The Kotonoha Sisters and the Legend of Lysant Island

The Kotonoha Sisters and the Legend of Lysant Island is a very cute and charming turn-based RPG. I'm not really familiar with the voice synth scene (like at all), I went on a limb to play this after enjoying A Robot Girl's Dream and I still found the game very fun and enjoyable overall despite not really knowing the titular sisters. The game still heavily plays differently from Paper Mario as learning an enemy's pattern and idle animation in combat is a necessity to even do any damage at all sometimes since you need to protect Aoi as Akane so she can cast a spell in every fight. I really like the art style in the developer's games and I really think it lends itself heavily in this one especially when it comes to the graphics. It honestly does a much better job at looking like a story book than even modern Paper Mario does sometimes. As others have said, there is nothing but good things to say about the game and is a big shining diamond in the rough. If you're looking at the store page, you probably already know what you're getting yourself into. I played using the Unity Auto Translate plugin, which lets you easily finish the game to the end even if you don't know a single JP character, although you will have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks or edit the file the plugin generates as machine translation interprets a lot of things incorrectly.

Played with translation from LunaTranslator using Google Lens for OCR, which mostly worked. This game really needs a better OCR than basic ones; Lens was ok but when I replay it it will have to be with an even better OCR since its inaccuracies were sometimes troublesome. Trial version available at https://uwago.itch.io/kotonoha-raysant The game has a cute story about the Kotonohas winning a trip, getting caught up in an incident, and helping out the island while solving it. It's clear that there's love for the sisters put into this and I'm happy the game is consistent in its vision. This kind of fangame often ends up chasing memes, but not this one. The game is set up by chapters. Each time you progress the story, new areas open up and the people on the island progress their own parts in the story. Side things are also opened up like this, like fish collecting and the missing cat subplot. The level design and rewards are good to encourage exploring and finding ways to get to items that seem out of reach. Enemies don't respawn and there are few duplicates, so areas tend to stay cleared and you need to try not to use too many items because you can't just get more. The main gameplay system is combat. Akane is in the front and has to counter/deflect or block enemy attacks, while Aoi picks a spell that will fire as long as an attack doesn't get through during the casting. You can also use an item as a free action once per turn. The battle system is such that you always have to do some defence and can never just brute force skip things. You can skip entire fights with generic enemies if you fought them before or lost 3 times to the same one, tough. Each enemy type has their own attack: most generic ones have 1-2, bosses have 3-4, and for the final boss I counted at least 16 (counting chains of attacks as a single attack). You can predict the attack by looking at their animation while planning your turn. So for most battles you have to learn the timings of the enemy attacks. Some of these parry windows are very tight, but the game is fair and those attacks can be blocked for low damage. You also get the backstep dodge (seen in the Steam promotional pictures above, dodging lightning) and jump, so it's always possible to dodge in principle, but each enemy attack has a timing to learn, so you could play this a difficult version of Sekiro. Lysant is generous and forgiving enough that this is really not necessary. Lysant also uses the best progression system. Aoi gains and loses abilities according to the plot and Akane finds stuff around or buys equipment. Akane is still closely tied to the plot, since new things for her are based on tthe story progressing enough that new things are available. It feels very natural and consistent with the world of the island. Lysant Island is a game about the best girls and it appreciates them, with good exploration and gameplay. It's great in every way.

For those who don't know, The Kotonoha Sisters are characters made by A.I. Inc, and where first released as voice-banks for the Japanese voice synthesis program VOICEROID. They also have voice-banks for A.I. Voice, NEUTRINO, and SynthesizerV. The game is solid! The fights are cool and the use of VOICEROID is very creative. I only speak a bit of Japanese, so I can only understand a portion of it, but it's still very fun!