Princess Lover!

Although the scenario writer is almost always the most important determining factor in the overall success or failure of an eroge, in terms of the number of sales (particularly preorders), the artist has the biggest individual role. Many consumers will purchase an eroge solely because of the art style and/or one of their favourite artists is working on it. As a result, there's the temptation by some companies to avoid putting similar effort into recruiting a writer of equal ability to the artist and structuring an effective plan for the scenario, as it may have little effect on the sales. Often, these so-called 'art' games also feature an ordinary 'default' setting with a slight twist to set their game apart, without making a significant attempt to innovate or depart from a default 'school' setting. In the case of Princess Lover, the focus of this review, this is the high society setting and characters, whereas others might use a trap protagonist, unusual club activities or a few magical or supernatural elements/heroines.

Rewrite

Expectations are a funny thing. When something is announced so far in advance of its actual release date, you get a lot of time to anticipate what it will be like. The slow trickle of details only serves to further excite your curiosity and your mind automatically starts to fill in the gaps of the information you don't have. You end up imagining, in some detail, what the game will be like before it's even been released. Afterwards, the actual game is released and of course it's not what you imagined. It's funny what expectations can do to your impressions of a game.

Mystic Quest: MQ ～時空の覇者～

Kanno Yukihiro is largely famous for his C's Ware games like DESIRE and EVE, and for his later title, elf's highly regarded YU-NO. For the latter title especially, he has been regarded by many as one of the greatest eroge scenario writers ever, if not the greatest. Beyond those, he's also eked out a number of respected titles for Abel Software, like the Mystereet games. Going back to Abel Software, in 2009 they had been dormant for several years (minus a couple of spinoff games/rereleases), with Kanno's latest title, Mystic Quest, in the pipeline since 2005 (for reference, 4 years of development is an incredibly long time for eroge.) Mystic Quest was released, and it would surprise fans and non-fans alike as never before. And how.

Mugen Kairou 1 + 2

Although two eroges would generally warrant two separate reviews, even if the games are sequels of each other, Black Cyc's Mugen Kairou (2005) and Mugen Kairou 2 ~Rasen~ (2009) are so closely related that one cannot discuss one game without referring to the other. This review will not discuss Mugen Kairou 1.5 (2009), as I have not played it due to it originally being a Cyc Members only product. It also received poor reviews, and was written by a different author, so I am still likely to ignore it if it is made available on dlsite or elsewhere.