QUALIA ~The Path of Promise~ Review

When I saw how QUALIA ~The Path of Promise~ was advertised in the tags, I was excited. I love a good adventure visual novel, and the idea of an android falling in love with a human is a trope that I thought I would enjoy a lot. The art and music were good, the voice acting was decent (I don’t speak Japanese, but I’ve watched enough anime to recognise decent voice acting), so why didn’t I love it as much as I should have?

You can see that the developer, PURESIS, enjoyed dabbling with the romance between Dr Hiro Koshino and his maid android, Machina. But, the issue with this is that we only get to focus on them. After a few hours, I felt myself growing frustrated with Hiro and Machina’s back-and-forth, and I have to admit, by the end of the first half, I was tired.

At the very beginning of QUALIA, Machina awakens and is praised for being the first android to pass the Turing Test. Sponsors are intrigued, as are the Directors. You would think that the Sponsor would have more of a role, but this was a far reach. After all, only major characters get character art; any minor roles receive a name, and that’s about it. So you knew who would be important: Hiro, Machina, Karen (Hiro’s Boss), and Hiro’s first ever robot: Proto, which is short for Prototype.

I expected a far more immersive experience. When I read adventure and see the visual novel aspect, I would usually expect your choices to matter. Considering the number of save slots, I thought I would have to consider my options. But nope, there is only one inconsequential choice that you can make at the very beginning of the prologue: Cool, Cute, or Beautiful. None of these options mean anything, so it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Everything will stay the same, and that is the only choice available for you to make in the hours of reading.

Karen decides that Hiro and Machina should live together, as he created her, and at this time, he kept referring to how he viewed her as a daughter at first. Keep in mind this is a romance visual novel, and yes, that did make the whole situation weirder than it had to be. Considering she becomes a maid, and how he viewed her in such an infantile way at first, I would have expected there to be more of a concern about the power imbalance. After all, forget the romance between an AI, the romance between a creator and their android should have been more of an issue. Instead, it was teased that there would be problems, but none ever realised.

Hiro was worried that Karen would disapprove, but it turns out Karen is the biggest shipper of them all. She teaches Machina about romance, and there’s the uncomfortable anime trope where she’s talking about her physical attributes, and she naturally talks about how she based her on her image. Sure, there’s a moment where Machina and Proto assume that Hiro has a thing for Karen, but considering we got Hiro’s perspective before this, I always knew that was to feed the drama that wasn’t there. Admittedly, that’s a problem with romance in general, but I would have preferred it if it wasn’t forced in during the second half of the game.

You may wonder, why have I designated this by first and second half? Well, the plot goes in another direction halfway through. Without giving too much away, there is a moment where Machina and Karen work together to find a way to travel through time, leading to a parallel world where Hiro has known Machina since he was a child. She appeared to him in his dreams, and I’m going to be honest: I rolled my eyes so hard. Karen described the whole thing as taboo and insane, but not that it was impossible. Machina is nowhere near advanced enough to have figured out time travel, and even though Hiro was deemed a genius, I don’t think he could have figured that out, either.

Overall, I just found it getting a little lazy. It didn’t help that none of the characters really changed appearance, nor did anything change in regards to the appearance. When Hiro’s child narrative occurs, we don’t see him or his parents, despite their deaths having had such an impact on him. He also has the same bedroom as an adult, despite the fact that even as a genius child, the idea he would have the same computer and bed is unrealistic, much less the same design. It’s the little things that drove me insane.

For example, in the later parts of the first half, it’s explained that Machina can’t go into water. At this point, it’s been a few months, and she has done so many chores in the house, that most likely included water. After all, there was no mention of a dishwasher, and she was also the one who would peel vegetables and the like, so she would have to wash them. She was also in charge of laundry, and I think it bothered me that such a feature wouldn’t have appeared earlier.

So, I think I will have to end this review here. I don’t want to tell you everything about the story, as that is all that’s going for it. But even then, as someone who’s read a fair amount of romance, I was underwhelmed and frustrated. There could have been so much more, and I think I kept playing in the hopes that something fun would happen. While it’s not a bad visual novel, I think the lack of immersion was what ruined it for me. The fact that the side characters, such as Karen and Proto are side-lined until Machina and Hiro need them for romance, was just so disappointing. But, I admit, I’m a bit of a snob for romance and sci-fi. I know many people enjoy QUALIA ~The Path of Promise~ but I have to admit, it’s not for me.