Temirana: The Lucky Princess & The Tragic Knights was a long time coming. Delayed from its original mid-2025 release window until January 2026, it’s at last time to determine if Temirana has the makings of a champion or if it should be banished from the kingdom.

What’s it About?

In this otome game, you guide the fate of Cecilia Farias Temirana, the princess of the titular country. Cecilia was born with a strange crest upon her forehead that everyone believes is the mark of a curse, and as a result, Cecilia has grown up separated from her family on an isolated estate with only a small retinue of trusted servants and guards to rely on.

Despite receiving nothing but indifference at best and blistering contempt at worst from her family, Cecilia has grown up to be a cheerful and determined girl who is focused on doing good for the kingdom. With her sixteenth birthday fast approaching, Cecilia must fulfill the royal custom that dictates every member of the royal family shall establish an order of knights once they reach adulthood.

Failure to do so will cause her to be stripped of her royal rank and privileges. And there are many in the royal court who would gladly be rid of her.

Since she carries the stigma of the curse, the greatest knights of the realm aren’t exactly lining up to pledge their swords to her cause, but Cecilia remains undaunted.

Cecily, as she prefers to be called, doesn’t think of herself as cursed. Rather she believes she’s quite lucky because she can see the Light of Good Fortune, a mysterious power that alerts her to danger by showing her a glowing halo of light whenever she’s in trouble. While attending a royal tournament, she spots the light surrounding five men in the crowd and decides they will become her knights.

And boy does she have her work cut out for her. Because the men she’s picked as protectors are more zero than hero.

Meet the Bachelors

Meet Cecily’s knight candidates. They each have problems that make them a bit of a fixer upper before they can stand beside her as either a knight or a life partner.

Josephy Cornelhild Zondarig is the first knight candidate she encounters. He claims to be the exiled prince of a fallen kingdom whose come to Temirana to find assistance in reclaiming the throne. When Cecily asks him to join her, he responds with offended pride and pompous bluster that she would ask him – a prince – to lower himself to the status of mere knighthood. Pretty big talk since he was competing in the tournament to gain the king’s attention and lost in humiliating fashion during the preliminary round.

Lord Tobias Harbeck Frey is much more amenable to joining Cecily’s cause. He has dreamed of knighthood since he was a small boy, so naturally he jumps at the opportunity to become her protector. And then he faints… because his sickly constitution has always gotten in the way of his dream. Basically, everything sends him into a fainting spell.

Kiya is a small, unassuming lad who runs errands for Tobias. When Cecily tries to recruit him, he says he’ll think about about it, and then he forgets he ever met her. Kiya suffers from memory loss. He can’t remember anything for longer than a day at most, and as such has no vision for the future since he can’t even hold onto his past.

Milan is a blacksmit and a man of few words and even fewer facial expressions. An emotional wall most of the time, he reacts harshly to Cecilia’s invitation to become her knight as he has no desire to be pulled into the affairs of the noble class. He relents when he realizes that if he becomes a knight he can gain access to the royal archives and investigate the suspicious deaths of his foster family.

Adel is a poor, near illiterate farmer who idolizes the kingdom’s knights, but since he’s never held anything more dangerous than a hoe, his dream of rising beyond his low status and joining a knightly order seems like more like pure delusion than ambition. 

The Common Route

The best way to describe the general tone of Temirana is to imagine a PG rated version of Cupid Parasite mixed with the fantasy world building of Olympia Soiree. The common route shares the same themes as Cupid Parasite as the knight candidates must overcome their flaws to find the hero within, be it their personality or their lack of training. Once Cecilia convinces everyone to give it a try, they have only a short amount of time to prepare for a tournament. If they can claim victory at the games, they can officially become knights.

And failure means the end of their fledgling Order, the collapse of everyone’s dreams, and Cecily’s banishment from the royal family.

