Title: Dance with Devils My Carol
Developer: Rejet
Release Date: 22nd March 2018
Age Rating: 12+
Length: ~10 Hours
Links: Official Website, VNDB
Dance with Devils My Carol is the fandisc to the 2016 game Dance with Devils released by rejet. It is composed of four sections:
- All Star – This is the group scenario where the characters are tasked with putting on a play at school, although things don’t exactly run smoothly.
- My Carol – With “Routes” for each of the main characters, this is essentially afterstories continuing from the Human Good endings from the original game.
- After Story – This section contains four short epilogues for each character that take place after their four route endings in the original game (Human good/bad & Devil good/bad).
- Extra – As the name suggests, this is a collection of fluffy extra scenarios for the main characters, plus a single chapter for side character Jek.
Each story chapter is accessed through the chapter select screen below, with only the All Star section unlocked at first. Playing through the game and making the right choices awards you with “Pome Coins” (“pome” as in “pomeranian”) which are used to unlock bonus voices.
As a fan of the original Dance with Devils, it’s no real surprise that I wanted to play this game and the fact that I picked it up on sale at some point was even more incentive. Did this fandisc live up the the standards set by its predecessor?
I have no hesitation in saying that this game was utterly disappointing on pretty much every level. It was incredibly short, much of the character interactions felt repetitive with stale jokes and overall I just don’t feel like I got my money’s worth with this game.
Starting with the “All Star” section and, to me, the group section of the fandisc is usually where we get cute/funny group CGs and a silly scenario that you wouldn’t get in the original game. There were no group CGs here, only a single ending image for each character & the plot was pretty boring.
The “My Carol” section was the longest (although I say that lightly) and was focused on afterstories that were set pretty much after the human endings for each character route. I think calling those endings “canon” would be fine because they were the happiest endings and most fans would probably be happy with that. The content of these was okay, although highly variable between the love interests. I wish that everyone just had a nice fluffy afterstory! Again, the game’s humour was getting stale and repetitive, with many of the characters feeling very one-dimensional (which isn’t something I remember about them from the original).
Considering that the game spent most of its time convincing us that the human good ending was canon, I don’t know why they then felt the need to include short epilogues for all four endings in the After Story section? The human good one was redundant because I’d just read a whole route about that & the bad endings generally had more impact without the epilogue in my opinion. One of the selling points of the original game was the whole “do you choose human or devil” thing so maybe a slightly longer epilogue for the devil good end would’ve been better here (or just cut this whole section tbh)?
Finally we have the extra section, where the leftover scrap scenarios that wouldn’t fit into the My Carol scenario went. These were pretty nice actually, very fluffy and cute. However, the Jek chapter was the Dandevi x Dialovers crossover I never wanted or needed in my life so thankfully it was extremely short.
As I’ve been alluding to pretty much the entire post, this game is just too short to be considered a full price title. There’s barely 10 hours of content and, while the extra voices are nice, the only other thing they bothered putting in the game was the stupid card collection system from the original game (which was terrible there so why do it again??). The whole thing feels so low budget that there’s not even a proper ending song, which is highly unusual from rejet.
Whilst the anime artwork will obviously never compare to Maeda Hirotaka’s original designs, I was fine with it in the original because the sheer amount of CGs made up some of the difference (it was a quantity over quality thing). However, there’s hardly any CGs in this game at all – 50 in total with no variations. I think I’ve had some lower-priced games with similar amounts so this is super diappointing. Whilst some of the CGs (such as the one above) actually look pretty decent, most of the others also don’t even look great so it’s not as if we got 8 gorgeous images per character either.
Final Thoughts
My Score: 4/10
To echo my thoughts from throughout this review, this game is just disappointing. It’s too short and devoid of content to be considered a full price title and, even with a hefty discount, what’s present in the game isn’t exactly good enough to recommend purchasing.
Dance with Devils My Carol feels like a hastily put-together game made as a quick cash grab that took advantage of fans of the series. Upon reading this, I’m really not surprised that rejet haven’t released any new games lately…
Thanks for reading!
Zettai Renai! 