Like usual, I'm going to review all of the routes, but at the end I'm going to make a final thoughts post, spoiler-free for those people who actually want to play the game. So, let's start discussing the game, shall we?
I'm having difficulties figuring out how to start this. Maybe I should start talking about how the game works?
PsychicEmotion6 is very easy to play, or it has been for me so far. There's a prologue/common route you have to read through, then you're allowed to pick which character you want to pursue. Yes, you don't have to use a walkthrough to get the boy you want. I believe there are about seven routes in total, but three of them are locked from the start. I'm not actually sure how you unlock them yet, because I literally just finished my first route, read the extra scenario and started writing this!
The game works the same as literally every other Otomate game, and there aren't any extra mini games or mechanics. There is full voice acting, of course. When I say full voice acting, I mean FULL voice acting. Literally every single button on the main menu triggers a voice. Like you'll click "load game" and one of the characters will be like "oh, you want to continue?" or something like that. This isn't the first game I've played that does this. You would think that this feature would get annoying after a while, but I actually don't mind it.
Speaking of voices, I love the opening theme tune! The autotune they use sounds really pretty. I think it's sung by the same lady who did the Code Realize themes. Also, the background music is alright. Some songs I swear I've heard in other games, but others actually sound nice.
I would like to give a shoutout to this super hilarious sound effect that I've heard in multiple Otomate games. It's usually used in fighting scenes, and it's just funny to me because it sounds like someone slapping a wet kipper about. It's used in this game, but not that often. Sorry, I just had to point it out because of how silly it sounds.
The artwork is a mixed bag for me. I really like the sprites, they look lovely, but the CGs and backgrounds range from decent to meh. To be honest though, I shouldn't be commenting on the CGs when I've only completed one route! But seriously though, some of them look a little bit odd. This game is one of those rare cases where I actually prefer the sprites to the actual proper illustrations. I'm impressed that the artist managed to draw three different outfits for each character. The colours and character designs are also super bright and there are stars everywhere! I'm not really sure whose design I like best yet, however.
I should probably start discussing the plot now. Keep in mind that this is all based on my subpar Japanese skills, so some of the events may be described incorrectly. I hardly actually study Japanese, to be honest. Literally the only way I learn stuff is through media now, because I really hate studying. I've spent so much time doing Genki and Anki and all that, but none of it ever sticks in my brain unless I hear it used in some kind of song or game or drama CD. Also, I have no reason to press on with it other than video games. I do love learning languages but I'm just super bad with motivation. Maybe I should just force myself to study it more.
Anyways, our story is about our lovely MC, Hikari Tsukishima. There's not really much to say about her, except that she's a very normal well behaved girl. Oh yeah, her parents are dead but I don't know why. If the game ever mentioned that, I probably never picked it up. A grandmother is mentioned, but I dunno where she went. Hikari lives in a house called Etoile. For some reason the game keeps using the word "pension" when talking about her home, and I have no idea what it means. I thought it was the name of her house at first, and I kept laughing because it's a very funny-sounding name.
Hikari has a cross-dressing friend called Kirara, who seems to have more common sense than her. I like him, and I want to see more of him. In Aoi's route he wasn't even there at all!
Here's a CG of the two friends. On the left is Kirara, and our heroine's on the right. This is actually a really pretty image.
So, the common route goes like this:
Kirara and Hikari are hanging out, and they decide to go out stargazing. The game also cuts to five of our love interests bantering about. They're in this spaceship, travelling to Earth. I suppose I'd better introduce them now. I had a lot of trouble remembering their names, mainly because they were in kanji. If you look at their last names, each one has a character that corresponds to what planet they're from.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, they're all princes.
We have the "main guy" and the game's resident ore-sama, Kazuteru Hinomiya. He's the only one who made the cover art with Hikari, which is sad. I like the art they used, but I just wish that all of the LIs were on it too. Kazuteru's from the fire planet, I believe. He's a bit cocky and can be a bit annoying to the other characters. The writers like to push him a lot.
Kazuteru has a tiger as a bodyguard. I chuckled when the name of this cat was revealed. You'll never guess what he called it - Lion! I don't know if that was supposed to be a joke or not, but it's funny to me for some reason.
The next love interest is Subaru, who seems to be the older, more intelligent one of the group. His way of speaking is a lot more difficult for me to understand. His last name literally reads "beautiful earth", so I'm guessing his planet has something to do with soil and earth? I really have no idea.
