The Royal Trap: The Confines of the Crown

I have a love-hate relationship with visual novels. I feel like the genre has a lot of potential, but many of the tropes and conventions bug the crap out of me. I generally only play OELVN (Original English-Language Visual Novels, try saying that five times fast, EVN is becoming the preferred term). Even then, a lot of EVN follow Japanese VNs in terms of style and conventions.

I picked up the recent Humble Bundle for Asphyxia and the Royal Trap. (This means I have an extra copy of pigeon dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend if anyone wants it, and it also means I have access to Sakura Spirit, which appears to be an amalgamation of everything I despise.) 

The Royal Trap is a fantasy otome with a mystery plot. You play as a lesser noble named Madeleine, who is Prince Oscar’s handler and is helping him vie for the hand of Princess Cassidy. The world-building is light, the main aspect of note is the societies are matriarchal and property and titles are inherited by women. Can’t say too much more without spoiling aspects the mystery, I’ll just say the title of the game is unfortunate and leave it at that.

I really liked Gaston’s route (it’s technically a yuri route because you can “romance” his assistant, Collette). Gaston comes off as this lecherous, shallow guy at first, but once you get to know him and Collette it’s a lot of fun. He’s my favorite match for Cassidy, too. Unfortunately the game glosses over intimacy between the women (whereas with the prince routes there are kisses and whatnot). It seems like that happens a lot with otome. If there’s a yuri route it’s always this chaste “we’re BFFs who kiss when the curtain is lowered” thing.

The Royal Trap is pretty standard for the genre, so it doesn’t avoid the things I hate. It has limited assets and the silliness of side-portraits really stands out here. I get using a side portrait for an unseen MC, but using a crop of a sprite when the sprite is RIGHT THERE is dumb. I’m overwhelmed when games have a ton of endings. RT has three endings (happy, good, bad) for each prince plus a few more, for a total of 15. I was willing to play through one ending for each of the princes because each route adds new information to the story, but I got burnt out by the third so Oscar’s will have to wait.

I haven’t played many otomes and I have yet to find one that really engages me. The Royal Trap has its moments but it’s a diversion at best.