Celestine: One to Eleven is an indie RPG otome game that features a POC protagonist with plans of a full release in the future. For more updates visit the itch.io page, Twitter, or TikTok.
Game Overview
Join Celestine and Secta on a mysterious quest with many twists and turns. Make decisions that will decide their ending. Meet another male love interest in a cameo!
Celestine woke up in a world in which one of her past lives lived. On Secta’s route, he promises to help Celestine study and learn some magic so that she can find a way home. This game is a demo that covers a side quest.
Characters
Review
As an avid RPG player, its always nice to see the willingness to create a project that puts elements of an otome game and turn-based RPG. From the get-go, the thing that draws me into this game is the super cute pixel art — full of lovely pastel colors. From my understanding, Celestine is a girl who is living in one of her past lives which is full of magic and adventure. We don’t delve into that at the beginning, so I’m guessing we’re getting a part of the game where the two characters are already acquainted as they speak fairly familiarly with each other and attend a magic school. While there aren’t any ‘endings’ per se in this demo, you have choices that affect your outcome of how the characters interact and if you make the right choices — you could get a pretty CG to look at. While this is clearly a sample of how the game could play out, the characters so far are charming and have a lot of potential — which is what I’d love to see with future developments of this game.
Celestine is a young student mage along with her mentor Secta who she’s known for a month now and has been her magic tutor since. Secta is a handsome but cocky young man who loves to boast about both his looks and his charm — giving him a very charismatic impression. Him and Celestine give a lot of playful banter to each other and clearly are used to bouncing off each other’s sly comments. The demo starts off with the two characters deciding to leave the school to go on a quick side quest for a item called the ‘mirror of venus’ — something Secta had his eyes on. When they leave the school, they head off to find the mirror outside the town but run into monsters. After fighting them, the two of them come back in order to patch up and even meet another handsome man at the apothecary (who Secta is very obviously jealous of). He informs them of a woman who lost her husband and has lost all motivation to keep herself going. The two of them find and help this woman named Eryna clear out flower monsters in her garden that suddenly came to life.
Gameplay
This game has a mixture of VN elements and RPG elements where you have sprites and dialogue boxes for the main characters while there’s RPG gameplay mixed in with world exploring and monster fights. So far, I really like how it feels like a 2.5D game, with the slight mixture of 2D pixel characters and a 3D environment — which somewhat reminds me of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. The battle system is fairly simple with it being a turned based RPG where you have a HP and MP gauge and can take and do damage. You have an option of spells to use with MP and just a general attack. I found the battles pretty simple and had I been able to use items, I think it would be pretty straightforward. In the demo, it seems there wasn’t an option to use any items but the battles were easy enough where they didn’t pose much of a challenge as of yet.
Overall, I think this game has a lot of potential to be a really fun game. The artwork is very nice and visually appealing and I really love the pixel designs — they’re absolutely adorable and I can’t say that enough. I liked the music a lot and it reminded me of an RPG I’ve played in the past. I think the battles are very simple and could maybe be spruced up some but it’s a ‘so far so good situation’ where I think it’s progressing nicely. There wasn’t a leveling system yet or a party menu to customize your characters equips and such — those are definitely two things I’d like to see implemented in the final game. UI wise I think the general speech textboxes and fighting textboxes could be a bit larger as the text is a bit small.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing what lies ahead for this game! So far I can tell it has a lot of potential and I really like what I see so far. I can see the hard work put into this and I recommend trying it out — you can download the demo here!
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