you have one shot at recruiting her this way, as you only talk to your first party member once. finding a girl who overhears you talking to whoever you recruited first about how time is looping, who has a real crisis over it and runs away to a place she tells you about if you do her (completely optional) tour of the city on the afternoon of day 3 in a prior loop.preventing an attempted murder done by a character so she'll know you knew she was gonna try (this requires going to the beach they dont Really tell you the location of at 7 am on day 2, because you have to start out trying to explain the loop to her at a point while she wont believe you to kick her quest off right).the game would be mostly playable with a hint system, though it still would play a little like a strange approximation of an rpg battle system. not even the slightest form of hints to figure any of them out, since theyre all required to progress. sounds simple, right? the range of character quests is genuinely something neat. i figured out One (out of seven first arc characters) on my own in my playthrough, but (most of) the rest of them were legitimately interesting pieces of character writing buried beyond the most inexplicable sequences of actions possible? recruiting each character requires convincing them that time is looping. it runs a majora's mask-esque timeloop (with five days instead of three) with inexplicable sidequests that essentially are the main quest as you can't progress through the game without recruiting almost every character. id say spoiler warning for discussions of the plot, but i didnt really say much about anything past the first arc. i dont know if that means you should attempt to play it. there's something so compelling about it.
This was the most unplayable game ive ever played. a review, maybe? a retrospective? something, for sure. i cant accept that, so here goes Something, because i still can't get my mind off it. its been a long enough time that i think i have friends who dont know about ephemeral fantasia.