***SPOILERS AHEAD FOR LOVE CURSE***  
  
I recently got to play Love Curse after seeing all the recommendations from this subreddit and the overwhelming amount of positive reviews that the game got on Steam. I played throughout all 4 of the routes including the True Ending which can only be unlocked after having played through both bad and good endings of every single character.

As the title implies, I genuinely think that Love Curse might be one of if not the worst yuri visual novels that I've read throughout my time following the genre. 

When discussing Love Curse it's important to understand that it is **more of a dating sim than it is a visual novel.** Its gameplay revolves around scripted events with multiple, optional dates peppered in between them to build up the affection meter and hidden meter for the characters. Once the player has a bunch of affection built up with a character, they'll be locked into their route for the rest of the game.

Love Curse's mandatory segments, such as Chapter 1, tend to already show a big issue for most of the game, and that would be its non-sensical premise. The game opens with the basic premise of you being cursed to having to find your soulmate, with the punishment being death if you fail to find that someone. However, this is a condition/premise that goes mostly ignored for every single route, even those that fully try to indulge themselves into the fantastical setting of curses, past lives and reincarnation. 

Characters such as Phoenix and Bell, whose only real purpose is to support this conflict, feature so little that at some point their impact on the story cannot be felt at all. I even found myself completely forgetting about them throughout most routes, and it even seems like the game does as well! They get completely rid of halfway through Victoria's and Iris' route since there's no place for them in the narrative.  
  
Bell is there to look cute in a couple of CGs (which are definitely very cute), while Phoenix is usually limited to random dates and extremely convoluted exposition that doesn't really explain anything. On top of that, her extremely antiquated force of talking isn't really helpful in portraying anything about the character, since she's nothing more than just an exposition machine that takes out the excitement of any mystery that the narrative even tries to setup.

Love Curse's world is not built up well at all, and the only thing that could save the game is its characters. But Love Curse's characters are simply not that interesting, iconic or even relatable to make the story better.

On that note, these elements are only made even worse by the format of the game itself. You spend most of  your time going out on dates with every character, talking with them and building some sort of relationship with them. But whenever its time for the game to put you into a designated character's route the pace becomes an absolute mess.   
  
You'll get to know Nyx before suddenly you are thrown into an absolutely incomprehensible story about your past ancestor and how you need to seal Nyx (who is actually an ancient demon called Chimei) before she kills you.   
  
Victoria's route does a decent job at building a simple storyline of the weight of expectations and how hard it is for her to be responsible of Huanyu's leadership, only for it to be replaced entirely by a surprise plot about her upcoming forced marriage. Now you need to take Rosalie down through some kind of investigation into her past to make it so you can date her freely, with none of it being explained well or foreshadowed properly throughout the 11 dates you have with her.

Eleanor's route is a cool little route about trying to get into the heart of an overprotective sister, with some nice flirting and teasing in between, but as soon as you get into her route it turns out she's not really Eleanor. She is the reincarnation of an ancient Daoist called Jianghe who's mission was to hunt down Chimei, with a dramatic battle in the end that may or may not get her killed. 

Iris' route I'd argue is one of the only routes that managed to get my attention in any way. It sets up very interesting themes, with a cold and aloof girl that doesn't care or need for anything in the world until she meets you, which leads to her mistreating and forcing you into a toxic relationship. But even then the route ends too fast, with most of the routes themes/information being conveyed through a third-person narration that exposes everything at once in an extremely uninteresting fashion.

Simply said, at any point in which Love Curse tries to do anything that goes beyond simple dating, it fails catastrophically. 

The way this magical compass that guides Selene's future is never explained to any sort of satisfying extent, why Chimei doesn't just kill you at any point when she's described as being overwhelmingly stronger than Selene, the fact that Eleanor's subplot just comes absolutely out of nowhere, even for Love Curses' standards, ruining a perfectly mediocre route. It all just baffles me.

The game doesn't only suffer because of these aspects, however. 

Most of Love Curses' music is, at most, perfectly fine. However you are never safe from a rather serious feeling scene being ruined by some overtly epic song or some trap beat lurking in the background of the scene.

The way time passes in Love Curse is also EXTREMELY liberal, to put it lightly. "Many days have passed" "It has been a while since" are particularly common throughout the writing of character's routes, and the fact that the game takes place over multiple months means that many events like Christmas, new years and other important events become relegated to a singular text message through the game's texting system. It also helps remove any sort of urgency from the whole "You die if you don't find your soulmate" premise.

Love Curse is, overall, a game that I continued to play regardless of how bad it got just to be able to judge it as objectively as possible. At points, I found myself enjoying some aspects. It's not a secret that the game's art is great, but even then I think some of these CGs are not good enough or even better than any of the visual novels that I played before. 

Worst of all, its gimmick of every character having some sort of messed up side/ending isn't enough to make up for anything. Iris holding you hostage at her home is ruined by Selene's poor narration and dialogue, which throughout the whole novel only serves to get rid of any subtlety left in the writing, which there isn't much of. 

Even shocking things such as Eleanor's death aren't felt at all thanks to the game's constant need to sacrifice character development to explain/move the plot forward, which it doesn't even do correctly. If anything, I feel like the game's only positive side is whenever you are on the first couple of dates and none of these things have really shown themselves.

Overall, I can understand why some people would find Love Curse to be a good read. The art can be cute, the voice acting is serviceable and who knows, maybe if you can fully suspend your disbelief you may be able to enjoy some of the fantastical aspects of the story. But for me, Love Curse was a read that was only bearable at any rate thanks to it being pretty short (around of 12 hours for all endings). 

I've found myself not enjoying a lot of other Yuri visual novels that people adore such as Flowers or Oshirabu, but I can still recommend something about them. Love Curse is a game that doesn't do anything well enough for me to recommend. It has extremely inconsistent and rushed writing, it's art can be good, but definitely not better than some of the better exponents of the genre such as Please Be Happy or Usonatsu, and its characters are very well.   
  
Unless you REALLY like the chibi art or there's some very steep sale, I don't think this game is worth your time. 

Love Curse - A not so good concept with even worse execution