Otome Game Review: Shuuen no Virche ~ErroЯ:Salvation~

There exists a small island called Alpeciel in which the government is ruled by a royal family – the Revpowells. However it’s not a regular island – as the people of this island are doomed to die before age 23. Before they hit 23, their lungs stop functioning and they eventually die due to lack of oxygen. In order to combat the rapidly shrinking population, the island managed to create a super technological advancement that allowed them to clone someone’s memory and body in the process called “ReLife”. Because of this, the citizens of the island would no longer fear death and would no longer take life seriously because who cares, you’ll just be reborn anyway. And when they are reborn, they are the same age as they died so most of the population physically looks between 20-23 years of age. Recently however there has been a girl by the named of Ceres, our story’s heroine. Everyone that she comes in contact with seems to die of the lung disease faster or get into a fire related accident. Because of this Ceres spends her life growing up being called a grim reaper because everything around her dies. Convinced that she’s a grim reaper that doesn’t deserve to live, at the age of 18, Ceres decides to end her life.

As usual, big fat spoilers – 11k words of spoilers. If you plan to play the game, skip to my final thoughts as usual. If you’re ready to read a novel, grab a bowl of a popcorn or a cup of coffee, we’re going to have a bumpy ride. 😱 Warning this post contains gory details and is not for the faint of heart.

First I’m going to go into more details of the common route before I go into the individual routes. At the age of 11, Ceres was involved in a burning fire which killed everyone at the orphanage she was at – or so she thought. Turns out there was 1 sole survivor, Yves, who sustained grotesque burns to his left side of the face that he had to wear a mask his whole life so people wouldn’t run shrieking in the other direction. Although I will explain in detail in other routes why this is a thing, Ceres has a certain thing in her body that basically does quick the lung death of those on the island. After the fire at the orphanage, nobody wanted to adopt her, except one woman named Salome who adopted her as her own daughter along with her adopted son Adolphe. Even though Adolphe pretends to be a good brother, he’s got his own issues and deep inside he’s hated Ceres the whole time. Even when Ceres tries to go out to buy groceries or something, the people don’t want anything to do with her.

Eventually she happens to run into Yves who is 18 now and is the head of the vigilante group. She’s so happy that he survived the fire but feels guilty to the scar she caused him. Then another explosion happens at her current orphanage (though it doesn’t start a fire) but it injures Yves again. Ceres can’t take it anymore so she goes to the spider lily field on the outskirt of the island to end her life. However, before she can actually do it, she is stopped by a mysterious man named Ankou. He then lets her drink some of his blood saying that it will suppress her grim reaper powers and that he is also the ~lord of the underworld~ 😂 Ceres believes this and after drinking his blood, she notices there seems to be less casualties around her. Unfortunately as you go through the game it’s revealed that there’s no grim reapers or any magic and that everything is a political science experiment.

On top of this, there’s a serial killer on the loose killing people randomly at night so now everyone’s on edge and the vigilantes are trying to get to the bottom of this.

Mathis Claude – Mathis lives in Shudie and is trying to find the criminal who killed his older brother. The murderer has a unique way of leaving his victims with a giant hole in their bodies after killing them. The reason is because he literally rips out and steals their organs. One day when Ceres visits his house, that night the killer actually shows up and Mathis goes into revenge mode. On top of this, she even saves his life when the killer nearly stabs him. As a child, Mathis was abused by his parents and thrown into a prison cell when he “didn’t behave”. Only his older brother Camille and butler Jean would sneak in and give him food and talk to him there. His parents didn’t tell anyone they had a second child because they thought he was an embarrassment to the family and only physically and verbally abused him. His parents were killed (but whatever fuck them) and after his brother was killed he was left all alone with only Jean to tend to him and the Claude inheritance. Jean asks Ceres to come be Mathis’ maid because apparently after years of training Jean can’t cook.

Since Ceres can she accepts the offer and also figures she will help Mathis cheer up after the anticlimactic death of his brother’s killer. However one day they discover that the killer isn’t dead and when seeing him again, Mathis goes berserk and runs off after him, after pushing Ceres away and calling her a grim reaper. When he comes back a few days later he’s not a boku who likes to write novels anymore… He’s an angry dude set on revenge and just came back to restock his weapons. He almost hits Ceres for trying to protect his manuscript, until Jean slaps the sense back into him and he’s horrified at what he was about to do. He falls in bed with a fever and starts crying and apologizing for everything he did to Ceres saying he has no idea why he did any of it. He tells her that until he kills the guy who killed his brother, he can’t move on with his life and he’s afraid to hurt Ceres again. He also then says he needs to do this because he wants to go back to living a peaceful life with Ceres, the girl he loves. Ceres agrees to let him go on the condition that she and the vigilantes also try to catch the killer before he does, so that he doesn’t become a murderer himself. So then it turns out that not only is Camille not dead, turns out Camille is Jean’s true identity.

Not only that but he’s the one who’s been killing all the prostitutes in town to hide the connection to his former lover who was also a prostitute. Turns out that Mathis is just Camille’ science experiment, a homunculus that’s made from the unborn fetuses of all the prostitutes he’s killed and all of their memories. That’s why he kept thinking that he had a brother who was killed and that he had abusive parents that were also killed. We get a flashback to the past where they reveal that Camille’ parents were in a political marriage and had a son to continue the Claude bloodline. They told him he can do whatever he wants until it’s time for him to be reborn as leader, so he went and screwed a bunch of prostitutes until he met one named Rosaly who he fell in love at first sight with. They got engaged and he broke the promise with his parents by agreeing with Rosaly that they would not be reborn since being reborn meant they’d lose their love for each other. Rosaly was pregnant with his child and on her way to the doctor, another prostitute killed her out of jealousy that she was marrying a rich dude while the rest of them had to continue selling their bodies. So like in Full Metal Alchemist, Camille decided to bring Rosaly back to life somehow by stealing technology from the government and creating Mathis as a test subject. He even went as far as relifing himself so he could continue his research. He basically needed to figure out a way to create false memories for Rosaly since there was no backup for her. After hearing this Mathis has a meltdown because he realizes his entire life and memory has been a life. Normally transplanting fake memories to a cloned body will cause it to die (just like in nier Replicant!!)

