Serafina's Crown

Two gender ambiguous people standing in a arched corridor. Dialogue reads 'I don't know how to balance my feelings for you with my dedication to my duties.'.
Here, I was faced with a conundrum – what do you do when you fundamentally disagree with many of someone’s values, but you want to impress them anyway because you’d sort of like to bang? If you’re me, you apparently say ‘to hell with my kingdom’ and you chase the girl.

Some context: this visual novel begins with a murder, as all good things do. It’s the murder of a monarch, no less, which means deciding upon a successor. You play as Odell, a girl who just wanted to get the hell out of this goddamn kingdom and who is apparently the only one who couldn’t have committed the murder, and who is tasked with deciding who to support in their bid for the throne. Here’s where I faced some problems. There are several ‘houses’ in the kingdom, and each house is attached to particular traits, so of course, each representative embodies those traits. Roza, badass, babe extraordinaire, is the from what is essentially the angry house, so while she’s frequently sassy and calls people out, she also solves problems by throwing soldiers at them until they go away. I’m not about that. Luckily, I found out that you can choose to pursue someone romantically without recommending them for the throne – but they do still need to like you enough for it to work out. I would also like to mention that I don’t like the name of this game – I feel like it’s trying to sway me. Given that half the plot is about deciding who should get the crown, it seems like it should be called something like “Serafina’s Crown?” or “Whose Crown is it Anyway?” That would make me a lot more comfortable.

You should play this if…

You want a visual novel with a slightly interesting mechanic. To convince the council of why they should agree with your diplomatic choices, you have to beat them in a ‘debate’, which simply involves choosing randomly assigned numbers from a dial and hoping that the number you chose is better than their number. It’s a little gimmicky, but it adds an interesting element beyond just choosing dialogue options.