Love, Elections and Chocolate

I felt like Love, Elections, and Chocolate was overall better than the sum of its parts. It’s imperfect, but it has enough good moments and handles enough sections in interesting ways even in those imperfections. The phrase that kept coming to my mind throughout my time with this visual novel was “rough around the edges”. I could definitely feel that this was sprite’s debut into full fledged visual novels, as there are some aspects (pacing, handling conflict) that felt rough at times. Its heroines all have rough spots in their respective routes if not their personalities and character, and the melodrama can come off as overdone. Things don’t always happen the cleanest in this story, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. I can’t say I expect it to work for everyone, but there was enough here that worked for me. It’s not a story I expect fans of this genre to all agree on thanks to the rougher aspects of some of its characters, and there’s plenty which I felt could have been done better with its narrative and character dynamics. Even with its weaker aspects, however, I enjoyed my time with it enough to give it just enough of a thumbs up.