Reincarnated as the Unlovable Villainess?!

I really love this game! I'm no good at habits, so I've been coming back to play a day or two of my playthrough over the last few months. I think so much about this game incentivises thinking a lot about character, personality, what information each character has and what impact that has on all their relationships... it's the kind of writing heavy lifting I usually have no motivation to actually do but this game makes it not just fun but necessary! I need to know what's going on in Pantaleon the assassin-jester's head here and why, and how the revelation of a particular secret might affect them...!!

Kumada said it better below, but I love how the rules here kind of trap you into interesting story, make you build your own cage to react to, to calculatedly go with or push against. The mechanical choices you make feel both important and precarious, you're carefully managing resources in a way that makes the elements of chance very dramatic. This kind of invitation to participate in building a complicated trap for yourself is absolutely what I want from a solo game! And it's hard to find such a game where you can trust the system to match up so well with the kind of story you're telling. Ah, it's really smart.

I'm rooting deeply for my Protagonist to become a love interest, but the current situation - in which the villain's only really romantic scenes are with the protagonist (who lacks a heart meter), so all the relationship benefits of positive scenes must mechanically go to a watching or involved LI (with a choice of a) bitter murderous ex, b) time travelling political agent from rival kingdom, or c) guard so convinced of the villain's evil that the game is bending around the power of his hatred) - is so interesting and so perfectly captures the tension between System and reincarnator (through productive tension between game rules and me!). I love how this makes the twists genuinely uncertain even to me, because they rely on multiple interconnected systems. It's very possible the Protagonist never gains a heart meter, and the reincarnator's desperate efforts to secure their survival by cosying up to them comes to a tragic nothing, a near-inevitable playing out of the original story's beats. All this in a game about trying to escape your narrative fate... it's so good! Thanks for writing :)

I'm currently at Day 11, and my play log is... longer than any one thing I've written since my dissertation........ If I ever finish the game, I'll be sure to share it. Thank you for writing! 

Hi so I'm just practicing coding and I used the mechanics and prompts in this game as the basis for my code. I don't plan on profiting of it or even releasing it publicly as a game but I wanna know if you'd be okay with me just sharing the process on tiktok

Such a great game. The rules are well thought out. A little confusing at first, but once I was not overwhelmed, they were easier to understand. It is nice because you can make it as funny or dramatic as you want. This can be played in one sitting or over a course of days. The only thing I cannot seem to understand is the extra Date Event tables after the 10 heart date event table. I reread the rules and find nothing that tells me when that table is supposed to be used specifically. 

I have assumed it is used after the 10 heart date as either an extra scene or to be used on day 30 for a big confession scene. Either why even without it, the game is fun. I plan to play all the versions and do the extended rules!

Hi, I'm about to play the game for the first time and I have a couple of questions:

1. Can I create my own custom roles/backgrounds that fit my setting better, as long as they can be used in a scenario?

2. When turning a BE counter up or down, do I focus on the most imminent BE or can I choose freely which one to change?

3. How do I decide which LI is involved in a scenario? Do I choose freely, do I choose the most logic one for the scene or do I roll to decide randomly?

4. I'm not sure how date rewards works. Do I keep them aside as "bonuses" and use them in a scenario that comes after the date in case of need to modify a bad result?

Thanks! I can't wait to start my game!

Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?! is a mini otome isekai solo rpg with splendid presentation and maybe one of the best banners I've seen on itchio; laser guided precision old-school shoujo, a Glass Mask panel backlit by lovely sherbet colors.

Reincarnated's PDF is actually three PDFs, at 8 pages each, plus three Chinese translations of the same. They're all standalone, you don't have to read all three, and they have the same broad structure. However they're different in their specifics, letting you choose between traditional otome fantasy, supernatural, and wuxia flavors.

Mechanically, Reincarnated does a strong job of replicating the traditional gameflow of a otome. You generate the villainess you've reincarnated as, you generate the ostensible protagonist of the story, and you generate the love interests the protagonist is supposed to be romancing. And then you have encounters with these characters, slowly raising their affection with you.

