Oblivious Garden ~Carmina Burana Reviews

This is probably the hardest VN that ive had to grind though. By that I dont mean that there is so sort of technical challenge no it was about understanding the storyline which was a complete mess for me. I've completed two of the storylines so far sadly it was a while back so I cant remember the names however that isnt teh problem here. The issue I had was trying to understand what the heroines were trying to achieve and what their motivations were but also trying to understand what they are trying to impose on the protagonist which a lot of the time didnt make much sense. This VN relies on you filling in the blanks a lot of the time furthermore the protagonist is a war veteran but a lot of the time he doesnt really act like it apart from the PTSD hat you see from him everynow and then. There is a lot of nice things about this, the art style is pretty nice, its high resolution and the music does its job(its not particularly amazing but doesnt tear you away from it as well). The minigames are unique and interesting as well. I'm not sure if my expectations were too high coming into this because I had heard a lot of fantastic things about this from a lot of people that have read this before so it was a downwards spiral sadly. So in the end I can't recommend this but I think if you are interested then read the positive reviews as well because this is only my opinion and it might be that it clashes with my expectations but i could meet yours. So in the end this a VN that succeeds in just about every sector apart from its storyline which is simpily confusing and results in it being very hard to connect with the characters, without you feeling in invested in the characters it becomes a lot harder to want to finish it.

Apart from the glaring translation shortfalls, Oblivious Garden ~Carmina Burana is one of the better visual novel style games to ported to Steam. This is a CHINESE made and voiced game and buyers should be aware of that before they consider anything else. While it isn't too big of a deal for me, some people on the forums are quite upset about it. Graphics/Art - 5/10 The backgrounds looks horrendous; it's almost like they went into paint and brushed some pictures together. The character models on the other hand look relatively crisp and workable. Some characters have a couple awkward postures and the sprites aren't overly polished compared to something like If My Heart Can Fly, but it's passable. Sound/Music - 9/10 The soundtrack is phenomenal and I'm going to give them props for voicing most if not all of the female lines. That being said, the Chinese voice actors sound quasi-amateurish but compared to most of the VN's on steam that lack any form of voice-acting, it's still a welcome addition. Translation - 6/10 This is where the game falls flat. If you are fluent with English and aren't afflicted with any mental handicaps, you will be able to make out ALL of the scripts. BUT, the English translation seems like it was made by people with English as a secondary or tertiary language. It's slightly better than the machine translations I would be getting off Atlas with a modified dicitonary so tbh it's doable. A welcome addition to the Steam repertoire of visual novels. I am thrilled that more Chinese made ones are making it onto the market and hope there's more to come. Given the price, this 5-10 hr game is definitely worth it.

Pretty presentation, and a premise with potential, but doesn't hold up as a text-based experience. The English is barely localized, and riddled with obvious errors, visible from the very first scene. All in favor of more VNs on Steam, but ideally they'd have a little more effort shown in the localization than in this case.

