The Dawn Of A Flower Review by Amjara
The Dawn Of A Flower is a beautifully illustrated otome. As a princess disguised as a prince, dodge danger & find romance as you strive to save your country.
The Story
The setting of the story is set in Ancient Egypt during the Bronze age where you play as a princess who disguised as a boy plays the role of a prince in order to gain favor in the royal court. Your journey takes you from romance to the battlefield as you try to to stay alive and help your country.
You will have three potential love interests in the game; Denehue (self arrogant and egotistical), General Tamuz (devoted and caring) and finally Enrim (caring, concerned and loyal).
Game-play & Features
The game features include your usuals such as skip options, read speed, display options, audio controls, voice on or off and language selections. Some nice extras include a gallery album that unlocks as you play, background music selections, mini games, and a log of the endings along with afterwords and spin offs.
As you play you will gain favor with each of the main romance options by building up points in a love meter. You can always check the meter by going to the Lotus symbol on the top right of your screen and clicking LOVE. In the first part of the game (7 chapters) you build up this meter with interactions with each potential love interest. At the end of the 7th chapter the meter that is filled will continue the story with another 5 chapters afterwards where you explore the romance with that mate. Your choices during the second half determine if, in the end, your path ends good or bad.
❗ Game tip There is no rewind feature that I could find so save often in case you need to reload before making choices. The first time you will be asked to make a choice is in Chapter 2 after your first meeting with Enrim. There is no warning when a choice is coming up, so again save often. There are twelve save slots but choices are few, maybe one choice per chapter.
Achievements in this game are frustrating, as to achieve each you need to unlock both the good and bad ending combined to unlock the ONE achievement. This would have worked much better if you had an achievement per each good ending and each bad ending.
Text & Translation
The narrative (English translation) does have many spelling and grammatical errors that are very evident. Especially mixing up pronouns. At times the translation is pretty rough, it will take a moment to realize what they are trying to say. Some words are used improperly in their meaning. So events and conversations in some parts will be confusing and disjointed.
And at some points the text will be spaced too wide apart and appear below the text box, almost getting cut off at the bottom of the screen.
The characters' names are continuously spelled wrong between the text and the character titles and in some spots the English translation is missing so parts of the story will read only in Korean.
The Visuals & Audio
Visually this game is a feast! Such gorgeous artwork, with backgrounds painted in a watercolor art style. The character art is beautiful, especially the event CG's (which I call special moment pieces).
The music is gorgeous but does not sound Egyptian given that is the time period the novel is set in. But honestly that did not bother me much. I enjoyed the music score despite it not matching. The main characters are voiced in Korean which I enjoyed and my subtitles were in English.
I have to highlight the opening of the game, it is beautiful. An animated intro with scenes from the game set to a gorgeous song.
Overall Experience
When reviewing a game, especially a visual novel I keep in mind this might be someone's first experience with this genre. Their first vn. I also reflect on my experience as a whole with the game; was it enjoyable, would I re-read it and how did it leave me feeling.
This visual novel has gorgeous artworks, and an equally beautiful soundtrack. The story has substance and in and of itself is good. But the translation for English speaking readers is absolutely horrible. You cannot have a good experience with a visual novel if the narrative is flawed.
This visual novel is like reading a bunch of Google translations slapped together back to back with no coherent flow to the story. Grammar and spelling mistakes pepper the entire novel and the meaning of words and phrases is incorrect and broken. Also the pronouns are atrocious, you play as a female lead who for most of the story takes on the persona of a male character so the pronoun problems are even harder to follow when they are constantly incorrect.
In parts I struggled to understand what was happening in the story because the translation of the words was so confusing. This game could be potentially unplayable by those whose English is a second language, and without a strong understanding.
I will go back to this story in the future if the developer attempts to fix the translations. It would not be an easy undertaking since the whole game is in need of fixing but if they do I will replay it and change my recommendation to a more favorable stance. As the game outside of the narrative is gorgeous and has potential. But without being able to read and understand the actual story the whole game becomes a very frustrating experience.
Otome Lovers wishes to thank LemonVelvet for providing a free review copy for this game.
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