#ellie plays psychedelica terribly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

isuzukuretsuki · 6 years

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Welp I finished Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk and my biggest comment is that this game has more plot holes than swiss cheese.

*insert more shifty eye uncomfortable emojis*

What was...... that convoluted mess of a game I just played? Like this is reaching Zero Escape level of plot holes and “wow the writer clearly has no idea what the hell they are doing”. I don’t even know where I’m gonna start breaking down the amount of issues. Lots of spoilers beneath.

My favourite order is prob Levi > Elric > Lugus > Hugh > Eiar > Aria > Tee > Lord > Olgar > Lawrence >>>> Lavan >>>>>>>>>> Francisca

For starters, this felt like less of an otome game and more of a gang bang 5p fuck pile orgy. Seriously. One moment, Eiar is making out with Lavan, the next moment, Eiar is dreaming of sleeping with Lugus and wakes up panicking because “oh no! I think I’m in love with Lugus!”. If the romance is “the heroine being passed among all the guys”, I’d rather there be no romance at all. It felt more like a fucking badly written reverse harem anime than an otome. I had this problem with PBB but boy it was not this level of bad.

None of the characters really develop, none of the relationships really develop. Let’s not even get started on the fact that 2/4 of your love interests are your adopted brothers who are actually your blood cousins. At first I enjoyed Lugus’s enchantment with Eiar but it doesn’t develop beyond that. Why is Lugus even in love with Eiar? His feelings never felt like anything beyond captivation, and the same applied for Eiar. Why is Lavan in love with Eiar? Because he’s some gross nii-chan lusty pervert who’s in love with his adopted sister??? IDK.

The only one who genuinely felt like he loved Eiar was Levi, and even Levi’s character was butchered with the whole “yeah I’m a serial killer who enjoys inflicting pain onto other people”. Even if you blame it on the ~magical stone~, the revelation was like a slap in the face and it was so disconnected w everything we knew of Levi. The writers clearly didn’t know if they wanted to write him as a character who’s sadistic and ruthless, or if they wanted to write him as a character who was manipulated by his mother into becoming her assassin through abuse + gaslighting. The writers aimed for both, and failed miserably at both.

Speaking of Francisca, the fact that Francisca is an evil bitch is literally NEVER brought up lol???? Like when Levi admits that Francisca was using him as an assassin, Eiar and Lavan are shocked but.......... that’s it. Especially in Levi’s ending, the fact that there’s never a hint of acknowledgement that Francisca was abusing him is jarring to say the least. There’s never any real discussion of how Eiar and the Wolf brothers feel about Francisca after they find out what she did to Aria and Olgar. Like wow we just found out our mom is a piece of shit, let us NEVER DISCUSS THIS or have ANY heart to heart talk about this EVER. Because that will give our characters perfect closure! The fact that Eiar never returns to her real name, the name given to her by her mother, also kind of bothers me.

Francisca’s character was honestly butchered along with Levi after everything she did to Aria was revealed. "That evil slut is taking away all the men in my life!” is not a good enough motive to burn a completely innocent woman to death, sorry. Her love for her sons felt shallow and her love for Eiar felt like she was just trying to show up Aria. I can’t find any redeemable thing about her and her character just ended up being at to the bottom of the barrel along with Rika and Mejojo. The only emotion I got out of the whole dumpster fire between the parents was “wow Aria deserved so much fucking better”.

Now lets get started with all the fucking plot holes this game has.

For starters, if the whole town is actually Psychedelica and everyone lost their memories, it makes no sense for Francisca to be the only one who remembers killing Aria, and there’s never any indication to confirm whether or not Francisca is actually aware the fact that everyone is in Psychedelica.

Speaking of Aria, that scene where Aria is shown to be slumbering in the abyss and stops the kids from completing the Kaleido Via makes no sense either. For starters, why is Aria even in the abyss? She died in the real world, so her soul should have moved onto the afterlife, or she should have been trapped in the Psychedelica town too. Actually, the fact that she isn’t trapped makes no sense. Olgar activated the Kaleido Via with a desire to see Aria again (similar to Hikage with Usagi), so it makes no sense for Aria’s soul to not be drawn to the town if the town was created through Aprus and Olgar’s collective desires.

