First impressions matter, right? This awesome visual novel opens with a recap movie of the first game before dropping straight into the fallout of an ambush by Melano, the leader of the group that attacked Selphine’s kingdom, and that confrontation immediately triggers the fractured, ancestral personality shift the story calls Empress Syndrome, also referred to in-story as Path-Down. I settled in expecting more of what made the first entry work: quiet, careful worldbuilding paced out over a linear, choice-free read. About halfway through, once the story shifted its full attention onto the coastal country of Viscanta and its underwater district Neo Sasary, introducing new faces at a clip I hadn’t expected, it started to feel less like a tight continuation and more like a story straining against the edges of what a single entry could hold. By the end, I understood exactly why: this was never meant to be a whole game on its own.
Written and directed by Munisix, with character designs by Hare Konatsu, this direct sequel to fault – milestone one, developed by ALICE IN DISSONANCE and localized by Sekai Project, commits fully to being a pure kinetic novel, no branching choices, no alternate endings, just a single, carefully constructed story told exactly the way its writers intended. That structural discipline turns out to matter a great deal to how the whole experience actually lands, especially once Selphine, her guardian Ritona, and their companion Rune reach Port Sasary and meet Sol, an orphaned local boy who offers to guide them through the city in exchange for payment.
What immediately distinguishes this entry from its predecessor is the new 3D camera system woven into every scene, giving even static dialogue exchanges a sense of spatial depth and cinematic framing that a typical flat visual novel background can’t replicate. That technical ambition pays off in genuinely striking ways during the story’s bigger, more dramatic sequences, and the opening stretch specifically delivers an early gut-punch twist strong enough to immediately reignite my investment in characters I’ll admit had faded from memory during the gap between games. From there, the story settles into a small story in a big play approach, deliberately narrowing focus onto personal, intimate stakes even as the wider political and magical machinery of the world keeps turning in the background.
Where the game draws its most legitimate criticism is scope, and it’s worth being direct about rather than glossing past. Originally planned as a single release, milestone two grew large enough during development that ALICE IN DISSONANCE split it into two separate purchases, side:above and a later side:below, which finally arrived in 2025 through publisher Phoenixx Inc. after roughly six years, rather than Sekai Project, following that project’s own extended development. That split shows in how this half actually plays. A wide expansion of new supporting characters gets introduced across this entry alone, and while several of the new personalities do meaningful work deepening the established trio’s own arcs, the sheer volume of new faces stretches the world thin enough that I found the plot occasionally reading like a detour from the escape-and-return story that made the first game work, with an ending that lands more truncated than earned. That’s a real, specific complaint rather than simple nitpicking, even against how much I ultimately enjoyed the rest of it.
Character work fares considerably better. The newly complicated dynamic between Selphine’s usual self and her Empress Syndrome personality gives the returning cast genuine, fresh material to explore. Ritona in particular carries real emotional weight throughout, dealing with visible aftereffects from her time in the Outer Pole that give her a more vulnerable, human dimension than a typical stoic-guardian archetype usually allows. The class-divide themes woven through Neo Sasary’s setting land with real, specific emotional impact too, even if a couple of character shifts along the way felt narratively convenient to me rather than fully earned by the buildup surrounding them.
Presentation stands as this entry’s most unanimous strength. Character designs continue evolving in genuinely distinctive directions, backed by a February 2016 post-launch update that redrew sprites for the Zhevitz family and the Lab 9 crew, with the option to toggle between old and new art. Combined with richly detailed environments, that new 3D camera work gives even a purely linear, choice-free story real visual momentum. The soundtrack operates on a noticeably different level from typical genre scoring, and the game’s Encyclopedia feature, cataloguing locations, politics, and magical terminology, gives genuinely curious readers real, substantive lore to dig into beyond the core narrative. The localization ships in British English, with a hotkey allowing an instant language switch without digging through a settings menu, a small quality-of-life touch I appreciated more than I expected to.
Verdict
fault – milestone two side:above builds meaningfully on its predecessor’s foundation, using a genuinely inventive 3D camera system and a jaw-dropping opening twist to reignite investment in a beloved cast, even as its rapidly expanding roster of new supporting characters tests the story’s focus and pacing more than a stronger edit might have allowed. Being only half of a story originally intended as one release is a real, structural limitation worth knowing about going in, one that would only be resolved six years later with side:below’s 2025 launch under a different publisher. For fans of the first game who fell for Selphine, Ritona, and Rune, this remains a visually striking, emotionally substantial continuation worth the time, even with its ending landing more like a comma than a period.
