Tifalia is an orphan who works with her aunt at an inn. One day a circus group comes to town but their first show is a massive failure. The purpose of their show is to collect feelings of joy from the audience to make Flora – a flower needed to wake their prince’s heart from the curse. He’s currently emotionless and a 17 year old stuck in a 7 year old’s body. After speaking to Tifaria and realizing she has some great ideas, they recruit her to help them improve the success of their shows. As usual spoilers and probably misspelled fantasy names ahead!

In the common route they go to a bunch of various towns which are all connected to the guys in one way or another doing their shows. Their shows somehow derail from being a circus to becoming a stage play instead ?_? Anyway once they get enough Flora they wake up the prince from his emotionless state, however he’s still trapped in a kid’s body. There’s also this Endwalker-ish plot about people getting overwhelmed by negative emotions and turning into monsters that can only be killed to stop their rampage.

Zafora – Zafora’s entire route is basically the Lion King but instead of being the king of pride rock he needs to become the keeper of fairy labyrinth. Instead his evil uncle Scar Balto killed his parents and basically outcast Zafora as he took over the town.  Turns out Balto was also possessed by a monster because of his inferiority complex of being the “2nd in line to the throne keeper of the labyrinth”.  And so with the help of boku-prince, they create a magic bullet that kills Balto and restores Zafora as the rightful king keeper of the labyrinth. At the good end Zafora attempts to confess his feelings to Tifa but she thinks he’s drunk and so he has to kiss her to prove that he’s sober and in love with her. ಠ_ಠ And so he goes back to his town to take care of changing leadership and while he’s gone Tifa gets into her head that he no longer likes her and throws a tantrum at him when he returns 1 year later.

She asks him to tell her his feelings directly and being the tsundere that he is, he starts rambling that there’s no way he could do this!! 😂 He then asks her to come live with him in his town and says he will “consider” saying his feeling out loud lol. (;^ω^) Just say it bro come on. Also conveniently the prince grew back into his body all thanks to making the magical bullet. In the normal end, Jinnia decides to ship these 2 and so he sends Tifa to Zafora’s town so they can finally talk again. As usual she rips the work out of his hands so he can take a break again for once. I’m honestly kinda disappointed because I usually love tsundere routes but there just wasn’t enough direct funny scenes between the two of them. It was too focused on the overarching plot and then they kinda just shoved the romance at the very end because “by the way the route’s over.” I’m even further disappointed by the fact that Zafora was actually great in other people’s routes but sucked so bad in his own, like what happened here? The wind spirit Libera also was so funny and had so much personality and would have been great if she had showed up in this route like she’s supposed to….but instead we never even saw her until the final route of the game.

Pashalia – Pashalia is the emo water boy who’s got an incurable disease that makes his body deplete water at crazy high pace that he will die of dehydration before he hits 20. Fortunately he made some water fairy friends who didn’t want him to die and so one of them who he named PS Vita decides to merge herself with his body. However doing this will eventually cause her to die and Pashalia cannot be MEIWAKU to anyone so after the circus shenanigans ended, he decided he would break his countract with her and quietly go off and die somewhere. Unfortunately his symptoms kick in after one of their performances and the fairy takes over his body giving instructions on where to take him to revive him. So now his secret’s out and so the prince offers to use his magic powers to temporarily keep Pashalia alive and once they get the “core item” they will use it in the place of the prince’s magic. At first Pashalia is like

But everyone talks him out of it and he finally admits that he just wanted a life of adventure and didn’t wanna wither away into a dried out corpse after all. So now that we’ve all agreed that he’s gonna live, Tifa finally decides to confess her love to him ever since he kissed her on the cheek and lit a fire under her ass. But then the game decides to go backwards, have Pashalia reject her confession because once again ~she deserves someone better than him~. When they arrive in his town to do the whole thing with replacing the prince’s powers with the magic item, they suddenly summon the lord of all water fairies, Leve, who is like “yo I’ll hook you up with water for the rest of your life IF you can show me the twu wuv~”. But oh well how is he to do this when he basically just rejected Tifa!?