The shota of the group is Mizuki Kinjou. He has a pet robot called Catherine. I misinterpreted it as Karen at first. Mizuki is probably from some gold-related planet, I'm guessing. I really, really hope that he's not three years younger than Hikari or something. Anyway, his personality is just being really cute and loud. This could probably be quite annoying for some people.
Next we have Shina Kiya, who seems to be a bit of a tsundere? I don't really know that much about him yet, but I'm guessing his planet has something to do with plants and trees? I'm just excited for his route because he's voiced by Yuki Kaji.
Lastly, we have the lovely Aoi Minase. I was drawn to him from the start because he's exactly my type. He reminded me a lot of Subaru from DiaLovers, not just in looks. I'll go into him more in depth later on in this post.
There are two other love interests, but they weren't introduced along with these ones, so I'm not going to mention them yet. I'm not even entirely sure who one is, I think it's Kirara's brother but I don't know enough about him to write it here.
Anyways, let's get back to the plot. This post is already super long, isn't it? Oh dear. I hope that doesn't scare away potential readers.
So, when the five alien princes (who are just the same as humans, but with magical powers) are in their ship, this warning light comes on. I don't know if it just came on randomly or if one of them triggered it, but it was probably them because they were messing around during that time. This causes them to crash, right in front of Hikari and Kirara!
The two friends are in a bit of a shock, because they just saw some scary UFO. They're even more shocked when some bishounen exit the ship, and start approaching them. The reason why they decided to come to Earth (which I forgot to mention earlier) is because they need to find this girl who happens to be their princess. One of them has to marry her, and start something called the "Engage Ceremony". If she doesn't get married, then something will happen to the moon. I dunno why, but hopefully it'll be explained later.
So Kazuteru walks up to Hikari and is like "Yo, is your name Hikari Tsukishima?" and she's like "yeah" and the others are all like "You're just the girl we've been looking for!"
Wow, what a coincidence it is that they just happened to land in front of the right girl!
Hikari is curious as to how they know her name and all that, and I was too. I still don't know how they know her name. Apparently she has something inside of her called the "Starting power" or the "Beginning strength" or something? I don't know, either attempted translation could be correct. I don't know how or why she has this power. They probably explained all of that too.
But then tragedy strikes as they hear the cops coming. Luckily Mitsuki makes Catherine turn on "stealth mode", which hides their ship from sight. How convenient. It would've been funny if the police had taken them in and Hikari had to pay for them to get out.
After this, Hikari invites them over to her house for dinner or something. They apparently didn't make any plans to stay anywhere during their trip, so she makes the very silly decision to let five men she JUST MET stay in her house, for absolutely free! She must have a massive house if she can keep six people in it. Her reasoning behind letting them stay was something along the lines of "They seem to know who I am so they must be trustworthy people". They could be government spies or something! I know they have magical powers but that doesn't necessarily mean they're aliens. Nobody seems to acknowledge this decision as bad except Kirara, who is very skeptical of these strange bishies from the start. What makes this all even worse is that she doesn't charge them rent or anything. I know they probably have no money, but they could still at least do chores! But no, she still does all of the cooking and everything.
As soon as the living arrangements have been made, Kazuteru just decides that they have a party. In the common route they have about two parties, and one of them even has a CG. I hope Hikari didn't have to pay for the huge amount of food they ate.
The next day, the princes decide to pretend to be humans, and go to school with Hikari. The purpose behind this is to learn about Earth or something? I know they're all school-age teenagers, but they're space princes, do they really have to go to school? They could probably learn more about our planet by going out and having fun rather than staying inside a boring classroom all day. They're not even legal citizens of Japan, so I have no idea how the government let them attend anyway. Sorry, I'm looking way too deeply into this plot, aren't I?
Aoi is the only one who makes the very smart decision of staying at home, but the others attempt to convince him to go. If he was actually from Earth, I would say that he probably should go to school, but he's a prince from another planet. He can do what he wants, can't he? Writing this makes it seem like I really hate school, doesn't it? That's true, I've never enjoyed it that much, although primary school was great. There's nothing wrong with learning, but the teachers never made it very fun. Anyway, I should probably get back to the plot now.
