Occasionally there will be an option to accept a challenge to a duel but these are the exceptions to the normal course of action. Ayato’s interactions with the other characters will most often be scripted conversations with no real choices available. The story of A.W.: Phoenix Festa progresses similarly to a visual novel. Joe Noname’s choice does offer some negligible character customization options, but beyond that and starting off with much lower stats and the longer time frame to raise them the two modes are basically the same. The reason it needs to be a longer time frame is Joe Noname is not as powerful as the fabled Ayato Amagiri, and subsequently requires more time to train if he does not wish to embarrass himself in the upcoming tournament. This story is a little longer, spanning from April through August. The other option for the story is to play as an original, player created character. Once Ayato is enrolled into the academy, he has two weeks to secure a partner for the Phoenix Festa, which following that he will have 45 days until the actual Festa takes place. A simple well intended good deed is not quite interpreted as such which results in Julis challenging Ayato to a duel, but luckily he ends up avoiding that thanks to intervention from student council president Claudia Enfield. They say no good deed goes unpunished, and this is an accurate way to describe the following turn of events. Ayato’s story begins with him running into Lieseltanian princess Julis-Alexia von Riessfeld. The player is given two options for the story mode.
Based on the Japanese light novel The Asterisk War, A.W.: Phoenix Festa melds this odd couple of genres together to tell a tale of a student trying to achieve victory in an upcoming Festa, which is a tournament where the six different academies put their Genestella against each other, which are essentially humans with superpowers. No attempts of combining these two flavors immediately come to mind, that was until the existence of A.W.: Phoenix Festa. Action role playing games and dating simulators are two very different types of games.