Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! ~Pirates of the Disturbance~

Story

The Game takes place directly after the first season of the show. With Catarina and friends making it all the way to graduation, Catarina has made it through the original events of Fortune Lover without setting off any doom flags. Now she’s free to spend spring break at the Claes estate tending to her farm. However, her plans for spring break quickly take a turn when Keith receives a letter from their parents. The Claes household has fallen ill, so Catarina is to accompany her brother on a diplomatic cruise in their father’s stead. Lucky for her (and you), all her friends are also in attendance, making it sure to be the best spring break ever!

The stage is set for a high seas adventure, and the story that follows is one of the nation of Quid and its political divisions, along with deeper mysteries to pick away at all while Catarina has the opportunity to deepen her bonds with her childhood friends and perhaps make new ones along the way.

I’ve seen other reviewers complain that the romance feels as though it takes a backseat to the politics in the story. While I can understand this opinion, I personally felt the political story added to the whole setting. It is especially comparable to the tone in the later halves of the first two seasons. As far as I’m concerned, it fits right in and makes for some comedic and romantic opportunities.

The story itself feels like it was pulled straight out of the original source material, and if you like the show- manga, or light novels - then this game is for you. The game clearly has a lot of respect for its source material and will actively refer back to it. Every character has their moment in the spotlight over the course of the game and no one feels out of character or misrepresented.

Fans of the show will find a lot to enjoy from the story and its new characters.

Gameplay

The core gameplay is the choices you make as you progress in the story. Catarina will have the opportunity to make choices that can raise the affection level of your target. Your ability to hone in on a single target will reward you with CG’s for that character and put you on their route for the remainder of your playthrough. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to hold court in your head to come to conclusions about how to best deal with potential doom flags. if you aren’t careful, Catarina can also meet her doom in various unique ways.

A second more supplemental part of the gameplay is memory scenarios, You unlock memories from other characters through your interactions with them. Each character has multiple memories to unlock which can require multiple playthroughs and different routes to collect all of them. These are not a required part of gameplay and can be dismissed entirely or returned to later under the ‘Special’ section on the home screen

There are a total of six romanceable characters you can pursue in this title: Prince Geordo, Prince Alan, Nicol Ascart, Keith Claes, and the secret romanceable characters made for the game. Engineer Rozy Lind and pirate Captain Silva Bastide.

Accessibility

Controls

For my playthrough, I played on the Nintendo Switch system and my review will only cover this version of the game. The controls in both handheld mode and docked mode are fairly straightforward. Upon first startup, you are shown a diagram covering the basics. The buttons you’ll be making the most use of will be the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ buttons.. The game makes it easy for you to skip past parts you’ve already experienced and even allows you to remap the entire controller. Another feature on switch is the use of the touch screen. These controls are not as well explained, but with a little practice it’s simple enough to memorize what gestures do what. By far one of my biggest complaints about the controls is that in docked mode there are no clear instructions on how to open and interact with memory scenarios when they appear (the answer is hit the minus button).

Options

Entering the options tab, you can reconfigure the controls to your preference and turn off the touchscreen features.

As for text, you have a variety of options to adjust the speed, for both auto mode and normal gameplay. Transparency of the text box can also be adjusted. Unfortunately, in what would have been a rather trivial addition, text size has been neglected here.

Finally, audio settings let you individually adjust for BGM, SFX, Character Voices, and Movie Clips. It covers all of the necessary pieces in that regard.

Inclusivity

This is probably not a category you will see in my future reviews, but for this game I believe it’s relevant. Anyone who has followed this series in the past would know that everyone Catarina meets is drawn to her… EVERYONE. It’s never been subtle that Catarina’s friends Mary, Sophia, and Maria all have a romantic interest in her. Mary is especially aggressive in her pursuit of Catarina, often butting heads with Geordo in the process. Consistently throughout the game, there are moments that make it clear that the ladies are in love with her.

Unfortunately, a very conscious decision was made by the people in charge of this game to limit your options to just the males. Despite Catarina gushing about how cute her girlfriends are and how she would fall for Maria, there was no real good reason for them to do this. It limits the players choices in a game based on the “why choose” premise. You can argue that they didn’t want to overwhelm the game with content. I think the amount of different branching paths in this game is insane, and there are so many different scenarios you can get into. I do not accept that “too much content” was a genuine concern. As a text based game with the occasional illustration, the work to add these characters as options would be minimal compared to other kinds of games.

Value

The game goes for $49.99 at its full price. I was able to get a sale on it. Even without the discount I think this game does offer an adequate amount of value. Currently I have completed 4 of the 6 Romanceable character’s routes and I have over 45 hours in my play history, if you complete all of the routes you’re going to be looking at around 50-55 hours of gameplay. The plethora of settings also help to keep the routes from feeling too terribly repetitive. If you are a completionist you’ll get more value out of it. I would like to note that for myself, I found completing the game has not been a chore and instead very entertaining.
My recommendation would be to wait for it to go on sale if you still aren’t sure if you would enjoy it. This has been my first contribution to the Writing Gaggle, Thanks for reading!