At school they're treated as new transfer students, along with this other boy called Tsukasa. It turns out that Tsukasa is also a love interest. I thought that he was just going to be a very important side character. His personality would probably be very annoying in real life, because he's one of those flirty types. He attempts to seduce Hikari but Kazuteru tells him off, because he's protective of his potential future wife.
That evening, Tsukasa randomly shows up inside Etoile. That's a bit... creepy. He was listening in on everybody's conversations, so he now knows that they're all aliens. Oh dear. Tsukasa also complains about having nowhere to stay and begs Hikari to let him live in her house. This time she's actually unsure about this, but earlier she let the others stay immediately with no problem! But the others encourage her to let him in, even though they find him annoying. Why do they do this? Because they don't want their secret getting out, as they can't trust Tsukasa's promise to not tell. So Hikari lets another bishounen stay in her house. Wonderful.
After this, they throw another party, and some more stuff happens that I cannot remember, until it was time to choose a love interest. At this point, Aoi had really caught my eye, but I wanted to save him until last because he's the best one. I was planning on doing Mizuki first because his language seemed to be the easiest to understand, but in the end I couldn't choose. That is why I got some random name chooser to decide for me! It ended up picking Aoi. I always regret playing the best character first, because I always get sad when I see him in other routes afterwards. Still, I couldn't ignore the random name picker, so I just chose his route anyway.
I believe that Aoi's route has three endings, but I've only played one so far. I'll read the other ones later because they have CGs, but I doubt that I'll write about them. The best ending to get is the Marriage Ending (spelt as "Mariage Ending" in the game), which is what I got. It's really easy to make the right choices, because when you do the screen flashes with hearts and the words "SWEET LOVER MODE", whereas the other choices give you "JEALOUSY LOVER MODE". Usually the Sweet Lover choices are at the top of the list, well in Aoi's route they were.
The route has about ten chapters, which sounds like a lot, but they're really short. I read it all over a period of three days, but I don't know how many hours it took me to complete in total. I listened to all of the voice acting, so it's going to take me longer than someone who plays it without the sound. Originally I was wondering why I was progressing through it so slowly, but I'm used to localised games where I play in public without sound sometimes, so I end up reading them super quickly.
I thought that Aoi was going to be a tsundere for 90% of the route, but he's actually really sweet early on in the story. Hikari only got called a "baka" twice throughout the whole thing! Another thing I expected was a tragic backstory, but there was none of that. That's good though, because it's nice to have a break from all of that depressing plot-heavy otoge. Aoi was a great character, and I ended up liking him quite a lot. In fact, I'd probably date him in real life.
The plot of this route starts with Hikari trying to encourage Aoi to go to school. Really, she should just let him do what he wants, but our MC's a good girl who cares very deeply about education. I complain about this, but I suppose it's a good example for small kids, but then again, I don't think children will be playing this game in the first place.
Every single morning, Hikari knocks on Aoi's door and tries to get him to come out, attempting to encourage him to discover the wonders of learning. I thought that it was going to take forever for him to be convinced to come out, but it literally takes two days. I think he decides to go so she'll stop annoying him.
So they go to school together, and all the others are shocked that Aoi is actually out of his room for once. He has to share a textbook with Hikari, and there's a little CG of that. It turns out that Aoi actually sort of enjoys talking with the others in the classroom, and he decides to come back the next day.
I'm just going to warn you now that a lot of this route is just fluffy high school romance. I'll try to only talk about the most important bits that have relevance to the plot, but I've ended up describing them all in a very random order, so I'm sorry about that.
One day, Aoi and Hikari walk home from school or something, and some shady people approach them, basically asking for a fight. Of course, Aoi protects our heroine. He even uses his ice powers to do so. I swear that there's a scene like this in almost every otome I've played. Actually, there's two of these in Aoi's route. I think that Aoi was willing to absolutely destroy these two thugs, but because Hikari's a perfect good girl, she's like "No, please don't hurt them!!!"
Probably the funniest scene in the whole route is when Hikari goes in the bath, but Aoi walks in on her. He gets a bit angry because he wanted to use the bath. Then things get a lot more awkward when the others walk in, and they think something steamy's going on. Throughout the whole story, there are multiple scenes where Aoi and Hikari are about to have some kind of moment, but the others appear and ruin it all.