Hello Everyone, A garden of oblivious pleasure is what comes to mind when I think of my experience with this game. The Story of the Oblivious Garden was an absolute delightful tale to complete. Oblivious Garden ~Carmina Burana is a romance themed visual novel game that was published by DigitalEZ. The story is about a general who was once praised by the people of his country but due to the loss of a major battle in the region of Latoy; the once praised general was stripped of his rank as General/his station as Baron and was exiled from the kingdom of Celantu. Three years later his Uncle the Emperor of Celantu invites him back to the kingdom in order to take charge in the kingdoms upcoming Miracle play that occurs in the kingdom’s coveted Oblivious Garden. The garden is occupied by 7 princesses that this disgraced general has to instruct in the art of fencing, so the princesses can perform in the Miracle play in an attempt to appease the country’s gods. This is where the story truly begins for the player. As the player you are in charge of making various choses throughout the game to either ensure that the events of the Miracle play go smoothly or ends in an utter disaster. In your choices you will have the option of following 3 of the 7 princesses in their story or follow the events of stories head maid. The three princesses’ paths have the longest play time with each route taking roughly 10 hours each when reading it at a leisurely pace or around 5 hours each for more aggressive readers. The maid’s path can offer roughly 5 to 2 hours of additional play time to the story. Each story route offers their own unique story developments that help to keep the completion of each of the games varying routes enjoyable instead of offering a story that just seems to be on an endless repeat. For instance, in one route the player is following the story of a goddess that has fell through the fabric of time, in another you will be following the story of a war toward princess that is struggling to accept the bleak reality that she is forced to live, and then there is also a route where you will be following the story of a maiden that is posed with a 1000 year old spirt who has an unquenchable blood lust. Regardless of the path that the player follows, they will likely come across several unexpected surprises as they proceed through each route. The story paths do not have a direct connection, so the player does not need to worry about which character route to complete first because it will not have a negative impact on your game experience. However, each route does have some indirect correlations that help give the player a better idea of some of the underlying reasons why specific events have to occur in the story and as a result of this it does help to give the player a little bit of extra incentive to finish more routes in the story. The audio in the game is in Chinese and the game can be read with English subtitles. There is also an option to play the game with Chinese subtitles as well. Most of the English translations seem to flow smoothly in most of the text dialog that occurs during the game. As the player continues to get further in game’s story, there were instances where the games audio quality was diminished and there were also a few occasions where the game’s audio did not match the text dialog as a result of the audio moving to fast/slow. These audio defects did correct themselves as the story proceed to its next frame, but it was frustrating to run into these problems since it can distract the player from paying attention to certain events in the story. The character models for each of the characters throughout the game were drawn and really worked well in the environments that they were displayed in. Al of the character models are static but are swapped out frequently to display the change in each character’s emotional state. The transitions from one-character model to another was smooth in most instances and worked very well with the atmosphere of the game. The background images could have slightly more detail, but this does not take much away from the aesthetic appeal of the game’s environments. The game includes a tea based mini game that is one of the most frustrating mini games that I have come across so far. In this mini game, the player has to blend an assortment of teas that will receive a grade once the blend is completed. You start off this mini game with about five ingredients and your first blend of tea only requires two ingredients (Liquorice and Mint Leaf; I am stating the two ingredients in the first recipe but don’t worry you still have to work to get it perfect). After figuring out what ingredients you use, the player has to then has to figure out the exact dosage, temperature, and time for the specific tea that you are making (for the ingredients that I gave you will be making Comforting Tea). The levels for each of these stages range from Min, Mid, and Max. Once this is figured out you will have made a perfect cup of tea. Each tea has an associated level (comfort tea is level 0) which range from zero to max. Along with this a tea is ranked D, C, B, A, and S with “D” as the lowest, and “S” as the highest. Sounds easy right? Well you have a total of 16 different combinations to make with an undetermined amount of tea ingredients in a tea. There are a total of 39 ingredients that can be unlocked (because I don’t you anyone else to waste their time on this, I will tell you that a tea can have a max of 7 of ingredients and minimum of 2, the game’s instruction clearly neglected to mention this). This mini game will likely be of interest to you if you are a person that likes to complete all objectives in a game or if you want all the achievements that are available in this game (seven achievements come from this mini game). If you decide to figure out all the tea blends on you own, then you will likely spend a significant amount of time in this portion of the game (like myself). However, if you don’t want to put that much time into figuring out blends then you can simply look online for associated guides for this mini game. They will save you a lot of time and effort. Oblivious Garden’s dialog boxes can be controlled manually by clicking through each scene to advance through the game’s story. The game’s text speed can be from 0 to 10 and this game also supports auto play. As you process through the game, there is also a day cycle system and there is an option to enable auto save at these points of a game. This game can be played with a keyboard and mouse, which has rather smooth controls. There is partial controller support for this game that allows the player to progress through dialog scenes and answer choices by pressing a button on the controller. However, save files, auto play, the pause menu, and option settings require for you to use either a keyboard or mouse. The games as 40 save slots available so save slots should not be to much of a difficulty. The musical score in this game complements the game’s story progression very nicely and helped to keep the player immersed in the story. With all of that being said, Oblivious Garden was a rather enjoyable experience that keep me entertained through multiple playthroughs. Although, the game did have its shortcomings in regard to certain audio segments, frame hiccups, and grammatical issues, the game still offers a memorable gaming experience that I will look back on fondly. I would recommend this game to people that want to experience a unique fictional romance story or to people that want to try out the visual novel genre for the first time. This brings this review to a close. I hope you found this review helpful and I hope you have a fantastic day. Happy Gaming.

