Sakura no Uta part 1: Makoto and thoughts on Sca-ji
Entry posted by Clephas
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First, I should say that I hated Subahibi. Those of you who loved it will probably try to convince me it was a kamige or that I'm not rating it without bias... but from my perspective, it ultimately fell flat. Part of this is because I absolutely loathed the psychedelic fantasy craze that went through otaku media around the turn of the century and gained full strength in VNs with Sumaga and Subahibi. Another part is that Sca-ji doesn't know when to shut up. Oh, I honestly think that if he wrote a chuunige, it would be awesome... but someone like him has no business writing a story where you aren't supposed to know at least something of what is going on from the beginning. For me, Subahibi was a slog, because I'd already figured out a good part of the protagonist's issues within the first chapter. The rest was, to me, a bunch of psychedelic BS that wasted my time because Sca-ji insisted on foreshadowing everything and dropping hints continually. That is, to me, the primary marker of his style, and it is seen in Ikikoi to an extent as well. The problem is, this is a hate born of the simple fact that mysteries don't hold any mystery for me and I don't really need someone constantly reminding me of something I already figured out while I'm trying to read a story. Naturally, this won't be an issue for the greater majority of people reading Subahibi. To be frank, most people simply haven't read as widely as I have, so catching the dozens of hints and bits of foreshadowing he lays on like peanut butter is probably not as easy for most as it is for me.
Sakura no Uta does indeed suffer from this same - to me - flaw... but not quite to the extent Subahibi does, so it turned out to be bearable in comparison. I say this because it seems that Sca-ji is incapable of not overusing repetition and laying the hints out too thickly in anything he writes without ever saying anything outright. If Ikikoi was a straight charage that departed completely from his style in most ways, Sakura no Uta can be said to be a story-focused slice-of-life romance that retains many of the same qualities of his writing seen in Subahibi without the poisonous addition of psychedelic fantasy to the mix.
Aside from that, those who played Ikikoi will probably nod in recognition at the character dynamic here. His love of creating abnormally strong relationships between the protagonist and the various characters is present here, and the fact that all the heroines are intimately related (whether by blood, his actions, or through those of his father) to the protagonist in some way - even if indirectly - before the story begins is probably the result of a decision that any other methodology would feel far more awkward.
In the sense of taking the idea of a natural harem-maker protagonist and actually making him attractive to the reader, he succeeds for the most part. Ironically, the part where the protagonist is at his worst is during the beginning, because the first scene feels oddly awkward - to me - in comparison to the way he introduces the various relationships later on. This is because his bad habit - in my eyes - is on full blast during the first scene, making it almost worse than a first-scene infodump (a convention that is generally restricted to jrpgs rather than VNs).
To be honest, if it weren't for the sheer length of the heroine route I've played so far - Makoto's - I would have been tempted to say that he fails on the character development, as two of the mains - Ai and Shizuku - are sort of left by the wayside in the first two paths so far (you are required to complete Rin's and Makoto's paths first). The fact that he was willing to devote so much text to a single heroine route - of a relatively minor heroine - tells me that he intends to do most of the intimate character development in the heroine routes, so I've chosen to reserve judgement for now.
Makoto's path is really heavy on drama, both personal and in general, and it shows off both Makoto's and Yuuya's good points nicely, while not sugar-coating their flaws, for the most part. As a result, I honestly found myself satisfied with the path as a whole, and the resolution of the drama was also reasonably satisfying, even if the result of her personal issues wasn't entire satisfying for Makoto herself.
Look forward to part 2, which will cover at least two other heroines...
- Chronopolis and Ayana
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