Pale Spectrum - Part Two of the Book of Gray Magic Reviews

This is easily one of my most favorite games ever and I really truly hope that there is a third game in the future! I had so much fun with the story and making decisions for the different characters.

Fantastic sequel to Brilliant Shadows. Just finished one playthough but feel with the multiple endings I missed enough to have to go back and try to get the other endings!

I love this game. You can tell they spent a great deal of time world building to develop their complex magic system and the how the relationship between the characters. there are quite a few endings, though i the ingame chart of all of the endings and options were more explict in letting you know how many other paths can still be taken. I'm still not 100% sure that I have taken every ending. As for the ending themselves one ending path feels more like a true ending than most of then the others. I really would love to see the next part of this game and see how it all resolves itself.

Unfinished, underdeveloped, unsatisfying, and seemingly come undone since it appears the devs have dropped this series. This is a real shame since the first book, Brilliant Shadows, was so enjoyable. Plotlines go seemingly nowhere, characters are brought back to do essentially nothing, there's an unjustifiable surplus of new characters who do not add anything to the story, and the pacing is jumpier than an anxiety-riddled frog during an earthquake. Even the justified new characters who DO serve to drive the narrative are one dimensional, or just unexplained and fleshed out poorly. There's simply too many ideas here that are delivered to you at a breakneck pace with inadequate time to digest them. I fell in love with the world I was slowly discovering in the first book, the second just unravelled any interest I had in seeing where it all leads. I struggle to think of how long it would take to wrap up all the ideas and plotlines that have been set in motion here, and in a clean way. Narrowing of scope would have helped here. I wanted to like this, I really did.

So, I recommend this game if you've played Part One and are familiar with the characters. In fact, in my eagerness to find the sequel I immediately purchased this right after I finished playing Brilliant Shadows, wanting to know what happened next. I'm writing this straight out of a completionist run of the first game and only doing one run of this one. Pros: + It has pretty much all of the original cast from before, fully voice acted + The art is different but still wonderful. You can tell who is who and it even explains why certain characters look much different from before (Belinda, Hektor). + The first half of the story comes across pretty solidly and brushes up a bit more on lore than we didn't know before. + I love the characters and how they interact with one another. They're all varied and issues are dealt with in interesting, sensitive, and realistic ways. It's a nice a diverse cast. Cons(Some spoilers below but I will try to keep it as spoiler free as possible): - The plot begins to drag out pretty quickly - There seem to be a lot of choices that don't quite seem to matter or affect the plot in any significant way even though there's a boast of numerous endings. - The tracking tree for endings is...incredibly confusing and tells you nothing. I have no idea how to use it to really track my progress in any significant way. - Because the game is tracking so many plot points/characters at once...some just get dropped completely with only a vague mention that events happened off screen. It gives you the feeling that if they were going to do things that way, they should have just either scrapped the plot idea entirely or done smaller DLCs to supplement Part Two. - The way the main plot is explained to the reader is haphazard and all over the place. Almost toward the end of the game a sudden New Player! shows up and conveniently handles a major plot point, treating it as if it completely minor and making it...Idk, pointless to even have in there to begin with. I felt like it would have just been better to have been focusing on the real threat instead of having what ended up being a secondary minor threat that got conveniently written off so we could move on to the real threat. - I feel that because they were focusing on too many things at once that they didn't need to, the ending of the story suffered with an unnecessary cliffhanger that leaves the reader really unsatisfied. There is no real sense of adventure like there was with Brilliant Shadows. I think they were going for a more introspective/intrigue setting this time around, but it just falls flat because the focus is in so many different directions with nothing really tying in together with strong cohesiveness. - Holy crap some scenes have 0 transition and you're left reeling at their spontaneity. One spoiler: There's one scene where everyone is at the kingdom and things are fine and have been fine up until that point. Ash, Terra and the lady Guard are in a COMPLETELY different location on a mission doing plot things. Immediately next scene without warning they're just...back and the kingdom has gone to shit for some reason? There's no warning, you're not told they've decided to head back or that they're done doing plot things...they're just back at the kingdom. Brilliant Shadows was slightly bad with this too but it was way more pronounced in this game. I know that's a lot of cons. I honestly didn't hate the game, and I'll probably go through it and do more playthroughs. But I was seriously disappointed after playing the first game and finding it so engrossing and fun. Characters were introduced and are even featured in the cover art and I still have no idea what their point and purpose were (besides looking pretty and being a love interest?)...and I don't feel like I should have to wait for an entirely new game to come out for me to discover their relevance. Maybe I just need to do more playthroughs to learn more but it'll be a bit of a bummer to do a completionist run only to find that's not true. I won't keep going on and on so I'll just tl;dr this: Play Pale Spectrum if you're a fan of the series so far and you really want to know the fate of the characters and you enjoy the world they're in, etc...but maybe get when it's on sale. I wouldn't recommend this game otherwise, there's just too many things I feel are off putting for someone to just jump right into it.

Very well done sequel to the original. Honestly, I am very relieved that they didn't "blow it" on the second installment of this series, like many companies do. Everything that was awesome about the first one was all packed into this one as well; maybe a little more. The biggest issue that got addressed in this installment was the main complaint that many (myself included) had from the last game: Without giving away any spoilers, I will simply say that we get to spend a LOT more time with our main Heroine and her romantic life. This second installment really addressed that aspect of the first book in a very satisfying way. That's the good news. What’s the bad news you ask? Well, put as simply as I can: It's EXACTLY the same as the first book in that it will leave you wanting the next book ASAP. But, that is a good thing too, in some ways, right? ;) Dig into the novel today if you can, its just as good, if not better, than the first.