However with Mathis it’s different because he was “created” with the new memories in mind by using unborn fetuses from the prostitutes he’s killed. Because Ceres was able to trigger feelings of love in Mathis, Camille kidnaps her too because he needs her to continue the experiment to make sure the Rosaly he makes still loves him. While Camille is gone for a bit, Mathis tells Ceres to run away and that his feelings for her are probably fake but she tells him that the time he spent with her are new memories that only he created for himself. She also tells him that she loves him, a feeling she thought she was never allowed to have. She gives him one final kiss because the next day Camille messes with his memory once again and not only has he forgotten who Ceres is, but he’s crude and violent towards her. 😰 So basically this continues and Ceres accepts each and every one of these extreme personalities as each one of them ends up falling in love with her. So yeah uh this game kinda forces you to do bad ends before you can see the good ends and they even throw cringy bad end cgs as a bonus! 🙄 So in bad end one Camille throws in the most violent in personality – aka himself, as the final test and of course he stabs Ceres to death and as she’s dying he briefly remembers her and his love her for her. But since this is a bad end it’s not Ceres he remembers, it’s Rosaly. I don’t fucking know how Ceres came out of that ordeal alive but she basically has to now marry Mathis, who’s basically Camille now and she pretends that she’s Rosaly and nobody has any clue to anything being off. 😬

In the 2nd bad end Ceres and Mathis try to escape but are unsuccessful. When Mathis wakes up he finds Ceres in the same water tube as Rosaly and then Camille is like lol now you know how I feel so yeah continue helping my experiments bro! And so basically Mathis becomes the guy that now lures pregnant prostitutes for Camille’s experiments. In the good end Mathis manages to snap out of it, and instead of stabbing Ceres, he stabs himself. When Camille returns, Mathis owns by saying that instead of loving Rosaly, he’s just focused on her reviving corpse like an object since he won’t even think to hug or kiss her “body” now. Before he can make a decision to append for his crimes, there’s a huge explosion from Dahut’s underground facility which causes Camille’s mini science lab to start to crumble and fall apart. Just then Adolphe and Yves burst in to rescue Ceres and Mathis and Ceres plan to run for it, but Camille says he’s going to stay back and die with Rosaly (well she’s already dead lol.) After Mathis and Ceres run off, Camille reveals that Mathis was created from the fetus of Camille and Rosaly’s dead fetus, so technically, Camille isn’t his oniisan, it’s his dad lol. The reason they found Ceres is because Ankou told them where she was since he basically stalks her 24/7 lol. Mathis and Ceres then go off to the seaside alone together to spend whatever remaining time he has left before his memory wipes itself again. He kisses her goodbye before his memory shuts down. In the epilogue, Scien turned Mathis from a homunculus to a relifer. Ceres starts working to save up money to become a relifer as well so she can live at the same time as Mathis, knowing full well that her current feelings for him will change once she undergoes the process. One day while she’s shopping, she runs into the reborn Mathis, who tells her he’s fallen in love with her at first sight. The final CG was super cute, but such a bittersweet ending.

Lucas Proust – Lucas is the teacher at the church where Ceres lives even though he’s only 22 and is still a human and not a relief. Since he’s close to the age where you die of the lung disease, he will sometimes have bouts of a bad cough but he tries to hide it. In order to try to help him, Ceres becomes his teaching assistant. Lucas also has a younger sister named Nadia who is bed ridden because she is permanently paralyzed and unable to walk by herself. Nadia knows that her oniisama wants to hit that shit and is already mentally preparing for Ceres to be her future sister in law 😏. In fact she even one day tells Ceres how she and Lucas have kept an exchange diary for many years… And in it Lucas has constantly written about how much he loves Ceres indirectly. Nadia picked up on it but never knew who it was until she met Ceres. Unfortunately not only does Ceres feel unfit to be his lover, but Nadia starts to get to the end of her life as the lung disease progresses further and further. After running into the murderer one night, Lucas decides to have Ceres live with him for a bit for her safety. When Yves and Hugo offer both for Lucas and Nadia to become relifers, he promptly refuses and says he wants to live and die as a human. Both of them were born to relifer parents, and he had nothing against becoming one himself eventually. Then one day he saw a friend of his become a relifer and then kill his younger sister.

After witnessing this Lucas decided that becoming a relifer would turn you into a monster like his friend and decided he would never become one. Because Nadia was born ill, the parents urged her to get relifed, but she refused so Lucas took her and ran away from home together. He’s then been working to the bone to give her expensive hospital treatment to prolong her life at a hospital that respected patients wishes to live and die as humans. When Ceres finds out about all of this and the fact that Lucas only has a few months to live, she’s heartbroken. But all the sadness is instantly dispelled when the game suddenly reveals that not only was Camille the killer of the prostitutes, Lucas was going around killing relifers because the exorcist group who hates them told him to do so. In exchange, they agreed to keep Nadia at their hospital and treat her heavy illness. So while Camille was ripping out fetuses, Lucas has been ripping out the hearts because the exorcists told him it would “purge the demons.” Lucas brings Ceres to the exorcist HQ which is basically a human experiment lab to try to figure out a way to treat the disease that kills people at 23. However they don’t want to use pure “humans” so they kidnap relifers to use on their experiments along with the hearts of all the people Lucas kills and brings to them. (;;;・_・) So then Otomate remembered that sleep meds and cages are funny again after Amnesia, and decided to bring it back for this route! 😂😂😂

So Lucas locks Ceres in a cage telling her that she has to stay there when he’s not around, otherwise she’s “free” as long as she doesn’t “have a change of heart” lol. He’s been giving her sleeping meds so she would sleep during the time he goes out & kills people but since Ankou woke her up to warn her she found out the truth. (But then Ankou got sliced up into bits & pieces by Lucas after rip.) Ceres has a moment to gather her thoughts, realizes the dude she fell for is fucking cray and decides that she can’t just sit back and let him kill a ton of people. But when one night he pours out all of his feelings for her and basically says he fell in love with her when he found out she basically walked out of the burning orphanage without a single wound. The fact that she didn’t feel sorry for Nadia and befriended her, and the fact that she was always so helpful in the orphanage contributed to his feelings for her. So now Ceres is torn because 1) ayy my hot sensei loves me 2) but he’s a serial killer 3) and he gonna die in like half a year rip lol. 😅 But anyway all that goes out the window as they spend the entire night making out in his bed. The next morning she hears Lucas talking in his sleep saying he’s sorry for killing everyone, and that he’s a monster that doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

The following day Dahut stops by the hospital to explain to Lucas that Nadia is forever ill because it’s a genetic disease and there’s no “cure” for it. (I mean I thought it was obvious but I guess the characters aren’t aware of the term.) When they go to Nadia’s room, while they are talking, suddenly Lucas randomly starts strangling Ceres, and when he snaps out of it he has no idea what he’s done. Freaking Cappucino also then gives Lucas a new hitlist and tells him that if he doesn’t kill them all, he will not be allowed to visit Nadia again. He then starts coughing blood because his disease is progressing further and further and he finds out the sad truth that once he dies, they will just let Nadia die too – and not help her live longer like Lucas thought. Lucas goes into yandere mode, locks up Ceres in his uguu cage of love, and then goes on a killing spree of relifers. Even when he returns back to his house, asshole Cappucino stops by, feeds him some more brainwashing drugs so all he can think about is more killings. After Fuckaccino leaves, Ceres grabs Lucas through the cage and tells him he can stop “Trying hard by himself” and that its ok to be upset. It helps calm him down and he starts to say his true feelings, and how he doesn’t want to be a killer, and that he’s tired of “trying hard” all by himself and fuck genetic diseases.

