East Tower - Akio

I was really disappointed with this visual novel. In my opinion, the story was somewhat flat and predictable, though it had its funny moments. For example, the carrot incident, which is immediately cut off by the game over. Speaking of which, the game gives you little to no freedom and forces you to take on the role of a character you know nothing about and guess what they're into. Sure, these choices are made fairly obvious by adhering to some humble hero standard, but doesn't that just make it less exciting? And if you make the wrong choice, you are sent to the beginning of the stage (which makes sense since you are in a game, but is still annoying as crap). Also, the art was actually painful to look at. There were few instances where I saw any of the characters as attractive, and it was really only the princess. I had my doubts about this VN to begin with, but seeing all the praise it was receiving as well as it being one of the few visual novels in the app store, I decided to buy it. After playing the VNs "Scar of the Doll" and "Moe Cure Net" for both a dollar each, I may have had high expectations from more expensive novels. "Kira*Kira" and "Tears 9, 10" were able to satisfy, but this just didn't seem well worth the price to me. Sorry. 3/5 Would not recommend. (I tried to format this review for easy reading.)

Okay, I'll be honest; after I played through the game once, I set it down and forgot about it for three months. Today, I found it again in the very back of all my iPhone's pages of apps. I remembered how the game had appealed to me the first time, so I clicked it and started playing from the very beginning, the prologue. Oh boy. Sucked into the storyline immediately, I read and read until I was finished. I enjoyed the fairly hard choices to make each stage-- they were much harder than most otome game's choices. Akio was utterly adorable, and may I mention that his voice acting was perfect? His adult version was sexy and his child version was adorable. The voices were great. I will admit I was a bit taken back by the artwork sometimes. There were many occasions where the characters just looked plain weird. Still, the characters and plotline are well worth it. I found myself less bothered by the art by the fifth chapter than I could have imagined. Excellent story. Can't wait for the new ones.

Before you dismiss the price tag, this game is fully voiced on top of a good selection of BGM. The story is also wholly worth it... it's a bit unconventional by most otome game standards, but rather unique and engaging. Honestly, I was a bit iffy on the art (sometimes the characters come off looking a bit derpy to me) at first but the storyline sealed the deal for me and after a while, the art didn't bother me as much as it did when I was playing the Lite version. However, this isn't your typical fluff so if you're looking for a lot of lovey-dovey type actions and such, you probably won't get much out of it. The length of this game is pretty average at seven chapters (plus the epilogues), given that the story continues with the other characters. I won't bother to go into the storyline, but I liked the approach to the story and the options you're given throughout. The options given were actually much more challenging for me than most other otome games so I really liked that aspect. If you choose the best answers you'll receive an epilogue after every chapter you achieve an "S" rank, which is vital if you're looking for the romance in all this! I am looking forward for the other character routes and to see how the plot progresses. :)