Thank you for playing our game, and for the nice comment! We are happy to hear you enjoyed it.
Haha, yes, that reaction to Mer's route seems to be common. It's intended -- each route was supposed to have a different feel/theme to it.
Zel's history is deliberately not explained because as we mentioned in developer's notes section of the game, there will be an expansion of the game released some time in the future. Many plot details and sub plotlines are deliberately withheld from this version of the game because we don't want to stuff too much information into a relatively short NaNo game (especially with the time limit of one month) and have the quality suffer. Moreover, we were trying to give players incentive to replay Mer/Snow/Zel's routes in the expansion. Therefore, much of the history/background/plot regarding these three princes are left out of this game on purpose. Zel's route in particular will have so much more increase in plot in the expansion because there was just no way to fully implement the plot planned for him in this short NaNo version without overloading artists/writers if we want to do it any justice.
Charming's parents will have proper character art in the expansion. Currently, they're silhouettes because of time limits for NaNo. Epilogue CGs will be mostly redone/recolored since we aren't restrained by time limits anymore. Our apologies!
Once again, thank you for playing and for taking the time to leave us a comment!