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Sunday, 22 March 2020

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk - A Review

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk just so happens to be the sequel to my all time favourite otome game, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. That first game was very different and probably less romance filled than most other otoge, but it still managed to grab me. I didn't review it properly on this blog (I basically just made a bunch of random posts about as I played), but I really wish I could've.

I had heard a few things about the sequel that put me off a bit, so that's why it's taken me almost a year to actually pick it up. The reason why it took me three weeks to finish this actually quite short game I'll tell you about further down below.

Since the Psychedelica games don't have traditional otome routes, I decided to just make one massive review post on Ashen Hawk instead of multiple smaller ones. There is a lot for me to talk about, so please be warned: this post is going to be very long and I'll probably ramble on a bit too much. Also, there are going to be plenty of spoilers for both games in the series, so read at your own risk!




Where do I start with this game? Maybe I'll begin by talking about the main technological stuff.


The interface of Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk is very much the same as Black Butterfly's. All of the buttons and all that are similar, but with different colours. The art is done by the same artist, and it really is some of the prettiest art I've seen in an otome game. The CGs aren't just boring ones of two characters in a romantic position, they're actually drawn to be interesting and colourful. Sorry, I'm not very good at describing art. I feel like the art might have improved since the last game, but that might be because the last time I picked up Black Butterfly was a couple of months ago so I can't remember it as well.

The sprites are all beautiful too. They don't have the moving mouth feature that a lot of Otomate's other games have, but I think that would just ruin them a bit. Each sprite has many varied positions and facial expressions, and they don't just stay in one spot for ages, they move around the screen. What surprised me is that the artist put the effort in to give all of the usually spriteless background characters designs too! The townspeople (I'll go more into that later) play a big part in the game, so it's nice that we don't have to deal with an empty screen whenever they're present. The heroine also has a sprite, but I turned it off to allow my self insert Mary Sue to take over. 

I absolutely love the background music they composed, it was super pretty sounding. If I could, I would definitely order the soundtrack. The opening theme was stunning, but for some reason it only played once during the prologue, instead of every time I booted up the game. I liked the ending theme too, probably even more than Black Butterfly's one that I still listen to often. 

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk also has the flowchart system. I don't know why some people don't like it, I think it's a great way of keeping track of every ending. It also eliminates having to skip through the common route every time you want to unlock a different route. 

Like the last game, the short episodes are also here. But instead of having to unlock them through a mini game like Black Butterfly had, you have to gain points by talking to random villagers and characters. This doesn't sound that bad on paper, but trust me, after a while, it turns into an absolute slog. There are so many you have to talk to that it just turns into a slog. Ninety percent of the time, the villagers don't even say anything useful, they basically just repeat the same nonsense but in a different way. It made me feel like a news reporter going around town attempting to interview people. Chatting to the main characters wasn't that bad, but I really don't care about what "Townswoman" or "Hawk Vigilante" has to say about the current plot situation! This is the main reason why it took me forever to finish this game, I was just getting bored of all of the villager interviewing that I couldn't play for more than half an hour without wanting to do something else.


In the last game, I didn't really mind the short episodes, but the ones in this game were starting to grate on me after a while. It's not that they were boring or anything, it's just that I wanted to actually get on with reading the plot! I personally think that they should've just ditched the villager chatting and tried to incorporate the short episodes into the common route somehow. Or they could've just kept the short episodes and forced the players to play a mini game to unlock them like Black Butterfly did. Oh well, at least they tried to do something different for once. 

After a while, the short stories and villager conversations were just causing me to lose interest in everything. I was starting to dread picking up the game, even though I had no problem with the plot or anything. But once you've gotten through all of that nonsense, things start to get better.

The plot of Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk follows our heroine, Jed, who lives in this town (that has no name for some reason) where there are these two ruling clans who hate each other: the Hawks and the Wolves. I didn't mind this story that much, but the main thing that really interested me was the backstory behind Jed's parents and the other characters. I'm not going to go too deeply into the plot, because this isn't a summary post. It is interesting, but I feel that Black Butterfly's plot was slightly better. The two fighting clans thing has been done so often now that it never really appeals to me that much.

Jed was raised by this woman called Francisca who you think is going to be one of those nice mother figure characters, but it turns out that she's actually a nasty piece of work. Our heroine was born with this magic witch eye, so Francisca's genius solution was to make Jed pretend to be a man all her life. This means that literally everybody in the town thinks she's a boy for a majority of the game. However, there are parts where she acts as a girl to get information out of people.

