Celestia Chain of Fate is an otome game that follows the heroine Aria Silverwings who attends the Celestia Academy after finding out she’s a descendant of an Angelus and Daemon. It’s a Visual Novel, Otome published by PQube with a release date of 9/12/24 for platforms Nintendo Switch and Steam.
Game Overview
Celestia: Chain of Fate is a romance-fantasy visual novel that delivers a captivating player driven narrative.
The perfect life you’ve known as a daughter of a Duke is about to change forever. With the revelation of your new hybrid identity, as a descendant of Angelus and Daemon, you must learn to live in a new world.
Compelled to accept an invitation to the Academy of Celestia to explore the world of magic, you must set out on a fresh journey in a world filled with demons and angels.
Uncover the secrets of your family history and learn to control the magical abilities you hold. Along the way, you'll have the chance to develop relationships with one of three romanceable characters, each with their own unique traits and personalities.
It’s down to you to hold your friendships and advance your love interests while also prioritising your education. Remember not to neglect your studies as you'll need to overcome a series of challenges to graduate!
Characters
There’s three main routes in this game which include Ash Winterlight (a half-blood Angelus), Val de Lucifer (a pureblood Daemon), and Luke Alistar (a pureblood Angelus). Unlike most games where there are individual routes, there is only one linear route where romance scenes can be triggered depending on the choices you make. Also, this game is not voiced, so none of these characters have CVs.
Ash Winterlight is a half-blood Angelus which is why he is attending the Academy of Celestia. He is the crown Prince of Glasia, making him royalty. He's close to his mother whom he respects and has the ability to manipulate ice which suits his cold exterior; but it's easy to melt away the moment he shows his softer side.
If you’re into kuudere types, you’ll definitely like Ash. He’s pretty much what I expected in terms of personality, cool and reserved at first but will soften up quite a bit when he warms up to Aria. I think he had some cute moments with Aria and it was fun to see him bicker with Val since they’re opposites in terms of personality. That being said, there wasn’t a whole lot of depth to him, so I was left wanting more in terms of his own baggage. In the human realm, you learn more about him and his family but because there’s such a big emphasis on the other realms, I felt his was a bit lacking.
Luke Alistar is a pure-blood Angelus who has a wish of overturning his destiny. He has the innate ability to talk to animals and has the ability to manipulate nature to his will. He has a very soft demeanor but is also a gentleman in every way. He often watches Val and Ash argue from the sidelines along with Aria.
Luke is in every way a softie that just wants to get along with everyone. Him and Aria made a cute couple because of how innocent they are and I liked the CGs he had. But with every soft, lovable character there’s usually a dark or secret past! Well, there was certainly things to learn about him, but just like Ash’s route, I was left wanting to know a bit more about him and his own predicaments and there are some things left a bit open-ended. That being said, I really do like the idea of his story and to give slight spoilers, his whole backstory situation reminded me of Colette in Tales of Symphonia — which is why I wanted to know more about it.
Val de Lucifer is a powerful pureblood Daemon from a well-known family within the Daemon realm. He has the ability to use lightning magic and is very powerful in his own right as Daemons usually are. That being said, he's a bit brash and tends to be a bit overzealous which usually annoys Ash. He's got a shy side when it comes to Aria though and tends to clam up a bit when he shows his softer side.
If you know me, I’m typically someone who has a bias for red-heads and this of course was no exception! Out of all the routes, I admittedly felt like most of the effort was put into his character because I felt like I got the most out of both his character development and his story in general. While there were things that could definitely be explored upon more, I enjoyed the scenes he had with Aria and his CGs were super pretty (and hot). I think Val got a combination of cute and sexy when it came to his romance and I think that’s a pretty good combo especially when you kind of want both.
System / Gameplay
Overall, the system is pretty simple and straightforward; I like the use of effects and animations on the main screen and I think the UI is pretty nice and ported well from the mobile version. That being said, I did run into a few bugs / glitches that were… honestly hilarious. At one point one sprite was completely stretched and one was just pixelated and glitched completely — then my game crashed. It wasn’t really a big issue because it didn’t happen again but it was kind of funny to be honest.
One thing that really stood out to me though is that this game has a lot of choices. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. I honestly wasn’t used to making that many choices in an otome game so I was constantly saving just to see different scenarios but soon learned a lot of them didn’t really make much difference and the outcome would usually always be the same. That being said, this game didn’t wimp out on bad ends and a lot of the choices can lead to some really random bad ends, so I guess there’s that.
So because of the vast amount of choices you can make in this game, I would’ve liked to have a text history function or a rewind function — I think that would’ve helped a lot. Especially because I don’t autoplay and I tap the button to proceed rapidly and I tend to accidentally choose a choice I didn’t want. That being said, the skip function was pretty fast so that was convenient. There’s also an affection screen so when you choose the right choices, you’ll see where you’re at in terms of their affection.