They both have these charms they buy as souveniers in town which basically reveal their inner emotions and it shows that both of them are still in love with each other. However, Pashalia then admits that with the magical item, his time will be frozen and he just cannot handle the idea of Tifa growing old, dying and leaving him all alone forever. Everyone tells him to stop being a whiny bitch and man up to his feelings, and Tifa tells him that everyone has a chance to lose someone eventually – it’s not like she could control her parents dying before she was even a teenager. Leve then makes a deal with the 2 of them, to prove their true love, she throws Tifa into the bottom of the sea and tells Pashalia he has like till the end of the day to find her. What does his true love have a GPS sensor? ಠ_ಠ If he finds her in time, she promises to cure his disease so he can live and age like a normal human with Tifa. Well turns out that charm of theirs was a GPS so they passed with flying colors – with the help of FRIENDSHIP MAGIC ENERGY from their friends of course.

Leve then comes out and does this underwater wedding ceremony for them giving them 2 free rings in the process – what a deal!! 💍 The entire town sees this event and it becomes a huge hit/tourist attraction for the town full of souvenirs and all. Pashalia makes another contract with Vita because she wants to travel the world and since he’s cured he will no longer be a threat to her existence.  At the very end, all her friends set up a surprise fairy wedding for her at the wish of Pashalia. The whole time Tifa thought it was some circus rehearsal until she gets on the wedding carriage in front of the entire town, including her aunty, with Pashalia. In the good end epilogue, Tifa and Pashalia return to her town and continue working at her aunt’s bed & breakfast. In the normal end, they make a play out of Pashalia and Tifa’s love story and involve audience participation to “find her”. At the end of the show some random dude hits on her and Pashalia is like dude really? Did you not just see the circus story. I liked Pashalia more in other routes (like when he was a wingman in Ion’s ) than in his own. I feel like he really only shined after getting with Tifa in the good end but before that he was just brooding sad frail bishounen ready to drop dead at any moment.

Ion – Ion is the quiet but strong guy who does the bulk of physical labor and performance for the team. The reason is because he used to be a slave forced to fight as a gladiator in a coliseum until he was the sole survivor and then was rescued by Jinnia. In order to hide his past – the tattoo on his right eye that symbolizes the fighters of the coliseum, he wears an eye patch. His parents died in an accident and when he went to Fells to look for work, he was kidnapped and sold as a slave. So needless to say, he’s done a lot of hard livin’ but despite that he continues to be a gentle bear to everyone despite looking “scary” to animals and children. Ion is also really good at cooking, much to everyone’s surprise. While in Oriens, Tifa has a wedding boquet fly at her and Ion catches it not realizing that it means that he and Tifa are “next to get married”. 🤣🤣 Anyway once the boku prince joins the party, Ion has to GTFO because apparently there’s some ring out there that can mind control him to do whatever the ring owner says. Somehow this DID NOT MATTER IN THE LAST 2 ROUTES BUT OK LET’S ROLL WITH IT. 🤣

Anyway they convince him to allow him to come with them anyway and then they find out the ring was sold an an underground auction to none other than Zafora’s evil uncle Balto. ಠ_ಠ They go directly to him offering a sum of money to sell them the ring and he plays dumb so the prince says that if he does not agree it will be the start of a war.  They decide to sneak into the castle to catch him red handed with the ring, but instead they run into him being killed by Luna, a random loli whose father was also a slave gladiator like Ion and who also got a tattoo to get the same “powers”. The owner of the ring is now Avi, a former fellow slave with Ion when they were children, and he refuses to hand the ring over. When Ion tries to grab it, Avi uses it to make Ion turn on his friends. Avi, being the current coliseum owner, is pissed that everyone stopped using the gladiator ring and forgotten about it so he wants to basically use the ring to revive it. Ion then attacks Tifa and starts strangling her until Jinnia uses water magic to save her. Avi commands Ion to follow him and the two of them escape as Ion manages to say “I’m sorry, goodbye” before disappearing. It’s also revealed that Luna basically does what Avi says because she was a homeless orphan and everyone just spat on her on the street until Avi adopted her and gave her “dinner and a warm bed”.

