izigame.me

Hour time exists as it does because I wanted to be thorough and consistent in ripping this story to pieces.
Mechanically, this game is quite good for a princess maker game, with a lot of variation in minigames, and several quality of life features (prestige to boost stats from start on replay, lategame things to modify stats/reduce them to obtain specific endings, etc).
The English translation is... Bad. Character names are inconsistently spelled in a lot of side quest material, as well as in some smaller side material (Derrick is sometimes spelled 'Derek', inconsistent spelling of Germaine, more than a few Lebsa typos).
Making matters worse, while no crashes have occurred, there's a large number of instances accidentally on Lebsa's route ( AND OOOOOOH, WE'LL FUCKING GET TO LEBSA'S ROUTE IN THE STORY SECTION) where I had experiences where the text and menuing didn't display correctly, making it so I literally could NOT turn down Lebsa's event (the one safety net you're supposed to have so you don't accidentally get a romance route you dislike!!) when you're supposed to have the option.

Spoilers
The Lebsa plotline is, to put it bluntly, absolute garbage.
Apparently before the 2.0 patch Lebsa was even more directly the soul of the hero Asbel in your sister's body, but as it stands, the script updates only serve to make the plot even more confusing;
in the original plot scripting, the daughter/Rose was apparently part divine and part mortal, with the only way for her to survive being to have those two sides filtered out from each other, and there's a number other things here and there, but the hero Asbel was partially playing into the hands of Luca regarding having both daughters live (from what I can tell anyway, I've been attempting to skim Chinese reviews of the original pre patch ending). Now, there's always been twins, but one has always been divine and one has always been mortal? I guess? And it seems as though Asbel just sort of Did All That without being tempted, and more pressingly...
the developers try to have it both ways; to say that Lebsa is a new soul with a different personality and none of the direct memories of the hero Asbel, but also is still kiiiind of Asbel insofar as mannerisms, and it being implied to be some sort of... soul... fusion... thing? To the point that the new versions of the endings tend towards it being implied Lebsa's soul is like, partially vaporized (presumably the Asbel part), and Lebsa talks some on not having the personality or memories.
... Except this is contradicted by the fact she fucking KNOWS that Asbel killed the father character at that time, and overall repeatedly shows recognition of Birdie Day and the father. Lines like 'did he lie to me' also seems to be implying that there's two figures, Lebsa and Asbel in places here and there, but then the question becomes where the fuck did Lebsa's soul come from? Was there a person other than Asbel involved in that story ages ago, or is this a new soul that exists because... reasons. It's baffling.
This breaks the plot. A lot. It's a half-measure that doesn't solve the fundamental issue of the romance being 'dating your sister's body who has had her body stolen', and the reasoning for WHY things have to happen the way they do, and why things keep being reset and redone nonsensical. The plot change essentially doesn't serve the real sickos who are fine with bodyhopping and 'killed your father' and incest, and also does a pretty damn severe disservice to like. Normal people who would rather not date their sister's body and some... weird person who is an old man but also not.
After a certain point, if you're so attached to the body theft plot that you're doing this shoddy measures to keep part of it, even as you slowly destroy the original plot's cohesion to keep it, shouldn't the first response been to make be not romantic?
Considering the 'marrying the blacksmith's son' that's been memed to death, it's apparent that the developers are fully capable of making routes that are not romantic with the person you are befriending, and have the romance elsewhere.
Of special note is 'Nightmare of the Brave' and Lebsa's route in the updated version, which is left so deeply ambiguous I don't actually really understand what happened. Lebsa's romance routes count as a 'true end' where Luca comes back to the father, but as far as things go, isn't Angel Rose's situation still roughly the same as it was? Some other true end versions have Rose mention maybe forming a new body or something, but those are in ends where Lebsa is more thoroughly exploded in older patches, and similar matters.
Other aside: the age listed for Lebsa is deeply confusing; it says 22 when the daughter is 12 and 28 when the daughter is 18, but this makes little to no sense with the timeline outside of when Asbel realized he was dying in the new version, but 22 years ago does not work with the daughter being 18? Unless they weren't twins and original rose was the older one...
Additional 'what the fuck' mention to Luca in this route, where she like. Wipes protag/Rose's memory of Lebsa being someone possessing her sister's body. Luca's actions in the new version of the plot in general are extremely inconsistent and strange, with a lot of the things Luca does with protag/Rose specifically being, quite bluntly, a bit cruel to both her and the father. protag is under the impression she is the original rose, the father isn't aware he had two daughters and now one is possessed.
This would work if the game took this more seriously.
It does not!
And if we're talking about reasonings for changing it, and talking about the unromanceable characters... it's very clear that the reason that it was changed was NOT because of Asbel's age, considering you can marry DERRICK, who your protag (even if she's not Actually the same as the original angel rose as of the 2.0 patch script changes) has MEMORIES OF KNOWING SINCE SHE WAS FIVE, and in most runthroughs would flat out recognize her from the story corner.

In general, the ages of love interest characters are completely unacceptable, with characters in their late teens all the way to their thirties getting into romance events with a character who at the time is 12. To put it bluntly, for so many of the characters there's no damn reason they would be that much older than her... They're supposed to be classmates.
If I'm going to be a bit mean: it seems that the developers only metric for what counts as an unacceptable romance is if the character in question has a beard (Basilou, Germaine, Asbel as of 2.0 patch), and not any of the actual power dynamics of 'knowing a character since they were five when you are like 30 (Derrick) or 'being your principal and decades older than you (Bryan). Wouldn't a setting with a farther timeskip make more sense? You already went from five years old to twelve, is it really so unbelievable to make that eighteen, and the overall setting err more towards a college or university type setting?
It feels that the only reason to have the knighthood setting be at twelve is to cleave to the Princess Maker formula, but the reality is that Volcano Princess would do better to try and do more of its own thing in this case.
People can argue that this would miss the entire point of seeing your daughter grow up, but I think that argument is more than a bit silly. Do you stop being a father when the daughter becomes twenty? If anything, the more severe dropping off of the father's influence would make more sense if the daughter was for the most part a mature adult, wouldn't it?