As I mentioned before, I grabbed all the rest of the Taisho Alice games when they got released before the Steam Summer sale. Buuuuuuuuuuuuut then we got sidetracked by Real Games For Real Gamers (TM) for the last few months (and trying to finish up our final prep before the upcoming FFXIV expansion) so this game has been sitting in limbo since then. Anyway, like I keep mentioning each one of these releases covers another set of storylines, this time for Snow White and Wizard and since this game is like 5 years old now I’ll spoil away.

The other reason that it took me so long to hammer this one out is wellllllllllllllll, the Snow White route is by far the worst one. Shirayuki…moar liek SHITAPOOPY amirite??? The five other routes have all been fun, but this one just crawlssssssssss. The first problem is that it’s repetitive. We keep getting the same sort of setup multiple times without any real differentiation. Hiragana Alice meets up with Snow White. She gives him some food that he can’t eat. Then he meets up with Snow White’s mom. She gives her a gift, which then turns out to be a trap. Repeat this over and over before we finally are ready to move on to the truth behind Snow White’s illusionary reality. Oops, never mind! Time for a loooooooooooooong extended flashback featuring Ryoushi! Seriously, I thought that I was right about to wrap the route up and then nope, time for another few hours of something you grew sick of long ago.

Of course, his route is still important in the sense that it fills in some of the important “what is the deal anyway with Katakana Alice” questions that we start getting filled in once we move on to Wizard’s route. This probably would’ve worked better though if I weren’t super bored and taking every opportunity possible to procrastinate from finishing it so that I could then instead move along to the next route with everything still fresh in my head.

Wizard’s route actually doesn’t have that many choices, most of which were pretty straightforward. Nothing like how Kaguya’s route had a zillion bad end uptions or how Snow White’s goes on forever. It does differ in that it’s got a lot of branching from the central decision point in order to get the numerous bad ends, although if you’ve got auto-skip on a lot of that will get fast forwarded. The main role here is that after a whole lotta recapping we finally start getting some infodumps behind everything that’s been going on, since otherwise up until this point the only times you ever end up seeing Wizard are his “LOL YOU DIED appearances”.

Long story short (or maybe long story long), Katakana Alice has dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder (made up of all the other fairy tale characters) and his shrink tried to hypnotize him into thinking that Wizard was the real one. This didn’t pan out, and meanwhile Hiragana Alice has tried to get inside of Katakana Alice’s dreams to try to get him out of his coma (that I’m assuming is also the Snow White coma)

Final Thoughts: I said this before, but just to repeat once again for posterity, I get incredibly stabby when anyone adds memes to their translation, so I was greatly relieved when at no point in the game did Wizard say “I put on my robe and wizard hat”.

(Oh and like with Episode 2, this one has the same glitches regarding the Steam achievements. Sometimes they trigger correctly, sometimes they trigger on closing and reopening the game, and sometimes I have to switch languages, start the game back up and play a little in the new language, then close and restart the game in English to get them to trigger.)