Note: Garland from Strangers of Paradise, not the og Garland of FF1
So I finished Even if Tempest and I had a lot of fun with. It takes around fifteen hours to finish, maybe an extra hour or two if you try to get every bad ending. They’re not really necessary, I tried a few, some were just dead ends and some were kind of cool but it’s something that you’d see in the main path later on anyway. There’s one at the final choice of the last guy and that one was also cool but still doesn’t give any extra info. There are sad endings that differ from the bad endings but you can skip all of those outside of maybe Lucien’s one.
Some of the tracks are straight up bangers, it reminds me of Code Vein, Nier or Muramasa where it sets up the mood before you even start the game. And then you see the cover image and you’re just left there wondering what the monster is meant to be. The art is kind of average. It has its own style and it works. I enjoy it, but you can tell the different levels of polish some of these titles have when you compare them.
So in terms of characters, there’s the main girl Anastasia and then the four main guys. Technically there’s like 7 main characters but 4 routes. Anastasia doesn’t have a voice actor which is pretty sad considering some of the others in the list. Most of them don’t really mean much unless you’ve read an otome here and there but the funny one is Lister, a character that’s voiced by the guy who did Shirou.
Lister is the inquisitor, he’s hilarious in the way that his personality is just Archer being his usual snarky asshole. Yet there’s that 1% of time where it escalates enough to the point that it sounds like something Gilgamesh would say.
Castlerock is the fuckboy one, he’s one of the leaders of the Garuda squadron. The Garuda are like legendary birds, they’re the Kingdom’s national animal.
Lucien and Conrad are the two of the three princes, they’re both working on different projects and they have their political factions.
Zenn is the one with the brutish exterior. He’s pretty fun, some might prefer others but overall he’s fine.
They all have their roles for the plot but there’s a lot of plot threads that are left open to the point it became kind of annoying because it felt like I just misunderstood a lot of it. The fandisk was released pretty recently so maybe a good chunk gets answered over there. But outside of these plot threads that I’ll talk about it in the spoilers, the plot itself is pretty straightforward. The easiest way to describe the title is that it’s just Umineko without the trolling and it’s really blunt about it. Instead of jumping through some hoops, it’s more like that Princess Bride meme where Inigo Montoya says what they did and how they’re connected alongside what’s going to happen now.
So you just have Anastasia trying her best, gets fucked over and killed. Realizes that time was rewound. Tries to fix it all, still dies and gets the monologue about this witch from the character that’s rewinding her time. So she wants to go back way earlier so she can train enough to kill all the assholes that screwed her over. But now the witch is fucking with her too so she just slaps the witch onto the kill list and just keeps on going. More plot points get introduced, more fuckery happens and she goes along with it to learn as much as she can before she inevitably dies. And this just repeats until the finale. The witch is great, honestly I wish it had more lines from the start but it only starts to shine at around the halfway point.
Overall
Overall, I’d give it around a low 8 in terms of my enjoyment. But in a more objective mindset, it’s more of a 7 that’s closer to a 6. Every section has their own plot points that you assume will be important by the finale but a good chunk of them are just forgotten. There’s this small minigame where you’re thrown into the witch’s court. It’s rather easy and there’s at least two ways to beat them but from what I can tell, the culprit is always the same. So really all of these choices could’ve been thrown out. I guess it’s mostly important in Lister’s route where a lot of affection points come from there. It’s a fun title, you’ll enjoy the banter but the plot is kind of random at times where you question if parts were rushed.
Spoilers
So the spoilers is really the nitpicks but it does cover a lot of plot points in the title. So one of the parts that stuck with me was the monster you see from the title screen. You start the title and it’s already there in the prologue, though it has no sprite from what I remember. It tries to keep Anastasia down and keeping her from hoping for any miracle that could save her from her situation. Anastasia tells it to shutup and that she’s tired of waiting so she’ll do it herself and the monster is like, holy shit that’s rad. Really at the time you just consider that it’s her darker thoughts.
After the prologue, you never see it again outside of one scene in the finale of the common path. I guess I should explain that the routes are part of the common path, just that the last section only gets unlocked after you finish the base finale. So basically you get through 80% and then they die or you die and it gets reset and some conditions are changed.
Anyways back to the point, it turns out that the monster is herself with all her powers. She’s basically trying to prevent any of it from happening, she basically gave up. But it doesn’t make sense. That version of her doesn’t exist anymore unless she’s going even further back for like the 2 days that she was in that room before she left for the knight training. It’s also stated that whilst the remaining witches can’t confirm, the theory that each timeline gets split into its own universe is really slim considering it would’ve been recorded by the artifact thing.
