I'm on my third Yuel/Tavi VN! The boys are back, in a story with choices. Which low-key terrified me due to my notoriously poor play skills. Yet, for the first time ever, I got the happy ending on the first try??? Whoa!!! Every time there was a choice, I asked myself, "What would THaTH!Tavi do? and this mentality did not steer me wrong.

All Scars and Starlight is a second spin off AU from All Ashes and Illusions and the final entry in the All trilogy. This time Tavi succeeded in his rebellion, deposed Yuel, and hid his cousin away in the Middle Eastern fantasy version of the cold palace (or like a Gothic spouse in an attic, if that's your genre du jour). While All Idleness and Ephemera was a pleasant standalone read, All Scars and Starlight pretty much requires playing or looking up a plot summary of All Ashes and Illusions. Otherwise you'll spend a majority of the story going "Yuel did WHAT?" hahaha

Being a longer game with branching paths, All Scars and Starlight has more plot and goes more in depth with the setting than its immediate predecessor. It's in this review that I'll admit what held me back from devouring Yuel/Tavi stories before. Basically, Middle Eastern fantasy settings have burned me before with their racism and Islamophobia. To ebi-hime's credit, while some elements are based on Richard Burton's fantastically incorrect opinons, her characters are visibly of color and any direct indictment of Islam is swept away with Yuel and Tavi's polytheism. There's not zero cognitive dissonance--Tavi's third wave feminism regarding sex workers clashes harshly with an advisor referring to women as baby-making property--but I squirmed much less.

Onto the yaoi. This game is some top quality yaoi. As other reviewers noted, the art style makes painfully clear how vulnerable and young Tavi and Yuel are. The soundtrack contains familiar and new bangers. Narrative-wise, All Scars and Starlight is a reckoning of Yuel's character, an exorcism of his twisted insides that can cost Tavi his.  It feels like a bridge between Yuel's rapist yandere origins and his grumpy depressed boi self in happier settings. He is condemned to living, to redemption, and to be loved. I very much enjoyed Tavi's POV. In other games, Tavi appears to Yuel like a mind-boggling miracle lover. The new lover resembles his cousin, but is almost a new person with his charm and maturity, a being from on high. With the spotlight on Tavi, we see that he is beautifully, viscerally human from head to toes. Tavi wants to care for his loved ones, but he and his loved ones live in a world that refuses to foster caring. Even as the king, Tavi has limited ability to heal what, and who, has been broken. Having so much power yet being unable to help is a special kind of experience. Such rich, fertile loam could have been dug into deeper, and I'm hoping ebi-hime returns to the topic in a later Tavi-centric VN.

All Scars and Starlight is a character study laced with sexy times wrapped in a political drama, and I ate it up. I highly, highly recommend the play to people who enjoyed All Ashes and Illusions and fans who want meatier, but still romance-centric, BL with extreme enemies to lovers.