Kage no Umi no Apeiria ~Casablanca no Kishi~ (景の海のアペイリア ～カサブランカの騎士～) Review

I personally recommend Kage no Umi no Apeiria because it’s full of surprises and genuinely novel. Unfortunately, despite all my hype, it seems the game didn’t sell well last year — apparently it couldn’t even beat some other game’s FD.

Still, Kage no Umi no Apeiria announced a sequel. Except it’s really just an FD, as you can tell from the title and cover art:

Kage no Umi no Apeiria Casablanca no Kishi — the suffix is “Casablanca no Kishi” (The Knight of Casablanca).

Normally, a fan disc gives you after-stories for the original cast plus new routes for characters who didn’t have one. That’s what I assumed Casablanca no Kishi would be, especially since the cover features those two side characters.

Calling them side characters isn’t entirely fair — they did interact a lot with the protagonist in the main game, and one of them is the nurse connected to another main heroine, Mashiro. But in the virtual world, they’re two female knights.

After playing it, though, I’d say this is less a fan disc and more an append disc.

The story structure of Casablanca no Kishi is exactly the same as the original. I mean, the structure is identical: the story kicks off, hits a bizarre ending, triggers a Timeleap, then does one new Timeleap per routeable character, and finally wraps up with one last Timeleap for the true ending.

And honestly, I couldn’t get into it. It’s the same loop: enter the virtual world, get a special mission, the mission goes off the rails, chaos ensues, two loops to find the truth, final end. Maybe my inability to engage has to do with how I felt about the main game.

The best parts of the original were the OP and the little sister heroine, plus the AI Apeiria voiced by Akino Hana. Those two characters are fantastic and central to the story. But these two side characters in the FD never interested me, and I had zero desire to pursue them. So reading this FD felt like a chore. Sure, there’s a bit of exposition for each old character at the start, but it’s not enough — the main body of the FD has no old character content at all. New CGs? Almost all are reused backgrounds except for H-scenes. No OP animation, no ED animation, and a ton of boring battle scenes. The protagonist’s personality even changes depending on the world he’s in. The original game’s visuals were already mediocre, the music was cheap, and its saving grace was the little sister’s snark and the protagonist’s interactions with Apeiria, plus that absolutely fire OP. None of that is here. It feels like a bonus episode — the kind of simple script added to a newly released galge as an append disc.

As an FD, the game gives almost no screen time to the old cast and dumps everything on the two new characters. Even then, it’s just one incident. If you cut the pointless dragon-hunting, the whole story would fit in a single OVA.

Looking back, what drew me to Kage no Umi no Apeiria was Apeiria herself, the breakneck plot twists early on, and those wildly imaginative troll developments. Almost none of that is in this so-called FD, so it just comes across as mediocre. Even if you’re here for the characters, I couldn’t care less about the two in Casablanca no Kishi. After finishing, I was just disappointed.

Maybe my love was only ever for Apeiria, and never made it to Casablanca.