turns into a pseudo romance novel 😂😂😂. After she comes out of the bath he gives her a cat hooded pajama lolol. He buys her some wafuu maid outfit and continues to keep her locked up in this house while he goes to school. While he’s gone he has her hands tied so she can’t eat…but then the wizard shows up and says he knows why she’s locked up. Yurika says she’ll ask Gretel herself and instead asks the wizard to feed her some lunch lol. Of course Gretel gets pissed and then buys a silk ribbon which he uses to tie Yurika to the uguu cage of love.  (눈_눈) He admits he hasn’t been going to school and that their parents or Ryoushi ain’t gonna look for them cause they’ve been abandoned. He then also admits that he knows that he and Yurika aren’t blood related and that she’s loved him like a man, not like a brother. (But yea teapot kettle black tbh.)  After Yurika remembers everything Gretel is on top of her in bed saying he’s always had feelings for her. He then reveals that he’s been using drugs on her to make her forget everything which is why she hadn’t remembered anything until now. Those same drugs calm down his meltdowns so after he takes a bunch he simmers down.  Yurika also takes responsibility for bringing him here and says she’ll accept whatever he throws at her.

She also decides to try to curb his drug dependency by decreasing the amount he takes. However she won’t let him do anything sexual cause that would be the moment she would no longer be his neesan or his family. Gretel knows his drug stash is gonna run out soon and he’s afraid he won’t be able to supress the urge to ravage his hot neesan. 😅 Just then the wizard shows up, and makes fun of Gretel saying he acted shitty to Yurika to test her loyalty to him. Wizard offers to give Gretel his drug refill, in return he wants his most valuable possession. Gretel refuses and decides to go to Yurika’s real brother to get more drugs cause he’s addicted.  He locks Yurika in his giant uguu bird cage of love and tries to slip more drugs down her throat to make her sleep while he’s gone.  When he leaves,  Yurika throws up the drugs and manages to free her arms and legs but she’s still stuck in the uguu cage. Meanwhile in the woods, Gretel starts an internal battle with his hormones who keep telling him to bang his neesan cause they’re both in love and not blood related anyway. He realizes that he’s wanted to bang her the moment he found out they weren’t related. Meanwhile back at the ranch,  Akazukin finds Yurika and breaks down the door of their love shack. He’s surprised to see Yurika in a cage and says while he was patrolling the woods he saw their shack and it looked suspicious. He then takes an axe and tries to break the lock but he doesn’t even scratch it. They decide to wait for Gretel to come back,  and he’s getting lectured by Alice back at his old house. Ryoushi shows up with the drugs saying he knows that’s why Gretel came back. Ryoushi then reveals that the reason Yurika stayed at home with Gretel wasn’t because she was a kind neesan, but because she was suspended from school.

While Gretel was locked up in the shack,  she  went around and broke school windows so that she’d get held back a year. It was all for Gretel so that they could walk to school together.  She asked everyone to keep it a secret from Gretel and threatened to continue her violence until they let him out. Gretel realizes that it’s not him who held her “captive” it’s Yurika who’s held his heart this entire time. Ryoushi concludes that they’re both crazy and he needs to let go of his drug addiction and not rely on Yurika for everything. Meanwhile back at the shack Yurika decides to jump on the cray bus and sets the entire place on fire. Gretel returns to the house and shits bricks, but when he tries to get her out it won’t unlock cause the heat probably melted the lock. Good end: Gretel realizes his perfect neesan is just as crazy as he is and Yurika apologizes for steering him off the right path. He then admits it’s not that he wanted her as a sister but he just wanted to bang her the whole time.  😂 I guess throwing away his desire to be siblings is the magical key and the cage lock breaks. Gretel and Yurika escape the burning house and return home. In the epilogue they become lovers rather than siblings and Gretel wonders why he never thought of this as an easy way to become “family” with Yurika. Was wondering where the kiss  cg went but turns out it was hidden in the bad end where Yurika tells Gretel to just TAKE HER (๑¯ิڤ¯ิ๑)ﾃﾍﾍﾟﾛ♥. After they have sex he ends up killing himself but tbh it makes no sense to me since that’s basically the GOOD ENDING anyway??? Well I guess the premature allowing him to bang neesan was the bad decision here. 😂 Real talk: Eguchi Takuya never sounded anything special to me but GRETEL MADE ME SING A DIFFERENT TUNE. ﾟ☆+.ﾟ☆+ヽ(照ﾟωﾟ照)ﾉ+.☆ﾟ+.☆ る

