Ever After Academy is a Romance Game Visual Novel by Voltage Entertainment USA, released through their Lovestruck app for iOS and Android devices. It debuted in June 2020.
The story takes place in seaside Whitethorn University in Connecticut. The male protagonist is a recent law school dropout who is returning to his hometown and reuniting with his younger sister, the female protagonist, a free-spirited young woman who loves fairy tales.
One night, their lives are changed forever when they find a hidden door to a secret, magical library, where fairy tale characters spring to life from their books. The protagonists help their new friends craft undercover identities as fellow students of Whitethorn and fit into the new, non-magical world in which they've found themselves. Together, they unravel magical mysteries while juggling school work and social events.
This game provides examples of:
- Almost Kiss: The Female MC and Nora almost have their first kiss in her route on a broomstick ride until the broom goes out of control.
- Beta Couple: The Male MC and Lucas are this in the Female MC’s initial routes having significantly less drama than the female MC’s relationships.
- Bookcase Passage: The main characters find a tunnel behind a bookcase in the university library which leads them to the secret library.
- Cast Full of Gay: Almost every member of the main cast is LGBT, as well as some of the supporting characters.
- Creepy Twins: Sable and Sabine are an intentional example being Nightmare Fetishist goth girls who love the occult and like looking at the mysterious side of Whitethorn.
- Flight of Romance: Nora takes the heroine on a nighttime flight on her broom.
- Forced Transformation: In Ezra’s route, the head librarian, James Tutorea, is turned into a frog by a curse of his own design.
- For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In the Halloween special, Lucas, Nora, and Ezra all dress in the outfits they popped out of their books in.
- Hands-On Approach: In Lucas season 1, the male protagonist briefly imagines Lucas teaching him sword moves and guiding his form.
- I Never: A premium option in Ezra’s first season has the group play it.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Throughout all the routes there are flashbacks to how the siblings gave up their memories of magic and what the threat was that forced them into it. None of the routes give the full story.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: The heroine decorates her room in soft pink colors with fairy lights and unicorns, while Nora is a witch of the Dark Wood who wears black.
- Lighthouse Point: The protagonists live in a lighthouse, which has belonged to their family since the town's founding.
- Mobile Maze: The old parts of the school that are underground and connected to the Magic Library move around a lot, one can control them if one asks them nicely.
- New Transfer Student: Nora, Lucas, and Ezra attend Whitethorn to fit in and more easily progress in their goals.
- Noble Male, Roguish Male:
- Lucas and Ezra, the two male members of the fairy tale trio. Lucas is Prince Charming, and Ezra is The Big Bad Wolf.
- Lucas has this dynamic with Abel, being the male MC's love interests. Lucas is a prince and always polite and courteous and wields a sword, Abel is gruff and unsociable, is a humble woodsman who are known for taking unsavory tasks, and fights with an axe.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: In Ezra's route, when the main cast discovers that James Tutorea has been turned into a frog, the female MC suggests kissing him, earning some odd looks from the others. Ezra teases her about it, both then and on a couple of future occasions.
- Portal Book: Nora, Lucas, and Ezra are characters who are transported to the protagonists' world from books of fairy-tales.
- Rule of Three: In Ezra’s route, Mouse explicitly states there is magic in the number three, which is why she and her sisters were so formidable together.
- Secret Room: The magic library that holds the books that Nora, Lucas, and Ezra come from and that the main characters stumble upon is hidden behind a secret passage.
- Sentient Stars:
- According to Nora, the stars back in her world wander around the sky of their own volition, and people reach out to them for guidance.
- The main characters are eventually revealed to be descended from two stars that fell in love.
- Thin Dimensional Barrier: It’s eventually revealed that Whitethorn was built to act as a bridge between the two worlds with the triad of the guardian, lightkeeper and pathfinder acting as the protectors..
- Trapped in Another World: The fairy tale characters become trapped in the world of the protagonists after they come through their books.
- A True Story in My Universe: The overall premise as it becomes very clear that the fairytales we know are distortions of events that actually happened in the magical world.
- The World Is Just Awesome: In Nora's episode 6 heart scene, the heroine helps her practice for an interview with Arin, and when she asks her why she wants to study Earth Sciences, Nora expresses awe at the complexity of the world.Nora: Don't you think this world is incredible. There's so much to it. It's this enormous, complex, interconnected system, and it's all so beautiful. Looking at it is like looking at an intricate tapestry, and trying to describe the design by mapping individual threads.
- Your Magic's No Good Here: The player characters' world has low levels of magic outside of some small pockets, rendering magical abilities weak or nonfunctional. Nora's magic is weak, and for Lucas and Ezra, who respectively have a sword that lets him strike true and claws that allow him to blend in shadow, their weapons' enchantments fail to work.
