Mistonia's Hope: The Lost Delight might be a romance game, yet within twenty minutes I've not only been thrust undercover on a violent revenge quest, but one slight slip-up has resulted in me having my throat unceremoniously cut open from an unknown assailant while walking the manor gardens. This folkloric world of fairies and magic can be beautiful and gorgeous, but there's an ever-present danger to its class warfare and politics that have me obsessed just as much as its roster of pretty men.
This romance comes from developer Otomate, who are behind some of my favorite otome games in the genre. Otome, for sickos-to-be, is a dating game subgenre in which you usually play a woman taking part in a romance story throughout which you can end up in love with – or disastrously fumbling – a handful of romance partners. Visual novel adjacent, they usually downplay stats in order to focus on telling a narrative (hedging my bets so I'm not jumped by the Jack Jeanne fans), often splintering into scenes and events tied to drawing closer to particular characters. My favorites always blend genres, like Hakuoki's vampiric samurai war story, and Mistonia's Hope is the closest to the romantasy literature phenomenon I've encountered yet: what if Sarah J. Maas was anime?