Cecily is a fantastic heroine. She sees these very flawed men, but because she’s been thought of a screw-up and embarrassment her whole life, she refuses to give up on them. She offers support and encouragement, and through her patience and compassion, she inspires each of her knight candidates to push to their absolute limits and become their best selves. She never crumbles under adversity and greets every setback, some of which are heartbreaking, with a brave face and an unwavering heart. It is easy to understand why each of the knights becomes 100% devoted to her.

There is maybe not as much humor as the Cupid Parasite comparison would lead you to think, but I was chuckling and grinning through most of the common route. I thought Josephy with his blustery tirades and Tobias with his near-death reactions to the physical training were the funniest of the knights, but my favorite comedic character was Bennetti, the cute mascot.

Bennetti looks like a cross between a teddy bear and 17th century French aristocrat. He’s Cecily bestie, and when the knights arrive on the scene, he encourages her to fall in love with one of them because he’s a thirsty little freak. He points out all their good, manly qualities to give Cecily a little push because she is a bit dense when it comes to matters of the heart.

I wish I could just pick Bennetti up and put him in my pocket. He is so precious and I love him.

One thing I wish the common route had done was establish a sense of friendly camaraderie between the knights. The interactions between them seem rather perfunctory and shallow when compared with the way they interact with Cecily. They seem like coworkers that get along with each other well enough, but no one is inviting the others to the summer barbeque they’re hosting over the weekend.

A little bit of this dynamic occasionally pops up in the character routes, but there’s not enough to satisfy me. Considering that these guys practically live and work together 24/7, it feels out of place that they don’t feel like they are closer with each other.

And from Olympia Soiree, there are all the fantasy terms explaining Temirana’s customs and religion. The story has a habit of using the term and leaving you to guess what it means from the context of the paragraph and a scene or two later they will use it again and straight up explain what it means. You have a glossary which will log the term as soon as it appears if you are totally confused, but there are a lot of unique terms so it fills up fast and becomes progressively hard to navigate as the fantasy word list expands.

I don’t think the world building is particularly complicated after you get the basic lore down. Here’s a really simplified version: Temirana is one of six continents in the world of Etrudia. Each continent worships one of the six gods of creation. Temirana’s patron god is Vorntahl, the god of wisdom. However, many thousands of years ago, the kingdom that preceded Temirana abandoned the worship of Vorntahl for a new god called Lux. In a jealous rage, Vorntahl brought forth a disaster called the Calamity and wiped the kingdom from the face of the earth in a single day.

After Temirana was founded, the people returned to worshipping Vorntahl with a fervor this time because he would call forth the Calamity again if he ever thought the people’s faith was slipping. As a warning to keep it up with the prayers, he sends the Calamity every 500 years just to be an ass about things.

Staying in good with their god is a matter of national survival and your social standing depends on a combination of social class, your birth month, and how favored you are by the gods. In Temirana, they use luck to measure how much god likes you, even going so far as to decide their king by a lottery instead of a hereditary line of succession.

With the year of the next Calamity fast approaching, a knight order devoted to the heretical god Lux starts targeting Cecily for assassination, making her knightly protectors more needed than ever.

The vocabulary I had the most trouble keeping straight were the terms for food and everyday items. It really made no sense to give all these food items weird names when there nothing special about them. It’s not unique cuisine unknown to earth. Melk is just milk with a funny spelling. Planta is cake with a star cookie hidden inside like the baby figurine in a king’s cake. And a blanket is called a ket and a café is a resta for the sake of having more fantasy words.

Presentation

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while I will never say Temirana is visually unappealing, it’s far from the most beautiful belle at the ball.

The character designs are a bit too generic for my taste. The CG images should show the characters off at their most detailed and dramatic, but I found them to be rather lackluster. Maybe it’s the soft color palette the game uses, but some of the CGs look oddly washed out to me, like the artist was on a short deadline and didn’t get to polish some of images properly.

A few look plain bad. My flabber was absolutely ghasted when I hit a romantic scene with one of the worst kiss CGs I have ever seen. The image of the knight, mouth open like he’s yawning in the middle of the make-out sesh, was so off-putting it took me right out of the story at a critical romantic moment.