Shirayuki – Shirayuki’s route left me confused as hell and felt “unfinished” but once again it’s all because it was a segue into the truth behind the plot. In Shirayuki’s story,  Cinderella, Kaguya, Akazukin & Gretel are all Yurika’s step brothers. She meets Shirayuki in the woods at night and falls immediately in love when he untangles her hair from a tree. Gretel is still her yandere otoutokun and he mad than neesan has her eyes on the white prince she met in the forest 😂 Yurika continues to visit Shirayuki in the woods every night (with Akazukin)  to try to win his heart. She keeps it a secret from the other brothers – especially her yandere otoutokun 😂. Cinderella knows it though but didn’t say anything since Akazukin always went with her. Every night Shirayuki is a cool prince and no matter what she tries, Yurika just can’t impress him. One day Yurika helps Shirayuki’s mom buy and carry apples at a time sale – without realizing that it’s his mom. The mom then calls out to Shirayuki and the two are both shocked to see each other lol. They both pretend like they don’t know each other though and Shirayuki leaves the room. The mom asks Yurika to be his friend and of course Yurika is happy to oblige. 😂 Things get weird when Yurika takes the apple pie home and it’s gone completely rotten. A few days later Shirayuki tells Yurika about another guy he’s friends with – but that guy just so happens to be Yurika’s long lost brother. He couldn’t stand to be compared to Yurika whose parents acted like she was the ideal daughter, so he planned to drown himself in the lake.

That’s when he met Shirayuki and befriended him. Yurika of course doesn’t know this but it’s assumed based on her dreams. Shirayuki admits to her that he hates the way he looks so he hates looking in the mirror. He tells Yurika that he only looks beautiful  to her and she doesn’t know his true self. Yurika makes him apple pie but Shirayuki can’t eat anyone’s food in this world. He really loves Yurika though so he feels bad throwing it out so he eats a piece…but of course it makes him sick and he throws it all up. Yurika returns to him and sees this and he’s horrified at being seen puking up her food. He tells her that her apple pie was nasty af and after this never shows up at night at the lake anymore. Yurika makes another pie and asks her brothers to try it and they say it tastes fine so she can’t figure out why Shirayuki hated it. She goes to visit his house the next day and his mom is so happy to see her she makes Yurika try on a bunch of dresses. She says that she always loved fairy tales because all the princesses in them would live happily ever after. However, she got upset that she could never be a “princess” herself. Before Yurika leaves, the mom gives her a hair accessory but when she gets back to the cafe, Kaguya freaks out cause there’s a creepy giant moth on her head O_O. He flicks it off and throws it outside  but that moth was the “hair accessory” that the mom had given her. After Yurika leaves, Shirayuki finds his mom whose hair went from silver to black and she yells that Shirayuki isn’t her child and she wants Yurika back. A few days later the mom visits Yurika’s cafe but when Yurika says she’s gonna call her brothers to help serve, the mom is like “what are you talking about, you’re an only child”. ಠ_ಠ

After the mom comes back home, she tells Shirayuki to GTFO because she says Yurika is her true daughter. They get into a scuffle and he pushes her away and she accidentally hits her head on the wall and passes out. Horrified, Shirayuki runs out of the house and into the woods. Yurika finds him at the lake again and he says he’s always wanted to meet her ever since that time he heard about her..and then he passes out. Yurika, Akazukin and Cinderella take him back to the cafe to rest. Shortly after he wakes up, the mom comes running to Yurika saying that she was so worried about her. The mom then asks Shirayuki who all the guys around her are, and says she won’t hand Yurika over to them. She takes Yurika to some random shack in the woods, and Yurika figures out that the mom is actually Shirayuki’s true self. Suddenly the entire shack is filled with rotting garbage and that’s when Yurika realizes this is his real house. He admits that he’s not a sparkling white prince, but a dirty child living in a pile of garbage. He also then points to the dead body of his mother and admits he killed her. He tells a story of how he was born to a mother who always wanted to be a princess but instead was poor and had a child on her own. Also because she had a son she couldn’t even live vicariously through her child so Shirayuki said he’d be a “princess” for her. She said since he’s a boy he can’t be a princess but he can be a prince instead. However as he grew up and saw himself in the mirror he didn’t understand why he didn’t look like his mother and other kids called him a girly foreigner.

