My Do-M mind forced me once again to try a mobage port, so here I am playing Ephemeral, Fantasy in the Dark!

Even if it could be just a typical school game, there’s a huge difference this time: if attending a school full of various races of monsters (vampires, werewolves, mummies, mermaids……) wasn’t enough, I’m a zombie girl too!

Well, that’s quite unexpected honestly, I imagined the heroine would be a cute creature…. but that’s ok, this makes her somehow interesting.

After a short prologue I got to choose my boy and I decided to go for the werewolf first.

I won’t lie, I did it only because he smelled like tsundere from a mile, it was obvious!

My expectations were fulfilled, since there were a lot of cute blushing scenes and embarrassing moments. His love was obvious from the start, but the heroine started thinking about him immediately too… I guess events are rushed because mobage are shorter than console games, so they didn’t worry too much about consistency.

Well, somehow this turned out to be almost funny: the heroine’s classmates kept teasing her for missing Shiba and sighing when he wasn’t there, but she didn’t even notice the reason herself…. I guess she was wondering “why do I love him so much this early? The game barely started” as I did.

Anyway, I enjoyed this route overall, since Shiba is cute as I expected him to be and there were some pretty sexy scenes as well. He’s such a sweet boy, I want to pet him too!

Everything was perfect until they added for no reason a beautiful girl and the poor heroine started being jealous and suffered a lot; who had this terrible idea? This is an otome game, come on!

If I wanted to see a desperate heroine, I’d just watch a shoujo anime! That part was really annoying, I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

I’m really sad the writers decided to ruin Shiba at the end of his route, making him unreliable as a boyfriend. I know, he was sorry and all, but I couldn’t trust him.

And the happy ending wasn’t even a proper conclusion of the game, it was just the end of that annoying scenario. It left me with a terrible aftertaste, I just wanted to change route.

I went for the mummy, Natsume, since he looked cold but fascinating.

At first he was really rude, he even accused the poor heroine of being a liar who relies on her pretty face to get what she wants. What a douche.

Anyway, after literally 2 chapters he changed his mind and started stalking her, saying weird stuff and flirting.

I won’t lie, it was way better than being insulted for hours, but this change was sudden and I couldn’t trust him, something was obviously wrong with this guy.

His yandere side was so creepy, he even said lines like “should I break your hands or feet? Or… cut them?” and “if I kill everyone except you, will you only look at me? Or it will be easier to poke your eyes blind?”. I wasn’t that scared of a character since Moshikami’s Masato, I swear.

I don’t even know if I wanted to punch his face or just run away to save my life. Probably both.

It was an interesting experience anyway, everything about him was so exaggerated I ended up considering him a troll after a while. At least I played a memorable route, that’s for sure!

I went for Ray, the arrogant vampire, next.

He made me feel like I was playing Diabolik Lovers, except this heroine has a pretty face but her blood tastes terrible.

Every girl in this school wants to be his sex slave, but he grants this wish only to the most beautiful ones… so I guess I’m lucky, since I receive his special treatments.

I expected some kind of bullying here, since he’s basically the school prince; still, it was annoying.

Somehow I couldn’t trust him completely, even if he promised me eternal love: we know vampires are too obsessed with beautiful things, how can he accept when the heroine starts to rot?

He’ll probably regret his choice. The happy ending felt kinda sad honestly.

My last route was Nagi, the invisible man.

I somehow expected him to be a stalker, since he can do everything he wants without being seen, but he’s actually a sad guy who needs love.

He’s the only one who is afraid of the future, like the heroine, because he’s low-class and something terrible will happen as he becomes older; his pain was touching.

Anyway, there’s one scene that would deserve an award as the “worse confession scene ever”: it was so awkward, it’s not even cute. But I guess the writers of this game enjoyed some trolling, or maybe they didn’t come up with better ideas, since there are also other useless scenes that looked like fillers to reach the requested length for the route, without worrying about character development (like, 3 chapters of the group playing hide and seek?! WHY?).

The routes are already short, I can’t believe they wasted precious time like that, it means they really didn’t know how to write a decent plot!

I’ll forgive them just because Nagi is a sweet angel, but it was a waste.

Would I recommend this game?

I thought I was just going to suffer and waste money while buying another mobage port, but Ephemeral was surprisingly more entertaining than I expected and I don’t regret my choice at all!

Of course, the plot wasn’t deep and the writing was bad in most of the routes, but the characters’ interactions are comedy gold and they make the game worth playing.

Natsume is creepy as hell, Ray can be a douche, Shiba is unreliable and Nagi is a crybaby, but I just laughed about it and I couldn’t take them seriously from the start, it’s a school for monsters after all; at least some of their lines will be memorable for a long time.

Ephemeral is not worth the price of the PsVita port anyway, because of the short length and the terrible plot writing; but if you find a Steam sale, I think you should give it a chance.

Don’t expect a masterpiece, but you’ll probably enjoy a romantic comedy with great art!