Rough year for EN Otome releases.
Looking forward to finally playing Collar x Malice Unlimited soon at least.
How in the hell are they going to make Shiraishi work. How.
So I'll vent a bit about mobile (pseudo-)otome gacha games I am currently obsessed with instead.
A3!
https://twitter.com/MankaiCompanyEN
The EN version is trucking along, every new event adds new story beats and interactions (and cute/sexy boy cards), I am very happy with this one and made it my main game. There's an event upcoming where they make a theatre play based on some nonsense Yakuza honor story, and I AM LIVING FOR IT. Saved up 2.000 gems to pull the card of my best boy in a gaudy mafia suit. Perfection. (The theme song gives me chills too.)
The JP version recently started adding a new story "act" - the Acts normally add four new chapters, last time they added a new act was 2 years ago, so it's a pretty substantial update. With the new story line they are also adding new characters, although it seems that they will not be added as actually "playable" character cards and will only appear in the story beats? (My info is from fan translations and looking at memes, so I do not claim any accuracy here.)
Here's the intro with pics of the new guys (the old summer troupe leader is voiced by Daisuke Ono, which is, of course, amazing).
I super enjoy A3! and all my money goes into this franchise at the moment - haven't spend anything on the mobile game, but bought a ton of merch.
Obey Me!
https://twitter.com/ObeyMeOfficial1
I recently picked up Obey Me! since the game has gotten huge. Like, I don't even understand why, but it's huge. Huge on Twitter. Huge on Tumblr. Huge enough to have it's own pinned thread for questions on the game in the "otomegames" subreddit.
The game is bad though. The gameplay is bad, and there is 0 gameplay reason to roll in the gacha except that some cards give extra event points, so you can get the event card. However, there is 0 reason to go for any specific cards since your bog standard starter team can steamroll anything once you fully upgrade them, and since the card art is so inconsistent and off, there's also no reason to go for them for the art. The stories that come with the cards are short and bland. And what's worse, you can't unlock some of the stories unless you randomly own some of the normal cards from the giant pool of normal cards. I have over 500 cards and still a third of my stories aren't unlocked because I still miss some.
The voice acting is... okay I guess, but some of it is bad. The story is pretty entertaining, but throwaway. I'll keep this installed to collect ingame currency and roll when I'm bored. New story chapters also give you something to read for a day or two.
I have literally no idea whatsoever why this is as popular as it is.
I got some sweet outfits for Satan though with cat ears... yay?
Ayakashi: Romance Reborn
https://twitter.com/AyakashiRR
This is actually the closest to an actual Otome game out of the ones I play. It has romantic routes and VERY good voice acting (ONLY fully voiced the tutorial chapters and for voice lines on the main screen though). No choices, just story. Unfortunately it seems dead. There's a few people playing the events for their respective best boy, but it's really hard to find anyone talking about it. They only released about half the available routes so far, and they are just now celebrating their first anniversary - I hope they get to the last story before this closes down, where all the boys I'm interested in are featured.
I'm playing this one the side since I have some best boys in there, and one of them (Oji) should finally have his route released next.
The gameplay is a lot like A3! where you just do your dailys to get ressources to upgrade cards and then find optimal team combinations for specific event sets to score as many points as possible.
The card art on some of the cards is pretty bad, and the card stories are bland, however the main story and the routes are actually good.
You can ignore the gacha and just play it a bit daily to get story keys from levelups and the login bonus.
More people should check this one out.
Mr. Love: Queen's Choice
https://twitter.com/MrLoveMobile
I think we talked about MLQC in this thread before. They are releasing new story chapters soon, and in endgame this app is very casual for me now. You rarely have to do anything once you got 6 or so SSRs upgraded a few times, except maybe have the phone run all night for City Stroll (which is the absolute hottest ass feature I have ever seen in a game, literally just "put phone on auto-pilot for 20 fvcking hours a week"). Events are almost always exclusively about spending the ingame currency you hoarded on grinding some random event currency for cards. Since the game is more or less following the Asian releases, it's easy enough to keep an eye out for upcoming events and save up for the cards/side stories/dates you want.
The game is based on a Chinese game called "Love and Producer" which garnered a lot of attention after fans bought a huge advertisement space on a skyscraper in Shenzhen to wish one of the boys a happy birthday in 2018.
Devotion!
It's become a bit of a thing for the fans of each of the 4 boys to try to trump each other on the respective birthday, feel free to google the nonsense.
The game is also pretty popular in Japan and Korea and released the EN version (with the above bad name) last year in March.
You can jump into the game, but unlocking all chapters takes some dedication to work on your cards/team and to gather a lot of resources for that.
I played daily and reached max level after around 100 days. It's not an easy feat.
There are 4 main boys, you can opt to have the Japanese voices or English voices - they actually paid for proper voice actors (if anyone wants some Joe-Zieja-aka-Claude-from-Fire-Emblem-ASMR, get on this game), however the translation quality of the text is... questionable.
It doesn't help that the story delves into a very confusing plot of superpowers and time line shifting. I won't lie, I read the last few chapters scratching my head as to what even is going on, thanks to both stuff just going off the deep end AND the translation literally making no sense at the same time.
The gameplay is pretty basic, mostly grinding resources to upgrade your cards. You get frequent free pulls and can get useful SSR cards by grinding specific modes, so if you stick with it, you'll eventually get to a competitive space as a free to play too.
Just beware that some of the cards are straight up for purchase. "Spend 20$ to get this card."
Either way, I'm still excited for the new chapters and nice new cards. Some of the dates you unlock with the cards make me all warm and fuzzy inside. Stuff ranges from "you and your childhood friend go shopping at Ikea" to "some flimsy excuse to dress up in wedding gowns, whatever, then you kiss on a merry-go-round, who cares". Meanwhile, the main story is angst central.
(That's a nice love interest you have. How about we make him stab you with a knife. In multiple time lines. You get to kill him too a few times, why not.)
If you're interested in Love and Producer / Mr. Love but can't be arsed to deal with gacha nonsense, the anime will supposedly start airing in July under the Japanese name of the app "Evol x Love":
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Not like anyone I know cares.
Oh, I'm still waiting for Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 4 by the way. It has to come one day. Right?