Charade Maniacs - Nintendo Switch Game | Mystery Visual Novel Adventure | Perfect for Anime Fans & Story Lovers

Here are my overall ratings for the gameOverall rating: 6/10Art/Visuals: 10/10Romance: 4/10 (May change this one after playing more routes but for now if all routes are this short I have little hope)Heroine rating: 4/10 (I’m sorry but playing as this heroine was frustrating for me, she was so naive and indecisive. She also lacked any ability to make decisions for herself and depended on everyone else way too much it really just made me dislike her and made it hard to like the game)LI’s Rating: 7/10 (The LI’s are all very diverse and have intriguing personalities. They all made up for what the heroine didn’t have ~Personality~)Plot: 8/10~Keep reading for a more detailed review~I was so excited for this game when I first saw it. Seriously super excited about the 9 love interests, but sure enough it seems they chose quantity over quality. I have only played one route so far and it was okay, but superrr short.First I’ll start with what is good about this game. This game has stunning visuals, the art style is great and yes the characters’ mouths move when they speak and they also blink. I fell in love with the art and I can’t praise it enough. The overall plot is very intriguing and I will definitely play through the rest of the routes soon just to find out the truth behind the mystery. If this was a plain mystery game and not categorized as an Otome game it would be awesome.Now on to the cons of this game. At first the premise of this game offering 9 LI’s is super exciting and seems amazing. Until you find out that each route is only about 2 chapters long or 1 depending on how you look at it, there are no chapter numbers in the game for the characters but there is a quick chapter screen that appears when you first get on the route and midway through if I recall splitting it. And worse yet either than like three of the characters actually have more than one ending… there’s no bad endings so any choices made during the character’s routes don’t really mean anything and that’s sort of what doesn’t make sense to me as the setting that shows when you raise a character’s affection only appears in their route when it doesn’t really even matter as no matter what choices you make you’ll still get the same result in the end with some varied dialogue immediately after the choice.Now if that wasn’t bad enough the common route takes up almost the whole game. It is SEVEN chapters long and you have zero idea who you have the highest affection with or anything as the setting meant to show you when you raise a character’s affection doesn’t appear at all (~update~ for some reason the love catch setting shows up in the cooking team route but didn’t seem to work in the cleaning team for me, possibly a bug since I did choose all the different options for most the choices in that route to try to trigger the love catch, not sure what’s going on there.) in those 7 chapters. I first ended up on a route I didn’t even see how I ended up in it as I never even really talked to the character much during the common route, and when I reloaded on the last choice before ending up on their route I chose the different option that ended up putting me on the route I wanted and actually played through. So somehow ONE choice made all the difference and none of the previous choices made seemed to affect which route I ended up on. Only the choice which you decide which team you will be in and the very last one before branching off to the character’s route seemed to matter.Overall I still enjoyed the game but had I read reviews/walkthroughs prior to playing I would’ve waited and bought it on sale. I found out way too late that there was literally one end to all the routes except three, found this out after completing my first route as I was confused by how short it had been and thought maybe it was the normal ending not the best one. But that was not the case it literally is one ending for all the characters except three. I also wish that during the scenes when you’re playing in the dramas would let you make decisions yourself and if you make the wrong choice it should lead to a dead end in the game. I genuinely thought this game would have that dangerous atmosphere of Collar X Malice where one wrong choice lead to a game over however that isn’t the case because your bland heroine in this game is always bailed out by the 9 LI’s. I really wish that the heroine had more presence and wasn’t just being tossed around without any spine.If you’re still here, I wouldn’t recommend this game at full price, wait for a sale. I will say that if you are new to Otome games then this might be a good starter game as you don’t run the risk of a bad ending so it is worry free gameplay for the most part. The overall plot is amazing and honestly I will play though the whole game just to find out the truth, but as far as the romance part goes it fell flat and the routes were beyond short and I didn’t feel like I bonded at all with the characters like you usually do with other games.