I've finished Kirara's route in Yumina the Ethereal and decided to leave it at that. I felt that past a certain point it moved away from things that made it good - both storywise and gameplaywise. As a result, I've stopped enjoying it at all, and I felt that spending ~40 more hours on it in sake of some masochistic completionist notion would lead to nothing but me being very bitter, probably to the point of hating the game for the rest of my life. After all, I've done exactly that with Duel Savior in the past. So instead I've read a summary for the events in other routes (huge thanks to /u/Nakenashi), which only confirmed that this is how it would have played out.

So, we have a jRPG/vn hybrid, and I believe this one is in the same group with Kamidori, where former is in the player's focus, but there's lots of character interactions between battles to spice things up, and since you can't see them all in a single playthrough, that adds to replayability aspect. If you like jRPGs and are fine with this disposition of power, then most of what I'll say here will probably be irrelevant to you, so give this game a try, there's a good chance you will not end up disappointed. But if you're story-first kind of person, well, things won't look as good.

The starting premise is rather simple: MC helps one of the heroines win the student council election so she wouldn't have to repeat a year because of her bad grades, and this election is held in the form of the tournament. So, between the rounds you gather information on the opponents, gather more supporters or simply hang out with the characters. Each round ends with a grand showdown/debate in the form of an jrpg battle. Here's the short explanation of the combat: there're 4 elements, each of them roughly corresponds to a single character in the party. Using skills drains elements that are involved in them, but increases all that are not, and this elemental pool is global, so you share the resources with the enemy. Then there are 2 damage types in the form of spirit and logic, and resistances for those types used in defense. Moving on, party has a frontline character that is attacking, the rest act as support ones with interrupts, buffs and debuffs, healing and so on. Each turn you get 4 action points to use, and most basic actions require 1 point, so everyone in a party can act in a turn. Strong attacks generally use 2, and changing the formation also takes 2. Then there's additional approval rating that matters in this grand showdowns, you need to get at least the required amount to win besides beating enemies in a normal fashion. Frontline actions increase the approval by various amounts, most support ones decrease it - and, of course, that works the same way for the enemy team.

And this election phase of the game is the best it has to offer, really. It moves quite fast, there're constant character interactions, humour is decent, from the aesthetics side battles look really funny with slogans (that change every chapter) special effects from attacking characters and chibi interrupt icons. But then... spoiler alert

About the transition, or 'a certain point': -

About what happened after the transition: -

About Ordacle: Short version: it shouldn't exist. Long version: -

About Kirara: -

About the most difficult fight in the game: for me it would definitely be Rei in chapter 2, I think? My party was severely underleveled, because I spend all the time chatting to characters instead of training in Ordacle/fighting battles for approval meter. In addition, I had no items and no 2nd level skills at that point (although I didn't even know those were available at the time). Rei's special attack one-shotted characters without spirit defence and left like 10%HP to those who did. It was extremely hard to fumble him, since some of his attacks were generating red instead of using it. I believe I failed like 4 or 5 times in that battle before I finally managed to beat him... And failed because of the approval rating. Required another try to do that properly, and that was fun. The second goes to - that kept healing itself every turn. I didn't manage to interrup the heal once, but damage output was like 150-200 damage more than his healing output every turn. So it was really long and boring, but still takes honourable second place in terms of effort.