This is a game you can lose, and there's a round structure with pre-set bad ends you can qualify for.  You can also romance all of the love interests, date and progress your relationships, and get bonuses when they fall in love with you.

Dice-wise, you have a two stat split---Lore and Love---and you roll d6s under each to pass checks. Checks are randomly generated, and you get a small bonus if you can leverage bits from your character creation in a situation. Rolling a stat exactly is a crit, and rolling a 6 is a crit fail. You always use your best die, so when you can bring in your background you have good odds of doing decently. Succeeding checks brings your Bad End meter down, and failing them brings it up, and if it isn't at zero when you reach a Bad End checkpoint you game over.

If you do make it through thirty rounds, the end scoring system takes into account both your relationships with the love interests and how much you've buffed your stats. In kind of a surprising progression fantasy twist, if you're rocking maximum Love/Lore you can choose to wave all of this dating aside and pursue ultimate power. It's charming, and there's a lot of variation both here and throughout the game. Lots of journaling ttrpg systems are deliberately loose mechanically, but Reincarnated kind of builds a cage of rules to force you into interesting scenes. It's neat.

In terms of writing, the roll tables are precise, confident, and fine tuned to duplicate the feel of the source medium. There's metaplot, drama with the protagonist, backstory for the love interests, galas and duels and the love interests getting into situations and uh oh the love interests are injured on your doorstep and there's only one bed. The plot twists that you get on a critical failure are especially interesting, and a lot of them start straying into high octane metafiction. Metafiction itself is pretty comfortable isekai territory, but "a love interest is aware of the heart meter"---we have now passed the border into very good and interesting horror.

In fact, the deeper you push into the PDF, the more it seems like that is an extremely intentional sublayer to the game. There's player support tools for things like timelooping and adding new love interests and expanding the upper and lower bounds of the affection meter, as well as for dating the protagonist (in true Katarina Claes fashion), but the game pushes back and distorts the more you interact with it on this fundamental level. If love interests really hate you, they automatically induce new critical failure twists, and their hatred for you "transcends the storyline." And if love interests love you beyond the normal cap of the hearts meter, they erase themselves from existence across all timelines to clear obstacles from your way.

And the more you timeloop, the more the game around you starts to degrade.

The easy bad ends and replayability push you towards running into this part of the game eventually---one "but wait, I can fix it" and suddenly you're doing a Re: Zero.

I don't think it is incorrect to say that this is a masterpiece.

Reincarnated is an excellent replication of genre that then has a second type of game lurking inside it like a xenomorph. You can play it for a fun cozy otome time, or you can play it to fall into a spiral of melodrama and clutching at the fading threads of a happy ending that may have never been possible or that may have been changed irreversibly by your mere observation of it. Or you can date three princes and a plucky country girl!

If you're on the fence about this one, or about solo games, or about otome, or really about anything in general you should get it. 10/10. Went in with expectations high and it still completely surpassed them.

Minor Issues:

-On page 1 of all three PDFs, on a roll of a 6 on the 10 Hearts event, "roll an additioanl"

-On page 2 of all three PDFs, if you roll lower than the related attribute, "how the action has helped you stalled your death" this should be stall

-On page 3, in just the fantasy PDF, "if you reach 10 Hearts with an LI" is missing pink on the I 

-In this font, it's pretty hard to visually discern + and - from each other. This isn't a huge deal, it's usually clear from context, but sometimes I had to squint at the page.

-Can the Bad End counter go negative? If not, it seems like you can kinda get torpedoed by bad luck if you're at 0 but roll a failure right before the bad end round. Granted, sudden bad end for no reason is kinda standard visual novel territory, and you can just timeloop yourself out of it, but I couldn't figure out if this was intended.

Hi! I really enjoyed playing your game! It was fun, dramatic and made me rethink about critical failure’s importance…lol

Also I’m a big fan of reincarnation novels, and the variety of scenarious, plot twists etc. are incredible. I love your game and I hope I could play with my friends, so they could also enjoy it!