So then they go to visit Nadia at night and turns out she’s now a relifer, because she could no longer live in her human body. One of the hospital employees showed him the contract that Nadia supposedly signed agreeing to be reborn as a clone. Not believing this, and refusing to accept Nadia as a clone, Lucas rages and kills the relifer version of his sister on the spot. They get a message from Crapaccino and he says he has the real Nadia with him, and when they go into his underground creepy ass doll museum they find out he’s a 40＋ year old relifer. He’s also revealed to be a scientist who used to work in the government long ago who was banned and arrested because he tried to tamper with DNA to create a flawless human being. Or rather, he just wanted to keep reproducing his own DNA to live forever, so he kep cloning 99% of himself but would change the other 1%. The idiot government and stupid Scien made the mistake of not permanently arresting him. Crapaccino, aka Otis, managed to escape, took over the exorcist organization for his own illegal research, brainwashed everyone and then used Lucas as a tool for his gross experiments. Normally when you create a clone relifer body, all the DNA is the same – appearance and all and that’s why Dahut said that even if they were to relife Nadia, she would be forever ill because the illness is imbedded in her genes. So then Lucas is like wtf doe Nadia have to do with this, and Crapaccino’s like ahh I’ve fallen in love with her genes˜. Does this make him a genetic pedo? ╏ ” ⊚ ͟ʖ ⊚ ” ╏

Pedroccino reveals what has become of Nadia, and she’s basically a weird homonculus mixed up of 20 women’s DNAs. Not only that but Pedroccino messed with her memory so she only thinks that the pedro is her groom and has no idea who Ceres or Lucas are. Lucas is horrified and shocked to react, so Ceres throws a gas bomb from the lab and escapes with him. Unfortunately, someone who works for Pedroccino catches up to them, injects Lucas with more brainwashing drugs and he goes on another lifer killing spree with his final target as Scien, the creator of the Relifer system. He ends up killing everyone, including Ceres who knew he would kill her because he’s so delusioned on DNA steroids. After he awakens from his murder trance, he goes into a yandere trance, and then goes to live on some remote cave of the island with Ceres’ skeleton who he puts a ring on to be his “bride” ugh lmao. NOT THE KIND OF WEDDING END I WANTED PART 2. 😰😨😭Anyway eventually his time runs out and the lung disease kills him too. In the other bad end, Ceres realizes that there’s no saving Lucas and so she puts him out of his misery with Ankou’s help. When someone bursts in to ask her what’s going on, she identifies herself as Lucas’ “wife” and is then publicly executed for his crimes. Adolphe and co knew that she’s innocent but the dumb government just wanted to put the blame on someone and Ceres lost the will to live without Lucas anyway. In all the other bad ends any attempt for Ceres to get help or run away just ended in her instantly dying. 😒

In the good end in order to stop Lucas from going cray after the whole thing with zombie Nadia, Ceres stabs him in the neck to snap him out of his murder trance. And now this ending becomes a great example of why forcing people to do the good ends at the end fails miserably. I honestly forgot everything that happened other than Pedoccino turning Nadia into a monster but because this is like 3 days ago as I’m playing this, seeing this again 3 days later the impact is just not the same. So somehow despite being stabbed in the neck Lucas is not only able to fight off his clone army, he is able to finally reach out to Nadia’s subconscious to get her to awaken. Or rather, one of Dahut’s many clones woke up being like u can do it Nadia before immediately dying again. And so Nadia regains some sense of herself, kills the Pedroccino, and then says she loves her oniichan and oneechan before Lucas puts her out of her misery. In the epilogue, as usual Scien is alive since he always backs up his data as he’s constantly a murder target lol. After Lucas had died, Ceres decided to join him in death and killed herself too. They were buried together in the lily garden and Ankou visits it a year later, and sees a little girl run to the grave and put a flower on it. Some “happy” end this is. ಠ_ʖಠ

Scien Brofiise – Scien is the inventor of the relife system and has “rebirthed” himself many times so he’s like an 80 year old grandpa, despite looking forever 23. (GILF!? 🤣🤣)Because of this he has no emotional attachment to “life” so everything to him is a science experiment and he thinks emotions are a “systematic bug” now. So because Scien is a slob and Ceres cleans his room, he goes to her orphanage and demands that she basically work for him as his personal assistant (aka maid lol). She figures it’s ok to do but Ankou is really against this because he’s afraid if Scien finds out she has real death powers, he will try to experiment on her. While working for him, Ceres even gets to watch the entire relifer process as these clones pop out of this sci-fi glass egg. However one day suddenly one of the workers there whips out a knife and takes Ceres hostage. The reason is they want Dahut to become the leader instead of Scien, because he wants to try to instill emotions back into relifers while Scien doesn’t give a shit. The threat also doesn’t work on Scien anyway because he has no emotional attachment to anyone or anything, including Ceres. Even Ceres is like yea I knew he won’t stand up for me, and I’m not his lover so uh you won’t get anything out of holding me hostage. She also then kicks the guy away and escapes on her own which leaves the guy open enough for Scien to knock him down and arrest him. When he tries to lunge at Scien again, Dahut shows up and shoots a tranquilizer at the guy. Dahut explains the guy was mad at Scien for not figuring out how to transfer emotions because his fiance who was relifed, ended up losing her feelings of love for him and marrying some other guy instead.

Scien takes Ceres out to dinner after this or Dahut will rage at him, and there he basically says his entire existance is to upkeep the relife system and if that’s no longer needed, his purpose in life is over. After this he reveals to her that he’s doing human experiments on prisoners as directed by the royal family. So honestly it’s no different than what Crapaccino was doing, but Scien is doing it “legally” and not because he has some gene fetish but in order to improve/advance the relife system. He inherited the science lab from his father and began doing human experiments as requested by the royal family. Once he completed the relife system, he was his first successful experiment and was the first one to live past age 23. He also explains the reason he continues the human experiments is because the relife system is just a temporary solution until he can figure out how to stop the disease plaguing the island. One day one of the royal princes, Simon Revpowel bursts in demanding he get a new body because of the system being updated would surely give him a better one than the one he has now even if it’s not time to switch yet. Even though there’s already a person in there getting reborn, the asshole just destroys the container, killing the clone inside and for some idiotic reason nobody keeps the backup of the data after it’s transferred to the clone so it means the person is now permanently dead. When Scien comes over and sees his system being destroyed like this, he’s fucking pissed and starts beating the shit out of the prince lmao. 😂😂

He gives absolutely no fucks and even permanently block the idiot prince from ever having his body reborn again. Ceres feels bad she couldn’t stop the moron with the sword and cries but Scien after cleaning up the dead body takes her back to his office to tend to her wounds from being knocked down. He suggests that maybe she stop working for him but being attached to him Ceres doesn’t want to leave so she blabs about how without her he won’t even eat hi lunches properly…so he lets her stay. ☺️ The next day things take a turn for the worse when a bunch of people spread a rumor that Scien is responsible for the deaths of the relifers (that are actually being killed by Lucas). Even within the organization there’s quite a lot of people who want Scien to retire and for Dahut to be the next president. After this the prince who got blocked gets pissed and uses his connections to effectively get even Dahut to follow his orders, and for everyone to turn on Scien except Ceres. Scien knows that she has a crush on him but he promptly reminds her that she can like him all she wants but he will never return those feelings. Suddenly the royals burst in, and complain that the Prince who got blocked from the system is suddenly dying from the lung disease. Turns out someone else had created a new body for him but since they’re not as good as Scien, they made some defective one he dies within a week.