Anyway everyone sneaks in to the coliseum prison and go talk to Ion where Tifa also confesses her love for him and says that even if the ring “binds his body” it doesn’t bind his mind or feelings.  Ion then finally gives in and admits he loves her back but feels helpless as long as he has the cursed seal on his face. Fortunately they trick Avi by having him “fight” Villio and during the show Jinnia floods the arena with water, all the guests run out, and during the chaos they jump to steal the ring from Avi. In the meantime, Tifa runs and hugs Ion to snap him out of his fighting trance. Unfortunately despite having ONLY ONE JOB, Zafora and Radie fail to get the ring and get knocked away by Avi who mind controls Luna and tells Ion to kill everyone. Thanks to the POWER OF LOVE ™ Ion manages to fight the urge to kill thanks to his feelings for Tifa. Avi is still eternally buttmad though, so he starts fighting Ion again but gets his ass kicked.

The reason: Tifa tricked him into putting the seal on herself which weakened the ring’s magic because now its split between 3 people (herself, Luna and Ion). After everyone gets out of the arena, they spread the seal on all the other circus members to weaken its power (and I still don’t know why they didn’t just smash it – isn’t that the sensible thing?? Or is it unbreakable or something.) In the good end epilogue, Luna is given a second chance at life after being arrested and lives under the supervision of Tifa and her aunty. The other guys go back to their respective towns/go traveling. Ion takes a job as the prince’s bodyguard but when he has time he returns to stay at Tifa’s place. When Tifa starts talking about hanging out and visiting the other guys again he admits he’s jealous and furiously starts making out with her (which is what she wanted anyway 😂.) In the normal end, in order to stop himself from killing everyone, Ion asks the prince to freeze his heart so he basically becomes a puppet like the prince used to be.

Ralida (Radie) – Radie is Tifa’s pet carbuncle magical beast who’s lived with her since she was 6 and up until now never took on a human form but much to her surprise he’s an ikeman when he does. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)✨ At first she’s shocked but after that she can’t stop staring at how hot he is ლ(́◉◞౪◟◉‵ლ). Turns out he met Tifa’s family way before that and lived with them as her babysitter. Then one day her parents went off to do research, came back and basically died at their door step. When Radie tried to revive them it didn’t work and he used up so much magic powers he turned into a floofy carbuncle form. Tifa also became like a lifeless doll and suppressed her memory so in order for her to not remember the trauma, Radie changed his name from Ralida to Radie and continued to hide his “human” form from her until now. He came to Spirea’s house and asked to be by Tifa’s side even if only in his animal form – dancing every day for her so that she’d smile again. Unfortunately now Tifa’s fallen in love with him, and doesn’t want him to see their relationship as “parent and child” like he had assumed himself to be.

She finally confesses to him that she loves him but he tells her he cannot be with her because he’s not a “normal human” like she is and it would never work out. He asks that they go back to the way they used to be despite Tifa’s broken heart. She tries to get back to the way things were, but crushes don’t go away immediately so for now she decides to just secretly continue being in love with him on her own. After one of their shows, Radie drops out of the circus without telling anyone why. Alester then strolls in explaining that basically in order to grow more flowers for the flora they need a lot of earth-magic. Their core item Karitas Wand stopped working and the only one who can provide this much magic – is Ralida. So because he’s busy helping with the flora research he can no longer be in the circus. In addition to this, it’s suddenly revealed that Tifa’s supposedly dead parents are floating in a coma in a test tube at her town’s lab because they’ve got a “dragon curse” on them. Apparently they had visited the dragon island, and dragons don’t normally associate with humans – so those who visit the island without permission get cursed.