So I would like to ask you about translating your game into Russian. May I do it? <3

Hellooo <3 this is my first ever comment on itch.io and my first time ever playing a solo rpg and i recently completed it and won!! as a retired fanfic writer who writes for corporate as a living now, i didn't think i had it in me to write creatively anymore but i really enjoyed writing this and suddenly i wrote 50+ pages??? Wym thank you so much for an absolute gem of a game <3 since this is my first game i'm not too sure if i followed the instructions to a tee but i think what's most important is having fun and that's exactly my experience :) i miss writing crack and i made myself laugh a lot which is great bcs i'm the target audience lol!! feels very freeing to write for yourself :)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-NN4q5p7qyZtIeNh9FYecOWRfQ170IraI0ZVkEvPi6w/... (absolutely not beta'd . just vibes)

this is my first time playing a solo journaling game! and i've pretty much completed my set up to run the first run of the story LSDKFJSLDFKJ  i just got waaaay too invested in my world building atp bc lowk...this WRITES itself..... i rolled some dice to let it speak to me for my LI creation and wow...they TURNED OUT REAL GOOD??? (yes i gave them first names...for immersion 🙂‍↕️)  like. dude. this writes itself and i can't wait to get it started!!! i'll let you know if my villainess lives to see another day 🤠

can't wait to get back to you to tell you how it goes! <3 

i cant find the actual download file, please help

For a plot twist 12, is that a person from the player's actual life or from a previous timeline (assuming regression), or should we create a pre-reincarnation persona?

Feels weird to self-insert, but I'm game if that's what the prompt suggests.

I made an account for this comment!

I'm about a third of the way through my first playthrough (it's taking me awhile. Every time I try to write just a short blurb for an entry I end up with several long paragraphs) and I LOVE this game! I already can't wait for my next go-around. I desperately want to try the other settings, but I'm also clamoring to replay the default one! What a problem to have. I love it so much. I think it's probably my favorite solo rpg, up there with Ironsworn. 

I think my only real minor quibble would be that attributes feel a bit clunky. I split them Lore: 4, Love: 2 and it's been easier than I thought it would be not to just lean on my best stat. That said, I think if I'd reversed them then there wouldn't be much of a reason not to just use Love every time, since it's so versatile. I'm wondering if some incentive to use the weaker stat might help prompt people into mixing it up. Maybe taking a penalty if you use the same stat too many times in a row? Or different types of rewards or scenario unlocks depending on if you succeeded with a Lore or Love roll a certain number of times? This is all hypothetical since I don't actually anticipate any changes to the game at this stage, it's just one of the only things that really left me wondering what to do early on. The Date rolls being only flavor also felt a bit off, since I tend to expect more impact from dice rolling, but at the same time I don't really think adding penalties to Dates would feel great, so I can't really complain about it, either. It definitely leads to some funny moments. 

Overall, it's an excellent game I made a whole Obsidian vault around, and I don't regret a single minute I've spent with it. It's perfect. Thank you so much. 

Highlights for this run so I don't explode keeping them in:

Critical failure on the FIRST ROLL of the FIRST DAY that gets me the plot twist of Penelope as a love interest (!!!) She'd rolled Enemies to Lovers with the Prince (another LI) my villain(ess) was the manservant of (my character ended up a guy due to random events during character creation oop) and Admiration for the villainess, so this ended up working out when she read the Prince the riot act when she intervened in the Day 1 confrontation between my freaking out character and the Prince. She keeps rolling 5s and 6s on their dates, while everyone else never gets higher than a 3. It's very cute. 

BUT. The very last Bad End of the game, landing on Day 30, is Penelope tricking my character into being executed by the crown! A protagonist, LI, AND Final Boss?! (This one's counter is at 7, so it's a large looming ominous Thing on the horizon. Penelope is absolutely lovely and seems to adore my character, so I have no idea what still makes that a possibility and I'm scared to find out. I love it.) 

My favorite LI from character creation has rolled a 1 on both dates he's been on with my character. My character is constantly scared for his life around this guy who is a Sunshine Golden Retriever who just so happens to be a ruthless assassin with the most brutal Bad End from the main game :) No idea why things could possibly be so tense between them :) (They have no idea what to do with each other. I have given up on my dreams of them being end game to laugh about it.)