All of the royals are now against Scien and they make a country wide announcement saying that Scien killed him. He blabs out an out of context announcement that Scien used people for experiments (even though the royals told him to). Just then Dahut comes in an announces that Scien is banned from his own lab and is now to be executed for his crimes… Saying he can’t go against the royals wishes and now he can continue to do research to create clones with emotions. Scien doesn’t care that his lab is being taken but he refuses to go down without a fight so he grabs Ceres and runs. They get split up and Scien ends up falling into some underground facility in the sewers that he didn’t know existed, only to be ambushed by a murdering Lucas. By the time Ceres, Hugo and Yves get down there it seems like Scien is dead, but despite being all bloody he’s somehow still alive enough to fight Lucas off. Meanwhile shit hits the fan at the orphanage, when Prince Dominic bursts in saying that the orphanage harbored a grim reaper and that she was escorting Scien and is a traitor too. They manage to escape thanks to Mathis but it’s so weird cause Jean/Camille is there too and we know he’s a traitor so it felt so awkward to me lmao. They head to the orphanage only to find dead children everywhere, and when they burst into the room Ceres watches as they slice Adolphe’s head off. 😱

Just then Lucas (stlil in disguise so nobody but me knows who it is lol) bursts in and starts slashing the guards with his halberd. Realizing he has no allies left, Dominic runs away leaving a mindbroken Ceres, and horrified everyone else except Scien who as usual has no emotion. They take hideout somewhere and Salome completely loses it as she sits there holding Adolphe’s disembodied head while repeating his name. Everyone tries to take the head away from her to bury before it rots but she refuses and cries saying they can still save him as long as they have his brain to clone him. Scien calmly explains to her that once someone dies, there’s no way to revive them without a backup beforehand. While recovering Scien also admits that he’s been doing experiments on himself as well to improve the system and his own body is covered in scars. So then Ceres points out that Scien has been focusing so much on making stronger relifers all this time that he completely forgot to focus on actually getting rid of the disease that causes death in the first place. Scien then has a breakdown that the whole time he created emotionless dolls like himself so that there would be someone else to “ignore” the curse in exchange for just adding more time to their life. He finally remembers what his true goal was and he states he will find a way to save everyone without anymore sacrifices. And so they sneak into the lab so that Scien can swap bodies cause his current one is close to reaching its limit. Before he starts the procedure, he kisses Ceres and says that when he manages to recover emotions in relifers, he wants her to be his first lover. Just then though, Lucas (probably?) comes in with his halberd and kills Ceres who tries and fails to stop him.

Scien manages to safely change his body, and then Lucas just randomly leaves like…why did you even come here, wasn’t your goal to kill Scien??? Lmao. After he gets out he immediately stuffs Ceres into the glass egg to save her but unfortunately he is unable to. He instead successfully regains his emotions, and goes crazy from despair and mentally breaks down because he downloaded her memories inside himself. He imagines that she’s still alive and serving him while he sits alone in his lab trying to find a solution to the disease. One of the other bad ends Salome kills Ceres because she won’t agree with her plan to kill the royal family. It’s so ridiculous just like most of the bad ends where the characters suddenly go o/c and randomly kill the heroine. In the good end, Scien creates a clone of himself that can withstand emotions without crashing his brain. And then he’s like anyway gonna find a cure for the disease and also bang Ceres and have 2 kids. 🤣🤣😳

A few days later during a public ceremony, Salome shows up and stabs and kills Comb Revpowell, and then also stabs and kills Dahut (lol tfw you kill your own son without realizing it.) She then takes Ceres hostage, and yells that she must kill every single member of the royal family. She basically had a memory crash after seeing Adolphe killed in front of her, so they shoot arrows at her to free Ceres and arrest her. Dominic Revpowell rambles that there’s no need to save Salome, and for the first time Scien feels the emotion of irritation and anger at him. He decides to use Dominic as his lab rat in order to create a more stable emotional memory for Salome’s next clone. In the epilogue, Salome is relifed again, and since all the royals are now dead there’s nobody left to prosecute her so she just returns to the orphanage. Scien and Ceres buy flowers for Dahut’s grave (and I’m still in disbelief that he didn’t have like 3 backup clones.) Scien then takes her back to her room at the orphanage, tells her that yep, he’s confirmed now that he’s in love with her and they make out in her bed. (~￣³￣)~ 💕💕 Scien honestly had the most satisfying -otomesque- ending for me so I’m glad I left his happy end for last.

Yves Noirouge – Yves is revealed to be the boy who gets in the way of the explosion at the orphanage when Ceres was younger, effectively saving her life. Because of that the burns on his face are so traumatizingly bad, he wears a mask to cover the left side of his face so to not scare others. In this route Ceres decides to work and live with Yves and the vigilantes. Unfortunately other than Yves, Adolphe and Hugo, all the other guys really don’t want her there. Yves is notoriously bad at cooking and they finally accept Ceres when they find out that she can actually cook. The reason that Ceres never seen him until now is Salome intentionally talked to the orphanage where he was staying and told them to keep him away so that Ceres wouldn’t have any survivor guilt or guilt for his injuries. However, Yves seems to be immune to injuries because he constantly gets hurt to the point of heavy bleeding, but walks away like nothing. One night Yves reveals that the reason he got involved in the fire is he was just spending time with a church friend. Afterwards, because of his badly burned face, his dogshit parents basically abandoned him and he was taken in out of pity by another church. Just then Ankou showed up one day and gave him the face mask to cover his wounds as a weird apology because he knew Yves’ fate ahead of time but was unable to do anything. So after that Yves then tried to live a life of finding someone who will love and accept him and not pity him because of his injury. Unable to do so, he gave up and decided he would just wait until he’s reborn as a relifer because then the scar would be gone since it’s not genetic. Since Ceres spends a lot of time with Yves, the other guys start shipping them and call her his waifu. 🤭

When Adolphe and Hugo ask her about this rumor Ceres denies it saying she’s unfit to be his lover and she’s happy just being friends. A few days later Ceres goes to the Pedoccino hospital and finds out that her parents died of the lung disease at the black spider lilly field while her mother was pregnant. To be technical, the disease got so bad they basically tore their own chest open and killed themselves. Ceres then like birthed herself out when they found her and so she was basically orphaned since she was born. Shocked at this truth, she goes to check out the flower field once more only to find Yves there who then tells her that he’s a descendant of a line of “black lilly guardians” whose mission in life is to make sure all the flowers grow so he frequently comes over there to tend to his garden. After Ceres she sees the flowers as another family to her, Yves is so happy that finally someone out there exists that doesn’t hate them. Unfortunately one again more people are killed by another mystery murderer and everyone starts calling Ceres a grim reaper again. The only one on her side is Yves, and Hugo gets so irritated that Yves is protecting her that he ragequits the vigilante. Ceres overhears their arguing and figures it’s best for her to leave, but befoer she can run out the window Yves comes in and stops her. So they continue to stay at his love shack despite the angry villagers demanding that he release her. They also notice the pattern with all the murders seems to be focused on couples in love. So things just keep getting worse because being a dumb tiny island, the idiot royals need a scape goat for all their problems, and they decide to blame the murders on Yves and Ceres because hur dur death girl. 🙄

One night when the villagers try to set Yves’ house on fire, Ceres and Yves come outside to ask them to stop and in the scuffle Yves’ mask comes off revealing his burned face. He’s so horrified at Ceres seeing this from past trauma, he starts screaming at her not to look at him. Just then Hugo shows up and pushes her away hiding Yves’ face and yells at her saying it’s all her fault that she ruined everything Yves worked for all his life. Hugo asks her to die and put Yves out of his misery, but Ceres refuses because Yves wanted her to live. After Hugo fucks off, Ceres goes back to Yves, tells him his scar is beautiful and reminds her of the black spider lilies. Yves, who thought the person he loved was going to reject him, starts crying and then says that he’s gonna stop trying to “love everyone” and will only love her from now on. Ceres kisses his scar, and after they leave his house they unfortunately discover Hugo’s dead body (which for some reason had a CG like holy shit there was no dead body CGs for literally anyone else until now jfc.) Meanwhile elsewhere, Scien uncovers Crapaccino’s underground lab and discovers that Lucas is working for him. Scien then tells Lucas that Crapaccino’s real name is Otis and he knocks Lucas out and has his guards take him away. Without his weapon to protect him, Scien grills him for answers on his bullshit experiments and underground lab. Back to Yves and Ceres, after finding Hugo’s dead body, Yves starts to have a blood coughing fit, the kind similar to the island lung disease which is unusual for someone his age.

