To be honest, I wasn’t really interested in playing this VN, as you might have noticed if you read my previous entries.  However, I ended  up playing it because, once I stopped taking the pain meds (thus going into withdrawal… viva Bucket and Water Bottle!), I had a mind just clear enough to read something on the level of a charage or slightly more complex but not enough to read something like Dies Irae or Jeanne.

I’m going to be straight up about this VN… like a lot of stuff Takahiro gets involved with, it is a bit outside of the ‘mainstream’ of VN culture, even setting aside the fact that there is no ero in it (which is actually out of character for Minato soft, considering the general ‘free sex’ feeling of their Majikoi/Tsuyokiss world games).  Why do I say this?  Simply put, it is because it actually has real drama throughout the entire VN, rather than just one or two per heroine path.

That’s not to say this is a terribly serious VN… to be blunt, if I were just to talk about serious drama, Tsujidou and Majikoi have both better and darker drama.  However, the general ‘light and joking’ feeling of this VN coupled with the more serious aspects of the game-making made for a pretty interesting read… until the endings.

There are no exceptions… the endings in this VN suck.  I don’t say that to be mean.  I say it because it is the truth.  This feels like a VN where the producer/director intends to create a direct sequel and never had any intention of ‘closing out’ the story conclusively.  To be honest, if they do make a sequel, I would like it to be based at least a few years onward, since they pretty much exhausted the possibilities of the school setting for this one.

The VN is funny, the content is interesting, the drama – even if it isn’t always emotionally engaging – is interesting intellectually… but the endings (and oddly the romance) are just crappy in this VN.  It didn’t make me angry, because I was never very emotionally invested in this game (sadly, this game fails somewhat in this regard, but it doesn’t seem to have been a focus in the first place).  However, it did leave me feeling this vague sense that I’d left something unfinished… and not in a good way (in other words, I’m not really looking forward to a continuation).  This is actually becoming something of a habit for any project Takahiro gets involved with, and it is the primary reason I stopped looking forward to this a few weeks before the release.

Overall, it is hard to figure out a group of people who will specifically like this VN.  If you just want to spend most of a VN laughing despite there being interesting drama, this is a good choice.  However, if you just want to do the ichaicha moe-moe thing, this isn’t a good choice.  It also isn’t a good choice if you look at it through the eyes of someone who played the previous VNs that had Takahiro involved.  However, being a Romeo fan is probably a plus for this VN, as his scenario/plot style covers a lot of genres.  This is, in a very real way, a VN that touches on the grim realities of the eroge industry (well, for the creators, not so much for the money-people), especially in Teruha’s path.  The fact that it does so in a humorous fashion only outlines this more clearly.