An excellent sequel to Brilliant Shadows. Good stuff: [list] [*] Great writing and character development. [*] Unique and interesting lore. [*] Racial diversity, given that several dark-skinned characters have their own goals and ambitions that don't revolve around white people. [*] Queer representation, three different queer couples and a trans character. [*] Choices greatly matter, with several different consequences and endings. [*] Lovely artwork. [/list] Bad stuff: [list] [*] Several typos. [*] Despite the presence of a trans character, there were some instances of ciscentric language and cissexism. [*] Incomplete gallery? (Some CGs aren't available in the gallery) [*] Lack of compiled information for reference. With a story like this that has so many unique terms and variables to keep track of, it'd be nice to have an option in the menu for people to refresh their memory if they've forgotten what something means. [/list] It's definitely an excellent visual novel despite its flaws. If you've read Brilliant Shadows, definitely follow up with this!

I discovered this after playing through "Brilliant Shadows", having looked to see if a second part had come out. Unfortunately, I would not recommend this game as a sequel. While it maintains some of the positive themes of the previous instalment, it quickly becomes a choppy experience where we switch between characters quickly and without reason throughout the chapters. The story has no focus and no true driving conflict - any antagonist is quickly dealt with and seems to be an afterthought. The introduction of the magical spectrum also creates confusion, as we are bombarded with new magic with no explanation or focus. This creates logical dissonance with the previous game - we had two forms of magic, well thought-out and explained to us. That there are more forms of magic is not the issue, it is the lack of explanation that makes it feel like the characters are now overpowered but still in the dark about their abilities. I intend to see this game through, despite my disappointment. I hope that Ithaqua Labs have learned from this experience and create more streamlined story experiences in the future.

As a big fan of Brilliant Shadows, I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunately, I could never quite get into the story while playing due to the pacing. It felt like there was too much jumping around from beginning to end that I could never follow the story and invest in what was happening. Brilliant Shadows kept the focus on one character, had a gradual build-up of tension, and an excellent mix of suspense, action, and character building that made the story easy to follow and very intriguing. Pale Spectrum unfortunately had too much going on to acheive this. There were too many characters that needed to spotlight, plot points, and attempts to intrigue and create mystery that the game was left feeling very unfocused. Although I can REALLY appreciate the time and effort the creators put into creating so much content, and making the game long for their audience (I finished my playthough in about 9 hrs - hat's off), it just didn't have the magic of the original that made the journey to the conclusion enjoyable. I think if each story/character arc was presented in longer sequences as opposed to being broken up, and if the number of conflicts/plot points had been reduced, the story being told here would have been a lot more satisfying. Although I cannot recommend this game, I'm still a fan of this developer and hope that the next game in this saga will be better.

EDIT : I have now soldiered throuh the ending and I can safely say that this is the most underwhelming and irritating visual novel I’ve ever read (really). The art is great, most of the characters are engaging, the voice acting is good... but everything else is just impossible. Too many storylines, FAR TOO MANY CHARACTERS, some of which even disappear mid-game as they were so useless you later wonder what actually happened to them. When you can cut half of your cast without harming your plot at all, you should ask yourself questions. . Please, don’t offer backers the opportunity to implant a character of theirs in a visual novel. You wouldn’t do that for a book or a movie, so why did you do it here? The game loses its plot a third into the story— not that it matters anyway, since the ending is so bad and anticlimactic that I can think of a single phrase, that if uttered at the right time during the first book would have spared us THE ENTIRE SECOND GAME!! Worst of the worst, perhaps more irritating than all, is that none of the choices really seem to MATTER. I too often found myself making choices that actually led to the exact same resolution as the other options, which led me to wonder why this was packaged in a visual novel in the first place. In its hubris, this game tried to give us more content than any other, to push the limits of what visual novels are in terms of content. To give us an 8 hours visual novel! But by doing so, it simply dumped quality into the trash, making all that content a disappointing, unsatisfying, bland mess. Original message : I certainly loved the first game- one of my favourite visual novels, in fact. But... The second is just a slog. Their attempt at making the game longer is admirable for its courage, but the main plot (which is sadly pretty lackluster) is horribly filled with clutter that makes the game almost painful to play. Too many characters, and way, way, way too much filler. The Aelfnod & Aku part should have been kept as a separate book/game, much like the lost in shadows branch. It would have been a lot more enjoyable that way. I found myself skipping entire scenes towards the end because I just couldn't handle all the fillers, especially between characters that I frankly couldn't care less for. Like "oh, yet another random character appears. An entirely useless one at that, so much that they seem like a kickstarter backer reward" The game seems to take heart in pairing all its characters, and while I had a lot of fun lesbianing/bisexualing around, all those romances seemed to blend together. I counted... FIVE romances going on (one being a love... square?) at the same time! *groans* A long story only works bet if there's a central plot, really. At this point, even the series' ACTUAL ANTAGONIST seemed to be just yet another secondary plot, overshadowed by everything else. By the end of the game you're just hoping for this all to end.