Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator Reviews

Have you ever played princess maker and wanted a longer, more fleshed out version of it, maybe with more story and cutscenes? Then this is the game for you. Absolutely love it and really wish it was more widely known than it is, because it's an absolute jewel of a game. Cute animation, and fun game mechanics. Only thing I didn't like too much is there was a lot of lag during the fight sequences, other than that it's a fantastic game with tons of replay value.

writing and worldbuilding is decent but the gameplay itself is slow and painfully boring

This is a stat-crunching game that is reminiscent of Princess Maker 2, however, I wasn't impressed with the first hour of play. The writing was not good. The tutorials felt like a chore, and there weren't very many interesting parenting decisions.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get this game to work. The game will not support any mouse input. Spoke with devs, but they were unable to replicate the error. I hope it will be fixed in the future, because I would really like to play this game.

While I understand this is an indie game, it is not without its flaws. I'll start with the positives: -Addictive gameplay: Another reviewer wrote about this and I would reiterate that it's very easy to get stuck in a loop of just doing one more week. A week can take as little as like 30 seconds, so you won't feel as guilty for the 'one more time' mentality as in some other games. -You get your moneys worth. I spent 27 hours with this game and only spent £9. Onto the negatives: -While it's easy to get stuck in the 'one more time' loop, that doesn't mean the experience is fun. I got to year 2 or 3, and I thought 'oh god, I've got to do this for another 8 years.' It's a real slog to get through this game and I did frequently end up skipping dialogue if it didn't directly affect the overarching plot. -A lot of the characters are boring, or annoying. And I get that Ciel is a child so why would the adults tell her anything, but when no one reveals anything for years, it really starts to grate. One of the characters turns up near the beginning of the game, in year one, and is oh-so mysterious for the next 7 years, then refers to us as a specific word (spoilers so I won't say the word) and then doesn't explain what they mean by that for another 2 YEARS. By the time she has her big reveal, I just don't care anymore- and even worse, the reveal is just like two lines. But it's the same with all the adult characters; they say "oh you're too young to be told about this" so everything is left until the last minute. If you're going to drip-feed plot, actually drip-feed us ANYTHING. -The mini-game is really boring. Maybe it was super easy for me because I heavily leaned into military as a career path, but near the end of the game, if the goal was 'survive' I could not press any buttons and still win. -Career paths- this one is more of a nitpick, but some of the things you had to unlock to progress your career path were convoluted and I really needed a guide to help me, or at least forewarning that I'm going to need certain things unlocked by the time I get to chapter 3. I didn't finish my career path because once I got to chapter 3, to advance in military, I needed x stat at level 7, which meant I needed to go back and unlock y job, which meant I need z stat at level 5 etc etc. It was just really frustrating to find out that, to unlock the highest path in Military, I needed to do a certain amount of dancing. Therefore, I cannot recommend this game, unless you like being frustrated!

Oh boy. I was rooting for this game even tried the demo some time ago but the result was just "meh" like really just that. EVERYTHING is slow like for real it took me ten hours to finish one playthrough and by the end I was just skipping everything and told myself "get me to the end already". The characters are so boring that I found myself skipping every dialog that was not part of the main story. But the main problem here for me is how lifeless I found this world. That just it lifeless. Also a particular "defeat" make me rage quit. So in the end it was a nice idea poorly executed.

