fault
Milestone 1 Playtime: 3.3 Hours
Finished 19 May 2025.Milestone 2A Playtime: 3.6 Hours
Finished 25 May 2025.Played both on Steam. I'm not aware of any alternative versions, patches or whatever - as the projects natively released with fan translation teams for various languages. Not really planning to get any of the other side novels until there's some actual progress on the main series.
The fault games are kind of an anomaly among the many VNs that I've played, with a very strange balance of a very professional production for relatively simple, small-scale stories. The world feels amazingly fleshed-out; lots of little details are put into the differences between the lives of people in the Inner & Outer Poles, and all of the mechanics and history of "manakravte" go far beyond simple rule-of-cool explanations. Given the spotty release schedules for the VNs in this universe, however, I wonder if the writers are having trouble coming up with the people & stories to populate the world? From my view, there's kind of a lack of focus - even among just the two games I played.
When looking into the series, the most obvious thing that stands out is that the story is extremely incomplete, and Alice in Dissonance (the developers) seem to have some trouble committing to a schedule or direction for the series. The "Milestone" series never even fully finished the 2nd part - M1 and M2A came out about 10 years ago (2013/2015) as of writing this entry, and yet there's little to no news of M2B! On the other hand, there's been a smattering of other random releases - a demo for a "Silence the Pedant (StP)" game in the series, which came out in 2017 and still has yet to be completed, and another brief side story, "Lightkravte", that came out a bit more recently (2022), yet is not a direct tie-in to either the Milestone games or StP. Keep in mind that playtimes per episode are very short as can be seen above. Comparing the release history of the fault games against something like World End Economica, which also consists of multiple short episodes, it's hard not to notice that WEE completed a cohesive story with annual entries, while this one is floundering at the starting line. I really can't commit to a series that feels abandoned by its creators... I know the developers maintain a Patreon for continual updates, but the actual results of the funding are questionable as a casual player.
With the above context in mind, I feel like there are plenty of other signs in the games - mostly in the writing - that make them feel a bit amateur. Since these games are unvoiced, emotions and tone can only be portrayed through various portrait sprites and text; this leads to an inordinate amount of time spent in each game talking about really inane things to "establish character", like deciding nicknames, getting excited about food, goofy expressions, etc. These occasionally interfere with actual plot elements as well, which can lead to a bit of tonal whiplash at times. There's also no shortage of out-of-place dialogue dumps and over-explanations, many of which I felt were completely unnecessary. Occasional strange and stunted dialogue makes it kind of obvious that some characters were conceived as self-inserts, or were based on the "fetishes" of the writers. It would explain why so many of the most powerful characters in this game are inexplicably very young girls, anyway. None of the threatening characters have a reasonable background fitting for the role.
The overall pacing of the central plot is very strange. I previously compared this series to World End Economica, which was able to produce a very complete & fairly concise storyline across 3 episodes, with each event contributing meaningfully to the saga. In constrast, the Milestones meander around with limited meaningful progress and no clear picture towards the actual adventure. Over the course of both games, I never got a clear understanding of how long this journey was actually supposed to be, and they don't seem to make too much meaningful progress on their way. Noting that M1 and M2A cover no more than 1-2 weeks of in-universe time, an estimate from one of the characters in M2A that returning to their homeland may take years kind of leaves this series open for any arbitrary number of entries. That doesn't even take into account the rest of the plot once they actually manage to make it back into familiar territory.
The first game opens in the middle of a pretty tense life-or-death situation, yet the remaining 90% of the game has virtually no relation to the villains in the first scene. The second game intersperses a couple of random scenes of the main characters' homeland, introducing some characters that have no known relevance to the story, then goes back into another self-contained plot. The nonsensical bit to me is that Melano (the "main" villain) teleports in to say hello and threaten the party before warping away for the rest of the game - this admittedly did feel like a instance of "rule-of-cool" BS to keep the villain squad relevant. Between the two released milestone games, there are several discrete storylines: whatever grand plan is going on with the villains, the debacle with Rune in M1, the Neo Sasary discrimination issue introduced in M2A, the pharmaceutical plot with Sol in M2A, and the unresolved kidnapping of Ritona in M2A. Most of them are currently in the open, and with M2B yet unreleased, there is no saying when or how any of them will develop in the future. The lack of scale in their adventure thus far speaks to a directionless story in my opinion - even if M2B were to be released, would it feel meaningful, or would it just introduce another detached subplot?
Pacing within the individual storylines and within scenes could be better as well - the issue isn't limited to the overall series plot. The final confrontation with Rune's brother in M1 (whatever his name is) involves an incredibly jarring 180 from complete rejection of Rune's character to an instant understanding and acceptance; I thought the entire thing was a hallucination at first. In the second game, I had no idea the final confrontation with the pharmacy gang (LMAO) was actually the end of M2A - I had thought the story was only half over at that point, and didn't expect a random side character would be the "final boss" of this chapter. Both of the games have the same issue of having a very slow buildup to a premature ejaculation of a conclusion that falls kind of flat in tone.
As mentioned before, despite all of my criticisms above, I don't really hate or even particularly dislike the games -- I just find them a little bit undercooked maybe, more like very thoroughly-crafted fanfics in tone. Other than that, I generally really like the art & styling of the world, music is fine, and I really like how well so many of the concepts in the world are established. I can't say that I'm invested enough in the first two games to look forward to any future ones (or even to care about the StP side-stories), but if I ever catch wind of a proper revival of the Milestones with more meaningful implications in the world, I could see myself coming back for more.