I think Jed's a rather unique heroine for an otome game. She had quite a strong character that made it hard for me to self insert at times, which can be a good or bad thing depending on what you like. Unlike a lot of heroines, she was quite strong willed and not a pathetic damsel in distress. I loved the scene where she got the whole town to get along by kicking their butts in a drinking contest, she was really cool there. The only thing she did that annoyed me was when she used this poor girl to get something, which resulted in her getting stabbed. At least the CG the scene came with was pretty. Personally, I prefer the less characterised heroines because I'm a self insert player, but I still appreciate her.


Jed's tragic backstory was one of the most interesting things in the whole game for me. I honestly wanted to see more scenes with Aria and Olgar, they seemed like a cute couple. During Aria's death scene, the game used this baby crying sound effect (because Jed had just been born), it sounded like some kind of animal screaming and I couldn't take things seriously. It also kept repeating like the music in one of those old Flash games, it was annoying so I had to turn the sound effects off.

When Jed found out that Olgar was actually her dad, she didn't seem to pay much attention to that fact. I know she was literally just about to kill him not long before that, but I just really wanted them to at least spend some time together. You don't even get to find out what happens to Olgar in any of the endings except the one where he kills himself. At least he got an after story where he gets to be happy with Aria in the afterlife.

The other characters were all quite interesting, but some of them I wished had gotten a bit more development. If they had gotten normal routes instead of just shorter endings, perhaps that wish could've become true. I suppose I'll go over them each in order, as well as their endings.

First, we'll start off with the two Wolf brothers Jed grew up with: Lavan and Levi. I'm pretty sure they're actually her cousins by blood, but nobody bothered to point that out. Each brother got an ending each, as well as the "Wolf Brothers" ending which was so weird. They basically just murdered the whole town for Jed's sake, then suddenly the credits rolled. I'm not gonna lie, I actually found it sort of hilarious because of how odd it all was.



Levi I liked. His romance with Jed was nice. It was cute that he loved her because of who she was, not because of her gender or anything. When he just decided to stab Jed out of nowhere, I was like "OH MY GOD, IS HE A VAMPIRE?" but nope, he's just a bit messed up. After he was revealed to be the town's murderer, Lavan and Jed were just like "ok then" and just treated him like normal. His ending was more on the sadder side. I'm pretty sure that after the final CG they just sat there and died in the cold. I suppose he couldn't have gotten a happy ending, since he was a criminal after all. 



Lavan was nice, I suppose. His character type doesn't really interest me. He was basically just a decent, normal guy for most of the game. At one point he just pinned Jed to the ground (in a "romantic" way), which was so random and out of character. I wished that his ending was longer, because I wanted to see a bit more focus on his relationship with Ashen Hawk. It did get a bit of development, but not really that much. They also just completely forgot about Levi and the fact that he had murdered loads of people. I suppose you can't really do much in just a short ending. The final scene in his route in the church was lovely though, I certainly did enjoy that.



Lavan and Levi's dad, Ashen Hawk, was also a big part of the game. At the start of the story, you don't know who he is, so I thought he was going to be a love interest for Jed. He did seem to act like he was attracted to her sometimes, or maybe he was just trying to be friendly? Then Jed has this funny dream, and it made me think that Ashen Hawk was actually her real father. I was waiting for them to reveal it and prove my theory right, but nope, I was wrong. His ending was excellent though. I played it in my bed in the dark and it felt so cozy. It's one of those endings where they just run away from everything and live forever in isolation, my favourite type of bad ending. It reminded me a bit of Karasuba's ending from Black Butterfly, actually. I suppose this one could've been perceived as a bit of a yandere end, but I didn't think that at the time. In the end, Ashen Hawk became one of my favourite characters. His backstory was pretty angsty and I felt sorry for him at times. 



The next love interest was this character who pops up about halfway through the story, Hugh. He managed to get himself two endings with Jed. I loved Hugh so much, to be honest. I think one part suggested that he maybe could've been related to Ashen Hawk, but it wasn't expanded on. I know for a fact that he was part of the Wolves, but then he went to live with this witch lady who I thought may have been Jed's grandmother or something? His past is quite a mystery, to be honest. Apparently Hugh travels to many different worlds, so I think that means he can travel through to different Psychedelicas? He seemed to know exactly what happened in the last game, so I don't know how he found that out unless he was there or he got it from someone else. Perhaps he was in the background of the last game spying on Beniyuri and the others? 

Sometimes I got the impression that Hugh was almost talking to the player, or breaking the fourth wall. He seemed to talk a lot about making choices and even interrupted the game to tell the player to open the "Notes" section (which basically just contains more short stories). He was a very interesting character, I would've liked to have learnt more about him.