I really wanted to like this game. It seemed right up my alley for time management and stat management. However, this game is all over the place. Here are the areas that didn't work for me: 1) The narrative tried to jam a whole bunch of things together where the sum was less than its parts. The reveal of Eli just left me going, "...but why?" 2) The narrative and the game play had zero relationship. You could have literally done nothing but sleep the entire game and I don't see how that would have impacted the overall narrative. There were no points in the story that checked your INT or STR or whatever to impact the narrative. Because of this, I spent the entire game wondering what was I supposed to be doing and dreading the fact that I had 2 years left on the game play. The game play only impacted what profession Ciel is in the credits 3) Even if you're good with the complete separation of narrative with game play, the implementation of the game play was frustrating. Like other players have commented, you don't see what you need in future steps of the path, resulting in wasted time and anger when it's finally revealed what you need. I went along the military route only to find at the end I needed to take Hairdressing and Classical Music to eventual get activities that gave you Medical and Charisma (and yes Hairdressing is the one that you needed to unlock Medical - go figure) 4) The mini game was frustrating because there would be random mouse inputs that would not be recognized. It also got very old very fast (keep clicking three of the same colors and if you need to, match combos you need to execute technicals aka special moves) 5) I don't know what to do with half of the items that I received. There were some items that you could eat for stat gains once you learned cooking. However, there were other items that noted it could be used for tailors or craftsmen, but didn't have a similar line to "culinary mastery required". However, other items clearly noted that they weren't useful and sold for high amounts. Sooooo what were these other items for? 6) During the second chapter, you're supposed to clear out the bosses of certain dungeons. Could not figure out how to unlock the last tier - they automatically unlocked in chapter 3, but by then you miss out on the goals since it needed you to clear out before the end of chapter 2 7) Buying items require you to spend a day shopping - which can ONLY be done on day 7 which is also the ONLY day you can do "fun" activities / socialize. So even if you want to do stuff to balance your mood / discipline / stress, all of them can only be done on day 7 except for sleeping 8) You can't see what a shop sells until you click into it, which wouldn't be a problem except that you can only shop at 3 shops before the game says time's up 9) There's no place in the UI that I could find where you could see exactly how far along you were in a friend's social meter - just the overall level. You also had to leave the calendar UI and go back to the focus tree in the status menu to find the level instead of just having it in the calendar UI like you have the stats 10) Affection is super critical to the game - moreso than the actual stat raising. It's pretty much the only thing that has any impact on narrative so would recommend just getting Ciel a job and spoiling her the entire time so that her affection is maxed. I got the worst possible ending (which was actually not catastrophic) because I focused primarily on stat raising. I'm kinda curious about what the other ends may be, but not enough to actually sit through a new game+ 11) Also if you're wondering what a new game+ includes because it's not mentioned anywhere, you keep your items - which would've been nice to know before I sold them all at the end in a fit of boredom Honestly, I'd recommend playing Long Live the Queen, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, or The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante.

