H-Scene Count-26
Created by Little Witch, translated by Aroduc, and published by J-ast(now on steam).
Length- first playthrough ~20-30. Second and on with skip about 1-5(depending on new content).
Romanesque is a raising sim thing created by Little Witch before the company went under and resurfaced as Tenco. In this game you teach two witch girls magic by rolling dice, so they can go on quests and eventually graduate to being official wizards/witches.
Story
You play as Domino, one of nine archmages who tired of the political bickering of the other eight leaves the grand magic school and goes off on his own. As punishment the other eight give him a mission before he can truly do what he wants, this mission being train two little girls into accomplished wizards in three years. The two girls being the schools worst students. Domino excepts and they go and live in an ancient tower were they meet the rest of the cast and things happen. If he fails he is forced back to the academy and the girls back to their old classes.
That’s all the story really is. Other things happen and the game has about 7 heroines(and hundreds of scenes), but each route is standalone and anything that happens in them is barely brought up during the main game. Even with 20~ endings the whole package is very slice of life and free of any real plot. Almost the entire game is composed of standalone scenes(ranging from learning magic to cooking) that have little to do with anything and are mostly short. What I’m trying to say is don’t expect a real story out of this, the game is much more about the gameplay then the excuse for a story it has.
By the way, Domino is useless. After reading the entire game, he seriously cast a grand total of 3-4 spells. He does nothing in half the heroine routes other then sex. He just exists for the plot to work, and for being fully voiced I wish he had a bit stronger of role. Then again, a raising sim is about the raised, not the raiser but still he feels like the biggest waste of opportunity in the game.
Just to note, this is an upgraded version of the original game, so it is fully voiced and has a few fandisc like short stories in it. These are mostly extra h-scenes/routes for characters who didn’t have them, with one even being just a short harem route. The only thing of importance here is that the first two short stories have more plot then the rest of the game and are probably the best reading you will get out of this.
Gameplay
This is something of a raising sim. Your goal is to get the two apprentice girls to know enough magic to be considered true mages by the end of a three year period. Each year ends with a test(that scales to your progress) that you must pass to continue. The test will list a spell or resource goal, and to meet these goals is where the gameplay comes in. There are three modes to how the game plays, though only the first is truly a game mode. The modes are dice throwing, spell learning, and quests.
Quests, like tests, require the girls to have learned specific spells and then they go and complete them for rewards, which are either items that do nothing, character affection, an ending, diplomas, or an increase to one of the girls max spirit holding stat. These spirit holding stats, of which each girl has six, are what are spent to learn magic. The magic is on something of a tree, where you just need to get a spell connected to something to learn the next one and can skip some spells with the tree growing as you find/gain spell books. When you learn a spell for a girl you use some of her spirits. To get these spirits is what the dice rolling is about.
The dice are six sided, and are rolled six times. You have three dice at the start of every roll, and what are on the dice is up to the girl(each girl has her own dice, so there are six total), the teacher, and the room. You get teachers through story progression, and rooms through a select few quests. Anyway, you roll the dice and whatever they land is is what kind of spirit you get, with one special side(a moon looking symbol) giving all the kinds of spirit. Now that is a bit boring and it will be until you learn some spells. Every spell a girl can learn can be cast during the dice rolling and each have their own effect from summoning more dice, increasing how much spirit the die gives, to creating objects the dice bounce off for more spirit. These spells are cast when you roll a specific set of spirit with the initial three dice for one of the girls. So as you roll, you get spirit to learn spells to help you get more spirit to learn more spells.
So what makes this a game is that you can control the dice to an extent. If they land and you want something different, just click on the side you want it to be. It will flip to that side. Now continue until you have the sides up that you want, but if you flip to many times you start to lose spirit, but only 1 from every type per reduction so its a very light penalty. If you don’t want to flip things manually, you can go into s spell list and manually pick the spell you want them to cast in exchange for all that girls spirit she has gained in that round of rolling to that point. So there is no penalty on the first roll and after that… well I just held Ctrl to speed it up. Usually they got enough of whatever I needed and when they didn’t then I went in and manually did something but usually I sat back.
So that’s everything you do. It’s a bit more complex considering the time limit(every action takes a week, and you only have 156 which is far less then it sounds) and quest time limits and requirements, but overall the game is not hard nor is save scumming required. If you do a bad job on your first playthrough you can start your next run with all your learned spells for casting in the spirit gathering sessions to help out, though you still need to learn the spell for tests and quests.
Anyway the goal is one of two things. Either get enough diplomas from quests to get an ending, or win a heroine. Heroine ending quests are stars on the quest map screen and are fairly easy to get, just do their quests. Except for one heroine, this is all you have to do and after the quest/route the game will end there. For diplomas you have to get three of the same symbols on three seperate diplomas and you can then get that symbol’s ending.
H-Scenes and Other Stuff
Before talking about the porn, I have one thing to point out. This game has no descriptive text. I said you play as Domino but it would be more accurate to say you experience things from his perspective then you playing as him. All non item/spell/quest description text is spoken out load, and this includes h scenes, in which Domino is fully voiced. This can effect your enjoyment of the scenes immensely, but luckily he can be turned off easily.
Now just like when I talked about this in DMC, I will complain here as well. Spoken dialogue only h scenes are stupidly short and boring. When only conversation and pictures can carry the scene there is a serious lack of padding. What I mean is the scenes progress far to fast because there is so little for characters to say while having sex. The other issue is that without descriptive text its hard to imagine them actually moving or doing it. It feels even more static when there’s only a couple moans and breathy words. As for situations/types… there’s the general vanilla stuff plus a some threesome/harem stuff in the extra stories. Other then a double assjob nothing really stands out here.
On to other things. The music is alright, I don’t feel like it was bad its just that nothing stood out. Unlike the music though, art definitely stands out. Its a very water colory style where all the characters look far more thin and flat then you would find in most games. In fact, of the games from Little Witch this one has the least amount of actual flat characters(a total of 5, with only three being heroines). Anyway, its a very unique style which makes it a lot more subjective to liking it or hating it. I found it nice because its so different but I can understand the dislike of Oyari’s(the artist’s) style.
Final Opinions and Save
Overall, I did not like Romanesque as much as I wanted to. Raising sims are a hard genre for me to enjoy, and add a full game replay system(any scene you see you can replay. All of them) in and you have a game I will almost definitely hate due to trying to 100% a game with almost random events.
Dice rolling was fun to play and watch(each spell gets its own animation~), but after I learned most the spells holding control got me more then enough spirits so the game was essentially playing the only fun part itself. I didn’t care for any of the characters, and the routes were so simple and short none of them stood out to me. Its a decent game to wind down from something dark or depressing, or if you have a few minutes to spare due to the almost disjointed game story and style. I would not suggest more then 3 or so runs as after that it just becomes a giant skip fest as you try to rush to the events you want to see.
So should you play this? Maybe a single run if it looks interesting. The art style and the dice game are the only real high points, so if neither are good/interesting to you don’t bother. Otherwise it is a decent distraction, but nothing really noteworthy.
Save contains all events, cgs, and anything else you can obtain/unlock.
Saves
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ddvwvmbxzba753w/Romanesqu.rar
http://www.4shared.com/rar/zNIbRpnSba/Romanesqu.html