After this his mom told him to just stay home and never come out. She would constantly have to fend off loan sharks, became depressed and started taking drugs. One day the mom went crazy and started claiming that Shirayuki isn’t her son. She then started calling out the name Alice. Not too long after, Shirayuki found his mother dead. As her corpse rotted inside the house,  he looked in the mirror and saw Alice. Just then the reflection changed to his real self and he realized it’s his fault he led his mother to suicide. He then met up with Ryoushi  who is the real brother Yurika had forgotten. Shirayuki then asked the mirror on the wall to show him a good but fake reality which is why he lived in that house, his mother was alive and Ryoushi would visit him every though he’s been gone for years. And because this is his mirror world,  since he didn’t know anyone that’s why people “disappeared” around Yurika.  They weren’t there to begin with. Yurika was an irregularity in Shirayuki’s dream which is why his dream world collapsed. Just like snow white,  Shirayuki just wants to sleep in his dream world but Yurika tells him it’s time to wake up! Yurika tells him that in her eyes he’s her fair prince, and not as disgusting as he claims. She kisses him and this destroys and ends his dream. A flashback happens showing Ryoushi finding a young Shirayuki sitting alone by the lake.

Ryoushi slaps some sense into him and they began talking cause he thought Shirayuki was gonna commit suicide. Ryoushi then gave Shirayuki books to read and that’s how he learned about the outside world. One night Shirayuki brought Ryoushi to his house full of trash and his mom’s dead body. Not only that but he then decided to eat the poison rotting apple pie and die from food poisoning. Ryoushi took him to a hospital and he’s been in a coma for several years – finally to awaken from his long dream thanks to Yurika. However the Yurika he meets is one he never met before and not the one from his dream. The one in his dream he created from his desire to someday meet the sister Ryoushi talked about. So Yurika then says she used the mirror to jump inside of Shirayuki’s dream and that’s how she was able to wake him up from the dream within a dream. Dreamception! He even says when he wakes up for real the dream Yurika will be gone for good this time.  In the epilogue, they ichaicha at her cafe. Well the truth of the matter is, the rotting garbage and dead mother is actually the reality. So Yurika rescuing Shirayuki from the nightmare is bringing him out of the “reality nightmare” into the happy dream that is basically the whole game. Up till now it was not revealed but this route reveals that Shirayuki’s world and the entire Mirror Country is all somebody’s dream. The scene of Yurika “waking up” Shirayuki is also a hint towards the true ending of the game.

Wizard – I thought the Wizard was gonna be the end boss of the game but turns out that wasn’t the case. However he is extremely relevant to how everything rolls in the story. He’s basically Mr. Exposition and he “moves the plot along” so that the “heroine” can reach her “happy ending.” To make sense of everything I need to explain something first and this ties in with the main plot and Alice’s route. The entire game revolves around the dissociative identity disorder of a boy named Alistair – who we in the game see as “Alice” (which is also one of his personalities but I will talk more about that in his route later.) All the other identities have been created by Alistair, however Wizard is the “hidden” identity that was created by the psychiatrist who was assigned to him. It was injected into him via hypnotherapy in order to trump over all the other personalities and take over as the “main” one. However, this personality took a mind of its own and refused to “be” Alistair. The doctor called it a failure and gave up on him so he remained “hidden”. Yurika however once she heard about this personality, she tried her best to “find it” within Alistair.

She eventually did find it (she interacted with all the personalities while living with him) and that’s when the Wizard fell in love with her. So while all the other personalities in the game are in love with a fake Yurika that was created inside of Alistair’s mind, the Wizard is in love with the real life Yurika – so the Yurika sent to make him “happy ever after” is not effective at all! The Wizard’s goal and mission is to make sure Yurika ends up with someone, but because this is HIS story, no matter what guy she picks, they will not answer her feelings or get a happy end with her. Good end: Yurika tells the wizard she knows that he was the one who sent her the death threat at the beginning of the route (it was a threatening letter saying she’d die if she didn’t pick someone – which basically happens if you don’t get a happy end with all the guys). He admits to it cause he wanted Yurika to end up with someone & live happily ever after. However because she doesn’t pick anyone,  he has to kill her, so that the Yurika he loves will kill him because she loves Alistair. Yurika says she knows this entire world is Alistair’s dream & everyone in it are just characters in his mind.

