Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly —Review

Written by: Marisa

As a lover of good stories, dating sims and specifically otome are on the ‘guilty pleasure’* end of my story-intake-via-gaming spectrum. They’re pandering, predictable, and I love them anyway. Like an 80s throwback track, I forgive those faults with a sigh as I hit replay on the same archetypes of eligible Bachelors and Bachelorettes time and time again. I went into Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly expecting characters with a little too much edge and a protagonist whose amnesia was there solely to allow any given player to fill her shoes.

What I got was a panic-inducing mini game, the first time I’ve ever forgiven amnesia as a plot device, and Kagiha—a trauma filled cinnamon bun.

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly was developed by Otomate (you have to admire pun commitment of that level) and published by their parent company Idea Factory in Japan back in 2015. It made it to the states this year when the MVPs of the obscure localization squad Aksys Games published it as part of their Summer of Mystery event in which Aksys brought over two other Otomate titles and offered a pin set to those who could show they bought all three. I’ll try not to let having lost one of the receipts for my pin set get in the way of my objectivity for this review.

The Gameplay

Or what amounts to gameplay in a visual novel anyway. I like to divide Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly into three parts—making choices, playing the minigame, and navigating the flowchart.

1. Making Choices (Minor Spoilers)- Skip this if you want to play blind to any story. You’ll follow your protagonist along for the start of her—or rather “your”—tale before the game starts letting you make dialog and action choices that impact the direction of the story and your romance options for the rest of the game. That story starts off as follows:

You start off in a out of context scene on a bus with two voices having an argument around you. Suddenly the screen starts shaking. There’s noise, something about falling, something about water, philosophy, and THEN…

You wake up alone in a mansion that looks like a scene kid threw up on the Castlevania anime.  You don’t remember who you are, but there’s a creepy girl in a mask that turns into an even creepier monster just as you happen to find her. You’re saved by a moody boy whose initial personality indicates he’s the “I guess I’ll help you, but you’re a pain” trope. Great timing, am I right?

Past this you’ll meet the rest of your reverse harem (all of whom claim to also be missing their memories), learn how to summon a gun with your mind to fight monsters (which you do by shooting butterflies in the minigame), and search for the pieces of a kaleidoscope that will grant you a wish you can use to get home. Oh yeah, you’re trapped in the mansion because that’s where the dart landed when the developers were picking out a reason to trap you with all those boys.

 

 

Once you get past the exposition, the choices you make range from “this will fairly obviously put me on this boy’s route” to “huh, I wonder if this one will kill me.” That is not a joke, several routes end in death or being trapped in an eternal abyss. Most of those choices are a coin flip of curiosity. If you get one, don’t feel too bad; they’re required if you’re going for a platinum trophy, the flowchart mechanic I’ll be addressing last makes it easy to go back and pick a different option, and many of those endings are interesting to read.

 

The choices you’re able to make as you narrow down your husbando of choice make this one of the better dating sims I’ve played. As stated above, the choices to start you on your anime crush’s route are fairly straight forward once you see their personalities—death endings aside. If you know what guy you want to romance, getting one of his two (or three…) endings isn’t hard, and while some of those ending aren’t “true”, they aren’t “bad” in a low affection sense. There isn’t a lot of worrying about misinterpreting a choice and making a character mad or disappointed on accident. I find that’s common in about half of otome games, and it can range from being frustrating to emersion breaking. Come on game, if I wanted to ruin a relationship, I’d go remind my real boyfriend that his seventy-nine platinums include at least five of my silly dating sims on his vita profile.

2. Minigame- For those or you that skipped all that for fear of story spoilers, it’s standard make choices to get your guy stuff, and now you’re back in time to shoot some butterflies. Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly requires you periodically to play a minigame in which you do just that. The story reasoning behind it has to do with the monsters and gun you might have skipped reading about, but the REAL reason is this is how you earn points. Points will be important for the flowchart.

 

 

The minigame is simple. Lock on to butterflies using either the analog stick or the touch pad and shoot them by pressing X. The aim is to lock on to as many butterflies as you can to shoot in one shot before they fly off the screen and the time runs out. I prefer to play with the touch controls, because there’s nothing quite like feeling skin peel off my finger as I trace it across the screen while screaming in a dead panic. There will be a lot of butterflies. Too many.

