Ahh, art blocks of any kind suck, but these Jams are really good medicine! Especially if it's something like this one where you're encouraged to "slack off" a bit, in a way! I have procrastinated an RPG project forever now, I hope maybe the Jams I entered finally boosted my confidence to start it. D:
I think hope is a good theme, if something gets too dark I find it hard to care about what happens sometimes, because the default assumption is that everything will stay terrible (or get even more terrible) for all the characters anyway. D: If I even start playing/reading/watching it at all, in the first place!
The Otome is very nice so far, and I hope you reach a point where writing becomes easier again! When I started work on my short visual novel for the TyranoBuilder Jam - which made me find this nice website - I was writer's blocked so much that I wrote 4 lines of text (which were changed later) in the course of about 4 hours initially. D: Good luck continuing your work on the Otome!
Haha, it must have been fun for them to voice a couple in that case, and a cute reason for the way the story turned out!
The character in my avatar is Dizzy from Guilty Gear, since I saw that you found my deviantART you've probably already seen her there, but I can explain why your description reminded me of her if you'd like!
I really can't remember that much about X, I'm not sure how many years ago I read it, and the fact that the ending never got released here made it very anticlimactic. D: Though it doesn't mean I dislike it in any way, maybe I should re-read it some time since it can be fun to revisit things you've read/watched/played in the past!
I've been a PC gamer forever as well and only got my first console rather recently, specifically to play Atelier games and Demon's Souls. It's always kind of interesting to see what games someone grew up on depending on which game systems s/he had available at any given time! Many games seem a lot cheaper now indeed, although I imagine some are hard to get due to availability!