The Reincarnated Princess Spends Another Day Skipping Story Routes

To be fair, the story looks promising. The concept of breaking flags to avoid bad outcome is also nice, because for once we get a main character who wants to change the guys instead of just avoiding death in bad endings. Rosemary is also a rival character instead of a villainess, and she only has one canon love interest in the original game. Sadly, the execution is just not working for me.

First of all, the concept of the game itself is really vague and it results in the world-building being just as abstract. The heroine of the game is a shrine maiden? In a world of princes and knights and sorcerers that has no shrines mentioned so far? As a reincarnated princess, Rosemary is always described as intelligent and independent, but this only lasts for the first few chapters before she gradually turns into someone who struggles to make a decision, refuses help when she needs it, and always has to be protected. In fact, Rosemary spends the climax of this book in the safety of her own room, under the protection of her guard and her brother. The spotlight is instead given to the sorcerers and her younger brother, so in the end all she does is mope around. The second half of the book is especially sappy.

The biggest challenge for me is to get used to the writing. On top of a lot of telling instead of showing, there's also a lot of flashbacks that serve as little info dumps. A new character shows up? Info dump. New character development? Info dump. Said character gets their own perspective? Flashback and info dump. Most of the scenes consist of 80% internal monologue and descriptions of emotions. It really drags down the pacing, and even when we get action scenes, it doesn't take long until the writing reverts back to that. At some points, the internal monologues would also blur the line between thoughts and reality, leading to lapses in logic that get resolved very conveniently.

I do like the story though, and the book does start off pretty solid, so hopefully it can go back to that tone in the next volumes.