The curse would normally cause death, but thanks to Ralida’s magic, they were kept alive, though in a comatose state. So then they have Villio remove the dragon curse and Ralida removes his magic he set 10 years ago and her parents open their eyes. Everyone asks Ralida to then spill the beans on why he could use such powerful earth magic. Ralida then admits that he was a golem created by the great earth spirit Serius in his attempt to reach an understanding of the “human emotion”. After Serius finishes his experiments he tells Ralida to travel the world and learn more about humans, telling him he’s now free.  Also Serius split his powers half into the wand and half into Ralida’s forehead gem – so that’s why Ralida decides to now help out with the flora. Especially now he feels it’s fine to leave since Tifa has her parents back.  His last night at the circus, Tifa drags him into bed with her while he’s in his fluffy form. 🥺😭 That night after Tifa falls asleep, Ralida turns back into his human form, kisses her goodbye and returns to the lab. When everyone goes to see him the next morning, he suddenly has amnesia and doesn’t remember any of them.

The reason is because he moved all of his powers to the Karitas Wand and with that his memories and feelings.  It’s basically the equivalent of wiping your hard drive and he’s been reverted to the blank state when Serius first created him. It’s also revealed that the reason the parents went to the dragon island was to try to find a way to break Ralida’s “curse” of basically living forever and that there has to be a reason that Ralida was kept alive even after Serius’ death. This is why Ralida probably felt like he was responsible for being a foster parent for Tifa because he felt like her parents’ “death” was his fault. Everyone decides to try to restore Ralida’s emotions and the best way is to throw some magic his way since that was initially the trigger for his emotional learning. They have the prince give him a bit of magic but due to him having the powers of a great earth spirit, it’s not remotely enough. Instead they decide to try to get the magic just like with the prince – by doing their performances and collecting magic via the flora. He starts to gain his memories back but they have not fully connected to his emotions and he still continues to be mostly robotic with the occasional act of emotion where he says “his body moved on its own.”

His first smile is triggered by his memory of Tifa burning pancakes when she was little and burning them again now.  While she’s remaking them, he finally realizes the feelings he has had for her are not “paternal” but “romantic”. After the final circus performance he gets enough magic to finally restore all his memories and emotions. In the good end epilogue, Ralida’s love awakening speeds up his growth so he can grow and age with Tifa. After waiting months with no action, she takes matters into her own hands and kisses him and he finally admits he was “holding back” because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to controls his emotions if he finally confessed his love to her lol. (n*´ω`*n) Man Radie’s route was so good like even the other characters shined in this route, including even Tifa’s parents who were so funny. It really made me realize also how much of an impact the heroine has when she has thoughts/feelings which she had quite a lot of in this route compared to the others. It’s almost like I was playing a completely different game until I got to Radie and suddenly “ah yes this is why I enjoyed Variable Barricade and Wand of Fortune”. It makes me sad thinking about the fact that the other 3 routes could have been so good had they just given a bit more thought to fleshing them out along with making the heroine not vanish into the background. (´；д；`) In the normal end, Ralida never gets his emotions back or his past memories restored but Tifa tries to look at it in a positive way and tries to start a “new” relationship with him instead.

Vilio – Vilio is the derpy dragon boy, who is a rare dragon that actually leaves his island to hang out with humans (and join the circus lol.) When he first meets Tifa he literally falls from the sky crashing into her. The funniest part about Vilio is that he looks similar to Lagi from WOF, is also a dragon who likes niku though I guess the difference is Vilio is derpy while Lagi was a tsundere. He decides to leave the dragon island of Pasio because he is the one tasked with saving the world but he knows nothing about the world outside the island. A lot of the route is basically a rehash of plot parts from the other routes but with Vilio involved so it felt a bit repetitive since it was not skippable. During their journey between towns, Tifa catches Vilio in action defeating one of the monsters but on top of just defeating it, he also devours it in order to purify the evil. Unlike the other dragons he’s the “Master Dragon” so he’s the only one who is able to purify the evil. He asks her to keep it a secret and the only other person who knows is Jinnia. Tifa gives him a little obsidian necklace as a good luck charm and even though charms do nothing since he’s a dragon and can pretty much do anything himself, he is happy that he has her “thoughts” in it.

