First, it should be noted that this game was planned and written by Watanabe Ryouichi, who also wrote the Harumade series (Harumade Kururu, Natsukumo Yururu, etc). As such, it is - quite predictably - a mindfuck game. Don't expect SOL romance in the traditional sense, because that isn't the kind of game this is.
This game has two protagonists... the first is the normal-seeming Koumi Masataka, who begins the story by encountering Sarasa, the game's main heroine, as she eats canned saba miso (mackerel in miso) at a convenience store. The other protagonist is Tsubaki, a young woman who spends her nights obsessing over videos of deaths of all types and thinking about herself in the same situation (it is more complex than that, but if I explain too much, you won't get to experience the creepy weirdness properly).
While this game has four heroines, there is only one actual path. All choices that go off that path lead to cut-off endings ten lines later (which makes sense in the context of full knowledge of the mindfuck), so there really is no point in picking them. For H-freaks, there are multiple h-scenes for each heroine... just don't expect happy romance endings, since there is only a single ending.
There isn't a whole lot I can say about this game besides what I said above without ruining it for you, but I'll tell you what I liked that doesn't touch upon the mindfuck or main story. I really liked the way the Preppers Club members got along, as they are one of those 'group of friends' that can't seem to stay on topic for more than a few seconds at a time (usually due to Yaotome Hanae making a sex joke or one of the others bringing up a subject that derails the conversation). As such, I found many of the scenes involving the club highly amusing.
Tsubaki and Amika's relationship is pretty weird, by any standard. I won't go into details, but don't expect lots of soft normal emotions there.
As a conclusion, I can recommend this to fans of the Harumade series and the mindfuck niche in general. It is often hard to follow what is happening due to the way the story is told, but, even with that, it was an enjoyable ride.
One of only two games written by Kazutaka, the writer of the somewhat comically-named Doushite Daite Kurenai no!? Onna no Ko Datte Yaritai no! (incidentally, despite the title, the aforementioned game is not a nukige, which is in itself humorous, lol). It is also the game that gave substance to Ensemble's quest to define itself as a specialist company in trap protagonist and ojousama-ge. Ironically, it is also the flat-out best SOL game the company has ever made, which makes it somewhat sad for me that Kazutaka faded out after this game was released. I can say right out that the only reason I still try Ensemble games is because of the experience I had with this one.
One of the parts anyone who first plays this game will notice is that the protagonist is voiced. More than that, 'Mizuki' is voiced by a female VA that was able to put a hint of androgyny into the voice, giving you the impression that it was quite natural that most people mistake him for a girl. Another part of this game that is obviously noticeable from the start is that the writer has really done his research into the art field. 'Mizuki' has an extremely wide and deep knowledge of all forms of art and their care, and this serves as one of his (actually, it is easier to think of him as a girl with a penis, lol) charm points for the reader, along with his obvious love of housework.
One part that makes it easy to regard this game's path as being far more in-depth than the norm for an SOL-focused game is the way the choices are handled. Essentially, before you exit the prologue, you will have already chosen your heroine, since all choices are concentrated in a very short period of time at the beginning of the game. By choosing to essentially get the choices 'out of the way', the writer manages to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of VNs in general... breaking engrossment in the game by inserting choices into every important scene. This game essentially ignores the lie of player agency (Clephas: Player agency in a VN, pfft), which is definitely a positive in this case. This allows the protagonist's and the heroines' personalities and actions to become clear to the reader (and there is no doubt that you are a reader with this VN) without the interference of random choices or the need to keep which heroine you want to go for in the back of your mind constantly.
Ootori Rena
Rena is the game's obvious main heroine. She is the daughter of the town's owner and permanent mayor (literally, their business bought the town in which the game is based). She is also an art dealer from a family of art dealers. It is tempting, at first glance, to call her a tsundere... but for once, this archetypical characterization fails. Rena is very straightforward in how she expresses her feelings, having a policy of expressing her emotions openly regardless of what they are. She is also very mature in the sense that she has a solid grasp on what her responsibilities are to those around her, coming from her upbringing as the successor of a family of primary art dealers (art dealers that primarily 'raise' artists and sell their works as opposed to buying artists' works that already have an established market value).
I say she is the main heroine, and indeed, her path is one of the few paths where the protagonist is forced to confront his own issues head on. For better or worse, in most of the paths, Shin/Mizuki manages to avoid directly confronting his past and his own weakness, making this path an obvious favorite for me. That said, this was the first path I played originally, so I couldn't help but play this one first again.