 

 

Is this minigame necessary? No. Do they make it required to progress anyway? Yes. Is it at least fun? Ehh…

 

 

The mini game has a strong arcade vibe, and your score will earn you anywhere between a C and S rank. The mini game will unlock with different characters in the main menu so you can play at will to earn points and get that score up. The trick to getting a high score is not getting all the butterflies but rather chaining how many you shoot at once. Getting a high score isn’t important unless you want to platinum the game, in which case you need to hit S. Just grinding low scores to accumulate points will get do the job just fine if your only aim is to unlock parts of the flowchart. Which finally brings us to talking about that bad boy.

 

3. Navigating the Flowchart- Some dating sims have a rewind feature to make picking different choices easier. Some require you to fallback on multiple saves. While both those options are open to you in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, they aren’t needed. The flowchart mechanic allows you to revisit any unlocked section of the story at anytime without the fear of losing progress. For example, I could start Hikage’s route, get bored half way through, start the “best” route, and then resume my progress on Hikage’s route when I was done. No extra saves required.

 

 

That being said, there is a catch.

Some routes are locked until you see other parts of the main story. Oddly enough, not the true route, which can be done on your first run , which I discovered while trying to romance my boy Kagiha. The route I ended up being happiest with for Kagiha was one of the MOST locked. I have never been so crushed by winning in my life.

By jumping around in the main part of the flowchart to complete parts of the story, you work to unlock different routes and endings, but that isn’t enough. You must also use the points used in the minigame to unlock side stories and memories of the protagonist’s past that are located on the right side of the flowchart (your right, not the chart’s). Yup. They made your amnesia matter in the gameplay AND the more you uncover about the protagonist’s past, the more you’ll be able to forgive the developers for using that trope. Viewing these memories and other stories are required for general progression and most “good” endings. The true ending wasn’t locked by main story endings, but it was locked by these side stories and memories. They’re often well done and add to you understanding of the main plot or relationships with the romance options, but sometimes they do venture into “anime filler episode” territory.

 

 

While jumping around the flowchart to fill out the main plot and view side stories is generally easy, a word of warning about jumping around. Going back to a started area of the chart isn’t an issue, but trying to go to an area of the chart you made no progress on requires you to go to points of the chart with choices and make the choices necessary for that route. For example, the route to the “Best End” shares basically the same route as two other endings. There isn’t a choice at the end that splits those endings off, but rather choices earlier that will place you with one. If I want a certain one of those other two endings, I may have to go to different chapters to make small choices before bouncing back to where those routes split. It’s about the most recent choices when it comes to unlocking new content. Confused yet? Me too.

The Graphics

                I wasn’t joking when I said the game looks like a scene kid threw up on the Castlevania anime, but Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly makes that incredibly specific aesthetic work. Dark detailed backdrops contrast with bright, color-themed character designs. The art style mimics the appearance of stained glass with crisp dark outlines and geometric patterns hidden in the details of the characters’ clothing. The game utilizes this style to add to the overall impact of the story by not just setting the mood but by shifting as scenes change or become more serious. Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly  has a full gallery of stunning stills outside of the regular character spirits over the backdrops, and in these colors will bleed off the characters and into the world creating panic and color when stakes are high but stay clean and clear in the calmer moments. It’s expected that visual novels of this type must have a strong emphasis on art considering there’s significantly less to worry about graphically compared to other genre’s, but Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly strives to make this game look like more than your average anime.

 

The Audio

                While the music Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly sets the mood of the game well with its many tracks of sad piano and string pieces, those tracks tend towards bleeding together. The track “Confrontation” bops, which is great because it’s used for the minigame, but as a whole, the music is so unobtrusive it’s forgettable. Not great, but simply fine and appropriate. If you’re someone familiar with other otome games and you were hoping for another Code Realize soundtrack, this game unfortunately misses the mark.

The game does have all the original Japanese voice acting though, which you can set to only your favorites at whatever volume you want, and that’s pretty neat.

