Mashiroiro Symphony HD -Love is Pure White-

I love this visual novel really honestly it is so beautiful and the characters are well written and funny. The reason this game is a nope from me is you will pay £33.50 for a 1/4 of the game. Thats it. If you want the rest of the game you have to download a patch that is almost the same size as the main game, I understand an nsfw patch but this is not. This is dishonest and greedy. £33.50 for 6 hours of playtime unless you go to their site and download it is just so unreal

Mashiroiro Symphony is a really well put together VN thematically, the music is fantastic, and the translation is actually quite a good localization (you see a lot of people griping about the TL because it's a little opinionated, doesn't use honorifics, and isn't afraid to rework what's being said to actually make sense to western sensibilities). Unfortunately the actual writing is really hit or miss. Personally I only found 2 routes actually worth reading to completion. Ange's (the maid) route is complete fan service with basically 0 themes and amounts to some dude writing out an entirely unrealistic maid fantasy. Miu gets the show stolen entirely by Sana and it just left a terrible taste in my mouth after finishing (which the separate Sana Edition resolves pretty well, thankfully). The two things those routes lacked? Extensive time in the headspace of the girl. It sounds messed up, but honestly the writing for the step-sister Sakuno is incredibly compelling, because you see her thoughts in their entirety. This really emphasizes the solid circle of friends and it presents a really harrowing picture of what it'd be like if such a relationship were to actually play out. It's a really weird route but it's kinda amazing what they accomplished. Airi of course is the stand out girl overall; she is always at the very least doing some vital string puling in the background, and her own route is ultimately a culmination of all the themes of the work. In my opinion, the recommended route guides get it wrong. Airi should definitely be the final one people play; it just ties everything together quite well. The order I played was Sakuno -> Ange -> Miu -> Sana -> Airi

i love the vn but this translation is so stupid. if you understand even a little bit of japanese you will notice that some voice lines do not match the text. Some entire conversations are straight up changed. nuances that make certain scenes enjoyable such as usage of the variations of the characters' nicknames are all changed (homogenized) into just the character's plain name. This matters A LOT in this vn. some jp idioms are translated into something that is not even remotely related to the original conversation. voice-only lines are not translated which is actually a good thing that whoever translated this didnt get to vandalize those as well. Only recommended if you can understand spoken japanese and only occasionally use the shoddy english tl to check your general understanding and know to ignore it when it is inaccurate, otherwise what you will get from this is an incredibly inauthentic experience. In which case, go check the anime adaptation out for an authentic symphony.