Video Game Review: Variable Barricade

Variable Barricade

Developer: Otomate, Idea Factory

Genre: Romance, Visual novel

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Variable Barricade is the latest from visual novel giant Otomate to be brought over to the West and it’s following in the recent trend for the modern more stylish type of otome game. In the game you play as rich heiress, Hibari who is forced to live with a bunch of potential suitors who are all vying for her hand in marriage. Hibari, a high schooler (Japan, why is this still a thing?), is less than amused to be stuck with a bunch of men she barely knows flirting with her on a daily basis. Not to mention that each suitor’s background check comes back with some worrying details about them all. Can Hibari manage to put aside her preconceptions about the bachelors and grow closer to them, or will they be locked out of her barricades forever?

Variable Barricade is a fast-paced romantic comedy and we get right into the action from the beginning with Hibari’s introduction and that of her new suitors. The game itself follows the common model of a lot of otome games on mobiles in that each scene is split into short seperate blocks making for a bite-size play experience. It’s very handy for playing on the go or in short bursts but does mean that the story feels very broken up at times and loses the flow a bit. The scenes are displayed in a flowchart form which allows you to see your progress and how much of the current storyline you have left to do – I really liked being able to see how much was left but each scene would often be titled in such a way it would often spoiler what was about to happen. The game had a fairly long common route with an additional initial route for each of the bachelors which must be completed before you can finish the common route and go onto an actual romantic route. I haven’t seen this done really before in an otome game and I really liked how it was done here, as it really helped you to get a feel for each of the four bachelors and their personalities. Completing a route would end in a ‘barricade battle’ where your choices throughout the game increases either ‘romance’ or ‘reason’ to determine if you and your bachelor of choice grows closer to you or not. This was conveyed in a cute chibi battle where the bachelor was a knight fighting his way through your literal barriers to get to the princess chibified Hibari. I kinda wished the ‘battles’ section had a bit more interactivity in them as they were just short interludes really.

The main issue with the game unfortunately lies with the characters. The four main suitors come off very poorly in the main common route most of the time. Seeing them through Hibari’s eyes we share in her irritation and it’s very hard to like any of them. Even in their own subroutes at the end of the Common Route, I struggled to warm to any of them, especially as these initial stories were mostly quite shallow and based around Hibari’s misunderstandings of them. The only one I felt had a bit more depth to it was Taiga’s story as this centred around the orphanage he grew up in, and actually gave us a good sense of his true character and a possible connection between him and Hibari. I liked Hibari well enough in the common route but she grew to be frustrating at times in the romantic route. I went with Taiga’s route as his common route story was the only one I really connected with (even if I found his attitude towards Hibari initially very annoying). I enjoyed the route a lot, and began to genuinely root for the two characters though Taiga himself began to frustrate me the further into the story it went. The main issue I think lies with the game’s insistence on Hibari choosing to become engaged to a suitor by the end of the game – it puts way too much unnecessary drama into the situation especially given this is Hibari’s first ever romantic relationship. This is a trope I’ve seen a lot in otome games and it’s a shame as I think it ends up overriding the good parts of the story sometimes.

I liked the art style a lot in the game, particularly with it’s more muted colour palette and emphasis on dark lines throughout which was very reminiscent of reading a manga. It does result in most of the characters looking a little on the bland side however. The music too is decent, with the main game theme being quite catchy and each bachelor having their own specific music theme song to match their character. The game does fall into common tropes quite a lot but pokes fun at them also, to the point where I did wonder for a while if the game was an intentional parody of the rom-com genre. The main romance routes however did get pretty serious further in so I suspect this was just done in the earlier portions of the game to keep the mood lighter before the more heavy themes were brought in.

Overall, Variable Barricade was a fun rom-com but ultimately I don’t think it does anything particularly that much better then other games out there with similar stories. Hibari was a great heroine but the love interests really didn’t appeal to me and it felt like hard work to push through their earlier annoying appearances to get to where they actually started to shine. The game itself isn’t super long however and the short bite-size nature of the scenes does make it easy to pick up and play on the go.