Amenity's life (Well, I warned you) *shrugs*
Entry posted by Clephas
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Anyway, as I said in my previous post, I've never finished all of the routes of a Hook Soft game, despite their VNs being almost universally of relatively high-quality as charage go. This one didn't turn out to be an exception, for the same reasons as all the others.
It isn't a horrible VN. In fact, for lovers of slice-of-life, cheap romance, and 'golden road' standard heroine routes, this VN is pure crack. Unfortunately, the excess of any one of those elements without a good balance with something else is almost guaranteed to make me feel like a diabetic without his insulin.
The concept is traditional moege through and through and a continuation of one of Hook Soft's ongoing series, where objects become anthropomorphized all of the sudden and at least one of them ends up as a heroine. The protagonist is your standard 'average guy who is kind-hearted but has no other redeeming traits' harem protagonist. That in itself was enough to turn me off to this game almost from the beginning. His standard-fare reaction to his smartphone becoming a cute girl and the vents that followed basically put the nails in the coffin for me.
I focused on two of the heroines... Maho (his smartphone) and Kanade (the cool-girl classmate who sits next to him). Purely based on the heroines and side-characters, I probably could have gotten into this VN... the first year I was playing them. Unfortunately, while I've become a lot more forgiving of certain quirks of the slice-of-life genre, the first impression of this VN turned me off so completely that I only took the very ending parts of the heroine paths seriously, which means that my opinion on this game is not really relevant to a moege-player at this point. Hook Soft has so many things going in its favor... so why does this company insist on reusing the same cookie-cutter protagonist for all of its games (to one extent or another)? A little non-downward (in other words, don't make the protagonist dumber or less competent) alteration to the character dynamic would be nice once in a while... but I suppose that was too much to ask from a company that prides itself on producing this kind of stuff.
Sorry, I needed to get that out of my system. I promised a friend I would play this game, but, as I warned him from the beginning, I've essentially been ignoring Hook Soft games whenever possible for this precise reason. I always end up bashing them or giving a really dry account of them as a 'standard charage'. Unfortunately, this one touched my worst button at the worst possible time (I'm currently recovering from a nasty stomach bug), so I just blew up a few minutes ago after finishing my second path.
Anyway, on a more positive point, both of the heroines were interesting, looking at it from a purely non-hate influenced standpoint. Their paths were also nicely-constructed if you ignore the excess of ichaicha and the fact that the choice system in the game is a bit too intrusive (you choose which characters' scenes you watch, rather than having a common route). Maho and Kanade were the two heroines I knew from the beginning (other than the osananajimi, Kikuri, who I had no intention of having anything to do with from the beginning) they were intending to thrust into your heart. The hints that you were supposed to take an interest in them weren't exactly subtle, and the relegation of the remaining two heroines (excluding the aforementioned osananajimi) to places where you don't encounter them outside of their own scenes is an obvious indication of their low priority in the writers' minds...
In any case, a lot of this game is the 'heart-warming' *sighs* scenes with the various anthropomorphized objects as they settle into their lives with the protagonist (you generally pick three scenes in each chapter to watch, with several of them being the sub-characters). Purely for this, I'd say this game does a good job of aiming for people who want this kind of thing and aren't as prejudiced as I am toward the protagonist of this story. If the protagonist was better, this game probably would have jumped another point and a half on my vndb page, but he knocks it out of the running for me being able to remember that I played this VN a year from now.
I'm a fan of the idea of 'all objects contain a kami' idea, but I can honestly say that moe ruins it most of the time, lol.
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