Of the visual novels I've played, this is probably my favorite so far. The artwork is lovely and the character design well done. The music works well with the setting. The character voices sound fine to me. As with all translated VNs, there are some occasional clunks in the text, but I didn't feel it was bad. I can't comment on the translation like I might with a Japanese VN as I don't speak any dialect of Chinese, but nothing in the text seemed overly hinky that would hint at a poor translation. These are just basic good points you can find in a lot of VNs. What really made this one stand out, in my opinion, is the vast difference in the stories for each path. Most of the VNs I've read have had pretty much the same plot regardless of what path you're trying to follow, with unique scenes and dialogues inserted in based on your choices. In this case, without spoiling anything, the entire progression of the plot is different. Each girl's path is written individually so that if you finish, for example, Leila's path and then go back and play Dyanna's path, the story is brand new (and each plot is VERY different from the others). Thanks to the real replayability of this sort of "four-stories-in-one" novel combined with the well-drawn graphics, I can't recommend it enough. I picked it up on sale but would cheerfully have paid full price for the amount of playtime and enjoyment I got out of it!

The story and the characters are interesting, personally i like it but the translation is bad, very bad. Many of the conversations are very unclear and it feels like a 6 year old child wrote it. Unless it's properly translated i would not recommend this.

I was able to clear one route for Dyanna, Lin, and Finn; three routes for Leira. From this, I do think that a lot of things are lost in translation because of cultural barriers, and to make matters worse the translation is quite terrible; as I read in the forums the translation is now being reviewed. Oblivious Garden ~Carmina Burana is pretty much similar to other VN's, you move around the garden and go to places where you can interact with its characters. Your decisions will direct which storyline you will go through. In some stages of the game you will be asked to prepare a tea, this will lead you to a minigame. You'll decide which ingridients to use, set the temperature and time for brewing. The game may end early if you somehow suddenly got kicked out of the garden (This was how my first game ended). If you were able to do you job well you may be able to proceed to one of the heroine routes. I had a hard time understanding it but the story is really good and interesting. The protagonist was presented well, and some of the characters are pretty unpredictable that you'd be puzzled out on how to interact with them. It was a joy listening to the voice acting, there was nothing that I didn't like (This is my first Chinese VN though; I can't understand what they were saying). I like the art and the soundtrack. The OP is what I like the most in this game, I don't know how many times I watched it, really loved the music. If you ever find yourself playing this VN, I recommend that you start trying to get to Finn's route first, finish Lin and Leira's before going on to Dyanna. I believe that this is the best way to experience the VN because with this you can have a finale with the Miracle Play.

Amazing game with an incredible story! Just absolutely fell in love with the characters. Definitely great to break away from the typical VN, no school girls, no stereotypical protagionist, nice break from the usual japanese voice overs with the chinese voice overs. I really love how in depth the story is, more of a book than most VNs. Irell is a great protagionist, how haunted he is by his sins and past. I never cared for the protagionists of other VNs, he really stood out from the bunch. The voice overs were great, especially Leira's. She really sold the taunting, cruel speaking character, but was also able to sound cheerful when needed. The music was superb, recommend buying the soundtrack. The girls are easy to fall in love with. I really wanted and wondered why Marian wasn't a choice to fall in love with but after doing Leira's story, I saw why (You'll see why). I really liked how the world had religion, magic, and other things but didn't feel the need to go in to depth with it all. 10/10. Playing again for sure. For the price of this game and DLC, recommend for anyone who loves VNs or just a great read all together. PS: Be careful on Leira's story. You may lose your head.