Most of the story is the same except in the Ion arc, Avi goes out of his mind and gets possessed by a monster and is killed by Vilio. They even wake up Tifa’s parents in this route as well. What Vilio wants to do is eat all the world’s monsters and then purify them all at once since it takes so long…but when he eats too many it makes him sick. His friends watch and tell him that they will help him out whether he likes it or not. (*’ω’*) It’s around this time that Tifa starts to realize that she has feelings for Vilio. Unfortunately things don’t go well and Vilio ends up eating the monsters faster than his body can purify the evil.  While Vilio is resting from all the purification, the other guys go to the other towns to get magic items to help him with the purification (and also resolve all their plot issues without Tifa lmao). Tifa then finds out the unfortunate fate of a Master Dragon – death. The previous dragon, Ragules gave up trying to keep up with the purification and just sealed himself away to his death. Vilio also reveals the government has kept monster info under wraps because if people knew how terrible they were, they’d get terrified which would create new monsters etc (like in Endwalker!) Tifa suggests that she become the “dragon’s bride” which would allow her to live longer and be there to support Vilio but Vilio refuses because he needs all the powers he has left to contain the evil..and also because the entire process needs both the dragon and the partner to be in love with each other – much to Tifa’s dismay.

She runs off to town to cool off but instead the town is in panic because a monster is loose at her parents’ lab. Unfortunately she gets hit by the evil from the monster and comes back to the tent spilling out all her negative feelings to Vilio. Those feelings include saying that everyone else can go die as long as Vilio lives, along with her love confession to him because she figures she’s gonna turn into a monster and die anyway. Vilio then apologizes in advance, kisses her and in order to save her, makes her the “dragon’s bride” by giving her some of his powers. She gets knocked out and wakes up on Vilio’s dragon island, Pacio. On there dragon village grandpa tells her that the reason she’s alive and became a dragon is because Vilio was in love with her – and had their feelings not been mutual she would have just died as a monster. So anyway in order to save Vilio from the same fate as Ragules, they head to the cave of regret convincing the great earth/fire/wind/water spirits to let them through. At the end of the cave remains a massive ball of magic left by Ragules that can instantly purify all the evil so that Vilio will not have to suffer the same fate. They also get to meet former King Artheir, distant relative of Colivus, the one who named the town after himself and a turbo ikeman. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)✨ He gives them access to the Ragules, and also returns Colivus back to his real age form (and since he’s a relative he also turns into a turbo ikeman 😂).

Finally they meet with the spirit of Ragules, who tells them this whole thing started when people stopped relying on fairy spirits and created their own “magic core items”.  It was too late to turn back the clock so that’s why Ragules decided to try to fix problems by purifying the evil created from all of this himself. After chatting it with him a bit they convince him to give them the powers and he gives them to Colivus since he’s Artheir’s relative. Anyway they grab the item, fly to Vilio, and he’s shocked that Tifa and Colivus just passed all the trials so easily.  Their plan is rather than to rid the world of all the evil feelings at once, but instead to use the magic item to release all the evil feelings he devoured within to save him.  Instead they will fill it with happiness – one circus performance at a time. Vilio rambles about “but muh mission” until Tifa is like alright spill the beans on your true feelings and he finally admits that he doesn’t want to die and has still so much he wants to do. (´;ω;`) Unfortunately he can no longer hold back the evil inside him and turns into a dragon out of control. Thanks to the great 4 spirits though, they hold Vilio back while Colivus creates a sword from all the magic items to cut and “release” all the evil out of him. Afterwards all the souls go flying out back to “where they belong” and meanwhile Vilio admits to Tifa that he was in love with her so much that he prioritized his “feelings” for her over his mission which pushed him over his limit. Because those feelings are “selfish” but he says he doesn’t regret it and they both kiss to a happy ever after. (´▽｀*)♥

