A lot of frustration with random crashes, settings being reset, and just overall really shitty dice rolls. Enemies crit me constantly and I've landed 2 crits in the last 2 hours. One of those crits was the killing blow on the very last enemy in a 6+ enemy fight, so worthless. I fail most skill checks (even using party members that get +2-4 as a bonus) or I'll get 10 on a DC of 10. A bunch of the NPC's are really dumb. Astarion is a twat, Gale needs magic items when I only had one. Laezel I missed somehow and now she's gone until maybe I'll meet up with her again? In BG2 I had magic missile and Minsc. How hard is it to make the game fun? Oh my god the inventory management is painful. You pick up so many items that you just don't know what to do with. Oh great, 2 huge stashes in camp. Because that's not going to be a nightmare and a huge waste of time when I'm 20 hours in and they're full of random jank that I still won't know if it's okay to sell or not.
I think if you're the kind of person to regularly read Visual Novels, especially Japanese Visual Novels, then this review probably isn't for you. Japanese stories are notorious for being poorly written with incredibly shallow main characters and The Expression Amrilato fits right in. This VN is atrocious. The characters are extremely typical Japanese characters, ones you'd find in any anime or light novel/web novel. The Main Character is borderline paranoid schizophrenic having anxiety attacks over issues she herself creates. The romance character, Ruka, is some 14 year old lives-on-her-own Mary Sue caricature of a real person. She's an idea made flesh and is as deep as a cardboard cut-out. The writing is inconsistent. Sometimes it feels like I'm reading a real story, but most of the time it's classic Japanese formula-writing at it's finest. "And here is where the MC freaks out because she has to believe she's utterly incapable of any rational thought, which of course leads to her not even attempting any rational thought. Let's have the next 10 minutes of reading be about her self-induced paranoid anxiety attack." "Here is where the MC has her hand grabbed by the romantic interest. Time to once again go down the schizophrenic rabbit-hole and let the reader be force-fed her delusional inner ramblings that are neither relevant nor interesting." Make absolutely no mistake. If you want to buy this game for the novel aspect I would strongly recommend otherwise. This story is awful. I bought this not having much expectation for the story (and it met that in stunning predictability) but wanting to see how a game would teach Esperanto and I have to say: it's doing that pretty well so far. The lessons are fun, Ruka's voice actor is pleasant to listen to, and while I've dabbled in Eo over the years this is serving as a good consolidation point of resources that I'm using to finally break into the threshold known as 'fluency'. Story: do not buy. Esperanto: maybe worth it
