This game has a lot of life and passion in it, but it turns out to not be a whole standalone game and instead related to something called Saint Spell. It seems perfect for people of that community, which happens to be closed now. This does mean that some of the enjoyment that I could've had if I were part of that community is definitely lost, as I'm very sure that this is meant to be a sort of love letter to it. However I still want to rate it for what it is.

First things first, the art is really pretty, and there is a HUGE ensemble of characters, all with their own stories to tell. Wow, I was shocked when I saw just how many there were. I think that each is someone's OC and they wrote their respective characters' stories, and this is what tipped me over to this game being a sort of love letter just brimming with passion.

However, the gameplay was a bit of a letdown. I was hoping for something that let you get fully into the role of a character and be able to roleplay a personality and life of your own, carving your own path at Saint Spell. But the way the game is does not meaningfully track what you spend your time on despite setting you up for something along those lines. It doesn't matter what classes you take nor what you do in your free time; except to spend more time with the character you choose to pursue. While one could bring up that there is a stat system, it is very barebones and ends up as something you need to raise in order to meet certain thresholds, rather than something that actually adds personality to your character. You often aren't given too many options for dialogue, either, so essentially you're a blank slate. The fact that there's a ton of different characters with different writers (at least I presume so), also leads to the person you play as feeling inconsistently written. 

Since the game doesn't quite care so much about the character you play as, there's far more importance placed around the whole dating sim aspect of the game. But I really do feel that it is far too strict. Both in the dialogue options you can choose for some characters in order to succeed their route, and in the difficulty in having to just try and figure out all of their events. It ended up being a little too stifling to just try and 'be yourself', if you get what I'm saying. You have to just sometimes pick (or not pick) very specific dialogue and obsess over them, and it felt a whole lot more like trying to crack a code and/or try to optimize a schedule with them and it really feels like you need to use a guide when all is done and said. And when you do that or have to do multiple replays, you lose some of the 'magic' that makes stuff like this special. 

Regardless of the issues I ranted on about above, it is an interesting cast and the world seems quite interesting from the small splice I got of it. The passion bleeds through so while I certainly can't give it a five star rating, I will not give it any lower than four stars either.