I enjoyed Collar x Malice quite a bit when I played it over two years ago and consider it to be above average as far as otome games go, but I have my fair share of problems with it. One of the major ones is how it presents itself as one of the darker and plot centric games in the genre while maintaining an ironically safe and sanitized approach to the premise involving cults and terrorism. Most of the routes are actually on the relationship focused side, which is where you get a lot of ups and downs because the love interests are quite a mixed bag. Okazaki was probably my favourite out of the bunch. His route is one of the more romance heavy ones and I liked his possessive, clingy personality. Enomoto is fine but there really isn't anything more to his character beyond comic relief. His route is also generally unremarkable and best played as a starter route. Sasazuka was a miss for me. I like tsundere love interests when they strike a good balance that doesn’t make it feel like the love interest you’re trying to pursue hates you, but Sasazuka is a bit too tsun and not enough dere for me (plus his pale and frail looks are the least appealing to me out of the five). Shiraishi's route is pretty universally liked and it's not hard to see why. I have no complaints about his route and it almost feels like a secondary truth route, which is why it’s kinda crazy that it becomes playable after only clearing one route. It definitely should’ve stayed locked until you’re done with Enomoto, Sasazuka and Okazaki’s routes to prevent players from spoiling themselves on major plot details too early on in the game. Yanagi is my second favourite love interest, but he is objectively too plain and perfect. His only "character flaw" is chainsmoking, and the skeletons in his closet regarding his past is how he was attacking a man in self defense after saving Ichika from life threatening danger, but she misunderstood the situation and got trauma from the incident. It's boring. A much better alternative for the truth route could have been to make Saeki a love interest, and have Ichika find out the hard way that her coworker and long time friend-turned romantic partner was behind the collar and mass scale terrorist attacks across the country. Though judging by how the game is hell bent on maintaining an uncontroversial and strictly pro police stance, I think not going there might be a deliberate choice on the writers' part to avoid any possibility of coming across as sympathetic towards terrorists or critical of the government, as the game is set in modern day Tokyo. The art is nice and polished, though in my opinion a downgrade from Hanamura Mai's work on Amnesia, and stylistically nothing like it. A few CGs have noticeable anatomical errors and some character sprites are allegedly traced from the Psychedelica series, which is a shame. There are some unique “minigames” if you will, like the point and click investigation sequences and trigger mode, but I find that these don’t really add anything to the game. Especially the trigger mode (which I have failed a few times despite how objectively easy they are because I misunderstood when the button was supposed to be pressed) is just a kind of a nuisance. Please don’t put QTEs in visual novels.