There is also a lack of dynamism in the CGs. None of the zooms or slow pans that reveal more of the image. Just a static image on screen as words scroll through the text box. It doesn’t really matter that much. The prettiest art is never going to make a bad otome game good, but other otome games have these little visual flourishes that Temirana lacks. It’s just another aspect that makes the game’s visual presentation feel flat to me.

Each character has an impressive number of costumes, including their normal default clothes, pajamas, black livery with an unarmored and lightly armored variant, and full knight armor.

Plus, there is an array of dynamic battle poses for the action scenes. I feel like these are underutilized though. In the common route, most of the battles are tournament bouts against nameless opponents who don’t even get a generic enemy sprite so it looks like the knights are fighting empty air half the time.

I thought it might get a little better once the knights started to face off against enemies that warrant a character portrait, and it does, but only a little. For some reason, the game hates putting both combatants on screen at the same time. You can hear the clang of metal and see the flashing arc of swords slicing through the air, but the visuals seem oddly disconnected to the action as one character will fade off screen as the other character counterattacks, almost like a turn based JRPG battle.

Sometimes they have all the characters fade off screen during action sequences leaving you with large portions of exciting combat sequences being described over an empty background.

In terms of audio, the game performs much better. Outside of Makoto Furukawa as Josephy and one of the side characters being voiced by a popular otome voice actor, it’s refreshing to see a cast that doesn’t feel overexposed since it often seems like the same eight guys are rotating between all the otome games. But I’m not complaining at all about the inclusion of FuruMako since nobody smolders like he does.

The characters sound on point, and dialogue, sound effects and music are crisp and sharp with the notable exception of the opening and ending themes. Both theme songs are muted compared to the rest of the audio like there is some glitch that compressed them more the other sound files.

While the opening and ending themes are catchy, the background music was barely noticeable. I don’t expect visual novel soundtracks to ever be on par with something like Expedition 33’s emotive score. They just have to compliment the mood of whatever is playing out on screen. But an otome game OST usually musters a few memorable tracks.

Temirana’s soundtrack is so forgettable that when I was thinking about this aspect I was like, “Wait! Did this game even have music?” I did purchase the Plus Edition which comes with the soundtrack for the game, and after listening to it a few times, I can confirm that Temirana does in fact have background music. But it’s still largely forgettable because it sounds like very generic JRPG music.

As far as the text, I can only evaluate an otome game’s localization by how readable the English is. I found no issues with text sounding odd or typos, which is impressive considering how massive the game’s script is. The only thing I can fault it for is when a fantasy term comes up, it’s highlighted in pink. For some reason, if the word is plural, the pink highlight doesn’t catch the ‘s’ at the end of the word.

The Romance

Whatever weaknesses the game has in presentation are minor in the face of the reason we all play otome games: the romance (and the plot). If a game nails that, it doesn’t matter how lackluster the art is. By the same token, beautiful art will never overcome a story that’s fundamentally lacking.

Temirana is a slow burn. The game has a lengthy five-chapter common route with seven unique chapters for each romance route, giving plenty of time to build up the plot and flesh out Cecilia’s growing attraction to her chosen knight.

The fire may be slow to start, but the moment that simmer turns into a boil is always just *chef’s kiss*. These are some of the most heart-melty love confessions I have heard in a long time, and most of them left me as giddy as school girl.

I’m going to go over each route very briefly, giving my impressions of each one in the order I played each character.

Josephy

I started with Josephy because ever since I heard him as Allen Melville in Cupid Parasite, I have been so thirsty for Makoto Furukawa’s voice. I would be satisfied listening to him read the Tokyo metropolitan area phonebook if he did it in that velvety, melted chocolate voice of his.

