Charade maniacs is an otome visual novel for the Nintendo Switch set in the 22nd century. The story is about a group of people who must find the traitor amongst them or they will all perish. It is an interesting mix of ideas with some similarity to Daganronpa and Skip Beat. The dramas are how you try to survive by acting them out so as to avoid getting killed by the traitor. In the game, the “producer” is the term for the traitor for the dramas you act in. The novel is long and took some time to complete and there was a decent amount of replay value.
You would think that it would be pretty high stakes and something along the lines of what Spike Chunsoft has made for Danganronpa and the Nonary games but it was so low risk that I almost even forgot it was a survival game. The story like had some interesting plot points but never really goes too deep so it just felt like there was more questions than answers leaving you dissatisfied. The more you play the more of the story is revealed.
The artstyle and the music of the game were very good and the user interface was nice as well. Its interaction is mainly through choices you make and there is a flow chart so that you can see what options you have. The characters were ok for the most part. The main lead Hyori was kind of a ditz being more clumsy than helpful. She was also quite gullible so she was a poor choice as the main protagonist. Something I've noticed with Idea Factory is that the translation in the few Otomes I have played all suffer from poor quality and awkward dialogue.
Overall, it was a decent game.
It gets 3 out of 5 stars.
I really like the idea of Idea Factory and Akys bringing other otome games outside of what is typically brought to translation but we’re not going to be seeing more of this, if they keep up with the poor quality translations because thats only going to do more harm than good in the long term.
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