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Otome Madness: Re: Alistair

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Introduction

Some games in this series are large in scale, others are pretty small, Re:Alistair is one of the smaller ones. Sadly, this means that the length of these articles are going to vary pretty heavily. Re:Alistair is a free otome game made with Ren’py by Sakevisual, an indie group. This is definitely one of the shortest games I’ll be playing for this, but it’s also probably one of the best. Despite its length, Re: Alistair++ is a really solid game that tells an engaging story that surprised me in the end.

The Story

The story in Re: Alistair++ is pretty basic with nowhere near the level of intrigue as Hatoful Boyfriend, but that’s not surprising. You play as a high schooler named Merui Lucas who enjoys playing a MMO called Rivenwell Online in her free time. One day during lunch, she’s playing the MMO with one of her online friends, Fiona and they meet somebody named Alistair. Alistair is a complete jerk who takes her kill and because of that, Merui completely hates him.

As she’s about to go into a PvP fight with him, her internet cuts out. It turns out his internet cut out as well, leading her to believe he goes to the same school as her. Cue the three love interests, Travis Wright, the megane leader of the computer club, Shiro Takayama, the shy, loner kid in her class who she’s paired up with to work on a project, and finally Derek Nevine, the womanizing basketball player. She has to find out which one of them was Alistair within two weeks due to a deal she made with Alistair.

The game actually surprised me with the detective work in finding Alistair. It’s not a super in depth sleuthing system, however it wasn’t what I first thought. When I originally started playing the game, I thought that who was Alistair depended on the route you played and the boy you ended up dating would be Alistair.

That wasn’t the cause, however, as it was locked onto one boy and you have to use some super sleuthing skills to find out who he is. This does lead to some problems with replayability because you’ll always know who Alistair is, but it was a nice surprise to find out that it’s not a route locked thing.

With this game, you have to take it as it is. It’s not something on the Hatoful Boyfriend level of complexity with secret routes and hidden depths. It’s a simple otome game with a simple premise. Yet it does this super well, it’s really enjoyable -- especially for a free game.

The story has its problems and the game gets dull when you’re clicking on buttons just to get further into the story. In the end, you get what you pay for, the game’s simple with not too much in terms of an in depth story, but enjoyable nevertheless.

Who I chose

I ended up dating Travis, the megane this time around. He was the first character introduced and I was pretty convinced that if the game didn’t choose Alistair based on who you dated, that he would be him.

Game update

I’ve gotten a character’s sprites completely finished up and some of the story planned out, sadly I don’t have much to show in terms of the story so hopefully you’ll be fine with some of his sprites. So far I’m on track to have 4 dateable characters and several side characters.

After I solidify the characters and get 100% of what I want the plot of this game to be, I’ll start working on writing the script, then after that comes backgrounds (which will likely be photos of campus), and finally I’ll put it all together with some of my programming chops and Ren’py.

Coming up next

Next week we’ll be going to the land of the dead, Niflheim. I’ll be talking about Niflheim+ by Shall We Date, a free to play otome game for mobile devices.

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