Review of Cinderella Phenomenon
| Subject | Cinderella Phenomenon Cinderella Phenomenon |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 7swordfish96 on 2024-10-01 |
| Review | This has pretty decent production values and is ~15 hours which is pretty impressive for a free VN. The general character writing is good. Lucette is a very well realized protagonist with a lot of internal monologues which helps the reader get into her head and demonstrates her personality and development. She starts out a pretty abrasive and cynical person as a result of severe emotional abuse in her backstory and eventually learns to be a kinder and braver person. I’ve probably not played enough Otome to get used to the cliches yet but the Love Interest's weren’t half bad either feeling like fairly novel personalities. Each LI having a curse means that they’ll usually have interesting backstories and development over the course of the story. However, the overall plot is generally fairly thin, The first half of each route consists of both Lucette and her LI getting to know each other and develop, and the second half is about confronting the villain; the first half is generally enjoyable focusing more on the characters than the plot but the second half suffers a lot from the fact that pretty much all the villains are 1 dimensional characters with pretty banal evil schemes making for a very elementary plot. The setting background is interesting with the discrimination against witches and literal witch hunt followed by the witches striking back, with the fairies as a third party but it’s never really explored as more than an excuse for the villains to be evil. In general the plot is a pretty basic morally unambiguous one; girl learns goodness, triumphs over evil, gets the guy and the simplicity of it is reminiscent of a fairy tale which I guess was the goal, but at the same time this simplicity makes the plot uninteresting. Perhaps that’s the peril of going for an ambitious setting. No ones going to notice if you don’t bother detailing a high school setting or the intricacies of a banal plot but with a novel setting and high stakes plot, it’s more noticeable and disappointing when you skimp on the details. What I found memorable about each of the routes: * Karma’s route had a nice subplot with the side characters. Had a spectacularly stupid instance of poor communication at the end though. * Rod’s route is amusing if only for the double tsundere romance. * Rumpel’s route makes for a pretty interesting contrasting couple with Rumpel’s excessive alturism even if the romance wasn’t that inspiring. * Fritz’s route barely even features the character in question and features a twist that was blatantly obvious before even starting the route. * Waltz’s route actually has a mildly interesting plot unlike the others and the romance feels more earnest than the other routes. Route Rankings: Waltz>Rod=Rumpel>Karma>Fritz Overall I suppose I’d describe it as competent with a good protagonist and decent love interests but a disappointing story. |
| 0 points |