Review of the Saekano VN for ps Vita and some thoughts on Oreimo happy end on PS3
Entry posted by bakauchuujin
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First of I want to mention that the Saekano anime is one of my favorite anime of all times and as such I was quite looking forward to reading a VN based on it, though some months before I decided to read it I looked at reviews on Amazon and it didn't look too good. After having read through all of it I was really dissapointed. The Saekano VN is by far the most bland and non memorable VN I have read so far. The VN base itself of the aspects of Saekano that on the surface level is the least interesting, with conversations between the characters at school (at the non official clubroom they have) and a few other locations like the main characters room, and is sett sometime after season 1. In the anime these scenes work well due to the good cleaver dialoge which gives a lot of insight into the characters while delivering good comedy as well as the great scene direction of the anime, in the VN the dialoge is just really boring and there is very little visual variation. I think the core problem of this VN can be boiled down to the writer of the VN trying to imitate one aspect of Saekano while mostly ignoring the others and having surface level of understanding of the characters. This is also more of a problem as the core consept for Saekano isn't too interesting, but rather the execution of it with regards to character writing and drama is what makes it good. The character development and romantic development in the VN is also really poor with both of those being pretty much non existant. It just lacks any and all ambition which is really annoying as I feel focusing more on things like dates or romantic progression of the characters could work even if the writing wasn't the best, here it is just a boring consept with bad execution. The routes are also somewhat hard to navigate and some times there are just odd conditions to enter a character route, like on top of having done events with Eriri you also need to do one event with Megumi to get into Eriri's route. There are also dialoge battle things where you choose 1 of 3 options 1 giving more strength to each heroine's argument and one that is neutral, the thing though is that having the back of the heroine you choose to do the route for is not the correct way to do it which makes the vs thing pretty dumb. The CGs are decent looking though nothing special. The annyoing thing about the CGs though is how poorly they are used. From how the CGs were integrated into the VN I would say they were probably made at random with no communication between writer and artist and then the writer just quickly made a quick half assed scenario to justify using the CG. A lot of the scenes with CGs are just so quick and lacks any sort of reason to be there. One example is a halloween party event, basically Eriri's parents are having a halloween party and all of blessing software are invited, the part starts Eriri is embaresed over a witch costume she wears, they talk like 20 lines then they decide to leave and the event is over, which left me wondering what was going on as the event basically ended after a few lines of dialoge with no real comedy or any progression or anything that seemed worthwhile. The other CG events were not much better than this, some being worse, but this one stuck out to me as it was the first event like this. So in conclusion the Saekano VN is really boring and poorly made with lots of odd decisions which doesn't seem to make sense.
Then there is Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai. Happy End for PS3, which is the first VN I have ever dropped. Oreimo happy end is a oreimo VN with an idol gimick where the girl who you choose aims to become an idol with Kyoske, who you play as being the manager. My main problems with this VN is that there are too many tedious elements in it. One thing is the photo shoot events where you need to take a bunch of photos of the girl, about 20 each event with there being in total 37 events for Kuroneko alone and then you have to pick which ones of the pictures you want to keep afterwards to boost her popularity. Then there are events where you talk to the girl either offline or online called SNS where Kyoske is not voice acted and the girl either has no voice acting or only has one word voice acted each line of dialoge. This of ofcourse is built on a system where you keep track of stats levels etc. The VN also suffers from having lots of long loading screens all over the place slowing down the progression quite considerably. Another apspect of the VN are some scenes here and there with full voice acting, which generally are before the photo events, these are actually quite good and the voice acting is stellar, but unfortually this makes up too little of the VN to really make up for all the other problems. I completed one ending for one heroine, that one being Kuroneko. After this I found that I lacked most of her event CGs and I would have to replay her route multiple times to get the rest of them. I didn't manage to find a guide, but looking for one I found that to get the true ending I needed to get her to level 60. The system is built so that once you get an ending you can continue with your levels from the start (also only 1 save file each heroine), and at the end I got to level 18 which means at best I would have to in total do the route 3 times, but probably more to get all endings. In these new playthroughs I would also have to deal with the loading screens, the photo scenes and all of the other annoying aspects of it. Realizing how much of a pain in the ass completing the VN would be I ended up just dropping it. It is quite sad since I think there are some decent scenes there with really good voice acting, but when this is all bogged down by so many other elements of it really being bad and them by their very nature slowing down any replay of a route really considerably, with multiple playthrous being required to reach the true ending, it just isn't worth all the stress and boredom for a few decent scenes.
I am sorry that all this boils down to is complaints about these VNs, but I truly feel that both of them are really bad, and while some of the VNs I read earlier based on anime were good the ones I have recently read has turned into being really dissapointing. From now on I am pretty sure I am done with picking up VNs based on anime unless I hear a lot of good things about it, as my recent experience has just been really bad.
Here are some screenshots from the physical editions
Front
Back
Disc and cartridge
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