None of the doctors want to take him in to treat him because he associates with the grim reaper girl so he just sits there suffering in bed at his house. Not knowing who else to turn to for help, she calls Crapaccino, but fortunately the one who answers the call is fortunately Scien. He tells her as long as she donates her blood to his research, so she heads over, after kissing Yves goodbye. When she goes to Scien, he reveals to her that Ceres’ parents were his 2nd subjects to undergo the relife process after himself. And so he reveals that the reason they died clawing at their hearts is because apparently if you’re a relifer with too strong love emotion, your brain has a “systematic crash” and you end up killing yourself trying to rip out the source of the pain – your heart. So that is why her parents were found dead but with smiles on their faces in that spider lilly field. This is also why Scien was against transferring emotions to relifers and why all the recent deaths were couples clawing out their hearts. This doesn’t necessarily limit to couples, it can be a one sided love, which explains Hugo’s death since he was sp emotional over Yves. 🥴 Scien says that someone probably hacked into the system and made it so that even a little bit of love emotion would crash and make people kill themselves which is why there was a sudden increase in couple deaths. Meanwhile the angry mob drives the doctor who was helping Yves away, and when they try to kill Yves who can barely move out of bed, the drunk guy who he helped out a few years back take the hit and saves him.

Just when the stupid angry mob is about to attack again, Ankou comes out of nowhere and kills them all. (Bro what have you been doing all this time.) He tells Yves to go to his grandfather’s grave, dig it up and he would find out Ceres’ truth and he also makes his lung disease suddenly go away. When he digs up his grandpa’s grave, he finds a diary. Inside gramps basically says he was a merchant from the far east who traveled west to make money, but got hit by a storm and landed on this island. He was shocked to find out that nobody on this island had lived beyond the age of 23, and told them how people outside this island live to age 60 or 70. A scientist on the island begged for knowledge from the outside world so gramps gave him a book on the human DNA. Despite giving him a lot of books, the scientist went mad and wanted to use gramps for human experiments to figure out why he lives longer than 23. He went into hiding along with his new wife and figured he’d just quietly die on this island. His wife died early so he ended up living with just his child until the day he met the grim reaper. They also find an entry saying that the red spider lilies in his country are supposed to bring good luck, not bring doom. So it turns out that the ground on the island spews out poison, and the spider lilies that are red turned black because they absorbed the poison via allelopathy (god I had to look this up) which is why whenever people would try to destroy them, there would be more deaths on the island. And this is also why the grim reaper left the task of caring for them to Yves’ family.

Scien overhears all of this info through a tracking device he implanted on Yves. So it’s like basically the entire island has some radioactive soil that messed up everyone’s DNA and caused a chromosome defect that made them all die of this disease at age 23. Since it’s such a small island that rarely gets visitors, there was no chance for anyone to leave or seek help so eventually basically this thing spread down generations. And so what would happen is every year the person would lose 1 chromosome, and since a person has 23 chromosomes, by the time they hit age 23 they basically die of necrosis. Soo basically everyone on the island is born with a genetic disease that is guaranteed to kill them, and it has nothing to do with grim reapers or curses. So what does Ceres have to do with this? Well since she popped out right in the middle of the spider lilly field, it had a huge effect on her DNA and she basically magically inherited the purification and poison absorbing power of the spider lilly. And so because she absorbed the poison into herself like the flowers do, she was basically a walking bag of poison and spread it around to everyone who came in contact with her. This would explain why people like Yves suddenly started getting the symptoms earlier than expected. Not only that but her poison is also apparently flammable so the random explosion that happened 7 years earlier was because it was like throwing a matchstick into a gas leak. 😨

And also her gas apparently would corrupt the memory of unstable individuals (such as the case with Hugo). So in a way, she’s now scientifically proven to be “Death” because she’s going around spewing poison …..just like Cardia in Code Realize (also a game by the same writer 😂😂). So Scien’s immediate response is alright girl, we’re gonna use your DNA to create clones that can withstand the poison. (And honestly I find the entire concept hilarious because WHY DOES NOBODY THINK TO LEAVE THE RADIOACTIVE ISLAND FOR FUCKS SAKE LOL.) Scien thinks they should just clone Ceres’ body and bury it alive all over the island LMFAOWTF bro come on. But despite Yves’ protests, Ceres is like ah yes, I must sacrifice myself like Jesus and save everyone. Also even though I thought they had arrested Crapaccino for being a big pedo, for some reason he’s not a pedo in this route, and in fact he’s got his eyes on Ceres’ genes instead lol. The other guys get together with Yves who doesn’t want Ceres to become a poison sponge army. So then Yves and co break into the lab to rescue Ceres, but like everyone just dies except Yves and Lucas (who was awakened and helping them) so that he can get to Ceres. He makes it to the main room because Dahut betrays Scien and takes Yves’ side. When Yves gets to her he’s basically like pls don’t die baby I love you. ( ˘ ³˘)♥ While Yves fights with Scien, he rages the reason they were all too stupid to find the cause of this sooner is because they were so obsessed with extending their life span that Yves’ gramps had to hide to not be used as a lab rat. They didn’t read any of his research of books that he gave to them and instead went off on a tangent to create clones, that would just repeat the 23 year life span because the chromosomal death was now embedded into their DNA.

Even though Yves wins the fight, the system goes out of control before Ceres is able to escape the egg pod. Because of this Ceres becomes a massive poison spewing machine and sets the entire lab on fire while exacerbating Yves’ lung disease again. Scien tells her that anyone shes near now is gonna instantly die and if she tries to kill herself, all the poison inside her is gonna explode and kill everyone on the island lmao WELP. Because of the fire, the lab starts crumbling and Ceres falls into the sewage level. Ceres walks over to the edge of the island in hopes if she dies there, nobody will be affected. However a bunch of idiot villagers ambush her there and attack her, which causes the poison to start a fire all around her and kill them all lmao. ಠ∀ಠ Yves chases her down, gives her a medicine to suppress her poison temporarily that was given to him by Scien. Unfortunately it ends just as you would expect – Yves is burned alive in front of Ceres in an instant to the point that he’s unrecognizable. Ceres goes completely cray and decides her charcoalled boyfriend will be with her forever now that he’s “dead” and therefore it’s no longer a problem that her poison will kill him! 🤪