Lastly, one thing about this game that was the biggest drawback for me in terms of gameplay was the format of the routes — which weren’t separated. This game is very linear in the sense that there’s no branching of individual routes. This wouldn’t be an issue for me as long as each character had a set ending (much like Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk) but it was more weird because all the romance scenes would happen periodically with each LI. So it kind of felt like the heroine was two-timing everyone cause at one moment she’d be kissing one guy and then another the next moment. It honestly kind of reminded me of Persona in the sense you could romance everyone and the scenes would occur like side events that no one addresses. I’m well aware this is probably due to the fact that these sort of events are locked in the mobile version of the game but I think because of that, some of the events didn’t feel super personalized and that definitely made the romance feel a bit shoehorned in a weird way.
As I stated before, this game isn’t voiced so it’s one component which was missed since I find voiced games give more immersion.
Overall Thoughts
I love fantasy and medieval realms so this game was appealing in a lot of ways to me. First of all, I thought the art was very nice and the designs were very beautiful. I definitely can say that the art and CGs are a big pro for this game because it’s very nice to look at. I also always find it a bonus when otome games show the heroine sprite art and this game definitely did that and more. Aria got a lot of different sprite variations when it came to different outfits and different forms so that was nice to see. I was also surprised to see that a lot of the side characters got sprites which isn’t always often the case — and there was a lot of different side characters.
I’d like to discuss the side characters a bit because I did like a few of them such as Lilith who was surprisingly a lot more in depth of a character than I thought she would be. One thing that I like in otome games is when side characters get some spotlight and adds a bit more realism to the game in the sense that the LIs aren’t the only ones that exist in the world. It adds world-building and gives the story depth so I liked to see there was a lot of different characters to look at.
Personally, I really liked Aria. When I was thinking about games like Hakuouki, I always thought it was disappointing the heroine had the blood of a demon but never changed into the actual form or really did anything with it. But in this game, Aria does actually have her different Angelus and Daemon forms and it’s nice to see that she has that plus her own weapon being a fan (Kagura from Inuyasha anyone???). But it was nice getting different variations of her sprites I definitely didn’t expect to see so many.
One thing I did notice which was kind of funny is that this game felt like it got a lot of inspiration from Harry Potter. And I know one would think Wand of Fortune was more of that but this game made it a bit more obvious with certain things such as going through a wall to get to a special train station that takes you to the school, the rabbits being similar to the owls (such as delivering the school invitation) the headmaster reminding me of Professor McGonagall, the contracts between Lilith and Flynn similar to Doby and Lucius, Seraph being similar to Draco, ect. There was even a point where a book was being written into EXACTLY like Tom Riddle’s diary and I stg there’s no way that wasn’t a Harry Potter Reference LOL.
There were also some pretty wild scenes in this game and it wasn’t afraid to give the BL / GL fans a taste — especially when it had some flirting with female characters and the main LIs almost having a threesome because of a weird horny potion (I kid you not).
But there are some downsides to this game and the main one for me would be the lack of individual routes. While I understand the formatting of this game doesn’t allow it, I can’t find myself really rooting for Aria with a guy because she’s well… with all of them at the same time. Because of that, the romance scenes just felt thrown in there but it doesn’t really affect the main plot and usually the plot / romance tend to compliment each other. So it kind of felt like you were playing an JRPG where you can just randomly romance the characters in the story. Sure, I don’t mind that for a JRPG — but this is a otome visual novel so that romance aspect is pretty important. In that sense, the formatting of this game doesn’t really suit a full-release console game but I can appreciate the fact that its available to play.
Another disappointment for me was the lack of voices. I think for some people this wouldn’t be an issue because usually the heroine is unvoiced anyway and some people play non-voiced games all the time, but for me its a bit of a disappointment when you’re playing a console game. But at least I got to imagine for myself what the voices would sound like.
Also, in order for me to fully enjoy a game, I really do need the main LIs to get the depth and story building they so rightly deserve. Unfortunately, this game fell short on certain aspects of the characters because it’s unfinished — so you’re left wondering what the outcomes of these characters are. But I suppose that’s not entirely fair to criticize because the game clearly isn’t finished and to be fair you can’t exactly conclude what isn’t finished. This is considered Book I which is why not all loose knots are tied. In that sense, it’s a bit disappointing to not have closure, but there are things to enjoy from the story in general and there is a second season in the works (although I’m not gonna share that because it’d be a spoiler!!) and I’ll definitely tune in for that if it gets released for Switch!
So would I recommend this game? Honestly, if you’re into fantasy and magic and you’re looking for something cute and easy to read, then yeah I would recommend it. Unfortunately this only covers ‘Book I’ but if there’s more content to be had in the future I would definitely be interested to experience it. Gripes aside, it’s a cozy game that lets you date hot Angels and Demons so where is the harm in that?
Trailer
[Many thanks to PQube for providing a review copy]
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