As the prideful prince of Zondarig, his main goal is to reclaim his stolen throne. At first blush, his route feels like it’s going to be about his journey to restore his kingdom. And it is, but a lot of his character journey takes place off screen. After spending the first few chapters of the route reclaiming the lost heirloom sword of Zondarig, a big plot twist happens in the middle of the route, and the story becomes more about Cecilia showing her strength and resilience for the rest of the route.

To be clear, this same plot twist happens in each character route. How it plays out and how it changes the relationship between Cecily and the knights differs in each storyline.

In Josephy’s route, it shakes up the political landscape of the entire country, as Cecily’s scheming relatives try to scapegoat the refugees from Zondarig living in Temirana for political gain. Josephy steps up to protect them even though he knows it will cost him dearly.

He goes through quite a bit of development, changing from this very blustery, bossy, and arrogant character to one that is willing to sacrifice his all-important pride and even his life to protect others. But most of it happens off screen. Since Cecilia’s own character development dominates this arc and we witness the changes in him through her eyes without learning what he’s thinking, feeling, and doing when he’s not interacting with her.

While it has a super romantic conclusion and it is a very emotionally intense arc, I think it would have been more impactful if Cecily and Josephy had been able to grow together instead of feeling like they are growing separately and meeting in the middle.

Tobias

My second character was Tobias. I was a little skeptical about him because him getting sick at inopportune times made him a great comedic character, but funny characters don’t always make a successful jump into the role of romantic hero.

But Tobias is a wonderful love interest. While he is something of an easily flustered dork, he also has a suave side. And his determination to always do his best for Cecily despite his weak health is adorable.

His route sees him and Cecily infiltrating the cult of Lux to find out why they are trying to assassinate her. While undercover in the cult’s stronghold, they pretend to be an engaged couple which gives a lot of opportunity for romantic stuff to happen that is both silly and sweet. During this investigation, Tobias discovers a surprising connection between his family, the cult of Lux, and the mysterious illness that has plagued him his whole life even as this revelation threatens to tear him and the princess apart.

This one turned out to be my favorite route in the entire game. I feel like it has the best balance between romance, how appealing the love interest is, and the plot hitting all the right notes to keep me on the edge of my seat to see how love would conquer all. I do feel like this one had the weakest epilogue, and it should have finished on a much stronger romantic note.

Adel

Adel, the peasant farmer turned noble knight, was my third route. And this one went by fast. I don’t think it was a matter of pacing since I finished it in a single night when most of the others took two to three. Adel’s route was noticeably shorter than the others.

Adel is not a particularly complicated character. He’s humble, loyal, loves his family, and is the most compassionate of the knights as concern for the people Temirana and his allies’s well-being are never far from his thoughts. Just the human embodiment of a golden retriever that one.

He is also the most determined to better himself. He really won me over with how once he learned to read, he went from someone who could barely stumble through a simple children’s book to a voracious reader determined to learn everything. He even starts carrying a book on his belt though it’s only clearly visible when he’s in one of his battle poses.

It was really shocking when a man who is sunshine personified started to act out of character. His voice gets deeper. He becomes forceful, callous, and violent. Like someone said his MK Ultra sleeper agent activation phrase, and the story abruptly shifts from its original focus to how his second personality poses a danger to Cecily.

Adel’s storyline is one of the more important ones for piecing together the mystery behind Cecilia’s curse. Mind controls sucks as a plot device, but I still really enjoyed his route largely because Adel is a such and devoted hero and his angst over his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde act is truly delicious.

Milan

I had to think for a moment who I would pick as my forth and fifth routes. A lady never reveals her age, but I have clear memories of the Clinton Administration. Boyish character do not appeal me to me, so I chose Milan, even though I found him incredibly boring during the common route.

Milan is an emotionally guarded man whose difficult to read at the best of times. He doesn’t talk much, and he doesn’t seem to like being around people. He has no experience in love so the story has to use some contrived reasons to push him toward Cecily like the other knights try to get him to rehearse a romantic play with her in the role of the heroine.

It’s sweet. It’s cute, but I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for him at all. It’s like I had a feeling that Milan was hiding something that I wasn’t going to like.