In the other bad end, Yves survives but instead Ceres gives her blood to Dahut before burying herself alive in the spider lilly garden. It’s easy to tell where she is because the lilies there are red, as they don’t need to absorb the poison since her body is doing it automatically. O and she also leaves her disembodied hand for Yves that Dahut has preserved from decomposing because she “wanted to hold Yves’ hand” before dying. M O R B I D W T F. 😨😱 Yves then kills himself so he can be with her forever in death. Also apparently the fact that Hugo was yanhomo for Yves made a bunch of fangirls rage and give this game 1 star reviews calling it a BL game. Clearly someone has not played UtaPri Debut here. 🤣🤣🤣 In the good end, Yves gives Ceres a bouquet of burnt spider lilies and asks her to marry him, surrounded by fire lol. Talk about a hot proposal! 🔥🔥 Ceres is like eh fuck it, I might kill him but ehh I love him, and they make out amidst the flames lol. But hey as it turns out apparently Yves added spider lilies to his diet and bullshit cooking and so he actually developed some antibodies of his own just like Ankou! And so in the epilogue, they both survive cause the rain put out the fire. Since Ceres is still a poison spewing tank, she lives with Yves in that cave hideout underneath the lily garden until the two of them eventually will die. Great. 😒

Ankou/Adolphe – The route starts the game over like a “redo” to give us all the happy end we’ve been waiting for. In this route Ceres ends up staying with Adolphe because she wanted to die alone in the rain after the explosion at the orphanage that hurt Yves. Adolphe is like oniichan to her because she was raised as his step sister by Salome. Adolphe has no plans to become a relifer, but after he dies he doesn’t know what to do with Ceres because without him, having left the orphanage, she has nowhere to go. Ankou shows up and calls him out on it saying that Ceres wanted to be a normal girl, but Adolphe treated her like she’s really at fault and isolated her from everyone. So they end up arguing and somehow we derail into a 3P route with Ankou and Adolphe at the love shack with Ceres. 😂😂 I didn’t mention it in other routes but Ankou is basically invincible and any wounds or injuries will eventually repair themselves. Even if he’s cut up into pieces they will eventually fuse back together and regenerate his form (which is how he came back to life after Lucas butchered him.) So then Ceres starts to realize there’s this invisible wall that Adolphe keeps putting between her, but when she tries to find out what it is he tells her he’s been lying to her all these years but doesn’t specify why.

Thanks to Dahut they get access to a secret underground library at the royal palace, and they find the diary of the former queen named Christine Revpowell. She wanted to try to find out the cause of the fatal disease but everyone of her family including her husband the king then, didn’t give a fuck and just wanted to keep relifing themselves. And when she tried to do research on her own, they sent assassins after her. When Salome finds out that Adolphe and Ceres are trying to find out the truth, she locks Adolphe in the orphanage basement dungeon and tries to do the same to Ceres, but Ankou saves her and lets her escape. When they get to the spider lilly field, Ankou starts stuffing them in his mouth saying it’s his regular diet. 🥴 Meanwhile, the king orders Scien to be killed and it’s revealed that his daughter is none other than Salome, real name Mariette Revpowell. A mysterious voice who’s been giving orders to Crapaccino and the Revpowells promises them new bodies that will grant them eternal life as long as they bring to him Ceres and Ankou. The townspeople go into a panic because Scien is dead, and they think that they can no longer be relifed. Comb Revpowell (I’m calling him that cause wtf is コーム) comes to the entire island speaker and tells everyone that they have found the solution to the curse aka Ceres.

Meanwhile Ceres, Ankou and Adolphe hide in some underground cave bunker while the citizens on the island are in chaos looking for them. After hearing the announcement, Ankou runs out to Yves’ grandpa’s grave only to find out its been dug up and the royals stole his diary – which is how they discovered the truth about Ceres and her flower power. So eventually the angry mob chases them down, Lucas chops up Ankou and in order to save Adolphe from being beaten to death she agrees to go to the royal palace. There she discovers the the royals in general just want to have eternal life, and made Scien work on those bodies for them and that the relife system was just an afterthought excuse to hide all of this from the rest of the citizens. Once they attain eternal life they don’t care that the rest of the island basically dies out. After this Ceres is thrown into an underground cell, right next to Dahut who was imprisoned for protesting against their stupid decisions. Unfortunately he’s taken out to be executed shortly after but before he goes he tells her a way to escape and go to the lab where most likely Ankou is being held. After that it appears like Dahut is taken to be executed. Not only that but they capture Adolphe to use him as their first test subject to see if he will get an invincible body from Ankou, before they run this system on the royals.

Somehow he ends up surviving the experiment, and after Crapaccino looks at his DNA, they found out Adolphe’s secret: He’s the 2nd person who somehow drifted to this island and therefore has normal human DNA, unaffected by the poison and will not die at age 23. I still don’t get why he wasn’t affected by the poison living here for years, meanwhile Yves’ grandpa and all of his kids/grandkids all got affected. Is it just living there too long I guess vs only being there say 10-12 years?? Adolphe reveals he’s 25 years old, and offers them information about outside countries as well as cooperation with experiments as a distraction in hopes Ceres can escape and save Ankou. After a bunch of painful experiments they throw him into the same cell as Ceres and while he’s out of it lying in her lap he confesses that he’s been in love with her for the last 2 years. I honestly couldn’t tell whose route this was with Ankou around but this scene finally made me realize it was Adolphe lol. Adolphe’s shit parents sold all their kids but becauses nobody wanted to buy him, they just threw him into the ocean. Like wow imagine having multiple kids and going through pregnancies, and then throwing them away like some used toilet paper. 🤪 Adolphe didn’t want to die alone in the ocean, so he decided to keep trying to swim until he ended up on the island and was found by Salome who adopted him as her stepson. Adolphe was hoping he’d just die at 23, but when his birthday came and he was fine, he realized he’s going to live a long miserable life. He was about to kill himself until 16 year old Ceres came into the room and stopped him. Adolphe had a mental break down and blamed his “lack of death” on Ceres lol. Ceres was like yea, I guess it’s my fault, sorry? And suddenly that made Adolphe’s heart go ズキューン for her lol. 😅🤣

When the day comes to present Ceres to the people of the island, suddenly everyone starts having a memory crash and clawing their hearts out including the royals. Within the chaos Ceres uses the opportunity to run to the Scien’s office as instructed by Dahut. She finds Ankou’s disembodied head, and he apologizes for being unable to save her. Ceres grab’s Ankou’s disembodied head tube, and goes to rescue Adolphe from the dungeon. Just when they don’t know where out to run, they get a call from Scien who’s at Camille’s lab with Mathis and Yves who are fortunately not dead at all lol. 😂 I mean I had a feeling Scien was a badass who survived but how the fuk did Yves survive Lucas’ attack…. Also Camille agrees to cooperate cause Mathis is like fucking fine dude I’ll help you revive your dead prostitute girlfriend. Anyway as I had guessed a few routes back, Dahut is the final boss but fortunately he’s on our side. He’s the son of Christine Revpowell, real name Liam Revpowell. He’s always talked about reviving his dead mother, so everything fit perfectly. Giving eternal life to his relatives was all a sham he ran in the background, and when he gave them that “power” it turned them into hideous creatures that no longer even looked human (think of Ed’s revived “mom” in Full Metal Alchemist lol.)

