Why I will NOT support Masquerade Kiss Season 2
Hi, my name is lovely-otome and I sometimes make walkthroughs for Voltage games. Many of you who have followed me on tumblr discovered me via my Masquerade Kiss walkthroughs. With that in mind, I am sad to announce I will not be reading nor making any walkthroughs for Masquerade Kiss in the future nor will I be supporting anymore Love Choice titles.
Simply put: Masquerade Kiss (and all of Voltage's Love Choice titles) is simply too expensive for me to read and to encourage others to read as well. Voltage likes to market Love Choice titles as "free" to play. While it is true that each chapter IS free to play, to get access to any of the cgs or good decisions/storylines in the plot you have to exchange hearts. While it is possible to get some hearts for free, you will still have to purchase additional hearts if you want to see certian choices and get cgs. This can get expensive extremely quickly.
To put in perspective how expensive these Love Choice games are I will compare them to their pay-to-read counterparts. To read a Main Story from a pay-to-read title (i.e. My Last First Kiss) it will cost you $3.99 USD before tax. While you may have to pay $3.99 upfront, it gives you full access to the story and all the cgs and endings the story contains. Additionaly, you get to read the story whenever you want and start anywhere you wish to in the plot. While some stories contain bonus content you have to pay extra for, this bonus content is not relevant to the plot so you don't feel like you are missing out.
Compared to the pay-to-read titles, Voltage's Love Choice titles are far more expensive. While you can read each chapter for free, much of the plot is hidden behind heart choices. As I've mentioned earlier, technically speaking, you can try to save up hearts to access these choices for free. However, each choice can range from 3-25 hearts, so realistically you will have to spend money in order to read the heart choices. From playing other Love Choice titles, I`ve found on average one will have to spend around $10 if they want to read the Super Happy Ending and get all the cgs in a Love Choice title and frankly, that is a low estimate.
Additionally, unless you are reading the Love Choice title during a "no wait" campaign or via the Collector's Edition, you will have to wait 5 hours before you read the next chapter. Apart from being able to read the chapters for "free", there is virtually no other perks to reading Love Choice titles. With all these drawbacks in mind, I can't recommend anyone read Voltage's Love Choice titles, no matter how much I love the stories.
When I made my first walkthrough for Masquerade Kiss, I did it because I had made for myself a walkthrough that would allow me to experiece the story while saving some cash. I shared it on tumblr becuase I figured others might find it useful as well and I might be able to save others some money. However, now that the Love Choice titles have become so expensive, I can no longer play them nor encourage others to play them.
When Love Choice was first introduced to Love 365, it wasn't too expensive. Yeah, the stories were a tiny bit more expensive than the average Voltage game, but I loved the art and the story lines of the Love Choice titles to ignore that factor. However, as more Love Choice stories were introduced in the app the more expensive they became. And now that the first Masquerade Kiss Season 2 story has been released the cost has reached a whole new high. In addition to the SHE there is now a Eden Ending. Before I made this post I was actually planning to make a walkthrough of the new route. But after I had finished doing my calculations, I decided to write this post instead. At a minimum it would take at least $10 worth of hearts just to reach the SHE. To reach the Eden Ending you'd have to spend even MORE money. Totally not worth it.
Long story short, I will not be supporting Love Choice stories in the future and I recommend you do the same. While writing this essay may have served no purpose, I'm hoping it will at least convince some of you to reconsider supporting Voltage's Love Choice titles. Ideally, a person from Voltage will find this post and change their Love Choice titles to be more affordable, but I highly doubt that will ever happen.
If you agree with anything I've said in this post, I would be extremely happy if you reblogged it. The more people are aware of how expensive the Love Choice titles are, the more likely we are to see a change.
Thanks for reading my essay!
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