Fault - Milestone One is a kinetic visual novel. Therefore, you play it just to enjoy the story as there are no meaningful choices or any other thing that you can do to influence its linear storytelling. The presentation is gorgeous, with crisp beautiful artwork, and backgrounds that move at times, and plenty of CG scenes. However, one glaring omission are voiceovers, there isn’t even any Japanese voiceovers. As a result, it feels a bit silent at times, as if something is missing.
The story starts off with a tense premise. A country is being invaded, and the princess, along with her guardian, narrowly escapes. This is a unique world filled with mana, and people use mana for everyday life, as well as using it for combat. The pair, Princess Selphine, and her guardian Ritona, manage to escape somewhere far away. They must now get their bearings, as well as figure out how to return to their country to find out what happened.
The visual novel has a ton of exposition. It takes time to explain the various concepts of mana, its world, the setting and how everything works. This means that it dumps you with text upon text of this stuff at the beginning. It also tends to focus upon the characters’ inner thoughts, as they voice what they are thinking, but this isn’t interesting for a lot of the time where this happens.
The princess is young, and despite her dire situation, she just enjoys being out of the country. It’s like she is travelling for the first time, wanting to experience the culture and enjoy new things. Ritona is a lot more reserved and guarded, she knows the seriousness of the situation that they are in. The pair easily meets new friends in new places, who helps them upon their quest. It can be a complete mood whiplash when it changes from an invasion to one where the characters were whisked away to an unknown place to explore.
The story mostly takes place in one setting, and it’s got a lot of tropes wrapped around it that it can’t quite shake off. There’s the whole magic vs science rivalry, where the protagonists come from a country where they can use magic freely. This is compared to the city that they arrive in, which is the complete opposite and manages to achieve a lot of what magic can do, but via science instead. The other major theme is the story wants to create a high emotional peak. It wants to create an emotional attachment between the player and one of the characters.
There is a strong theme of love and familial bonds. Given that the game is short, it tries for a quick payoff, so it ends up falling somewhat short of what it aims to do. The method of creating that emotional attachment, as well as the story itself, can feel methodical and cold. However, the game uses unique pieces of music, that helps to hammer some of its themes in place, to the point where you can say that it will elicit some emotion out of you at its climax.
Despite shrouding one of the characters in mystery, it is very easy to guess their background. What was more satisfying however was the full revelation of the history of the character, and how they came to this point. The journey wasn’t what you would have expected, even though the writing and story developments are nowhere near the quality of any other visual novels that are considered all-time greats.
This is a short game, and once the major arc is over, you kind of know that the game will be over soon. However, it’ll still surprise you at how soon that is. It’s like they were starting to say their farewells, and then boom, it ends. It is supposed to be a cliffhanger but is too abrupt. If you’re a fast reader, then the visual novel can be finished within two hours, otherwise it’ll be 3-4 hours. Given that there are no alternate endings and only one inconsequential choice in the game, there isn’t any replayability.
Overall, Fault - Milestone One is an average visual novel. For a first chapter that is designed to suck you in, it doesn’t do a great job at hooking you with the characters and its settings. The change from the opening scene to the subsequent chapters where the core of the story takes place felt completely different, like there was tonal incompatibility. There are a lot of awkward exposition dumps, and in general, the things that the story tried to do, others had done it better.
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