So, after finishing Princess Nightmare, I decided to pick up and try the other neat-looking otome game that I had lying around, which is Heart no Kuni no Alice. After all an anime is coming up for this game soon, so I thought I better try play it first.

As the title suggests, the game is based on Alice in Wonderland and borrows a lot of concepts and characters from that story. Except that here, Alice does not follow the rabbit but gets kidnapped by him, and everyone in Wonderland is at war against each other. The hat maker is a mafia boss even….

Instead of being a plain visual novel where you read along and makes choices from time to time, you ca move around the map in this game, and choose who you want to visit. You can even change the time of day a few times to try and better your chances of getting certain events with characters.

The art in the game isn’t the most shiny and impressive of all the newer games out there, but to make up for that there is a ton of CG’s in this game. The kind of flat and very strong colours also fit this strange world well. I guess that maybe one could learn something by this – you don’t have to make a game with stellar Ef quality CG’s for it to be good and interesting. I will have forgotten all about this next time I take a look at my own CG’s though, I’m sure….
I can recognise a lot of the voices in the game, there are a few there that I like a lot (Julius! I got really surprised there). That’s a plus. The music isn’t terrible either.

After messing around, going for a guy you couldn’t get yet (bleh), I decided to try and get Ace’s route. He’s the knight of the Heart castle, and seems a nice and dependable guy. Until you find out that he’s not, but instead a bit of an airhead. And kind of creepy sometimes, but so are they all 😛

I have been going at it for a couple of days now, and it seems I’m doing good progress. Apart from the mysterious event here and there, the story is nice and uneventful…. until today, where jealousy hell suddenly breaks loose. Just seeing the characters talking to each other and being all “nice” and “friendly”, I knew this couldn’t go well.

And what do you know! Before long bullets are flying through the air! And the conversation they had in the meantime just had me cracking up several times. Man, this is awesome…. although I get worried too xD The game has this strange double-edged atmosphere going on all the time.

Now I just hope Alice will be able to run for cover.

Really, I wonder if they will have fights like this in the upcoming Alice OVA. I hope so…. hehe.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IoQf0-S3qU]