 

Replay and Overall Value (SPOILERS)

Skip this if you don’t want to know about the romance options. With five different romanceable guys, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly has twelve total endings, good, bad, and death-y. In addition, there are thirty-nine semi-required side stories/memories to experience. Are they all worth experiencing? Considering how easy the flowchart makes moving through and skipping large portions of text that are the same for several routes, I’d say many of them are.

I can whole heartedly recommend four out of five of the romance options. Some of them I even recommend seeing all their endings, though the “bad” ones do get dark. If you want to know more about them to pick and choose more easily, here’s a breakdown of how I feel about each option:

1. Hikage—He’s the first guy you meet, and this aloof archetype has more to him than meets the eye. He’s has no time for you being a person with emotions and ideas (like gross; what even are those?), but can be kind when he wants to be. The trick is getting him to want to be, but of course you will because you’re a dating sim heroine. Experiencing his story is the least repetitive and necessary for a full understanding of the plot, and as a added bonus, he fulfills my favorite trope, but it’s a major spoiler I won’t cover here. In spite of being one of the cold characters, Hikage’s story/stories are worth playing.
2. Yamato—The other cold character type, Yamato tries to be as big of a jerk as Hikage, but fails miserably by being genuinely a good person. This socially awkward jock doesn’t know how to say what he means, and this results in this hot head being better with deeds than words. This boy crushes hard, and it makes his route honestly adorable. Some his stories are more important to the plot than his others, but the character is good enough that they’re all worth it.

 

3. Karasuba—This cocky, pervert bothers me more than the characters that actually try to be mean. He has moments when his playful nature is sweet and endearing, but other times he’s rude, forceful, or apathetic. This character’s good route brings out the best in him, but the bad ending is something I feel could be skipped. If you feel you’re on that track, I’d turn back. Your understanding of the plot would be the same, and you might come out of it still respecting the character.
4. Monshiro—This shy boy is the character of mystery, and the more you learn about him, the more you may want to cry. He’s better at expressing kindness than Yamato, but more awkward in other ways. This character’s story/stories are worth experiencing if he’s up your alley, but you’d still have a good plot understanding if he wasn’t for you and you’d already completed some of Yamato or Kaghia’s routes.
5. Kagiha—MY WHOLESOME BOI. Kagiha just wants to have a night in and make pancakes… in the middle of an otherworldly hellscape. I adore him. He protects. He’s got that floofy hair. It sounds like I’m describing a dog, but I digress. Kagiha is there at every turn to listen to your character vent and think about the nightmare around you. He also next too, if not above, Hikage in importance of plot. He’s another cry worthy character but going into detail would be heavy spoilers I don’t want to touch. Just play every scene with his face next to it, but be ready because his bad ending is almost as dark as Karasuba’s.

Step aside, Akechi.

I pre-ordered this game because of who I am as a person, and with it’s full flowchart of content, for me it was worth the close to forty dollars I paid for it. I would have recommended it to loyal fans of the genre at that price, but the good news is it has gone through some significant price drops. As it is now, it shouldn’t cost you more than twenty dollars if your looking to pick it up, and at that point I could recommend it to visual novel fans that might want to give it a try as well.

Conclusion

In sum, I enjoyed this Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly as a solid addition to the genre and feel other otome and dating sim fans would as well. I’m not sure if I would recommend all fans of the genre platinum it like I did. For fans that do want that complete story, not all guys and routes on the flowchart are equal, but the flowchart itself makes life easier. The biggest drawbacks are a forgettable soundtrack and a minigame that, while not being awful, stands as a feeble wall between you and story progression for no good reason. At least shooting butterflies is just as visually stunning as the rest of the game, and you can enjoy the pretty colors while you panic to the games best track and the disappointed voiceover of your favorite boo. I give Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly a 77 out of 100—on the better side of good.

 

Pros

• Flowchart mechanic
• Stylized visuals
• Strong replay value
• Kagiha
• Choices are either stress free or lead to your demise; a hilarious balance

Cons

• Unnecessary minigame blocking story
• Average music
• Choices are either stress free or lead to your demise; a hilarious balance

 

*Regret does not begin to describe how I feel about this choice of words.