In around the second chapter, the school asks for volunteers to hang out with children in this place whose name contains a lot of kanji. I think it's an orphanage. Hikari makes Aoi go with her for some reason. It is then where we get a little bit of info on the water planet where Aoi lives. They did talk about it a lot throughout the route, but I couldn't understand much of what they were saying. On Aoi's planet, there are no parents, or women, I think he said. There was also one sentence I used Google Translate on, and I think it said that everybody on the planet is born artificially? Also, there are two sides to the planet. I thought Aoi was talking about its geography, discussing the different regions of the land, but later on I found out that there were actually two sides battling. There'll be more on that later.
So Hikari and Aoi go down to the orphanage to hang out with the children. These kids want to play what I thought was some Japanese playground game at first, but they're actually just role-playing as families. I think when I was in primary school we called this game "Mummies and Daddies" or just "Families". One of the kids wants to be a dog, and the other two want to be brother and sister. They make our two main characters be the parents.
Aoi, being from another planet, doesn't really understand what he's supposed to do, but they tell him that his job is to protect the family. I don't normally like scenes where the LI plays with children, but I'll admit that this was quite cute. The children keep asking if Hikari and Aoi are dating, which they quickly deny. One of them pushes them together and they almost accidentally kiss.
At first Aoi was a bit awkward and shy amongst the kids, but he actually begins to come out of his shell a little bit. I really thought he was going to turn out to be a hardcore tsundere, but he's actually more of a kuudere. Towards Hikari he acts so sweet, and isn't ever a douchebag. I'm so used to dealing with love interests who act mean towards their MCs, so it's quite refreshing to play a game filled with fluff and nice characters for once.
As well as volunteering to play with the children, Hikari and Aoi also help the other princes with their little host club cafe thing they do at the school fair. They all dress up in their original royal outfits and "escort" all of their classmates and serve them food and stuff. Aoi's not really interested in serving anybody, and Kazuteru and the others get a bit annoyed with him. In the end, however, he drags Hikari in and serves her, because she's the only girl he'll deal with. There's a CG here too.
Back at home, Hikari and Aoi do some more bonding in the kitchen. It turns out that our heroine is a good cook, and she teaches our love interest some of her skills. It is during this time when Aoi asks her to do something along the lines of teaching her what a real family is like. She tells him that families cook together and go shopping for food, so they go out to the market to buy vegetables.
The good thing about this route is that Aoi asks a lot of questions, so often Hikari will be explaining stuff to him. This is useful for Japanese learners like me, because sometimes I'll get a definition to something I don't understand. These cooking scenes especially had a lot of this in it.
Eventually, it's almost time for Christmas, which is great because I'm playing this game in the correct season. Hikari wants to do something for the kids in the orphanage, so they decide to do a play. I didn't actually understand that they were going to perform something until they started practicing. It's some kind of romance story, where Kazuteru and Hikari are two lovers. They have to say a lot of lovey-dovey stuff to each other, and this causes Aoi to get a little bit jealous. He's so jealous that he decides to hide in his room and not talk to anybody. For some reason he's angry at Hikari, even though she really did nothing wrong. Eventually, Kazuteru talks to Aoi and everything's alright again. Hikari then visits Aoi in his room and we get a CG where he pushes her onto the bed.
The play gets performed to the kiddies, and all is well. It's soon time for the New Year, and everybody goes out to some festival or something. Aoi and Hikari get separated from the group, so they just decide to go home. This is when he has a little chat with her. I think he wanted to discuss the "Engage Ceremony" and maybe confess his love, but he can't because Kazuteru barges in and shouts "I'M HOME!" or something really loudly. So Aoi promises that they'll continue the conversation later.
At this point, I was thinking "All of this slice of life fluffiness is great, but all of these boys are alien princes, so when's the fantasy stuff gonna happen?" I had no idea that soon, the plot was going to completely change into something so different...
After the New Year begins, Aoi gets a phone call from someone on his planet. Hikari listens in and hears that he has to go home immediately, and she gets super worried. So she sneaks up on him as he is about to take the spaceship and leave Earth. Wait a minute, is he even allowed to take that? I was under the impression that one of the other boys owned that ship!
