They kind of fused Rosalia, various mean girls and bullies, and other rich girls from older manga (like from Aim for the Ace or Oniisama e or Glass Mask, who were sometimes bullies, sometimes rivals, sometimes role models and allies). Threw in the aesthetics of The Rose of Versailles and misc European nobility too. I think it’s strange it presents itself as a parody of something that doesn’t quite exist, but people really like those stories! I could be missing out, but I’m usually too focused on history to check out a lot of new things.
A lot of those games are on my backlog, but I have to get through all Ruby Party games first. Just doing that will knock out a lot of those, but there’s other interesting games I’m excited for too. For example, Dear My Sun!! is a game where you have to raise twins while romancing men. Princess Debut is a rhythm otome that made it overseas, and I feel I missed out by not playing it when it was new. Back then the games I played were up to my parents’ whims at the store, but now the gaming world is my oyster…
I don’t mind! I like to talk a lot about the things I like, and have barely anything to say on anything else.
I want to write a blog post somewhere when I’m finished with Angelique about it, so I’ve been thinking about where I first heard about it. But I really don’t remember. I can guess and say that after I played my first otome game in 2020, Hakuoki, I likely read about the subgenre and found out about Angelique that way, because that would be such a me thing to do. If someone asked how I found out about Hakuoki I would have no clue at all*, as I didn’t know it had an anime or anything. Anyways, I know I had the game on hand for literal years. The first time I tried to play it the Japanese was too hard and I didn’t make it past the opening tutorial. Same the second time. For some reason in May of this year I was compelled to try one more time… and after powering through the wordy tutorial, it was pretty easy to understand! Studying pays off! And as you can see, I’ve basically gone through the entire series in half a year because the first game was that intriguing. I hesitate to say “good” because if it was good enough to make me play the rest of the games so quickly someone might think it was amazing, but it wasn’t. It just felt like it had the makings of something that COULD be amazing. And I was correct; after a few tries they made a games that were ALMOST. ALMOST 10/10s. Nothing’s perfect, so I’m not upset or anything. I’m very happy with the time I spent! _
Between obsessively playing my games where I balance the affects of 9~18 emotionally unstable men, I would be on VNDB looking through the otome tag. Otome and RPG, Otome and SRPG, Otome and Sim, Otome and Map Movement, lots of things in hopes of finding more. And I looked at Ruby Party’s list of games too, plus other games by other studios I found that I liked or thought sounded interesting… My backlog is huge. I’m eager to play them all, but I do wonder if I’m going to lose touch with the broader gaming community 😭 Oh well!
*Now that I’m thinking really hard about it, I think Steam recommended Hakuoki to me because I had played games with romance/dating in them and visual novels. I bought it nigh-instantly because Hijikata looked like my type, I like history, and I think anything with swords must be cool.
And to answer a question from earlier… I played Angelique (1994, SNES) and all PS1 games on my 3DS, the DS game on my DSi, and all other games on PS2 or Vita PC emulators. The Switch game will be played on my Switch.