Picture: some princes. Cyril looks too happy to see you and there is something odd about that…
You, a linguistically gifted correspondent, go with a client to a party filled with foreign socialites. Wait, are those hot socialites also princes!? These gorgeous guys clamor around poor, disoriented you. You let a prince escort you the rest of the evening, which passes like a dream.
Then, the next day… You’re about to fly back home, when you get caught up in an investigation! Coming to your rescue is a prince from last night…!? And what’s more, he demands that you enter a contract marriage with him as thanks. You can’t turn down his command! Will you find true love at the end of the aisle? Or will you find…
The Cinderella Contract is a free-to-play otome game by Arithmetic where you get not one love interest choice per route, but two, making the replay value pretty high. And with four routes, eight love interests, and three endings per each LI, well, you are going to be playing this for a while.
The plot varies from country to country in this game. I feel like there is one route that is waaaay better than the other three and then those other three range from good to rage-inducing.
The MC has no personality and is written to allow everyone walk all over her and never stands up for herself. She seems to rarely ever be into the sexual situations she is put in that for some reason the writers want us to think is hot. (It’s not.)
Arithmetic seems to love its grey area of consent (and sometimes OBVIOUSLY non-con/rape). So, proceed with caution especially in the sequels. I HATED all but one sequel prince.
The translations (outside the four main stories) vary from okay to “I can’t understand what they are saying at all.” There is too much Engrish/just bad translations. Some people might not consider this a con but, when you are trying to figure out how an in-game event works and you can’t decipher what in the hell you are supposed to be doing, it’s quite frustrating.
There is a lot to do in this game (see my post on how to read the Game User Interface). I think that this could be a bit overwhelming for new players of this genre. There is a lot to do and it can be quite confusing at time. It took me a while to figure out where to go to exchange out my dress pieces.
There are times where you will have to choose to buy an avatar. One can only be purchased with Platinum, which you either get with real money or through TapJoy. I have only bought a handful of these and the scenarios were very short.
There are three ends in each route; normal, good, and royal (best ending). In order to get the royal ending, you have to beat the route on good. This, in turn, opens a limited-time gacha where you have to spend gacha tickets in order to spin it. These tickets can be earned two way, purchasing them with real world money or beating any route on normal the first time around and then spending over a month acquiring the tickets. More on this is on the game page linked below.
Events in the game are pretty much impossible to clear without a mate’s support or spending money. Find an active person and team up with them to send aroma back and forth to build up stock. The aroma send rate has plummeted over the years, so it might take you some time to build up enough to make a good go at an event.
Overall score: 3/5
Game is good, but nowhere near great. Bland MC, some of the love interest are extremely frustrating, non-con here and there. Best route in the game is easily Turkiye, where as the best sequel in the game is Yuri’s. My bias is Isuka followed by Asena.
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