"Pavane of Blue" is a fighting game/visual novel that had unique game mechanics for its time and an incredibly convoluted yet interesting story with great BGM's s well as an instantly memorable art style. I have played incredible games like Dark Hearts 1 and 3, BeastsBlood, Deity of War series, and other AAA games, but I still personally put Pavane of Blue as my number one game.

It has a character roster of 25, an arcade mode where you explore each character's individual side story within the story mode. An Unlimited Mars mode where players must fight 10 random Unlimited characters from the roster with a special AI setting that is the hardest difficulty and has additional attacks and abilities for each individual character. There are other single player game modes in the game that I could gush about for hours, but that isn't the point.

The game introduces two protagonists who are both 18 at the start of the game. The first is Ulysses Dragunov, a child of one of the first ten original named families. The second is Tiona of the Northern Yaoguai, a girl from a beastkin tribe and one of the very few beastkin that has an ability.

The main story begins as an attempt to stop a rebellion and either kill or capture the five leaders of a cult that uses the blood of the deceased King of Monsters to gain power and overthrow the humans in power. The story changes as you progress through the game. The story is separated into four acts that are a year apart, story-wise. The game only has three endings.

Endings one and two are essentially the same, as one of the protagonists must die for the other to reach their individual ending before the end of Act 3: Calamity Trigger. If neither of them dies, the Calamity Trigger is pulled, which, regardless of the route taken, leads to Act 4: Prelude of the End.

Ending three for Act 4 is said to be the canonical ending because both protagonists survive but the King of Beasts is reborn. In ending 3 you spend the rest of Act 4 trying to kill it, only to find out it exists outside of reality which means nothing besides an entity or weapon outside of reality can kill it. It then wipes out all life on the planet, and winter devours the world.

Only a few choices in the game matter, as some just lead to gag reels, romancing love interests, building harems, side stories, or miscellaneous things that don't really move the plot forward. At the end of the day, it was just a fighting game with cool mechanics, a great story, cool music and art style, interesting game mods, and characters that I loved.

Now though, as I find myself in the same world as Pavane of Blue, most of those things I still like, maybe just not as much right now.