Board Games

 The premise starts off with a not-too-unusual tragic romance base in a historical Japanese setting, where the family of Ren (四宮恋), the heroine, has died from an epidemic, and her relatives have sold her off to be a geisha. The hero, Feth (フェス), in Japan due to his father's trading career, falls in love with her while with his father in the red light district for a session of entertainment. He decides to free her, which he does with the help of one of the older geisha, but during the escape, the nameless older geisha is shot and killed, causing Ren to fall unconscious from shock. The game starts with Feth having returned to the foreign conclave with an unconscious Ren, where he wonders if this occasion is why he has the undesirable ability to enter other people's hearts, deciding to do so with a weakened Ren, with sunrise as his deadline.

The mechanics are fairly involved, revolving around a very unusual two-player, asymmetrical, cooperative game with no allowed overt in-game communication. For each of three batches, the person playing as Ren draws four cards from the memory deck, keeping them out of view of the person playing as Feth. Each round, Feth draws as many cards as desired to make patterns on the board (referred to as the Atman); at the end of each round, Ren is able to take a card from the board, allowing Feth to use the power on that card from then on. A batch ends when certain conditions have been completed, and the players can win the game if they successfully complete the third batch. The specifics are complex enough such that I won't repeat them here.

The theme, however, is (imho) even stronger.

• Terms: (mostly) accurate translations. 三千世界 is an abbreviation of 三千大千世界, meaning trisāhasramahāsāhasralokadhātu (which thri hashari is also an abbreviation of). 鴉 would more correctly be translated as crows in this case, however, since crows are related to Mahākāla in Vajrayāna Buddhism, god of time and death. Rather appropriate in this case, given that in the game, crows attempt to take Ren's memories (presumably in preparation for her rebirth). For the playing field, the Japanese instructions refer to it as Limbo (辺獄), where the English instructions refer to it as the Ātman (self). Seeing as Limbo is a particularly Christian notion, it makes sense to look for something more applicable.
• The English description of the story from the BGG video unfortunately doesn't do the game justice... as the more you dig into the story, the more poignant it becomes. It's also written in the English instructions, but being a straight translation of the Japanese instructions, it doesn't have as much weight as the story at the bottom of the official homepage. It might only be a few paragraphs, but there's additional weight there.
• There's a sample translation of one of the poems available in this post.
• One things that disappoints me about the English instructions is that they don't describe the emotions behind the cards: hatred (red), remorse (green), grief (blue), isolation (white), terror (purple).
• There are the endings: much like a Japanese ren'ai game, there is a Normal, Good, and Happy ending (although I would argue that the last should actually be the True ending). The English translation is available, with the Japanese version being available at the end of the Japanese instructions.