Butterfly Seeker
Entry posted by Clephas
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This is Unobara Nozomu's second attempt at the mystery genre (for those who are interested, he also wrote Yurirei, Teito Hiten Daisakusen, and Fairytale Requiem) after the dramatic failure of Shinsou Noise last year.
To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to this game, despite its interesting concept. This game, like many detective mystery type VNs, possesses a deduction system... but thankfully, it also lets you skip that portion at the click of a button (thus avoiding the story disruption that is the norm for games with deduction gameplay).
The story takes place in Shiraori City, a small city that has a massive murder rate, with most of them being carried out by serial killers, who seem to bloom like poisonous flowers by the handful in the city (incidentally, the manslaughter and incidental killing rates are much lower compared to the population than in the rest of the country, apparently). In this city, due to the sheer workload of all those murder cases, is a system whereby young people with unusual talents are taken on and trained as student investigators.
The protagonist, Tohno Keisuke is one of these, a young man with the ability to see the factor that made a victim's fate certain when he touches their corpse (or their ashes, hair, etc.). This ability has, with the help of his fellow investigators, allowed him to find several serial killers. His school's 'team' of student investigators works under the label of 'mushikui' (a club supposedly devoted to finding better ways to eat bugs).
The members of the club are Tendou Yui, a girl with an extremely strong sense of empathy that allows her to read the emotions and thought patterns of others from the most minor clues; Himuro Chitose, an almost autistic girl with an excellent memory and capacity for rational thought that has her training to be a profiler; Saotome Haya, an aggressive girl with immense physical abilities who hates criminals and loves nothing more than beating the shit out of them; and Kiryuu Azusa, the club's overseer, a teacher who is also a trained detective.
The game consists of three heroine paths and one true path. There are eight endings other than the true one (five of which are bad or dead endings).
The heroine paths in this game are about of equal quality, each adding pieces to the greater puzzle of the strange city the characters live in and bringing each heroine to life in turn. The protagonist, Keisuke, is something of a fractured spirit, constantly stabbed with pain left from his past (I'm not going to spoil you about it, even though it is revealed relatively early in the common route why this is), and how the heroines bring him out of this differs radically from path to path.
... trying to avoid spoilers in a mystery game is a serious pain in the butt. I can't really say anything in particular about the heroine paths without spoiling things, so I'll restrict myself to saying that each heroine path covers an individual case (a series of serial killings), and the mysteries themselves are relatively interesting on their own. Chitose's perp is probably the most obvious, whereas Haya's perp is the most obscure (clues are more subtle). There is a lot of psychopathy and disturbed minds in this game, and that includes the heroines and the protagonist (they all have issues, though not as bad as the killers they chase, lol).
The true path follows the mystery of the 'why' and 'what' of what happened six years ago (the events that resulted in Keisuke gaining the Butterfly Seeker ability and becoming obsessed with saving as many lives as possible). It reveals, piece by piece (drawing on the 'pieces' revealed in each heroine's path in part) the full truth of both the events six years previous and the events still occurring in Shiraori City. The ending of the true path is a bittersweet one, and - unlike most such paths - it isn't a heroine ending. While there are some things to be optimistic about for the characters, the fact remains that theirs is a life surrounded by tragedy (oh and watching Yui during a certain scene was scarier than any of the serial killers in this VN, lol).
I left this VN feeling relatively good about it... which is rare for me, when it comes to mystery VNs. A lot of it was that I liked the characters, the music, and how they handled the actual cases. Another part of it was that Keisuke was a surprisingly good protagonist. Overall, this was a good VN, though I'm not likely to pick it for VN of the Month this time around (this month is waaay too packed).
For those who are interested, Dergonu is handling Akumade, Kore wa ~ no Monogatari and fun2novel is handling Etatoto. The simple reason is that there are just too many March releases for one man to handle, and they were interested in those two games.
Edit: In retrospect, I do have one big complaint about this VN... there is no Azusa path. Azusa would make an excellent heroine, and it seemed a bit forced to make all the heroines around the protagonist's own age, considering how mature he is, in general.
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