In the epilogue, 1 year goes by, and Zafora who is the new labyrinth master decides to quit. His reasoning is that his town should belong to the people, not to one guy in charge of the spirit labyrinth. Pashalia in the meantime acts as a diplomat between water fairies and the townsfolk. Ion is handling the fights and problems of his town as the new captain, and Colivus now 18 has become the new king while his father is retired and rolling around doing nothing all day. 😂 Ralida continues the circus performances along with Phiro and Luna who has joined with some new members since everyone else is busy with their own lives now. All of them have received invitations and go to Vilio and Tifa’s circus themed wedding. 💒 In the normal end, Vilio follows the same fate as Ragules and Tifa ends up living alone in the dragon village telling young dragonlings the legendary tale. As I expected Vilio had the most put into his route, but because his route kinda did a “rehash” of the entire story (but this time with Vilio included)  it made the first 3 routes feel completely insignificant. On top of this, the way Tifa acted in this route is exactly the type of heroine I wanted her to be, it was perfect – and it was extremely not how she was acting in the first 2 routes of the game. It’s like almost like she was written by a completely different person and that was such a let down. I feel like the non-red heads deserved a lot better routes than what they got and you can definitely feel the bias in both Ralida and Vilio in comparison. I didn’t mind since I liked both of them, but if I was a fan of the other 3 I’d really be bummed about it. Anyway, Uchida Yuma’s voice acting is so good, I’ve loved his voice since Sweet Clown and with every game it just gets better. 🥰🥰

In the overall normal end, Tifa becomes Jinnia’s personal secretary and is constantly having to nag him to stop slacking off his job. JINNIA ROUTE WHEN!? (´；д；`)

When I was in the first 2 routes I was like “oh no, is this going to be another mediocre game” because they were really crappy but then once I got to Ion, Radie and Vilio things finally picked up.  The problem of course was that they forgot to write the heroine in those 2 routes and it made it really hard for me to get into the game when half the time I questioned whether or not she was actually in the scene. It was an even bigger disappointment because Zafora was the tsundere, my favorite type, and his route’s bad guy is more memorable than he is. 😂

However once we got into Ion, Tifa finally started coming out of her mobile-game-esque persona and actually feeling like she had some participation and feelings. Then you can tell they totally biased the game towards Radie and Vilio, the 2 red heads XD. I’m ok with this because I enjoyed their routes a lot and those 2 routes basically saved the game for me before I had completely dismissed it as “yet another mediocre otomate release.”

Is the story super amazing and compelling? Nah. It’s just a cute fairy-tale like game and there’s definitely a lot of “hey this reminds me of x” going on especially when I can make story references to things like Dumbo, the Lion King, Endwalker, Heavensward and Shadowbringers lol. I think seasoned otome gamers may find the story not all that compelling, so the real enjoyment of course comes from the character interactions and when the heroine is a floating camera it really makes the experience take a nosedive.  The story is also focusing on the whole “Circus” thing but in the end they only had 1 real circus performance. The rest felt more like a travelling stage troupe (aka FF9 lol) and it made me wonder what the point of the “Circus” even was? They could have just made them a travelling stage troupe to begin with 🤔. Another complaint I had was the loading times between choices when using the jump command were really slow. Some of their past games had things like bonus voices, seiyuu talk, character profiles, extra omake stories etc. but this one just had the standard gallery/bgm. Speaking of BGMs, it felt like they were ripped straight out of Wand of Fortune for some reason 😂.

One final thing I wanted to mention – this game has 2 famous Otomate artists: Kagero and Miko. Kagero did the designs for all the main characters but Miko did designs for all the side characters. So when you have a main and side character on screen it’s kinda jarring to see 2 completely different art styles. New players unfamiliar with Otomate titles may not think anything of this, but if you’ve played WOF/VariBari and Code Realize it sticks out pretty badly. 😂Here’s an example:

Despite the few drawbacks, I think the 3 routes were still good enough for me to say this game is worth playing. It’s definitely not one of Otomate’s blockbusters, but it’s a pretty light hearted otome game, without any massive angst or violence or anything else we’ve seen a lot of lately. I hope they consider a fandisk because the characters really shined in the end of their routes, especially the 2 routes that were mediocre to me got really great at the end. Also PLEASE I need a route for Jinnia and Liyan, I HAVE A GREAT NEED. 🥺🥺🥺🙏 Now that the game has been officially picked up for localization hopefully you can all enjoy it in 2023! Thanks to everyone who dropped by my Twitch stream during the play through!