Wizard is a character that spawned from the combination of all the other personalities who was supposed to get Alistair to lead a normal life. It was a cold emotionless persona to be able to handle the mental insanity of the other personalities injected by the psychiatrist. After the doctor abandoned him,  Yurika’s family adopted him instead and that’s when he created Gretel in his head with the massive siscon. So then finally real life Yurika created the Yurika in Alistair’s head,  who would “save” the other personalities in his dream world. She was able to do this by “talking” to an unconscious Alistair and it was the Wizard’s job to “relay” the messages to him. Unfortunately he also let his Alistair persona slip through aka the angry Alice we always saw.And if Yurika’s dream persona can’t get a happy end,  it was the wizard’s job to destroy her so real life Yurika would send a “new” self to get a happy end. Real life Yurika’s goal was to awaken Alistair with a happy end,  but if he wakes up all his personas and fake Yurika would all disappear. The wizard is in love with RL Yurika so he could have killed all the other personalities and awakened as himself… but he didn’t want her to hate him so he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Yurika surprises him saying she loves him and wants to save him, not just die again. He rejects her saying he only has feelings for the real Yurika but she only has eyes for Alistair.

As she played chess with him eventually his personalities would come out at random but the wizard was the one trying to push them all out. Meanwhile,  Alistair, the persona Yurika really wanted and loved,  stayed hidden inside because he was scared he was going to get pushed out. By having sex with him,  she accepted all of his personas and after that it was mostly the wizard persona that was with her. However a few days later Alistair fell into a drug induced coma and Yurika has been injecting fairy tales by talking to his sleeping self hoping it would wake him up.  Some days pass & he doesn’t awaken because his brain refuses to wake up probably due to all the multi personality trauma. Ryoushi then suggested that Yurika talk to him daily in order to get his brain to “wake up” his body. In the epilogue, Yurika is still trying to wake up Alistair which means that the wizard & dream Yurika are still in the mirror world playing chess. (Chess is an activity Yurika and Wizard-persona would often play together in real life and dream-Yurika hopes that by one day beating him she’ll get him to return her feelings.)This Yurika is the one created just for the wizard personality, and the other guys have their happy endings with another Yurika that will be sent into that dream world. Wizard tells her this is a bad end cause they both have one sided love for other people.  😂 And so Yurika becomes that black cat that’s always by the wizard’s side, while he does his role in RL Yurika’s fairy tales. Too bad he never got a kiss cg 😢. A lot of stuff in this route ties in with Alice and Alistair so I wanted to spend time talking about that in the next summary.

Alice – Here comes the block of text. As I mentioned in the Wizard’s route, the entire game is basically full feature about a person with dissociative identity disorder and all their different personalities. Someone with this disorder typically has no recollection of what his other identities say or do so when he’s back to his normal self people accuse him of things and he panics because he has no recollection of saying or doing them. Alistair was a very shy child, who was half foreigner and his mother’s family shunned her for marrying a foreign man. They were basically against it so needless to say Alistair “stood out” and a lot of the kids made fun of him. So basically all the issues in Shirayuki’s route about being “different” are all true. While we’re here, all the events that happened in the routes of the game are based on actual true events that happened with Alistair in real life. He also at this time created a personality called “Alice” when he looked in the mirror. The Alice personality would be strong and confident, the opposite of his real life weak & shy self. He went to a party hosted by his parents and he found a crying Yurika outside. She was crying because people thought her blue and red gradient eyes were a disease (even though she was just born naturally with them.) He told her he’s half Japanese and looks like a foreigner so it’s the same thing. He then took one of her ribbons and put it in his hair so he’d attract more attention and no one would focus and say  bad things about her. They both realized they’re 7 years old with a similar name “Arisu”. After this they became good friends and would play together a lot. ❀.(*´▽`*)❀.

