I didn't think you were rude. I'm honestly, genuinely interested in your reasons for thinking this feels like an otome to you. Could you please tell me why think that? I'm really curious.
@Gorl
I think Sunscoop already explained this on their first post. According to them, there was a "monk-boy" and a "snake-boy" that apparently got "gender-swapped", hence why they thought this was an otome.
Now, I don't know if this was before the Kickstarter, if they simply mistook this game for another or if they simply saw early sketches/designs and though they were male-looking when they were actual women. This is a Yuri game and from the looks it has been since the beginning... so maybe there was a big misunderstanding here.
Otomes are VNs whose central figurine is a woman pursuing or being pursued by several romantic options, sometimes exclusively male, sometimes mixed. But more often than not its usually male ROs. Since this here is a Yuri game, I don't think calling it an Otome is correct IMO. So yeah, probably Sunscoop misunderstood.
(hi, I'm geck/the editor!) as someone who plays mostly otoge and BLge, mizuchi has been an interesting learning experience in the demographic differences, haha- you'd think otoge and yurige would have a lot of overlap, but the things I've come to expect from otoge are.. pretty different? the simplest- and most significant- of which is probably protagonist agency. with otoge, the devs, generally correctly, think the player wants to be swept away from their boring normal lives by handsome guy(s), and it's /that/ sort of fantasy- with yurige, it seems to be more ex/implicitly about empowerment; this is a pretty consistent theme with media 'for and by LGBT+'. romance VNs across the board are escapism, but it's a different flavor of it for each main group.
(fwiw, BLge tends to be this weird in-the-middle mix of the swept off one's feet effect but with the protag in intense denial the entire time until they finally surrender to their intensifying (often considered in-universe as horrifying) gay desires. it's one of the things that are most telling that it's a genre not really by or for gay men.
that got kinda longwinded. oops😅)