A siege on your own home is a dramatic enough opening for any fantasy story, and Alice in Dissonance wastes no time throwing a reader straight into one as castle Rughzenhaide burns and princess Selphine Rughzenhaide and her royal guard Ritona Reighnvhasta scramble to escape a mysterious invading faction. What starts as a desperate flight through a teleportation portal quickly becomes something stranger. The two girls land not somewhere familiar, but in an entirely different region called Kadia, part of a wider set of lands known as the Outer-Pole where magic simply doesn’t exist and science reigns in its place instead, completely severing them from everything they know about their own homeland’s fate.
Alice in Dissonance, a doujin group operating under the name Project Written, developed the game, directed and written by Munisix with character designs and additional art from Hare Konatsu and a score composed by Luiza Carvalho. Sekai Project published the game.
Alice in Dissonance deliberately called each installment a milestone rather than an episode, fitting given how much of the story is framed as a journey rather than a series of discrete chapters. The game first released in Japan in August 2013, with Sekai Project’s English localization following in December 2014, a Switch port arriving in October 2019, and a remastered PlayStation 4 release in May 2020 that added a new soundtrack alongside higher resolution visuals.
The faction responsible for the siege, led by Koko, Mharie, Sian, and Melano, drives Selphine and Ritona out of Rughzenhaide in the first place, though their actual goals stay mostly unclear across this opening milestone. Kadia’s total absence of Mana turns out to be actively dangerous for bodies conditioned to it the way Selphine and Ritona’s are, adding a real physical stake to simply existing in this unfamiliar land on top of the more obvious challenge of finding a way home.
That displacement sets up what should be a straightforward road trip narrative, rallying help and finding a way home, but the game deliberately sidesteps that expectation almost immediately. Once Selphine and Ritona meet Rune, a bubbly girl introducing herself under an assumed name, the story quietly shifts its actual focus onto her and her brother Rudo, the head of a major company, telling a touching sci-fi tale involving artificial life and strange, unexplained medical conditions that ends up carrying more emotional weight than the ostensible main characters’ own arc. That’s a real structural gamble, and I found myself actually torn on whether it pays off. As a self-contained vignette, Rune and Rudo’s story lands with real dramatic weight even while leaning on some familiar genre tropes around artificial life and medical tragedy, but the choice does leave this opening milestone without a properly established sense of who its actual protagonists, villains, or wider setting are actually going to be.
What earns consistent attention regardless of where a given reader lands on that structural question is the character art. Vivid, bold lined designs with proportions closer to reality than typical anime style visual novels default to give the cast real visual identity, backed by a distinctive 3D camera system built specifically to make reading feel more visually immersive than a standard static-portrait presentation.
Ritona and Selphine’s classic contrasting dynamic, outgoing warmth against cool reserve, gives even the story’s slower stretches real chemistry to hold onto.
An in-game Encyclopedia helps manage the dense, occasionally jargon heavy worldbuilding, a real necessity given how much invented terminology the story throws at a reader early on, and the balance between lighthearted humor and real serious drama, while occasionally causing tonal whiplash, is handled with more care than a first milestone of an ambitious, Kickstarter backed indie series usually manages.
As a purely kinetic novel with just one minor branching moment that doesn’t ultimately change the overall story, this asks for patient, linear engagement rather than replay driven exploration, and it ends on a deliberate cliffhanger given the series’ explicitly episodic structure. That structure has since grown considerably, milestone two picking up immediately after this entry in 2015, alongside a prequel called SILENCE THE PEDANT and a further 2022 prequel, StP – LIGHTKRAVTE, that fills in even more of this world’s history.
A bundle collecting this game alongside milestone two, the series’ first original soundtrack volume, and a dedicated art book covers most of what a completionist would want from this stretch of the series, and an in-game language wheel, accessible with a quick keyboard shortcut, lets a reader switch between translations on the fly, including a Chinese localization the fan community itself worked to complete.
Watching Selphine and Ritona’s own homecoming quest get quietly upstaged by two characters they’d only just met left me curious rather than frustrated about where the wider series actually plans to take its real protagonists.
Verdict
fault – milestone one succeeds as a distinctive science fantasy debut, using vivid character art and a real willingness to shift focus away from its ostensible leads to deliver a touching, if structurally risky, standalone story about Rune and Rudo. Its choice to sideline Selphine and Ritona in favor of new characters is a real gamble that doesn’t fully establish this opening milestone’s own protagonists, villains, or wider setting, even as it delivers real emotional payoff on its own terms. Some jargon heavy pacing keeps the presentation from being flawless, but as the opening chapter of an ambitious, Kickstarter backed episodic series that’s since grown into multiple sequels and prequels, this earns its reputation as a real labor of love worth following into its later installments.
