Today's route belongs to Kiya Shina, the prince of Jupiter. Shina just happens to share the same birthday as me, and he's voiced by Yuki Kaji, one of my favourite voice actors. After playing Mizuki's route, it made me less excited to start this one, but I'm glad to say that I was pleasantly surprised by it. In fact, it might actually be my favourite route so far. There's actually a bit of angst and tragic backstory here in this route, which I always enjoy because I like my otoge to be dramatic and sad.
I was sitting through the route expecting Shina to turn out to be a secret yandere, but that never happened. The closest thing we get to that is him telling Hikari to stay inside and not to leave once, but she doesn't even listen to him anyway. His personality is that he likes reading and playing the violin. In fact, his magical space prince power is music, I think. At first, he doesn't act very warm to the other love interests. He says that they shouldn't be friendly to each other, because they're all rivals trying to get Hikari's hand in marriage. We didn't get any of this in the prologue or the other routes, where he seems to act fairly friendly towards everybody.
The plot of the route follows the PsychicEmotion6 Formula that I wrote down in my last review, but it did have some interesting things going on. We got to properly see Kirara's brother, who is actually a locked love interest. I can't even remember his name, all I know is that he works in the cafe that Hikari always goes to and seems to be quite friendly with her.
During the high school slice-of-life portion of the route, Shina joins the school orchestra because he's good at music and stuff. For the school fair they perform, but this causes him to get a flashback of his tragic backstory, so he runs off and decides to quit. It doesn't take Hikari long to convince him to rejoin the orchestra, however.
Shina's tragic backstory I didn't really understand much of, but I think that what happened was when he was a child, he played his violin for some ritual or something, but it caused something to be destroyed and that made him think his music was bad luck or whatever. I think his parents also hate him for this, so that's sad. The game kept using this word "Lumiere" whenever talking about his planet, and I thought it was a terrorist group or something, but after reading someone else's review, they're fairies.
After performing the Christmas play for the children, Shina runs off somewhere and Hikari follows him, of course. This is where we get a really cute confession scene, which is probably my favourite part of the game so far. Even though I couldn't understand it all, I could still feel the emotion in the voice acting, and it was all quite beautiful. Maybe the lack of comprehension of the Japanese made it better, I don't know.
In general, I think the romance was lovely in this route, but that might just be because I really like Shina as a character. If I could choose the canon love interest for this game, I think I would probably pick him.
Like the last three routes, in the final chapters Hikari always goes with her love interest to their home planet. This happens much later in Shina's route, they only go to Jupiter in the final chapter. Shina tries to go alone, but Hikari runs and begs him to let her come, because she wants to be by his side.
The problem that forces them to go is those Lumiere fairies. I really didn't understand much of what was going on, so there's not really much I can say about it. Of course, Hikari's power saves the day at the end, like always. This random woman called Dame or Damn or whatever comes up and says some stuff too.
Every single planet that Hikari's gone to in this game seems to look so similar to Earth. The princes are basically just super-powered humans too instead of aliens like they really would be. I don't really know what the other people on these planets look like (they don't have sprites), but I'm guessing that they look like regular humans too. The princes could just be making themselves look human to fit in on Earth, and the artist just didn't bother making sprites for their true forms, or their planets could just be colonies of Earth, so they aren't actually a different species at all. I think I'm looking into this game too much!
In conclusion, I liked this route a lot. My current ranking of all the routes so far, from favourite to least favourite, is: Shina > Kazuteru > Aoi > Mizuki . My ranking of each character so far, from favourite to least favourite, is: Aoi > Shina > Mizuki = Kazuteru .
The next route I have to play is Subaru's, which will then unlock the final two. I hope that these ones will have a lot more backstory in them and not follow the PsychicEmotion6 Formula. I really want to know why Hikari is supposedly the Moon Princess and why she holds these magic plot device powers. Even though I self-insert onto her, I still want to know what her backstory is. How did her parents die? Why does her grandmother let her live alone? Do the princes pay Hikari rent, or are they just freeloaders? There are so many questions I want answered!
I forgot to mention that I also bought a PsychicEmotion6 drama CD. I saw it on Amazon for an ABSOLUTE STEAL of a price (I dunno why I capitalised those words), so I simply couldn't resist buying it with my Swagbucks money. In fact, I paid for this entire game with Swagbucks. It just shows that some of these free gift card sites actually do work. Hopefully the drama CD doesn't just repeat all of the stuff from the game, but I got it for free and it'll probably be good anyway, so who cares.
This concludes my review for today. I think I'll have completed this game in about a week, but it depends. Some days I don't really feel like playing too much, because I'm too tired or whatever. I only finished this route so quickly because I had a day off yesterday.
I'll see you all in the next review then. Have a nice day/night!
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