[Coldsaturn]

....she got blasted by something nebulous, got her new heart+1 (was that an injury that happened on the field? or a deliberate medical experiment while she was in the hospital for more mundane wound care? magic 8 ball is uncertain but it starts off like it just sort of happened to you (shards of something got embedded) but after the Zayne conversion over Grandma's box... hang on, I should strip this out and move this somewhere else

This is kind of the good stuff.

I'll be honest, the writing isn't THAT good in this game, but its leaps, bounds and several more bounds beyond what I was expecting so five gold stars to Infold for exceeding my (possibly too low?) expectations.

The implication, or at least the implication that I got, at the start was that you were injured during the arrival of the Wanderers, that shards of something got embedded into your heart (which, go us for surviving damage to the left ventrical long enough for somebody with a high tech bandage to show up) and now you're just on followup care, and Zayne is unimpressed by your life choices.

Now, after The Bomb Event Centered On Your House, Grandma may or may not have been involved in unethical medical research, Zayne may or may not have been involved at the time but possibly was pulled into it to BE your medical advisor (timelines and relative ages of everybody involved are hazy) -- holy shit, it just occured to me, did Zayne specifically get his doctorate in a cardiac field BECAUSE of you??? - and maybe They™ grabbed you off the streets at the time of the original injury and decided you were a perfect candidate for said unethical research?

Not much is clear at this point, its all super hazy, but there's just enough going on in the main story and in some of the side pieces I've got access to to wonder if I should be grilling Zayne with a truth serum in his sleep.

Yes, let's start putting things in order.
14 years ago - Chronorift Catastrophe = it opens a deepspace tunnel above Linkon, and Wanderers flood in.
MC is out and about and gets into a kerfuffle, something happens, she now has a heart+1 which is giving her Protocore Syndrome among other things.
Grandma was possibly involved in unethical medical research, then her house gets blown up with her and Caleb inside.
Zayne's job is specifically to treat protocore syndrome affecting people's hearts, which is quite the coincidence considering he's our childhood friend. And what grandma will say to him about taking care of us.
Important to note: MC's memories of her childhood are riddled with holes. Before the chronorift catastrophe it's pretty much a question mark for her.

But what's going on with her heart? When did it happen, and who's involved?
All good questions.

I wasn't expecting anything in terms of writing either, but I soon found myself intrigued by the scattered nature of the info that is given to us. You get it with the main story chapters, the anecdotes for each companion, all the 4 and 5 star cards, the audio files (tender moments, secret times), the in-game encyclopedia, side missions (abyssal chaos) that you'll unlock in a bit, world underneath (which is a series of texts similar to anecdotes which go into the worldbuilding and important events; you'll see it unlocked in the bottom left side of the main chapters page). And you start making theories based on obscure texts that are visible in some backgrounds, putting the events in order, catching references (some literary, some belonging to chinese culture). It gets fun. It's not written well per se, but if they don't get lost in the maze they're creating, it's extremely admirable that they're putting all this effort into what should be a simple otome mobile game.
Someone reading this - or maybe even you - might want to throw me out of the window for saying this, but: I'm approaching this game's lore the same way I did Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Which is to say, I'm like this 


I also find that the writing gets better as time goes on, possibly because the staff realized that they were actually cooking with this plot and decided to get serious lol