The monster also has the markings that Zenn has, it’s not a magic thing considering neither the witches or the goddess have them. And they don’t show Anastasia getting the markings that one time where she goes to Zenn’s world. Either the markings are actually part of Zenn or you only get it if you isekai into Anastasia’s world. Technically she could have them but wasn’t used for the cg. And the only way that makes sense is they saved it for the fandisk.
Anyways, no idea why the monster has the markings, the easy or lazy answer for what the monster is that it’s just the embodiment of the goddess’s powers and the hatred she felt before basically freezing her own time. She basically needed some time alone to cool off or she’d kill off the humans. So there’s a plot point where Anastasia is secluding herself in fear of nuking the kingdom. Really the monster doesn’t have its own cg in the game anyway, it’s just used as a title screen, so at this point I’m just hoping the fd addresses it.
There’s one with Castlerock but it’s honestly nothing to be bothered about. This sect of the church killed off his sister and that was one of the reveals in his section. It doesn’t really get brought up again outside of Zenn’s route where you can bring it up in the court minigame to save your ass. But it’s seen as a off-putting choice so it could lead you to the sad ending.
So it’s not in the finale from what I remember and it’s probably something that would be brought up in the fd. But really you can just see it as foreshadowing that a lot of crap that you’d take for granted could be working against you. By the end it’s one of those “humanity is full of beauty and grime” type of trope.
I would say it was meant to be a leadup for Lister’s route but either of them can be your first route. While I’m here, Castlerock group consists of three cadets. Hugo, Landon and Mitchell. Mitchell is there in Lister’s route but the other two are mostly in Castlerock. A lot more so with Hugo considering his dad is part of the church. But Landon is the worst character in the entire vn from what I remember. He’s a giga simp that doesn’t know how to read the room. I dislike him more than the actual antagonists, at least they’re entertaining or interesting. You could remove Landon and it’d be an improvement all around.
Technically there’s this other entity called Endy that’s kind of a hit or miss. They could’ve done more with it but he’s kind of just forgotten until the last ten minutes. And it was basically a part that covers plot points. The point was that Endy was something that could kill the witch but it was ruled out considering it’s a wild card and Anastasia would most likely die if she tried that type of plan. He does come back for like 2 minutes in Zenn’s route but then just gets forgotten again. Basically if you watched Dragon Ball Super, he’s basically Beerus. He brings things to an end and it’s one part of the goddess.
Lister is the interesting one because it covers the nobility/royalty aspect. Basically there’s the Neuschburns(Noiche) that are part of the goddess’s lineage, and the Ishik clan that was wiped out by the Neuschburns. They were the top guys when the goddess was around. Basically the Ishik clan did the shady shit behind the scenes to keep the kingdom running. While the public just assumed it was Goddess’s powers that were keeping the kingdom prosperous. Anyways, Lister is the sole survivor.
The royalty had this festival where they’d bleed on this golden flower and it’d produce all these gems and the myth was that only people with the goddess’s blood can make it work. So the idea was that somebody might’ve replaced the king because that festival stopped happening like 15 years ago. Obviously because they can’t reproduce the gems crap. And that’s around the same time that Evelina, Anastasia’s stepmom left the castle and got married to her dad. So you assume she kind of knew and she ran away before she’d get killed too. Except by the finale you learn that the og Neuschburn already stabbed the goddess and they got a body double for her. So the shit turning in gems couldn’t be a thing from royalty to begin with since 0 of them were part of the goddess’s lineage.
So the three ideas I can consider is that maybe you can do some chemistry shit to make it close enough that it’d work for the flower crap. The only reason you can even consider that is because that was kind of the Ishik clan’s thing. Like they have something to calm down people with magical powers, so really you can slap anything there.
The two more prominent ones needs background info from the finale. Anastasia is basically the goddess’s reincarnation and that the goddess made the Garuda and they were considered her perfect creation. Solely because they can reproduce unlike the witches/helpers. So it’s either that Anastasia’s mom had close enough blood gave it to her friend Evelina and she gave it to the king so he can make the gems. Or somehow Garuda blood works but Castlerock was nosy enough to the point that the Commander of the Garuda squadron no longer had the opportunity to sell their blood to the king. To be fair, one of the Garudas did die, so it could’ve been that one specifically and it had nothing to do with Castlerock.
Either way, all the reveals kind of mess with Lister’s route. In the end, you don’t really know what the deal with Evelina is by the end. At least you can understand what’s the deal with Conrad. He’s a piece of shit, but so was the og Neuschburn. He’ll do what he has to get ahead, you understand his character. Evelina just has that vn super soldier syndrome where some of their senses are too subdued so they do crazy shit to get some adrenaline going. So you can understand her abusing people, but why the child slavery, lol.
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