I almost missed Taisho x Alice entirely because of how badly its first attempt at an English release went. The original 2017 localization replaced the full Japanese voice cast with what sounded like a single English actor voicing everyone, left entire menus untranslated, and became something of a punchline before most western otome fans ever got a real look at the story underneath it. I came to this considerably later, through the properly retranslated version that Primula and a dedicated localization team put out starting in 2019 and later consolidated into the All in One release, and I’m glad I waited, because the game hiding under that disaster of a first impression turns out to be one of the more committed takes on the “rehabilitate a broken man back to happiness” premise I’ve read in this genre.
The setup drops an amnesiac heroine into total darkness alongside a boy who names her Arisu and claims no memory of his own identity beyond the name Alice. They stumble through a crystal mirror into the Looking-Glass World, a twisted, dreamlike fairytale dimension where familiar characters get bent into unfamiliar shapes, Cinderella and Red Riding Hood reimagined as men, Snow White and Kaguya carrying real trauma underneath their storybook trappings, and Arisu finds herself pulled into one broken retelling after another, each one asking her to help her chosen love interest work through whatever’s keeping him from his own happy ending.
That premise could tip into shallow melodrama fast, and the restraint the writing shows instead genuinely surprised me. Mental illness, grief, and violence run through nearly every route, and rather than treating those themes as edgy set dressing, the script handles them with a level of care that earned my trust well before the story’s conclusion. Each episode focuses tightly on its specific love interest’s fractured version of events, letting that fairytale’s twisted premise carry real emotional stakes before the connective tissue between all of them starts to reveal itself. Arisu herself deserves credit too. She flirts first, gets rejected sometimes, and keeps pursuing what she wants without the story punishing her for being forward, which felt like a small but real departure from the more passive heroine archetypes I’ve run into elsewhere in the genre.
Where I ran into real friction was how the story handles repetition once its structure kicks fully into gear. So much of the eventual epilogue material involves retelling earlier scenes from new angles once the full context becomes clear, and by the time I reached the fourth episode centered on Alice himself, I was covering ground that already felt thoroughly explored the first time through. One stretch in particular circled back over material I’d already pieced together without adding enough new to justify how long it lingered there. That’s a real pacing cost for a story built explicitly around layered perspective, and my patience wore thinner in the back half than it had earlier on.
The voice work carries an enormous amount of the emotional weight here, and it deserves to be singled out specifically. This is a stacked cast of Japanese talent, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Alice, Toshiki Masuda as Kaguya, Takuya Eguchi as Gretel, among others, and more than one of those performances ranks among the more demanding, transformative work I’ve heard from these actors, especially whoever handles the story’s most psychologically fractured character. The rest of the audiovisual package shows its age more plainly. CG count runs thin relative to how long the story actually is, character sprites carry little to no animation beyond swapped facial expressions, and the original 2015 PC release in particular suffered from a low native resolution that left text looking soft even in full-screen. The Switch and later PC re-releases sharpen that up considerably, though the CG scarcity and static sprite work remain baked into the source material regardless of platform.
Knowing the localization’s history going in changed how I read the current release, and I think it’s worth knowing before you start. The 2019 retranslation by Molly Lee, working with JAST USA and later Primula’s own team, replaces that infamous first attempt with something considerably more careful, right down to small choices like how regional dialects and pet names get adapted into equivalent English textures instead of flattened into generic phrasing. That kind of attention shows a level of care a rushed, purely functional translation wouldn’t have bothered with, and it made a real difference in how much I trusted the writing during the story’s heavier scenes.
By the time every route folded back into the connecting epilogue, the emotional payoff justified most of the patience the structure demanded of me. Watching a story built on broken fairytale premises slowly reveal how they connect back to one central relationship gave the whole thing a shape that rewarded reading through in the intended order rather than jumping straight to a favorite character’s route, and the story’s insistence on taking its heaviest material seriously paid off once everything clicked into place for me.
Verdict
Taisho x Alice takes real risks with its premise, using twisted fairytale archetypes to explore grief, trauma, and recovery with more sincerity than a typical rehabilitation-romance otome usually attempts, and its strongest routes reward that ambition with real emotional weight. Thin CG counts, minimal sprite animation, and a back half that leans harder into repetition than it should keep the presentation and pacing from fully matching the story’s ambitions, but a genuinely committed voice cast and a considerably improved modern localization make this an easy recommendation for otome fans willing to sit with heavier material than the genre typically offers.
