My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom: Pirates of the Disturbance review

Reincarnated as the villain in one of your favorite visual novels!

Contemporary gaming is full of curiosities. Although hardly as tedious as being forced to scroll through a massive terms and conditions document, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom: Pirates of the Disturbance begins with an atypical warning. A splash screen cautions readers that the visual novel takes place in a different timeline with elements that have “no correlation to the original light novel, manga, and TV animations.”

Thankfully, Pirates of the Disturbance isn’t a complete departure from its source material. Instead, it’s a non-canonical story starring the property’s cast along with two new characters. It feels like a natural continuation of Satoru Yamaguchi’s playful property, making the caveat unnecessary.

Otaku in a Past Life, Rich Girl in This One

However, reading or watching My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom is highly recommended, with familiarity intensifying enjoyment of this novel. Each preexisting work will introduce you to Catarina Claes, the eponymous lead and daughter of a respected royal family. One day when playing with her childhood friend and budding suitor, Geordo Stuart, Catarina trips, causing a head injury. This accident has an odd consequence, with the debutante remembering a past life where she was a young otaku obsessed with an otome named Fortune Lover. Ironically, the antagonist of that novel was Catarina Claes- setting things up for a transmedia isekai.

Much like the original work and previous adaptations, the concept of a story within a story provides for plenty of potential. Silver Link’s animated series would occasionally display a title screen for the ersatz visual novel drawn with devotion, and I once thought my HDMI selector was acting up. Moving in the opposite direction, Pirates of the Disturbance can’t match the fluidity of the animated version. But portrait art with wonderfully exaggerated facial expressions and the occasional transition to a super-deformed subjective style help capture the look of the series. Occasionally, the art team lets Catarina’s maliciousness leak out and it’s consistently enjoyable watching the character self-correct.

Love Boat, But with Pirates and Death Flags

Here, the storyline revisits the lead character’s careful avoidance of ‘death flags’, which refer to the user decisions that can produce a visual novel to an abrupt and disheartening end. Pirates of the Disturbance simultaneously employs and mocks the mechanic. Set after the lead character’s succession evasion of a succession of death flags during her high school career, Pirates of the Disturbance finds Catarina and her circle of suitors on a cruise ship. Things begin to get interesting when the lead remembers a Fortune Lover fan book that centered on pirates attempting to take control of a luxury liner.

What follows is a branching script that favors comedy over romance and melodrama, making for a worthwhile expedition. Yes, the usual suitors are here, with Geordo, his twin brother Alan, Nicol, and Catarina’s own adoptive brother all having feelings for the lead. Although Pirates of the Disturbance’s isn’t a particularly long read, the running gag about Catarina being completely oblivious doesn’t grow stale until you’ve seen several of the novel’s 25 endings. Pleasingly, the two new romanceables, a crew member named Rozy and Silva, the pirate captain mesh seamlessly with the returning men. But likely, the inability to couple up with Catarina’s female admirers might frustrate some readers. Pirates of the Disturbance seems to lay the foundations for some of these relationships, but doesn’t make good on them. That said, there’s also a platonic path, where the lead decides to keep her distance from the death flags brought on by romance.

Conclusion Flag Here

And that correlation between death flags and romance might be My Next Life as a Villainess’ most interesting lesson. Opening your heart for anyone can be a risk, Yamaguchi reminds us, but the rewards just might make it worth it. Evading the novel’s death flags means being selective with your trust, identifying suspicions, and coming to terms with worry. Despite All Routes Lead to Doom’s subtitle, happiness can be found with a bit of patience and effective game-save habits.

Fortunately, Villainess is virtuous at managing those saves and handling other plot-related duties. If you need to review a preceding line of dialog, the action is performed by a pull on the left analog stick or a flick on the touchscreen. The novel’s options let you see a graphic charting your bond with each bachelor and there’s subtle coding to expose your trajectory through the novel’s branches. For some, the lack of English voice acting might be a sticking point. But given the performance offers by the same voice actors as the anime, subtitles deserve a chance.