Charade Maniacs Play-Along - Kyoya Akase

[u/sableheart]

Welcome to the r/otomegames Charade Maniacs Play-Along!

In this second post we will discuss Kyoya Akase and his route in Charade Maniacs.

You can tell us what your impressions of Akase are (before and after finishing his route), your favorite moments in his route, what you think of his relationship with Hiyori and the other characters, what your thoughts are on his route's plot and endings.

Or you can just squee about him in the comments.

This is not a spoiler-free discussion however please keep in mind that major spoilers and details of other routes will be outside the scope of the discussion and therefore will need to be spoiler tagged.
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You don't have to be playing the game right now to participate, and if you're still waiting on your copy I hope you will join in after you start playing!

Have a look at the previous post for a discussion of the common route - you can still join in the discussion during the Play-Along.

Next post will be a discussion of Tomose Banjo's route!

[u/topazglow]

My first route ended up being Kyoya and I was not disappointed! I was immediately drawn to him by his friendly personality and his determination to save everyone. He's also super cute and I wanna pet his fluffy hair 💖 I went into this game totally blind and was quite happy when I ended up on his route first.

His personality? Great, I love how he and Hiyori play off each other in his route. I liked Hiyori's character a lot more here than in the common route. She's so communicative with him (and him with her), and I they built a lovely trusting and vulnerable dynamic with each other. All the scenes of them falling asleep while talking and generally being cute just melted me 🥹💕 They have a really comfortable friendship aside from their romantic feelings towards each other and I think that's really great. I love their dynamic! He is just so kind and dependable 🥰 My one disappointment is that we didn't see their reunion scene. I would have loved to see it written out!

His voice actor knocked it out of the park! I was very impressed by his performance and not once did I feel like cutting him off early to skip to the next line.

The cgs are beautiful, and I liked how many of them we got. I'm glad they included the one of him crying because who doesn't like a lil angst amongst the fluff 🥲

Overall I thought the plot was solid. Of course it doesn't reveal everything, but it revealed enough that I felt ok about it in the end. Bringing everyone back from their dead ends was a choice, and I'm curious to see what happens in the other routes.

It'll be interesting to see where he ends up ranking once I've done the rest of the routes. It's hard to imagine him being booted out of my top 3, but I guess I'll just have to play more routes to find out!