"Can your heart handle this love?"
— From the game's site.
Moonlight Lovers is a French online visual novel created by Beemoov games, the same company behind My Candy Love and Eldarya.
Eloise, an ordinary orphan girl living an ordinary life in an orphanage, has it turned upside down after coming of age and inheriting an immense manor. She soon discovers that it is already inhabited by six vampires, whom she can befriend and flirt.
It is set in the same universe as My Candy Love.
This Visual Novel provides examples of:
- Acoustic License: It's mentioned that the Moondance is very noisy, with music in high volumes and people talking. But the characters never have any problem to hear each other while there.
- Aerith and Bob: Vladimir, Ivan, Aaron, Ethan and Raphael are completely mundane names, but we can't say the same for Beliath.
- Allegedly Free Game: The player gets 510 AP per day to be used IN THE SAME DAY. Each line of dialogue costs 30, so you can read 17 per day without buying more.
- Big Fancy House: Eloise gets flabbergasted when she arrives to the manor and sees how impressive it really is.
- Bouncer: The Moondance's one, Gaston, is very well acquainted with Beliath and Ethan, and also becomes Eloise's friend.
- But Liquor Is Quicker: Lampshaded by Eloise, who is afraid that Beliath does this to his victims, but Vladimir assures her that it is not the case.
- Cast Full of Pretty Boys: This is a given, considering it is an otome game.
- Change the Uncomfortable Subject: The vampires have several subjects they prefer to avoid or ignore entirely, so this happens often. The main one is the one of how Vladimir moved into the manor.
- Coolest Club Ever: Needless to say, the Moondance.
- Conveniently Interrupted Document: Inside one of Aaron's books, Eloise found a paper with instructions on how to kill vampires, wrote by her mother. Too bad that the most important bits had faded with time.
- Crush Blush: Duh. Happens do every one of the vampires.
- Curiosity Killed the Cast: The My Candy Love cast should know better than to invade abandoned manors to throw parties.
- Dark House: The setting of the game, inherited by Eloise.
- Dead Man Writing: Eloise's parents were certainly pretty excentric people, living in an auto-sufficient manor away of everything and leaving a letter for her just in case that they die before she grows up.
- Destination Defenestration: Eloise almost dies like this. The vampires are forced to save her, triggering the whole plot.
- Disposing of a Body: Trying to avoid having to do this is one of the reasons why the vampires try to avoid killing people. But sometimes people die in the manor, and this dirty work always falls on Beliath's and Ethan's hands.
- Emergency Transformation: An important part of the plot. Eloise fell from the second floor and would bleed out very soon. Her condition was too critical to transform her into a vampire, so they chose to transform her into a chalice instead.
- Establishing Character Moment: The whole point of the introduction was illustrating each one of the vampire's personalities.
- Faceless Masses: The vampires are the only characters to have animations and change facial expression, all the other characters are only black silhouettes.
- Flower Motifs: Vladimir gets really mad after seeing that his cyclamens were destroyed. That's because they symbolize his relationship with his mother.
- Frozen Fashion Sense: Vladimir and Raphael are the only ones in the group that have a hard time adjusting to the present times.
- Garden of Love: Vladimir's very convenient hobby served to create the perfect setting for romantic scenes.
- Guide Dang It!: Guides are extremely helpful to get the ending you want, considering that choices can have consequences several chapters later.
- Hair Color Dissonance: The black hair options for the player character being anything but black is common in BeeMoov games, and Beliath and Raphael suffer from this as well.
- Haunted House: The mansion gained this reputation for being seemingly uninhabited for a long time, but being well-kept.
- Horror Hunger: Ivan is the only vampire who can't hold his thirst. The other vampires actually deal with the presence of blood pretty well.
- Insult Friendly Fire: Beliath mocked Vladimir's Frozen Fashion Sense in Raphael's presence.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Eloise can befriend the vampires, depending on the answers chosen. The vampires also have this kind of relationship between themselves, since some of them were born centuries apart.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The vampires usually don't drink twice from the same victim and it's important that they wipe their memories after.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Some bad decisions you make lead to bad consequences.
- Limited Wardrobe: Like in other BeeMoov visual novels, the characters wear the same clothes everyday.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: The vampires were discussing how to do this while Eloise was bleeding out, but, in the end, they managed to save her life.
- Make Way for the New Villains: On Beliath's route, Asmodee overshadows Neil.
- Masquerade: In My Candy Love you play as a normal high school student and only gets some ambiguous hints of the existence of the supernatural, while Moonlight Lovers is focused on this world.
- May–December Romance: Unavoidable, unless you choose Ivan, considering that all the love interests are vampires and Eloise just turned 18 by the start of the story.
- Mayfly–December Romance: The only way for a vampire to be freed of their bond with their chalice is waiting for the chalice to die from old age.
- Mood Whiplash: In almost every chapter.
- Muggle Power: The vampires take extreme precautions to avoid being discovered. They are specially fearful of the police.
- Multiple Endings: Three different endings for each vampire.
- Noodle Incident: The one when Beliath stole and wore Vladimir's clothes is vaguely mentioned by Raphael.
- Peggy Sue: The replays can be used to get outcomes you didn't get the first time and rewrite the history.
- The Power of Friendship: Discussed and played straight.Beliath: I... I don't know. I never believed in the power of friendship and all that crap... We're not in a 1980s movie.Eloise: Why? Because it's too cliché? Know what? Clichés work because there's an element of truth.
- Oddly Visible Eyebrows: A way of making the character's facial expressions clearer.
- Oh, Crap!: The vampires, when they see Eloise as a soon-to-be corpse. She had documents with her that proved that people knew where she went and would notice her disappearance, and sooner or later the cops would knock their door.
- Older Than They Look: Except Ivan, who was turned vampire recently and really is the age he seems to be.
- Our Vampires Are Different
- The Ageless: The vampires. Aaron, the oldest of them, was a mercenary during the Hundred Years' War.
- Kiss of the Vampire: As long as the victim isn't afraid and doesn't resists, the "poison" present in the vampire's fangs make it a pleasurable experience. Because of this condition, this trope is played in different ways in each routes before finally being played straight.
- Super-Senses
- Super-Hearing: Raphael is the one that makes most use of it, but all of them have very impressive hearing. It also seems to be their favored sense.
- The Nose Knows: Their sense of smell is also sharp, specially to detect blood.
- Vampires Are Sex Gods: Or at least Beliath thinks he is.
- Vampire Bites Suck: Eloise was afraid during her first experience, so she describes it as nothing less than terrifying and painful.
- Vampire Dance: You can guess which kinds of dance each one prefers.
- Parental Abandonment: Eloise spent most of her life in an orphanage.
- Pretty Freeloaders: The vampires actually occupied the manor illegally. They aren't pleased when the rightful owner tries to claim it.
- Really 700 Years Old: Minus Ivan and Ethan, the other vampires are all at least a few centuries old, some older than the others.
- Romantic Vampire Boy: The vampires the dateable characters of an otome game. Though you can make a case that the majority of them aren't all that ''romantic'", per se.
- Social Circle Filler: Eloise's friends from the orphanage. Melanie is said as having been her best friend while she lived there, and Eloise even mentions some other names, but those people have almost zero relevance to the story and exist solely to avoid Friendless Background.
- Special Person, Normal Name: The vampires, except for Beliath, and Leandra.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: The vampire whose route you chose. It is funny to compare their behavior in the first chapters of their own routes when compared to in other routes.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can say mean things or take selfish decisions.
- Welcomed to the Masquerade: The price Eloise had to pay to survive.