Milan’s main motivation for becoming a knight is to investigate the deaths of his entire foster family. When he discovers the truth about his foster family’s murder and who his real parents are, he undergoes a dramatic personality shift. The mid-route plot twist plays out in a unique way in his storyline as it is the only route where Cecily is not the not the one in charge anymore. And goodness gracious does he let power go to his head. He becomes the most possessive, controlling jerk.

Now to give him some leeway, as with Adel, there are outside forces causing him to act like a lout, but the story makes it clear that his sudden turn is the worst his part of his personality that he normally keeps under wraps coming to the surface.  To Milan’s credit, he does try to make amends to Cecily, but the well was so thoroughly poisoned for me that point, his sweet nothings and promises of love fell totally flat. He gets the cutest epilogue, and it got me cracking a smile despite myself, but other than that, Milan can go pound his anvil sad and alone. Should I ever reread Temirana, I will be skipping his route.

Kiya

Kiya. Oh, Kiya.

All characters are available to play from the beginning, but Kiya’s route should have been locked. If you start with Kiya, his route will basically tell you everything about the overarching plot, so he is best left for last if you want to piece it together yourself.

Kiya is the most unlikely of heroes. He’s such a small guy, and his memory loss keeps him in a perpetual state of child-like innocence.  He can’t learn anything about himself or the world around him because he forgets it all. Kiya is almost like a dragonfly frozen in amber, and his circumstances make him the only one of the knights that I would call tragic–unable to grow and stuck in a rut until Cecily reaches out to give him the help he needs.

With proper training, he is capable soldier with his bow and dagger, and in the end he proves himself to be the most devoted of all the knights as he is the one called on to make the greatest sacrifice for his beloved princess. And he does it all in the name of the sweetest, most gentle puppy love.

Given that I was so biased against him, his route hit me hard. I teared up during Josephy’s epilogue, but Kiya’s finally broke me and got me to cry. First tears of sadness, when I thought it would not end happily, and then tears of joy when, when against all odds, it did.

With the stories of the five knights complete, Kiya’s route should have ended things on a high note. But there was more route waiting for me like a robber in a dark alleyway.

The (Extremely Disappointing) Final Route

Temirana was already a very long game with five hefty romance routes to navigate. But there is a sixth character to make it even longer. The secret character’s identity shouldn’t be too hard to suss out. The prominence of his voice actor should easily give him away since the VA is too popular as a leading man to be a side character in an otome game.

His route has nine story chapters, with the first three acting as a truncated retelling of the common route. These opening chapters aren’t a complete waste of time as they add a decent amount of new information while also integrating a character that flitted at the margins for most of the story into the core of it.

This is honestly one of the weirdest, most bloated, and unnecessary true routes I’ve ever experienced, and I completely lost my patience with it by the time it was over. I understand why it was added. We never a got a proper showdown with the main antagonist in any of the knights’ stories. But Temirana was always a romance first, plot second kind of game. I wasn’t craving the kind of resolution this truth route was aiming for as I was satisfied with the story told across the five knights’ routes.

The romance with the secret character felt like it built up forever, yet it never seemed to get off the ground. The plot also seemed to drag until it was put on fast forward, speed running through the weird plot twists of the second half. Without the time to digest them they seem tasteless and abrupt without the breathing room they needed to have proper impact.

It’s quite difficult to talk about what made this final route so disappointing without spoiling both the route and the plot of the entire game. But I will go into greater detail below

Needless to say, I was not a fan of the true route.

The Rating

While it’s disappointing it ended on such a sour note, Temirana put a derpy, lovestruck smile on my face too many times to let a bad final route spoil everything, especially when the game could have functioned well enough without it in my opinion.

Temirana is not flawless game. With two routes that left me cold, it might not have the makings of a grand champion, but it’s sweet, romantic, and uplifting enough to enter the winners’ circle.

 

 

I award Temirana: The Lucky Princess & the Tragic Knights a silver recommendation.