Genre: 18+ Adult Visual Novel RPG
Developer: Littlewitch
Publisher: JASTUSA
Release Date: Dec 20, 2014
Littlewitch Romanesque is an Adult Visual Novel Developed by Littlewitch and produced by JASTUSA. This is the “Editio Perfecta” (perfect edition) of the game, which includes all additional game scenarios from the game’s fandisc, plus one all-new game route created for this edition. The character you play as is Domino, who is the youngest Mage to ever obtain the rank of Archmage. Domino’s raise to Archmage has caused him some troubles, however; being young and vocal, he has angered the other Archmages, and has been given the task of retaking the Dark Tower. This tower is an Archmage tower from the Age of Towers, when Archmages warred amongst themselves. The Dark Tower is one of ten remaining Towers, and has stood empty for a thousand years.
Outside of retaking the Dark Tower, Domino is also Tasked with two young apprentices, Aria and Kaya, who are also the worst students in the academy. Beyond that, he only has 3 years to make them full Mages, which is far faster than the norm. As the story progresses, various beautiful woman arrive at the tower and join Domino, helping in a variety of ways.
The game’s options menu is actually quite extensive for this style game. It has volume sliders for the background music, the sound effects, the system sounds and for the voices. It also has a voice details section where you can adjust the voice volumes of every character in the game individually. You can change the speed of the game by altering the message speed, action speeds and how long the game waits between. The graphics section of the settings allows you choose your screen mode and to set the effects to low or high. The settings even allow you to toggle full skips for scenes you have seen, auto skip so you can avoid clicking the skip button, and gives several options for the voiceover as well. There are also advanced settings that allow you to modify the base fps, window transparency, allows you to hide various aspects of the User Interface under specific conditions, choose when the game asks for confirmations, and a variety of other useful options such as disabling hints (nice after first playthrough).
The gameplay comes from teaching lessons. In a lesson, you start by selecting your teacher and classroom, these effect the faces of two of the three dice rolled for each day of the lesson. The faces of the dice represent Spirit, the main source of a Mage’s power, it does not go into depth as to what each face really represents, but these fonts of power are what is needed to learn and cast spells. The spells can trigger in lessons to create effects that impact the amount of Spirit gained in a lesson, and also are needed to progress through the other section of gameplay: quests. Quests are given by various NPCs in the game, and you have your apprentices complete them to unlock more slots for Spirit, happiness (or love) for the NPCs, and also other things for the tower. Each quest has a time limit, and if you fail to complete it within that time, it is gone for the rest of the playthrough.
The entire game is built around time management. You have three years to make your apprentices full Mages, and at the end of each year your friends, who are highly ranked academy Mages, come to test the girls. If they fail the test, it is a game over. During the tests, and during the lessons, you have two ways to affect the outcome of the week. The first that is introduced is bumping the dice, basically you can cheat for your apprentices and influence their die rolls, however if you do it too much it reduces the amount of Spirit gained. The second is to select a spell they have learned for them to cast, as with bumping, abuse of this will negatively impact their Spirit growth.
As I said this is an adult game. The adult scenes are long, with 3 or 4 static images, and dialog from the characters. You unlock them a variety of ways dependent on each character. While the images are static, there is enough in the audio to make the scenes fairly stimulating, and I know my wife, kytten, definitely enjoyed me playing this game for its benefits to her. Outside of these scenes, the game comes with a variety of extra stories that offer more interactions between Domino and the girls, without any gameplay to get in the way; most of these are quite well told and enjoyable.
The game does offer a new game plus of sorts, and features to help speed such a playthrough. You can choose to have the spells you learned in your last playthrough to be available in lessons, allowing you to greatly accelerate Spirit gain, and thus story-line progression of spell learning. This allows you to complete more quests and get deeper into the story each time through. It also has an option to ‘skip’ (which is more of a very fast forward through) story arcs you have already completed. Outside of this, there is also a gallery that allows you to see both how much of the story you have uncovered, and allows you to look back on the images the game has shown you already.
The game is fully voice acted in Japanese only, and the voice acting is excellent. The art, while static, is beautiful. The soundtrack is amazing it is very calm and relaxing. The story is excellent, and would be worth playing through even if it were not an adult game.
The game is $39.99 JASTUSA or $40.00 Nutaku (though it is currently on sale for $28), and has a great deal of replay value. So far in my visual novel experience, this has been my favorite.
Selthor gives Littlewitch Romanesque a Drastik Measure of 9.5 out of 10 (95).
Pros:
- great story
- great art
- great voice acting
- great sound track
Cons:
- could use one or two more images in the adult scenes considering their length
