Featured as the main route for v5, Maidenswap exploded in popularity everywhere and became one of the fans favorites in most cases, offering some missing background for Holly, John's sister, as well expanding the characters of Cassie and Elizabeth, Holly's friends.
While I think this scenario is a fantastic option for people who look for wish fulfillment and cheesy stories, it fails to add the depth it wants to achieve for people who are into TF interested in the psychological aspects of it, the relationships are artificial, and overall, it falls just as a beautiful lie.
Now, this review will contain spoilers past this segment since it will discuss things related to the plot, if you like to wish fulfillment and do not look for TF for the depth, I still recommend it, when I did read it I felt a lot of emotions because I enjoy the content of that kind as well in a certain measure.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there is no character development from the characters in almost all situations, while Holly accepts her identity and opens out to people, this happens too fast and the acceptance from her part works surprisingly easy. She even accepts the fact that John and Cassie might had been dating a year ago when she was rejected with a drink, there are no consequences for them, even when Holly was initially the focus o the route.
Elizabeth, one of the main characters, stays the same through the entire plot, probably because the devs wanted to give her more protagonism in Maidswap, but even then, she ends up things that might seem out of character for her, like erasing her friend's memories at the end, a decision she takes without consulting her.
Aside from the ending Maid(en) from Scratch, where John and Cassie decide to start their relationship all over learning that they should get to know each other in a more normal way, the two main characters do not see any character growth through all the route, Cassie does not learn about her or about other people, and either end up breaking up with John for lack of trust or decides to forgive him. The worst one would be John, who ends up even doing some terrible things like mind controlling Elizabeth and hiding the remote from Cassie in one of the ends without consequences, again, not bad for wish fulfillment, but bad for a story of another kind, John does not feel remorse for his actions and lives with Cassie's stolen life.
One might argue that he grows in some of the bad endings like Where the Was Fire, Ashes Remain, but that's just because he is forced to learn when Cassie and Elizabeth destroy the remote and kick him out of the house.
Another big issue that this route suffers is how casual the characters are about the situations they go through, sure, Cassie cries, there is drama, frustration, and eventual acceptation, but a lot of stuff seems to be skipped over or relegated to happen offscreen. Once the long swap starts, John doesn't even try to contact his regular friends, telling Cassie to live his life for him, John does the same, and just after some years, they decide to live more "as themselves", even then, they don't seem to care about their old relationships anymore, everything in their previous lives got shifted aside.
When John swaps back to his original body in one of the endings, he casually goes out with his friends and tells them the truth, who doubt at first and still talk to him normally, why? Because apparently replacing John with Cassie doesn't make really a difference. Even John says once "Well, there is no class at university today, what should I do?" Implying that he doesn't care about the career Cassie had chosen for him or that Cassie chose something John would study and had been studying as if she was him instead.
Another issue is that most characters have the same way of speech, or rather, their personalities are rather similar in most of the cases. With the main four friends, you can differentiate the personalities of each character: John, casually standard, Katrina is playful, she teases, Kiyoshi is forceful and annoying, and Kyoko is shy and reserved, she is the nerd girl of the group. With Maidenswap we have three Johns that are all casually standard to something, they do not have a recognizable voice between themselves, and that makes the characters not feel alive, all of them have very few defects, (aside from John in some endings, and controlled by the player), Cassie never does anything against John, and solves the misunderstanding with Holly in a single day and in the most assertive way, Cassie says she has done bitchy things, but the player never gets to see any of that, overall, it feels like the whole dynamic of their relationships was very artificial, a perfect story about perfect people.
One last thing I would mention is how I disagreed with the ending when John said that he and Cassie were not as compatible as they thought, I said, yes! You have hit the nail on the head! Their dynamic is flawed, and overall it really feels that they got close together only as a coping mechanism, I thought it was a perfect conclusion, it was difficult to accept, but it was something, they would teach them about how a swap can affect their thoughts, it would have made the trauma really mean something because they were living something they didn't really feel, they would have learned, they would have grown. Unfortunately, Chori decided to go for a more idealistic ending, saying that they both had lived great moments together, in the endings Cassie defends John, what does she say? He is gentle, loyal, a good man, just what any other girl would say of a generic anime protagonist, that he is basically "a good person". I found the couple to be quite dysfunctional and I didn't really get to dig completely their happy ending.
This is an issue that a lot of people will find themselves with, sometimes the conflict of a story will be ultimate, romance, but the issue is that John has other romance routes already in the game, he has Monitor, where he gets to know more Yui, a classmate, that makes a bit more sense, it is the usual school first love, he has Connie, that actually shows how a relationship-centered by the remote can end in tragedy, he has Katswap, and more, and it seems that a lot of the routes could end up in that, John should not hook up with all the girls in the game, and he clearly shouldn't have ended up with a person as Cassie, which has no real reason to be with John, she is a college student, a rich person that wants to be a fashion designer, John is a middle-class high school student passionate about videogames. If you wanted me to believe their relationship was genuine you should have used something stronger.
Overall, I do not think Maidenswap is bad and it has actually a lot to offer to ST and TF fans, but, failing its original purpose, it works mostly just as a wish-fulfillment story, relegated of logic at the very end.
