Fire is the stars we look up to at night, giving us hope, guiding our way.
Story
In the city of Castlecoast, magic and alchemy are used for many things and there is a college where students can learn about them. Audrey Clary, an alchemy student and Marion LeRue, a rebellious elemental magic student don’t really get along. One day they got into a fight and they both had to go to detention. However, Marion was not going to sit around because the Sunflower Festival was going on and she had someone she wanted to meet.
Audrey did not want to miss it either and they both decided to escape detention to go and find out what events the Sunflower Festival has to offer. While overcoming their hardships and finding out why these two students started to hate each other.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- A genuinely nice story with very nice characters
- You play as both Audrey and Marian and learn from their perspectives
- Characters are fully voiced
- Animations are smooth and well done for both characters and backgrounds
- Beautiful art style that is very nice to look at
Cons
- Some plot points were not resolved throughout the story
Story/Characters
Perfect Gold allows us to follow both Audrey's and Marion’s perspectives throughout the events of the Visual Novel. You will be told events both in the past and present on how they both met, other people’s reactions to their relationship, and their falling out. You see how a high noble family functions in society and how some other people function around them.
You also see other people’s reactions on how they view other people, but that development is the side story stuff that the two protagonists deal with. They are dealing with the struggles in their families' relationships and the relationship between the two protagonists. They both specialize in their very own fields but have different goals they want to go for.
Audrey must deal with the standards that the higher-class people have and what they think of people in the lower-class system. They are rich people who think they are all high and mighty and think of the lower-class people poorly. She also has to deal with her family and how they may think of the relationship between her and Marian, although we don’t exactly see them in the story. It’s still something that is worth thinking about.
Marian has to deal with what those people think of her and the strain she has with her sister, Simon. Who has not been staying connected with her and she thinks Simon thinks nothing of her, but has plans to meet her during the Sunflower festival. She is also not from Castlecoast, so other people tend to view her much differently.
The characters are also fully voiced and they all sound amazing, I had zero complaints with the English voice acting.
The only issue I had with the story of Perfect Gold was that some of the plot points that the Visual Novel highlighted were not resolved. I would have loved to see a conclusion to what Audrey’s parents' feelings towards her relationship with Marian, or even what other people thought of Marian herself. However, none of these ever got resolved and it would have made a nicer impact on the story and could have even deepened our understanding of the characters that we saw throughout the visual novel.
Graphics and Performance
The art style for Perfect Gold is beautiful, it’s extremely detailed with it’s backgrounds and they are animated beautifully. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50 and 16 GB of RAM. I experienced no issues during my playthrough with everything running smoothly.
Final Verdict
If you are looking for a nice, short and sweet yuri visual novel, then I think Perfect Gold would be a fine choice. It’s only about two hours long but I definitely had a wonderful experience. I have to also give the Visual Novel props for making good character development in a short amount of time as well, something that other games in this genre seem to struggle with.