An Octave Higher

First off, I will admit upfront that I did not complete a playthrough of this game. That being said, I cannot recommend this game. I've played a number of Visual Novels in the past, and if I know one thing about VN's, it's that this is a story first and foremost. They live and die by their writing, for better or worse. And An Octave Higher is unfortunately the latter This VN clearly has a really interesting, and well thought out world, with a magical system that has some intriguing depth. It is clear that a lot of time, effort, and love went into creating a logical yet fantastical world... However, it makes the unfortunate mistake of being unable to contain it's excitement to tell you all about it in EXHAUSTING detail. There were far too many moments in the start of the game where this VN is more concerned with explaining, in depth, the logistics of any given topic than with actually progressing the story or having a scene that characterises the cast. It seems so preoccupied with preemptively answering questions on how certain modern conveniences exist in this world. I can't help but feel that the writers were hesitant to let too much of their world-building go to waste, and so front-load much of it in large, drab, boring paragraphs on how their magic system allows them to have flying machines and such. While well-intentioned, I often found myself skimming and skipping dialogue. There are ways to make exposition and world-building provide character to the person speaking it, but this VN never feels like it does that. I put up with it though. I was intrigued enough to see where it was going. But I ended up putting this game down for good when the character writing took a turn for the worse. I am no stranger to stories where the perspective character is not a good person. My favourite anime is Evangelion for goodness sake. An Octave Higher has one of the 3 main perspective characters as a morally dubious, and overall bad person. Which is fine. But what I took issue with was that I too often felt like the writing was trying to brush aside and downplay some of that character's more heinous actions in favour of making them feel more relatable. Perhaps that was just me, but I could never shake that feeling. All in all, the combo of dry exposition and an improperly handled morally dubious perspective character was too much. I won't say to avoid it, but I most certainly can't recommend it. There is not enough beyond its flaws to justify spending the time with it.