Currently my character and Penelope are badly traumatized from a bandit attack they both only survived because the yandere love interest (prep rolls: obsessed with Penelope and betrothed to the villainess, I'm scared) put it down viciously, but my character is Perfectly Fine Obviously Haha. That's not REALLY his body that got seriously injured. He'll be right as rain once he finds a way back home! :) :) :) 

It took kind of a dark turn recently, so I need to introduce some absurdity soon, if the prompt tables will COOPERATE.

Anyway, thank you so much for making this game, especially for free. I will be back to donate once I'm through this rough patch for sure. Thank you again!

I just downloaded both the paranormal and fantasy settings and I'm super excited to play this game! (Even though I'm debating on which one to start with.)

By the way, I would love to see you add more settings to the game like medieval, non-fantasy historical, and 00's high school shoujo romcom just to name a few.

I've been playing your game for the past few days and I love it! I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I never thought I'd find something so specific :''D
I really like stories that revolve around this theme. Thank you for sharing it <3

Hello! I have a couple of questions about permanent rewards and time travel. If I travel back in time, do all permanent rewards carry over? Or is it just the attributes?

Also, let's say that a love interest has 10 hearts, you get the permanent reward, and you go back in time, and their hearts reset. If you raise their hearts back to 10, do you get an additional permanent reward, or is it always one permanent reward per love interest?

hi there

I tried buying this as part of the Queer Game 2025 Bundle but the $10 option isn’t working

I’ve downloaded the free copy and love your game. How do I leave a 5 star rating for you? 

Hi, I'm starting my first playthrough, and I'm a little confused by the love and lore stats. 

How do we determine which stat is applicable for the scenario? I thought it might be vibes, but I wanted to be sure. 

Also, how do our roles and backgrounds apply to the stats, or are they unrelated?

I'm super excited to see if my girl Ravena survives!

Finished my play through! I had a few more questions but it’s late so I’ll just type the ones I have right now. For the 10 Heart reward, do you roll to see what permanent reward it is? Or do you get to choose? How would you get combined stats over 7/10? Is there another way of raising Love and Lore other than 10 heart rewards? 

Mechanically, do date results (ie it went fine) mean anything or are they there just for lore purposes?

So, I've had a playthrough.

Won the game. For first 15 days I thought the game is too easy, but then I was out of rewards, and my luck has run out.

 Had a plot twist 2 days before BE no.5 - Penelope was killed, thus striking that BE as she was the main instigator there.

Had many repeated events, people mocking me and bringing scandals, criticizing my relationship with Penlelope, oh boy, they couldn't just let me be... The secondary roll was always odd making things progressively worse, up until day 30 when the roll was even, and crown wrote a letter instructing them to kindly fornicate upon themselves and leave me be.

Overall fun game, I appreciate all the tropes and breaking of fourth wall. It's a bit of metagame inception.

Hello! I wanted to ask, do you roll the dice according to attribute ONLY when you roll the same scenario again, or do you do it for all scenarios? Also it's written that 

"When you reach 1, 3, 6, and 10 Hearts for the first time in a playthrough, you will have a Date event with that LI. After the date, you will gain a one time reward if reaching 1, 3, and 6 Hearts, and a permanent reward if reaching 10 Hearts. "
I didn't understand this part, it would be great if you could explain it a bit more. Thank you ^^

I'm in love with this! I just have one doubt about the Bad Ending counter, when the counter for the first bad ending reaches zero, do we start on the next BE counter (BE2) on the next day, or only after we reach the date of the BE1? Me and my friend got confused at this bc we each understood one thing haha

Love the genre and LOVE the Chinese translation! (Especially that it's in Traditional Chinese; easier for me to read!) This is a brilliant idea and I can't wait to try out all the settings!

Otome Villainess Reincarnations are one of my favorite sub-subgenre genres. I'm looking forward to playing this, and in preparation, I've made some edits to FangzV's spreadsheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MdFPW4Sl1pI47dhl5scuv3wrZt1T30nH-I_X8-C2..

I've just tried playing this game, and it's great! I've really enjoyed it. It's so fun, and the prompts create such unexpected and fun combinations!