All right, finished the game on one runthrough, don't think I'll have the patience to do another. There's some feedback I have, since it looks like Studio Naampa is working on a sequel: -First off, the schedule, which has a whole bunch of issues. Detailed information on each activity should be provided somewhere for the player, because a lot more planning is required in this game due to the chapter stat caps and labyrinthine unlock requirements for a whole plethora of activities. I want to know the numerical costs/benefits of the activity in question beyond just stamina and credits (so discipline, stress, mood), and the expected gains in stats before modifiers. It's very disappointing to assume that a one-gain activity like, say, teaching which does scholastic, actually gives less scholastic than going to university which is a four-gain activity when the reverse is true in other multiple activities that target the same stat. -Other parts of the schedule make no sense, such as adding skills where they would be obsolete in and of themselves: a good example of this is geometry class, which raises logic despite it requiring 5 logic to unlock and being unable to raise logic past 5. What's the point of that? -There being no spillover xp from one skill level to another -- why? Skill xp up to the level is lost, and the next level starts from 0. What reason is there for this? -The labyrinthine web of requirements for unlocking activities, followed by the chapter stat caps make for extreme minmax playing. I understand the concern during dev that you didn't want Ciel to get too strong too quickly, but the side effect of all this is that players going in blind without a guide will simply waste a lot of time getting up that one skill which can only be acquired by a multiple-gain activity which already has been maxed out. The focus tree benchmarks for level 5 and 10 encourage maxing out skills ASAP, only to discover later on that it means wasting gains down the line. -Minigames. they're fun the first, third, fifth times. After that, they become a bore when all the player wants to do is to grind, and yet skipping them isn't an option because, well, grind. After the player proves that they can reliably complete the minigame (maybe 3-5 consecutive wins), just let them have an auto-success because it's clear that it's just busywork at that point. -Storyline: it's fine for the most part. Not amazingly stellar or moving, but it does what it needs to. There are several minor points which make me go "why?", though -- some of the character changes in the adult characters feel forced and there to be "there", like Zhara and Amira cutting their hair short and Juno growing a beard. Not everyone needs to update or have a change, in these instances it felt forced just to keep up with everyone, since apparently there's no deeper meaning behind the cosmetic makeovers. -Becky's story really feels out of place and incoherent with the setting. The tired "muh parents want me to be a laaady" trope which is more than sixty years old in popular speculative fiction aside, the world of Ciel Fledge is presented as one where people don't think twice about women in roles and professions that we would consider masculine (Amira, Nieve). It really felt rushed to me, as if the storywriter was phoning it in and just picked out a stock character plotline off the shelf. -Exploration. Oh, exploration. Just about painfully useless. Adventure in PM-esque games is the high-risk, high reward task, and yet exploration is painfully and awfully unrewarding in Ciel Fledge. The stat gain isn't amazingly stellar, monetary reward is middling at best (from enemy drops), and worst of all, you don't build skills, which is the main bottleneck to advancement. There's no way to cancel exploration midway, there's no spillover for extra days, and any items you can find really just don't cut it. Comparing this to adventure in PM games - huge gold gains, special events, powerful items which can't be found anywhere else and have effects that aren't mirrored. The most Ciel can find in her exploration is just a bunch of items that she doesn't need anyway, and even the creature meats are of limited use because, again, the main roadblock to progress is skills, not stats which cap out well before. Exploration feels weak and any time spent on doing it wasted. I only did it where mandatory in the story and never bothered with it again because it was just a straight-up loss. -There are two skill raising items for str, img and spi, but only one for int and cha. What's up with that? *** I don't begrudge the money spent on the game, it was entertaining enough for the price tag and satisfies the need to grind. However, as pointed out, it has numerous weaknesses that make me unwilling to take advantage of the new game +, because honestly it feels too tedious. The lack of transparency when it comes to activities coupled with the chapter caps makes it feel like the devs are intentionally trying to trap the player into wasting time on their daily schedule, the repetitive minigames which just waste the player's time after they've demonstrated competency... Other raising sim games can get away with just an approximation on their activities, but Ciel Fledge can't because it has these caps and requirements. The game punishes players for poor planning, then refuses to give players the information they need to make that planning; I would consider that the core problem of the game that leads to frustration. Ultimately, the poor execution of ideas means I can't honestly recommend this. Play Lullaby Days instead if you want a similar experience with shorter runs.

I love this game. I've been searching for a Raising Sim ala Princess Maker for years, but none of the games I tried had quite the same charm and fun. The game is very reminiscent of the PM games while still being original and bringing new ideas to the table. The translation is also so, so much better than the official release of the PM games. The gameplay is actually more difficult, although I see that as a plus; in PM it was so easy to raise a god-like daughter that you would have to purposefully handicap yourself to receive anything but the best endings. In this game, reaching the best actually looks like a challenge, which is something I enjoy. Plus if you ever get stuck, the developers are currently running a thread in the discussions where they have personally offered to help players with tips and advice! I would recommend this game to anyone looking for a fun, challenging game with high replayability.

Great game for people who liked Princess Maker 2 or any other life-simulation games! The devs are responsive to feedback and questions as well. Just as a warning: it is EXTREMELY anime. NOT anime as in Princess Maker 2's "would you like to date your underage daughter and maybe give her some breast expansion pills ho ho ho????" but very anime as in "we live on a flying city one thousand years in the future in our eternal war against the Kaiju aliens who threaten to destroy us and yet somehow our aesthetic is entirely 1980's Japanese suburbs" Still lots of fun tho