We then see a flashback of how Christine tried to solve the reason for the disease and then the royals killed her in front of Dahut. Dahut then spent years running away, even burning his face so he wouldn’t be recognizable by any of the town folk and one man took him and raised him. At age 15 he then climbed his way to the top by joining Scien and became VP of the entire research team while working to find a way to revive his mother. He also then worked in the background giving orders to people desperate to cling to life like Crapaccino and the royals. Dahut also admits to introducing Lucas to Crapaccino as revenge because Lucas’ father, who was supposed to be Christine’s guard, was unable to protect her. On top of this, the reason there’s radioactive poison on the island, is because many years ago, the idiot royal family decided to try to build a nuclear wall around the island so they wouldn’t be conquered by outside nations. Instead, they dun’ goofed and basically spread radiation poisoning in the entire country. GG. ಠ,_｣ಠ And because Ceres was born in the same lilly field where Christine’s bloody remains were dropped off, somehow magically Ceres inherited her genes inside herself too. LMFAO. OK OTOMATE. So yea Dahut wants to revive mommy using Ceres but before he can capture her, Ankou revives in the nick of time and helps them escape. (Honestly the dude has his eyes on like every place on the island where is there even places to run to??)

Of course Dahut sends his Lucas clone after them and he captures Ceres and tells her to make herself “comfy” in his underground lab lmao. He then sends a PSA to the island that he’s going to kill everyone because he wants to end the entire concept of relifers. The reason is if anyone from this island leaves and goes to the outside world and tells of this technology, it would create chaos in the world. Everyone on this island doesn’t take life seriously because they figure they’ll just “be reborn”. He wants to turn this country to being back like normal humans, like Adolphe. So like he’s totally reasonable, and since I love revenge, I honestly can’t hate the guy and I give him props for being this much of a calculating genius lol. Dahut even saved Nadia from Pedroccino and became friends with her because of her will to never lose her feelings of brotherly love that reminded him of his mom. Meanwhile back at the hideout cave with Scien and co, they casually reveal that Ankou is just a regular human with a “regenerating” power and the whole “disappearing in a cloud of smoke” was just a smoke bomb he used to act all mystical and shit 🤣🤣🤣. Anyway once Dahut sets off the poison gas everyone has to retreat except Adolphe and Ankou who are unaffected. Dahut watches the love confession from Adolphe again, goes aww…anyway, and sends more of his Lucas/Lucas dad clones to fight Adolphe. Unfortunately for Dahut, because Adolphe was subject to Crapaccino’s experiments, he also gained the ability to regenerate his body, so even though he had his hand chopped off last time it grew back lmao.

Dahut gets so pissed because Adolphe was the last true “human” on the island and even now that was ruined forever. They rescue Ceres out and this also stops the mass murder of the island citizens, so Dahut admits defeat….or so they thought, and while they are deciding on what to do with him, he sets off the mass murder system after all. 🤪 Just then Salome shows up, and reveals that she’s Dahut’s mom, Christine Revpowell…before stabbing Dahut with a knife. The reason she survived was because Scien found her after they had beat her up badly, but because she was still alive he took her backup data (since all the royals had it done) and relifed her. She kept getting killed so he had to do this over and over until he put her in charge of an orphanage. Despite being relifed, she never lost her will to be a mother which was strengthened when she adopted Adolphe and Ceres. She had no idea her son Liam was alive because she thought he was killed shortly after she was supposed to be. Thanks to Scien’s appearance changing technology, she was able to hide in plain sight all this time. Because of a memory lapse from all the relifing, Christine was never able to remember Liam’s face which is why she had no idea he was alive either. Salome suggests that she and Dahut die together and restart fresh and that she will give him the love she wanted to all these years. However Dahut is like “nah fuck u, instead of trying to find the truth about the disease, you spent all this time hiding and relifing yourself, you ain’t my momma!!! 😡😡”

The Dahut that Salome stabbed dies, and just then one of his other many clones shows up, stabs Salome and stuffs Ceres back into the LCL tank. Adolphe is like wtf, we found your mom why do you need Ceres anymore. After she breaks out of the tank, her entire body is covered in scars that look like spider lilies. Apparently her body now absorbs the poison at like 10x the rate which will eventually overwhelm her body and kill her just like how spider lilies turn black after absorbing the poison. Ankou tries to save her by dripping his blood down her throat because apparently he’s a researcher who’s spent hundreds of years trying to create an antibody to dispel the poison (and how he ended up gaining an invincible body.) Just then Salome manages to get her bearings, and then she stabs Dahut clone #whatever through the heart. She tells Dahut that he’s right, she got jaded to being killed so many times and being revived over and over. She hugs him and they both die peacefully but Ankou is fucking pissed like “yo what the fuck u just go and die peacefully with mommy while leaving Ceres a complete suffering wreck 🤬🤬”. He then starts stabbing Dahut’s corpse over and over raging until Adolphe stops him. Ankou then takes Ceres and walks out of the lab into the lily field crying that he couldn’t save her again – revealing that he’s actually Adolphe from the future jumping back into time over and over trying to save her. Oh hey Ukyo, nice to see you again. 🤪🤣

So after the intro where Ceres killed herself, was the start of when Adolphe decided to work with Scien and offered his body for experiments. Because of this he gained a completely regenerating body and then 103 years went by as he searched to find the cure for the disease. He then found out other countries have a time travel option (clearly he visited the world of Tearblade AMIRITE?) so he decided to leave the island to find this technology. He stole the technology and travelled back to right before Ceres was born. Because of all the travelling his appearance change and he no longer even looks like Adolphe anymore. He then dressed up as the grim reaper and went to see Yves’ grandpa to be like “ayy I command you to plant those flowers to help with the poison” but grandpa tells him that it’s not about the flowers, but about making an antibody for the poison. And of course the best way to do that is to shove the poison filled flowers down his throat in hopes his body would create those antibodies lol. It was pretty painful since spider lilies have their own poison in them. So when he first met Ceres, his text was bleeped because he was not allowed to speak things his present self wouldn’t have known at the time. So the best he could do is make Ceres drink his blood which contained antibodies to help subdue the poison in her body so that she could be around others without having them instantly drop dead within days. So that’s why he made up the whole thing about being the lord of the underworld and that he would magically use his powers to turn her into a “normal girl”.

After telling her the entire story, Ankou asks Ceres to die with him before she turns into a spider lily monster. Ceres is like nah, no matter how painful I want to try to live. So then the 2 Adolphes have a gun vs sword man battle to see if present Adolphe is fit enough to protect her lol. ¯\_ಠ_ಠ_/¯ But really it was an excuse to mess around with Adolphe’s genes to give him full regenerative abilities like his future self in hopes that would help cure Ceres one day. Ankou then shoots himself in the heart with a special bullet that would actually stop his regenerative ability and end his life for good. Damn, I actually liked him more than present Adolphe LOL. 😭 As he’s dying, Adolphe makes a wedding boquet (???) out of a bunch of nearby lilies and gives it to Ankou who’s like bleeding to death so he can “propose” to Ceres before he dies. Ankou then basically says that he enjoyed his time with her as Ankou, more than he ever did when he was Adolphe. In the epilogue 5 years later, they open the island to outside visitors. The royal family ruling dies out and instead it’s ruled by a government who obviously Scien is on top of. They also created a vaccine and antibodies for the disease so the relifer technology was deemed useless as people were able to live beyond age 23. I guess they cured Nadia too as she’s able to go outside while going through rehab. Lucas has gone through mental rehab to cure his murderous intentions too. Jean returns to being Mathis’ butler, and Mathis continues to need memory constantly downloaded into his brain but Scien is taking care of that in hopes to someday end the process. Mathis also continues his writing hobbies while Jean is forced to adopt an orphaned baby to raise. Yves goes travelling outside the island and Hugo decides to go with him lol (is this what the amazon reviews raged about?🤣) Yves secretly regrets that he got NTRed by Adolphe though lol. Scien is busy with government duties but he visits the grave of Salome and Dahut, who are buried together, every once in a while. Meanwhile for my fucking first happy end in this game, Adolphe and Ceres live happily together as she’s recovered from the poison thanks to the antibodies, though she still has some scars left.