This game is really a mixed bag. In one hand, the art style of the characters and backgrounds are gorgeous, the music beautiful and relaxing. The romanceable characters are very unique and deep, and I found myself genuinely interested in finding out more about them and they're well being. (Be warned though, if you're planning on choosing Leira as a romance option, you will need A LOT of patience. Her rudeness can be really hard to take, and at some points your perspective will switch to her's, and the game neglects to state this, leading to some confusion.) On the other hand, the translation is absolutely awful, and english-speaking players will need to read a lot of the lines over and over again to understand what's going on, and there are not that many different music tracks in the game, making long playthrough's a little tiring. Oh, and a little advice; even though there are multiple paths to take in the game, you can only choose one path and stick to it. I completed Lin's route, and on my second playthrough, decided to take Leira's path. As mentioned before, Leira can be an exhausting romance choice, as she insults you much more often than shows affection to you, so eventullay, I got sick of it. I thought I would take a break from the *cough*bitch*cough* and visit Lin. And the VN immideatley launched one of the early romance scenes for Lin's story, even though I had never once visited her in the game before, making it very awkward when the main character said, "I know our meetings in the forest have not been a coincidence." Um, what meetings in the forest? So, I decided to just shrug that weird moment off and go on to the next day... when I was immediatley expelled from the garden and failed the game. In a nutshell; after a certain point in your chosen path, if you even GLANCE at another option in the game, you're hit with a game over instantly. I guess those princesses assumed I was courting them both. You can just imagine how much this ticked me off. The thing is, this ending would be perfectly fine if they had programmed it better, by say, making the player need to visit a princess a certain amount of times before romance with them becomes possible, and then visiting each one with romantic intent, and NOT allowing the game to jump between romantic scenes at random! So when you do remember to visit one and ONLY one princess after a few in-game days, there's still not that many important decisons you can make that greatly affects the outcome, such as in other VN's like Long Live The Queen. The biggest decisons you make is whether to tell Dyanna that she screwed up baking cookies or not. The result: This visual novel takes the word 'novel' a little too seriously, as you passively click the mouse like crazy, following the story in it's own set path. However, if you're an avid reader like me, you can probably look past this lack of interaction and choice as the characters and plot make the ride very engaging, and the game itself is beautiful to look at and listen to. And no matter how bad the translation is, I will always have a blast brewing Finn's head into the princesses tea. (I think that may be another glitch...) So, if you like reading, gorgeous backgrounds, amazing music, anime art styles and suprisingly good romance stories, you'll feel right at home, but I would still recommend waiting for it to go on sale or for the developer's to fix the translation. If you demand important decisions leading to endless possibilties of endings, high interactive content, and freedom of choice, you should look elsewhere for your next VN treasure.

Here're my preliminary observations: [u]Graphics:[/u] Very pretty. The graphics are watercolor-esque style. 4:3 aspect ratio (Not widescreen). Full-screen is achieved by hitting the windows maximize button. [u]Story:[/u] The game summary mentions 7 princesses. Only 3 are romanceable. A 4th girl, the head maid, is romanceable with the addition of the DLC. The news states that the DLC is included with each copy, however I'm not sure if this will apply in the future. While the story flows for the most part, there are moments where the transition is abrupt and the flow is broken. I'm not sure if it's deliberate. [spoiler] For instance, there was a scene where you're teaching Finn and she falls asleep. Then, when you try to wake her she's terrified. For all of 2-3 clicks. Then suddenly she's calm and apologetic. You get the feeling she's either schizophrenic or there's a step missing. Then, there is another scene where you're at the training hall on the first day, and you find her acting really different...extremely confident I suppose. She asks you to teach her like you promised and you ask her whether she has androphobia. You try to comfort her... ...and cut to a childhood memory of Finn's. You wake up after that memory is complete. How did you get from the training hall to your bed? What happened in the middle? I haven't noticed this on the other girl's routes yet...I wonder if Finn's route is a bad end or a joke route. [/spoiler] [u]Sound:[/u] Music is peaceful, appropriate, and doesn't feel repetitive. The battle music is rather interesting. It's the first time I heard battle music arranged this way. Voices are in Chinese. Voice acting seems to be a hit or miss thing. (Whoever's VA'ing Dyanna sounds like her mouth is right on the microphone. Or maybe there's an echo in the background?) (Whoever's VA'ing Leira and her maid does a good job though.) Main character (you) is unvoiced. [u]Gameplay:[/u] Visual Novel. Branching appears to be determined by a combination of choices and the number of times you visit a girl. There's a "dictionary" button at the top of the screen. I'm not sure what it's for since I can't use it yet. The "return" button returns you to the previous set of choices. Failing that, it returns you to the start of the scene. [u]Translation:[/u] Much improved since it was released last year. The prologue makes sense now. The translation itself does not appear to be machine translated, i.e. since the writing takes the context of the scene into account. [u]Saving / Loading:[/u] For those of us that like to make a save point for each branch, you get 40 save slots. 39 are traditional slots. 1 is reserved for quicksave. You can only quicksave when you reach the screens where you're picking the girl to visit. I think the solution is to quicksave, then visit each girl in succession and save normally. [u] Misc Notes [/u] My firewall picked up an outgoing connection from the game when it starts. I blocked it and the game seems to run fine. Dunno what it's for though. [u] Conclusion [/u] I'll recommend for now since the game itself seems interesting. I'll need to update this review as I play more later.