After some time,  Yurika says she has to go abroad with her family. He tells her that it will be fine and he’ll wait to see her again. She told him that he’ll always be her prince. After Yurika left,  they kept in touch via letters but Alistair’s father also began to be away from home more frequently. Alistair was going to send Yurika an expensive glass ornament his father gave him, but when he tried to reach for it on the shelf it fell and broke. Sometime later Alistair and his mom moved out of the big mansion into the small shack in the woods. She didn’t explain why but he was also afraid to ask. Just like in Cinderella story it’s all based on truth because his father created a bunch of loans for the family, ran away overseas, & dumped them all on the mother. Meanwhile Alistair had problems in school because of his dual personalities and he would make promises he can’t keep. He then pretended to be sick and just stayed at home. After staying home enough his dual personality disorder got worse and he would say bad things to his mom that he couldn’t remember. Eventually his mom died from a disease/overworking and Alistair couldn’t remember anything – because for a long time his Shirayuki persona took over. He found out later that after she died, he lived with her corpse until Ryoushi, Yurika’s brother, found them. When taken to the doctor they said Alistair has psychogenic amnesia. He kept being thrown between relatives who couldn’t handle his mental disorder until he was hospitalized after being found unconscious by the lake.

After doing a mental exam on him,  the doctor concluded he has dissociative identity disorder. By this time he was living in an orphanage and he stumbled upon Yurika’s older brother but had no idea who he was. As the treatment for his mental illness continued, the doctor tried to use hypnotherapy to try to make contact with his other personalities. Eventually the doctor got tired of handling all his personalities (because personalities like Kaguya were suicidal) and switched him off to Yurika’s brother Ryoushi to handle. Ryoushi then suggested that Alistair come live at his house. Alistair ran into Ookami who said that Alistair referred to himself as “Akazukin” one of his many personalities. Alistair as usual had no memories of this. Once he arrived at Yurika’s house,  she had returned from abroad and gave him a big hug. (She returned because Ryoushi sent her a letter to America telling her that Alistair was his patient and he wants her to help him recover.) He ended up lying to her saying that he doesn’t remember her. They begin living together, and since both parents were doctors, and Ryoushi didn’t want to “live”with his patient,  Alistair spent most of his time at home with Yurika. They lived in an old house from the Taisho era. Alistair was also disappointed that Yurika had grown up into an independent strong woman who don’t need no man – and not the cry baby she used to be. Eventually he was sent to school but it was a school for “special” kids so he was disappointed he couldn’t go to the same school as Yurika. After some time,  Alistair realizes the one Yurika is looking is not him,  but his first personality he created – Alice.

Yurika also had haters at school because she threw random English into her convo – which she did so people would think she’s a foreigner because of her hair and eye color. Realizing that Yurika isn’t just a happy mindless girl,  Alistair decided he wanted to get to know her. He also pretended to bring out other personalities to see how’d she react. She was able to see through his act though. Eventually the parents needed to return to work overseas again leaving Yurika and Alistair home alone,  with Ryoushi being their guardian though he lived elsewhere. It was around this time Alistair began to develop feelings of love for Yurika and created the Gretel personality. Ryoushi reveals that Yurika is in love with Alistair and needs him – adding she often “uses” her friends and family in order to achieve this. Some time later Alistair finds out that his Gretel personality beat up his classmate and Ryoushi warns him that the personalities inside him aren’t always on his side. This escalated of course when the wizard personality had sex with Yurika, and Alistair woke up with her naked in bed next to him.  He was so horrified at himself and his personalities that he threw up and started avoiding much contact with her thereafter. (•́ω•̀ ٥) The incident with Yurika getting attacked and “Gretel” beating them up happens and Alistair shits bricks even further. He finds her crying one night and decides to use drugs to induce himself in a dream state in hopes to forcefully talk with all of his different personas. After this he got hospitalized and that’s when Yurika began talking to his comatose body to try to awaken him with fairy tales for all his personalities.