For some reason even though it’s been 5 years and they’re obviously both in love, Ceres still hasn’t given him an answer to his love confession. 🤪 So now that she finally confessed to him he can finally kiss her for the first time in 5 years lol. Honestly it’s so disappointing to me because I really liked Ankou, and even though present time Adolphe makes more sense, compared to Ankou he didn’t do shit for Ceres. Ankou spent his entire life, hundreds of years to save her and in the end ended his life for her but what did Adolphe do? Blame her for his lack of dying, make her feel shitty, and then try to push her off to Yves because he was more fit for her while suppressing his own feelings. BLEH, Ankout FTW. 😭😭So anyway if my brain hasn’t suffered enough here’s some final bad ends for the road. In the despair end, it’s technically a 3P end with Ankou and Adolphe but unfortunately Ceres is basically dying and can’t actually enjoy it lmao rip. In the other end, Ankou is like nah fuck this island, we’re gonna just die in a fire together and then everyone else can rip afterwards. Before they both burn though he’s like damn girl you should have picked Yves someone else not useless me lol. He gives her one last goodbye kiss. 😭 In yet another bad end, they’re unable to save Ceres after all, so Ankou tells Adolphe to kill her to put her out of her misery. After he kills her Ankou offers him to repeat his despair to become invincible and time travel to try and save her again…..welp time for Ankou #2. In one of the other bad ends, the memory of Christine Revpowell awakens inside of Ceres and she goes to the royal palace like a zombie out to kill everyone who hurt her son Liam. Somehow she’s able to overpower a bunch of guards with just a knife in her hands, and when she awakens from her trance she has no idea what just happened.

Woooweee where do I even start with this one. I’m gonna say straight out – as far as the game is concerned I have no complaints. The story was pretty solid (even if it copied a lot of elements from other games). The graphics were beautiful and I never saw inconsistencies or any derpy CGs. The routes didn’t feel like copy pasta and everything was relatively unique to each route.  The system was nice allowing you to jump to next choice/unread text (though the loading time was kinda slow.) However the execution and direction is where the game falls apart for me.

First of all, the game requires you to basically complete bad ends before you can see good ones. There’s 2 types of bad ends: The one that should have been a good end but is instead a despairingly long and winded bad end. The 2nd one is just the typical “you looked out the window instead of going out the back door, you instantly died.” So because you basically spend HOURS AND HOURS seeing blood, gore, death and despair, by the time you get to the bad end your brain is tired. The game makes you basically see the “true end” first before allowing you to see the “good” ends of the other characters. I expected then the good ends of all the other characters to follow canon of the true end: they did not. So even though in the true end a certain character was alive and kicking, in his good end, he still died. So ultimately there was absolutely no fucking reason to force players to do bad ends first. None of them broke canon, none of them affected your perception on the story and some of them didn’t even fucking feel like good ends. (ノ# ﾟдﾟ)ﾉ ┫:･’∵:．┻┻:･’．:∵  Seriously the only ends I could call good was for Adolphe and Scien. The other ends ranged from bittersweet to just “less bad than the bloody gory bad ends”.

I literally cannot understand the point of requiring to sit through so much bad shit. I understand the game was going for that whole ~despair~ shtick, and I honestly think there was plenty of despair to go around without this.

Secondly, the SHEER AMOUNT OF VIOLENCE. Ya anyone of you who saw that Cero D rating and think it was for sexy times: it wasn’t. Not even implied. It was all violence, blood everywhere, heads rolling. Fortunately most of it was in text form only but even some CGs were so violent and bloody honestly it felt like a waste of the artist’s skills lol. You can still do despair and sad endings without having to have SO MUCH VIOLENCE. As you all know I’ve played a LOT of otome games, but I have never played such a violent game in my life. MoshiKami came pretty close, but this game puts that to shame. There was so much fucking blood and violence that my brain just became jaded to everything and by the time I got to the happy endings, aside from Scien (who was my favorite) I really couldn’t give 2 fucks about anything. I intentionally avoided games like Chaos;Head and anything by NitroChiral but welp I guess Otomate decided to grab a chapter from their book. I should be thankful I didn’t see any of this in picture form at least!?

And finally, the lack of balance between story and otome elements in this game is just downright poor. Only Mathis and Scien’s routes felt romantic to me. All the others felt forced or just downright lacking in general that left me unsatisfied and disappointed. I won’t spoil it, but the true route – I actually was extremely unhappy of how that panned out. I wanted Ceres to end up with the other guy, not the one she ended up with because he did so much for her and he just gets tossed aside like that. They really did him dirty. There’s plenty of otome games that still manage to somewhat balance romance and despair (like Code Realize, or Collar Malice). They were trying to push the despair shtick so hard, they ended up forgetting like “oh shit uh we should add some happy endings right”. Some of the happy ends felt like an afterthought, and they weren’t even really happy or satisfying to me. Speaking of Collar x Malice, just like in that one, I actually liked the TRUE villain – because I generally love revenge themed stories, so in that sense, despite the drawbacks, that was one of my favorite things in the story.

So should you play this game? Well this comes down to how much you can stomach in terms of violence. A friend of mine heard me ranting about it and was like FUCK YEAA DESPAIIR I’M SO EXCITED. So honestly if you just wanna see everyone be miserable from start to finish, then this game is right up your alley. If you’re looking for a good balance of story but ultimately want an “otome romance game” then this might be a huge disappointment. It feels even more disappointing because if they only executed it better (starting with not forcing you to play all the bad ends first) it might have been less dissatisfying (to a degree depending on the route lol). They probably can’t even have a happy fluffy FD because it breaks the canon of almost every single “good end”.

And one final note, apparently this game got under fire from Japanese fans claiming that it has BL. Here’s my take on this: The BL is as much of an after thought as the happy ends. In fact I didn’t even fucking THINK it was BL until I saw the Amazon reviews. It’s literally 1 side character,  is revealed to have potentially been in love with one of the main love interests after his death. That’s it. Outside of this one brief indirect revelation, there is absolutely NO HINTS OF BL. You’ll find more BL in UtaPri Debut than you will in this game. The fact that people on Amazon Japan gave this game 1 star reviews because of this, vs you know, the fact that you have to sit through shitty bad ends for 30 hours, just blows my mind. Supposedly most of the rage stems from the Stellaworth tokuten booklet, which I didn’t buy, so I can’t comment.