Any otome visual novel built around a gated route structure needs a real reason to ask players to wait for content, especially in a genre where instant access to every suitor from the start has become close to standard practice. Piofiore: Fated Memories earned that patience by wrapping its five gangster love interests in a genuinely tense mafia power struggle worth following route to route. Olympia Soirée, for all its own pacing hiccups, at least justified the wait with real, escalating political stakes tied to its fantasy court setting. Illusion of Itehari is the newest arrival trying to earn that same patience, offering not just a striking, richly imagined setting but a route order that deliberately locks half its cast behind earlier routes finished first. It’s a clever combination that mostly works, but after finishing every available path, I’ve found this leans a little too heavily on some familiar otome pacing problems to rise above being one of the stronger recent entries in the genre rather than something that fully transcends it.
A city floating above the clouds, kept aloft by technology nobody currently living actually understands, makes for a genuinely striking backdrop, and Illusion of Itehari uses that mystery as the foundation for a story considerably more interested in political rot than pure romantic fantasy. Developed by LicoBiTs, a joint venture between Broccoli and TIS Creation formed by former Otomate staff, with character designs from RiRi and scenario writing from the same team behind Piofiore, this steampunk otome released for Nintendo Switch in September 2025 and casts Hinagiku, a young noblewoman from one of Itehari’s distinguished ruling families, into a conspiracy that unravels everything she’d been raised to believe about her floating home being a genuine, crime-free utopia. That unraveling starts the moment she turns eighteen and meets Yashiro, an amnesiac man whose arrival sets the entire plot in motion even though his own romantic route stays locked until considerably later in the game.
What struck me reading through this world’s construction is how thoroughly it commits to worldbuilding over simple romantic wish-fulfillment. Itehari’s entire social structure, noble families each governing a section of the city, commoners genetically modified to physically recoil from violence, a semi-divine ruler whose authority few dare question, gets real, patient attention, and the mysteries surrounding drug trafficking, classism, and isolationist policy give the plot genuine stakes well beyond the five love interests competing for Hinagiku’s attention. That density is both the game’s clearest strength and its most consistently frustrating weakness, since the political material runs deep enough that entire stretches bog down in repetitive monologuing about the city’s internal power struggles, testing patience even when the underlying mystery stays genuinely engaging.
The route structure itself carries real, deliberate weight. Rather than offering all five suitors from the outset, only Awayuki, Hinagiku’s overprotective attendant, and Tobari, head of the Entertainment District, are available at the start, with completing their routes unlocking Yori and Tsuyukusa respectively, and finishing all four eventually opening Yashiro’s path along with a final Truth Route that ties every loose thread together. That gated structure gives the whole experience real, earned progression, and the Truth Route in particular avoids the rushed, lore-dump-heavy conclusions that plague comparable otome titles, running a full five chapters that let its revelations land with real weight rather than arriving all at once in the closing minutes.
Individual route quality varies considerably, and it’s worth being honest about where that variance lands. Awayuki’s route, despite pairing Hinagiku with arguably her closest established relationship, sinks into repetitive political discussion genuinely difficult to stay engaged with for long stretches. Yori’s route, by contrast, earns surprising, specific credit for making a character initially read as a walking red flag into someone considerably more redeemable than his introduction suggests, even as the same route carries the game’s most serious content concern, an intimacy scene that reads as not fully consensual and gets handled with less narrative weight than that moment actually deserves. That’s a real, fair criticism worth taking seriously rather than glossing over in favor of the game’s stronger material elsewhere.
RiRi’s character art and CG work draw the same enthusiastic praise that made Piofiore a genre standout, richly detailed and visually distinctive across the whole cast. The Live2D animation applied to those character sprites during dialogue proves more divisive, with exaggerated breathing and movement effects that some players find genuinely off-putting rather than the subtle liveliness the technique is meant to add. Full Japanese voice acting and an opening theme titled Dawn both hold up well, even as the background score itself lands as merely functional rather than a standout in its own right. A persistent story log that doesn’t wipe when the console powers off earns specific, practical praise as a genuinely thoughtful quality-of-life feature for a story this dense and this easy to lose track of across multiple sittings.
By the time the Truth Route works through what actually happened during Itehari’s founding, the payoff for sitting through Awayuki’s slower political stretches finally arrives, and the specific way that revelation reframes earlier, seemingly minor conversations gives the whole cast’s earlier behavior new weight in hindsight.
Verdict
Illusion of Itehari succeeds through genuinely ambitious worldbuilding, using its floating utopia’s political rot to give romance real stakes beyond typical genre convention, backed by a gated route structure that pays off patiently and a Truth Route that earns its resolution rather than rushing toward it. Some individual routes, Awayuki’s chief among them, sink into repetitive political monologuing that tests real patience, and Yori’s route carries a legitimate, serious criticism around how it handles a non-consensual intimacy scene.