I don’t really understand why tf Aria would want to stop the kids from completing the Kaleido Via when that’s literally the only method to free the souls of the town so they continue into the afterlife? It’d make sense for Aria to stop them if their souls would go into the abyss, but again, it’s explicitly stated that your soul will only end up in the abyss if you die in Psychedelica. And again, the fact that Aria is supposedly in the abyss makes no sense in the first place. The scene with the kids and the kaleido via was so out of place it was ridiculous. How do you not remember a scene where a shard flew into your friend’s eye and caused her to bleed everywhere?

Moving on, it’s literally never explained what the hell is up with Eiar’s red eye. It can be assumed that Eiar inherited it from Aria who really was a witch, but then that doesn’t explain why only one of Eiar’s eyes glow red and not both.

MOVING ON, who the fuck is Hugh and literally what is his damn role in the story. Like I looove character types like him bc and I’m a huge sucker for “mysterious observer characters who act as the story’s narrator” not to mention he’s beautiful but Hugh’s origins and role remains wishy washy from start to end and his character ends up being a plot device to give 30 minute info dumps on the plot. Like, he’s the dumb dead bird that lived with Ashen Witch (whom I assume is Aria’s mother), and after he’s killed by Aprus, Ashen Witch... releases his... soul? So he becomes... a mindless traveler traveling between the different Psychedelica worlds...? I guess??? It’s implied that Hugh is the one who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope but again, how or why he did so is never explained either. I also dunno wtf is up with his ending where Eiar just magically turns into a butterfly and whooshes away with Hugh.

I still have no idea what was with that scene where he chats with Aria about the stories in the Links ending, and I definitely don’t know what was with that scene where Aria talks with Eiar and decides to name her non born child off of her (who is the same Eiar). Like what?? are dreams and timelines converging or something??? No clue.

Also. What the fuck is the deal with Lawrence and Elric??? THAT’S NEVER EXPLAINED? Like yes, I know that much that they’re Kagiha and Hikage respectively but literally wtf is Kagiha and Hikage doing in Aprus/Olgar’s Psychedelica. Lawrence clearly retains his memories as Kagiha, but Hikage never does and it’s like ??? why?? Also why is Usagi in a form of a rabbit in this world? WHO KNOWS. I was just so tired of this game that by the time I was half way done all the endings I just wanted it to be over already.

No joke, I seriously thought that PAA took place in the real world where Hikage was born and raised because of the medieval/historical setting and we’d learn more about the lore of the manor and the kaleidoscope. Honestly though, I wish it was because it prob would have made this game a million times better. If the game was split between a “wolves” and “hawks” path like BWS, it probably would have fixed some of the problems with the terrible romance.

The one good thing I will say about this game is that it’s the first otome game localization from Aksys I’ve played that didn’t give me a migraine because of no proof readers. There were some issues with wrong tenses being used but other than that it wasn't littered with typos like literally EVERY OTHER otome they’ve localized so far lmao.

Presentation wise, this game is beautiful. The sprite work is beautiful and the cgs are amazing. I loved the character designs for all the guys like A++ pretty boys. Unfortunately, the OST really lacked in comparison to PBB this time around. This game had so much potential but everything just fell apart the further and further you go and that’s what makes it even more disappointing. It’s setting and premise were a million times more interesting than PBB. Like medieval setting? Check. Feud between two clans with the heroine caught in between? Check. It had everything I loved and I was confident I was going to love it but the execution was just so terribad that I don’t love it. I can’t love it. I do love all the characters sans Lavan and Francisca though and I think they all deserved better. They deserved better writing. They deserved better development. I wish I could just rework this entire game from the ground up because that’s how frustrated I am with it lmao.

TLDR; I am very very disappointed with this game and it’s such a shame because I loved Black Butterfly to bits and pieces but this game ended up being a convoluted mess of bad and inconsistent writing. PBB had a rather weak premise with an uninteresting and incredibly cliche “all childhood friends in love w the heroine and there’s ~tragedy~!”. However, it had a very interesting and well written lore and universe while simultaneously being clean and easy to understand so it didn’t make any unnecessary loop holes for itself. PAA was the complete opposite. I enjoyed the connections this game made to the first game, but that was pretty much it.

anyway wow that was long, this is the first time I’ve played a game where all I can do is go on a tangent about all the problems I’ve had with it. Hopefully other people enjoyed this game more than I did HAHA.

#ellie plays psychedelica terribly #ellie plays

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