• Price: $29.99 (digital); $39.99 (physical)
• Developer: Agate Games
• Publisher: PQube
• Release Date: September 12, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by PQube on behalf of Agate Games. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warnings: Rated T for “Fantasy Violence, Language, and Suggestive Themes. One incident with dubious consent due to accidental intoxication. Kidnapping.

I’ve seen the social media posts leading up to the release of Celestia: Chain of Fate, and I must say that it sure looks…divine. 😉 It’s an otome game about a young woman (default) named Aria, who discovers that she is a descendant of both an Angelus and a Daemon. She must attend the Academy of Celestia to learn how to control her powers, and she may even find love along the way…

Thankfully her adoptive parents did let her know ahead of time that she’s adopted, telling her the love story of her biological parents in fairy tale form. But they left out the important details about Angelus, Daemons, and magic actually existing – and that the story is about her biological parents being forcefully separated.

Aria receives an invitation to the Academy of Celestia on her birthday, and she initially thinks it’s a joke until her family proves that it’s real. Attendance is mandatory, so off she goes! She meets the game’s 3 love interests when they all help her in some way in the beginning of the story.

There’s Val the Daemon (my favorite), Ash the Human/Angelus hybrid, and Luke the Angelus. I like that they gave us love interests from different races – especially because the Academy emphasizes tolerance between races.

The curriculum requires students to complete trials in the 3 realms (Angelus, Daemon, and Human). One’s performance in these trials will determine the top graduate for the year. Students must compete in teams, and naturally Aria is placed in a team with her love interests. This is an otome, after all!

Aria will learn how to use her Angelus and Daemon abilities for the first time at the Academy. She’s got some neat abilities, and I was happy that they didn’t make her overpowered by giving her an affinity for all of the elements or something like that. (Just one.) I really liked the weapon they chose for her, too.

However, it does seem like they rushed the training process for her; the guys help her learn how to fight, use magic, and transform into her other forms, and she always catches on in the first lesson. I thought that was a bit unrealistic. We don’t get to see many formal lessons or day-to-day life at the Academy, which was disappointing.

One of the games biggest strengths is that all 3 love interests are nice guys, helping Aria but not dominating team discussions. Some players may prefer more variation in the otome love interest archetypes. But while Val, Ash, and Luke are all good guys, I did think their personalities were different enough that they didn’t seem like the same kind of “nice guy.”

The friendships and romantic relationships between Aria and the guys was another area where I felt like they went a bit fast, though. I was fine with the instant crush component, but then they started kissing her cheek and telling her pretty personal information almost right away.

The game doesn’t seem to divide the story into a common route and then branch off into love interest routes based on your dialogue choices. Instead, you interact with each guy in a chapter, and making the right choice will increase their affection percentage. (I really liked the affection status screen, which has “nodes” for each chapter for all the love interests; if you made the right choice, that chapter gets filled in.)

Honestly, it kind of made more sense for them to have Aria hang out with all of the guys on her team in each chapter. It just was weird to see her in romantic situations with all of them at once in the same playthrough (and not in a polyamory situation).

None of them ever really comment on your dates with the others. You don’t have to date all 3 in one playthrough, but it might be more convenient for the sake of viewing all of their final dates and CGs. Whoever has the highest affection by the end is the one Aria ultimately ends up with, but the ending has more to do with the main story than the romance.

It was usually pretty easy to figure out which responses would increase affection or lead to 1 of the 20+ bad endings. I would always save before making a choice though, as you unfortunately cannot use the log function to return to the dialogue prior to that choice.

Having less bad endings might have been a better choice, but there were some completely ridiculous and hilarious bad endings that were definitely worth viewing (such as Bad Ending #8). There are also 22 side stories (total) that unlock after you finish each chapter, and all of them are short but silly, so I enjoyed them a lot.

The main story has to do with Aria’s family, her relationship with the guys, and the individual goals of everyone on the team. I don’t know if I’d say everything made sense to me – like the underlying conflict – but I found a lot of elements really interesting, such as the magic and technology systems.

I think that a lot of stories involving angels and demons Angelus and Daemons do tend to focus a lot on religion, but this story doesn’t touch on the subject apart from a few names clearly derived from Christianity. The conflict has more to do with issues related to (fantasy) race and class. It was nice to have a more balanced version of the Angelus and Daemons, with good and bad people in each race.

My biggest complaint about the writing is that the English can be a little wonky sometimes; you can understand everything just fine, but the game suffers from some awkward phrasing and the occasional spelling errors.

For example:

• “Do you need a help?”
• “Are you sure to quick saving?”
• Frequent use of the word “panorama” instead of a more natural-sounding “view” or “scene”

I also found the transitions between chapters a little awkward because they repeat the final lines of dialogue from the last chapter in a recap even though that scene had just happened.

The writing isn’t perfect, but it is decent. I laughed a lot, and I didn’t expect some of the plot twists. There isn’t any voice acting, but they made good use of sound effects in each scene (especially in the more comedic situations). I also really liked the soundtrack.

As far as the art is concerned, on a few occasions some of the portraits were slightly blurry when they were more zoomed in. But other than that I really appreciated the gorgeous character art and backgrounds. The clothing designs were very pretty, and the animal designs made me smile.

Overall I was satisfied with my experience with Celestia: Chain of Fate, which takes an estimated 15-20 hours to complete. It does end on a cliffhanger, as this is “Book 1” in the series, which was previously released on smartphones. I found a trailer for the sequel (with spoilers from this game), and I’m hoping to see it come to Switch at some point because I’m invested in the unresolved storylines.