His first ending was where he basically rescues Jed from her wrongful imprisonment, he turns her into a butterfly, and they run away to visit other worlds. It was cute, I suppose. His other ending unlocks after you complete everything else. In this one, Jed forgets about everything and runs off to work in a tavern. It's there where she meets Hugh, who goes by the name of Jed in this one. It plays out a lot like a normal otome route. After it ends, you find out that the whole route was a lie, it was just some random story Hugh wrote in the past. That's why the main story and other characters were completely forgotten about and why Jed acted a bit different in this one. She was quite happy wearing feminine clothes and being a girl in this ending, whereas everywhere else she's not too thrilled about the idea.

Hugh's endings were decent, I suppose. They certainly were less angsty than I expected them to be.



For some reason, Kagiha/Natsu, Hikage and Usagi from Black Butterfly were in this game. It's never really explained why they're there, but I think when the last game ended they got transported over to this other Psychedelica, Jed's unnamed hometown. Natsu's the same as before but with longer hair, but Usagi's a literal rabbit, and Hikage's now a little blonde child. I have no idea why. Hikage seems to not remember anything about the past game, but Natsu certainly remembers. 

They were helpful to Jed at times, but other than that, you could've swapped them for different characters and it wouldn't have mattered. Really, I think they were only there to tie it all back to the last game so that it counted as a sequel and not just a spin off. I actually thought at the very beginning that they were going to give them an ending, but nope, they got nothing. 



The final love interest, my favourite one, was the poster boy of the game, Lugus. On the Japanese cover art there's an image of him and Jed, but it's not on the English localisation's box. Perhaps Aksys thought it was too girly, and that's why they changed it to just Jed standing there. 

Lugus was such a sweetheart, I absolutely adored him. He got plenty of romantic scenes with Jed, which was great. His first ending was depressing, so depressing that it didn't even get a CG. Olgar committed suicide to save Jed, and she was just taken to live in hiding in the Hawk mansion forever, only allowed to come out during the yearly masquerade. 

His proper ending was the game's True Ending, I believe. Basically, there are these magical stones that are sort of like the One Ring in how they make people go crazy. There's this other magical thing which is I think the kaleidoscope in the first game, where by completing it, you get to go back to the real world. Each magical stone belongs to a major character, and Jed has one... in her eye. That sounds extremely painful. Jed tells Lugus to kill her and use her eye, as well as all the other stones, to complete the kaleidoscope. After killing our heroine, Lugus then kills himself with the same sword. It's sort of a bit like Romeo and Juliet, I suppose. Then the other characters use the stones to complete the kaleidoscope, and their Psychedelica ends for good. 

Then the epilogue happens, and this one was really exciting for me. Why, you ask? Because Jed conveniently reincarnates into a Japanese high school student who just so happens to be friends with Beniyu- I mean Ai. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see Kazuya, Takuya or Aki, but we did get to see Hikage and Natsu reincarnated. I have no idea which Black Butterfly ending it's supposed to be set after, I'm guessing it's the True Ending or whatever it's called.


They still won't show us what Hikage's eyes look like...

Then Ai and Jed go to school, and guess who we run into? A reincarnated version of Lugus! Oh yeah, Hugh is also just there in the background. This epilogue was probably the closest thing we'll get to an after story for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, and I loved it. 



Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk, while it started out slow and a bit boring, it turned into such a great game. It certainly wasn't perfect, and I wish that some of the characters could've had a bit more development, as well as that some more dialogue choices, but I did love this game in the end. I don't think it's as good as the first game, but that's alright. At least it turned out to be a worthy sequel. 

Apparently (this may not actually be true, sorry) the artist for this series left Otomate, so that's crushed my hopes of getting a third game anytime soon. I sort've always wanted some after stories for some of Black Butterfly's endings, but I suppose the whole point of some of those tragic endings is that what happens next is left up to your imagination.

I found out that this game is on Steam now, so out of curiosity I clicked on its store page. In the screenshots section there's a CG that I absolutely do not remember getting at all, and I completed the game's gallery. It's this picture of Jed with long hair and a skirt. I am 100% certain that wasn't in my version of the game. Either the PC version has extra content, or it's just a promotional screenshot that isn't actually part of the finished product. Or maybe my memory just fails me and it was in the Vita version. (I really can't be bothered to check if it's actually there)

This ends my review. I'm glad that my backlog only has one game left in it now. The beginning of Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk really did burn me out a bit, so much that after my next game, I'm going to take a break from console otoge for a bit. 

Hopefully, this review entertained you in some way. Goodbye.


















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