Hikari accidentally falls inside the spaceship and ends up blasting off to space with Aoi. He's a bit annoyed, but he lets her stay with him and travel to his homeland. It is at this point that my excellent understanding of the plot stopped, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Aoi explains the situation of his planet, spitting out a lot of difficult kanji that I could not comprehend. I had literally no idea what he was saying, all I knew was that his home was split into two sides. They land in this awful frozen wasteland (no offense, but this planet looked like an absolutely horrible place to live) and they walk to this town. I thought that this water or ice planet or whatever would have some cool looking fantasy buildings, but they're just generic modern buildings we have on Earth.
Hikari is absolutely freezing, but Aoi does some magic spell or something to make her warm. We're then introduced to some spriteless characters. There's this one bloke whose name I can't remember, and this boy called Kai. I don't know much about Kai, but his voice actor sounded like he was trying really hard, so good for him.
I was understanding hardly anything in these final chapters, and my mind started to wander a bit. The fact that there weren't any CGs or many sprites didn't help. All I could gather was that there's some kind of war going on between these two factions for some reason. These last few chapters had a very different tone to the fluffy high school romance that occurred before!
Aoi tries to stop the war but his attempts fail. During this period, Hikari has to stay in his dark, isolated bedroom doing nothing. She's annoyed that she can't go out and help him, because I think she promised to be by his side forever or something. This causes her do to something so stupid, run outside in the middle of a dangerous battle just to be by her boyfriend! Why do otome MCs always do stuff like this? This intense fight is going on and she just runs in and shouts "Aoi! I know you wanted me to be safe inside but I love you so much that I'll risk our lives just to be with you!"
I'm pretty sure that Hikari gets hit or something too, but I don't really have any sympathy for her because it's her fault. Somehow her stupid decision actually saves the day and ends the war forever. Her "Beginning Power" awakes and melts all of the ice, uncovering some pretty flowers underneath. Everybody decides to stop fighting because of how pretty it is.
Now we come to the ending, where Hikari and Aoi get married. I was wondering how all of the other princes were feeling, since those two just ran off to space without telling anyone, but they seem to be alright. The final wedding CG is actually embedded in the ending credits, so if you skip them like I do sometimes, you'll miss it. With the CG you get some voice acting and some text that scrolls past too quickly for me to read it.
There's also an extra story, which is basically just a visual drama CD with a little bit of a skinship mechanic in it. The heroine has no dialogue in this, there's just an adorable CG of Aoi along with some lovely voice acting in it, as well as some kiss sounds. It might have used the dummy head mic, but I didn't use my headphones to check. There's not really any plot here, it's just pure fanservice.
So, what are my final thoughts on this route? I loved Aoi as a character so much and I had a lot of fun with this route, but the plot was a little bit meh, but it didn't have to be anything groundbreaking, it just needed to be some sweet fluffy romance, and that's what I got. I'm just used to games like Code Realize where there's so much dramatic plot-related stuff. With my games, I do like a bit of plot, but I prefer the plot to revolve around romance, instead of having some unrelated events with a little bit of love tacked on at the end.
The ending with the war did lose me a bit, but that's not the game's fault. If I could understand it better, then I probably would've had more fun with it. Actually, I wish that this route did have more fantasy stuff in it. Most of it was just regular slice of life nonsense, and a lot of the time I had forgotten that everybody was actually from space. However, this is the only route I've played so far, so the other ones might be different.
I wish that some of the CGs were in different parts of the route instead. I feel that the scenes on Aoi's planet needed one to show what was actually going on. The ones we did get were alright though, I suppose.
If you're wondering how easy this game is to understand for beginners, it's not that difficult. Most of it is simple slice of life stuff using fairly basic kanji, it's just the events on the other planets that might get a bit complicated. If you're skeptical about whether or not your Japanese skills can handle this title, just pick the game up anyway. Forget about the language levels and play the game. There are plot summaries online that can help you if you get too stuck.
I don't know whose route I'll to start next. Hopefully completing Aoi's has allowed me to unlock the other ones. I'm going to miss Aoi though. He was such a sweet character and he had such a lovely voice. It'll suck seeing him in the other routes, not caring about Hikari at all. That's what happens when you date the best characters first. I'm not sure who I want to play next, but my choices don't matter because I'm letting the random name picker decide!
This concludes my extremely long review. I'm very excited to start the next route!
See you all later! ♥
UPDATE: I am laughing so hard right now, because I just read someone else's review on this route, and it turns out that he wasn't from some random water planet like I thought, he was from Mercury! Now I feel really stupid!
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