The highlight of my game was when a demon (love interest) invited my angel character to a date in the Underworld and said that he wants her to become a fallen angel to be together.

I ended up playing for ~4 or ~5 hours, and I've written 24 A5 pages.

Thanks for the game, it's great!

Today I decided to run 1 DM 1 player one shot with your rpg system similar to how this channel does 1 DM 1 player

My friend ended up rolling really great for days and ended up his last day event 23 and with each scenario roll he kept getting lucky critical success (his attribute was 5 lore 1 love) and took many advantages to heart reward which got him to decrease so many of bad ending counters lol

On last day of 23 when he made it he also triggered protagonist 10 heart Love Interest ( she was added mid session due to scenario or some sort) and ended up giving him the biggest plot twist secret of all time. Which was she was also isekaied into the world as he was

It was really fun to see and witness and it felt like post credit anime ed with that twist if that makes sense lol

Enjoyed playing this again! This game is always great when I'm in a creative rut.

I've been tinkering with the digital sheet I personally use, and while it's not in the nicest condition to be copied I figured I'd share it in case anyone finds use in it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GN_nWED3zO5_pWwkqtDjVcdOUaUsrsBgU_DSScooTEs/edit?usp=sharing

I use it to track the numbers and profiles while I have a separate document to actually journal.

Meanwhile, I have a few more fringe questions I wound up with in my last playthroughs!

• Does Heart 10's #6 (extra counter decrease) apply for crit successes? Also, if you get it twice, does it stack or should you reroll?
• Does the bonus for Heart 15 happen immediately, or do you choose when to use it? 
• Do you play any dates or scenarios on Day 30, or does the game end at the top of the round? More for those last minute affection levels.
  

hello!

i have just downloaded the first of the games & have read through the documents a few times now. Maybe i've misread something but i'm a little confused. what are the mechanics behind the backgrounds or relationships w Penelope tht someone chooses? while i understand why the scenarios r kept kinda vague & i likely just need to start playing to fully understand them how do i determine if my background helps or hinders? have you considered constructing a character sheet document for players to print & then refer to?

im sorry if that's too many questions or if the answer is obvious, i'm just a curious bean & this game is so intriguing tht I'm going to start playing it anyway without waiting for a reply. I'll likely see the answers to my questions through the act of playing the game :)

Hello, I'm a first time player and I had a question about BE. When you successful resolve the event or critical succeed you subtract 1/2 from your BE. Does the BE stop decreasing at 0 or does it go into negative digits?

Example:

The BE counter for the first BE is 2. Day 1 you roll a minor success -1 to the BE counter. Day 2 you roll a major success -2 to the BE counter.

Now BE1 is conquered but you have an unused point. Is it applied to BE2 or is it lost as unusable?

Currently doing setup for my first run, and there is a question that I need clarification; there are 6 bad endings, you roll 2d6 to see what day those bad endings will be, for the first one, 2d6 if say landed 5 and 6, you are meant to addition/add together so the day of first bad ending is 11 right? And then for second and rest of them we use only 1d6 after day 11 yeah?

One last question: on how to play section "Then, resolve the scene by rolling 1d6. Roll +1d if your way to resolve this challenge is related to your role or background" 

That +1d meant to say +1d6 correct?

Otherwise I should be all good to give it a shot

Thanks for the updates! I played multiple runs before the updates and had a blast. Can't wait to use the new rules and settings!

This is a really great game! Thank you so much for making this available to all of us.

Lovely novel ideas.

I love this game! The concept is very original and I really like the execution. When I first died, my reaction was delight because I could properly envision the bad ending I had made, haha.

Hi! I just found your game and got my characters set up, but there is something that is unclear to me and doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the rules at all. On page 6, what is the Character - Goal and Focus table for? Is it for the Villainess? The other characters? In what situation(s) is it used?

Thanks! I can’t wait to get this game started!

Hi! I started playing this awhile ago and I'm enjoying it! I just have a question, what are they ways to increase the attributes? Is it only increasable when you reached 10 hearts with an LI or are there other ways?