Otome visual novel collection Taisho x Alice All in One arrived on Switch yesterday courtesy of PROTOTYPE. This romance game is in fact a bundle of four stories, which contains Taisho x Alice episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, and epilogue. That’s plenty of dreamy bedtime reading.
Taisho x Alice s a twist on the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its follow-up, Through the Looking-Glass. But instead of meeting many of the book’s characters, each chapter contains different gender-swapped fairytale characters such as Cinderella, Gretel, and the Huntsman. Alice is there too, of course, as a blonde-haired male bachelor, but you should try to not be late for a date with any of your suitors.
But there’s something sinister hiding behind the looking-glass — and no, we’re not talking about the weird world that Alice ends up exploring in the books, don’t you call your Switch screen the looking-glass?
In order to play the game in English on Switch, you’ll need to pay additional money for the English localisation. The standard bundle itself is $53.99 / £48.59, which is pretty normal for a new Switch release (and don’t forget there are four games here technically). But the game’s description explicitly states that this version is in Japanese, and you will have to pay for and download separate DLC to play it in English.
There are two ways you can access the English text for this game – one is to buy the DLC separately after purchasing the bundle, with costs $4.99 / £4.49. Or, to save yourself some pennies, you can buy the Taisho x Alice All in One – English Text Mode Add-On instead, which contains all four games and the English Text DLC. The Add-On bundle is only an extra dollar or 90 pence, but it seems a little cheeky not to include the English text off the bat, especially as you don’t need to buy the English localisation separately for any of the four episodes on Steam.
How do you feel about paying extra for the English text? Have you played Taisho x Alice? Let us know in the comments.