Flash forward to the present and Yurika is once again injecting her personality into his mind this time to “save” Alice. As she “saved” the other guys and gave them happy endings, it has had a positive effect on Alistair overall. This Yurika runs between the different “worlds” of each personality and they realize that this is not the same Yurika that they fell in love with even if she looks/sounds the same. Grand & good end: Yurika finds out Alistair got sucked into the darkness when coming to this world so now he’s inside of Alice. Because Alistair wasn’t confident and had a weak will, he got sucked into the darkness, to be replaced by Alice. He tells Yurika to wake up Alistair with a kiss like in a fairy tale.  😂 After babbling like an idiot he ends up kissing her, admitting he loves her but then he disappears and Alistair comes out. Yurika then brings Alistair to meet all his other personalities. Everyone talks and realizes that all the personalities were created to deal with the pain of the real life events going around him.  Everyone realizes they love the dream Yurika who saved them in their stories not the Yurika in real life. Alistair then suggests that instead of completely erasing them, they can continue to live in the dream within Alistair’s heart, along with each Yurika who saved them. Everyone agrees and Yurika leads Alistair out of the dream world so he can awaken in real life. He feels bad leaving dream Yurika alone so he splits Alice away from himself and leaves him to be with her – at the risk of losing his childhood memories with Yurika.

A montage of happily ever after scenes follow with all the different Yurikas returning to be with their beloved personalities. (Except for the wizard who admits defeat but then gives in to play eternal chess with his Yurika-cat.) Alistair wakes up in the hospital telling Yurika about the crazy dream he just had and confessing he loves her.  He wanted to have a happy ending too and Yurika jumps on his bed hugging him. Meanwhile inside, Alice and dream Yurika run over the rainbow together because the darkness within him has cleared up. Bad end: Yurika’s created personality takes over Alistair’s body and stabs Yurika in order to “save him”. The wizard and her fight over trying to save Yurika since they’re at a hospital. Dream Yurika is mad for being killed so many times in all the bad ends.  😅💦 The real Yurika is like meh I’m tired of everything and stabs herself again dying on the floor. (Also what a waste of cg in this end!) Also this route finally explains the title “Taisho x Taisho Alice”. The first word Taisho refers to 大正 which is the cafe that Yurika’s parents bought and where Alistair spent the bulk of his happy life with Yurika. The 2nd word 対称 refers to  “second person” aka the various personalities that Alistair had. Also obviously Alice is a word play on both Alistair’s imaginary confidence personality as well as the “shortening” of his name to “Alice (Alis)”, and the fact that his mother loved fairy tales and her favorite fairy tale heroine was Alice. Also I guess they added Yurika’s family name to be “ARISU” which is unusual but works with the kanji they chose for it.

I’m just completely impressed by the quality of writing in this game. I thought it was going to be mostly a joke/gag game, but as I went in further I was just amazed and surprised at how different everything turned out to be. That said, it was different in a good way and I just don’t know how to gush about its greatness without spilling spoilers all over the place. The characters were all written very well, and the heroine Yurika is just the best. She’s very strong and knows what she wants and will do anything to get what she wants.

Honestly at this point I only have a couple things to pick at. First of all – not enough Cgs! The Vita port brought nothing new to the table so each guy has maybe 8-9 CGs and some of them are actually quite disappointing. The Wizard doesn’t even get a kiss CG, poor guy. That said I really do love this artist’s work and the few CGs we got were really cute but yea I just wanted MOAR! The backgrounds were mostly photoshop filtered stuff like this:

But again I couldn’t care less simply because for me writing trumps over everything. The writing was so good I’ll forgive filtered backgrounds and lack of CGs. Music was APPROPRIATE but nothing really stood out in my head. Overall it’s a great game for those who enjoy psychological mysteries so for me it was definitely a home run. Despite the comedy and the constant of characters yelling out セックス and ビッチ😂 the game does have its dark side and it’s the main plot but no worries, as every fairy tale has it, everyone will live happily ever after. (●´ω｀●)

I highly recommend the Vita port simply because all the routes are there so you don’t need to deal with the hassle of multiple PC disks and installations. If you do play the PC game though, since there’s no “play order limit” like in the Vita I highly suggest playing Cinderella→Akazukin→Kaguya→Gretel→Shirayuki→Wizard→Alice.  I encourage everyone to play this as this is so far probably the best written game I have played all year.

P.S. Akazukin is best boy. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) But I wouldn’t mind pampering my yandere otoutokun Gretel for a bit too. ❤

P.P.S. Go to hell E2 Gaming and take your bullshit wagon with you. Prayers and offerings for Mangagamer to pick this up instead!