Chiharu
Chiharu is my yome! lol Seriously, if you were to ask me which heroine (as opposed to 'which girl' since Akie is my favorite girl... I love haraguro characters) touched my heartstrings (and my libido) the most, it would be Chiharu. Chiharu is the single-minded but kind-hearted bodyguard that serves Rena. She is very serious and kind-hearted, but it often shows in odd ways, because she is somewhat socially awkward. Her reactions are also driven by her early upbringing and profession, the former of which was strict and the latter of which is professional security.
Chiharu's dere is... frighteningly powerful. Oh, this can be said of all the heroines, really, but Chiharu is a very loving soul. I love Chiharu's path for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that she is, at heart, someone who just wants someone who can accept her from the bottom of their hearts, flaws, disabilities, and all. This very human worry is what turned Chiharu from a two-dimensional character to a person in my mind.
Also: 「だって幽霊って死んでるんだよ、死霊って生きてないんだよ、生きてなければ殺傷することもできないじゃないか、刀で死人は斬れないよ怖いよ！！」
Chiharu "But ghosts are dead! Ghosts aren't alive! If they aren't alive, you can't kill them! You can't kill the dead with a katana! I'm scared!"
「いえ、テレビは斬れます。寮の器物損壊はやめてください」
Akie "No, but you can cut the TV. Please refrain from damaging dorm property."
Shizuku
Shizuku is an art auctioneer and the daughter of the head of the Karasuma Group, a company that specializes in the resale of art. She and Rena are on bad terms, not the least because their places in the art industry make it inevitable. To most people, she is a sharp-tongued (dokuzetsu) but elegant-looking girl who dominates her surroundings by her very presence. In private, she is an intensely loving and passionate woman who will do absolutely anything and everything for the person she loves. However, she has a bad habit of jumping to conclusions (something that can be said of the other two heroines above as well, though not of Yuki and Anastasia), especially when it comes to Shin.
Tbh, this is the most frustrating of the routes to speak of, because so much of her profile is spoilers for the other routes. Let's just say there are some seriously hilarious antics that occur partly because of Shii-cha- *coughs* ahem, Shizuku's tendency to jump to conclusions, her willingness to do anything for the people she loves, and Rena's inevitable reactions, lol.
This path is primarily hilarious, but it also gets into the more intimate elements of Shin's 'why' in a way that even Rena's path doesn't. Tbh, if I were to put a recommended route order up, it would be Rena>Shizuku>Chiharu>Yuki>Anastasia. My reasoning for this is because this game actually benefits from experiencing it in an order that could be seen as 'main to sub' instead of 'sub to main' as I would normally recommend. All the paths are good in their own ways, but the knowledge from Rena and Shizuku's paths enhance the experience of the other three paths to a rather large degree. Moreover, playing Anastasia's path without having played Rena's would make it somewhat confusing, and I'm pretty sure some important points would be missed by first-timers.
For now, I'm going to stop, because I need to take a rest from SOL for a few days, but I'll finish this one up soon.
This is the latest game from the makers of Dracu-riot and Sanoba Witch, Yuzusoft. For those who are curious, in nature it is somewhere in between the two styles this company tends to use (placing more emphasis on the SOL portions or the story portions). There is, technically, an overarching story, but it is given more focus in some routes than others, while there is as much lovey-dovey and ero content as the most SOL-focused entries in Yuzusoft's library.
I'm going to be blunt, I basically picked up this VN because of Kaguya, as I am a kemomimi fetishist above all other things when it comes to eroge. I'm also going to state my biggest disappointment with this game... Kaguya's ears are only present in a vast minority of the game's scenes! *cries* Considering how much effort (and probably money) went into producing so many varied sprites for her expressions both with and without the holy kemomimi, I was sadly disappointed at how rare it was for those ears to actually pop out (what can I say, my first fetish is my first fetish).
Setting that aside (I basically had to get that out of my system to give my honest assessment of the game otherwise), this VN stands in the upper three of Yuzusoft's games in quality, along with Dracu-riot (which I consider to be the company's magnum opus) and Senren Banka. I say this without any doubts because it displays the impact of this company's visual and scenario styles to such a degree that I couldn't help but be struck by how much it stood out in the current times. Yuzusoft didn't compromise in quality even once in this game, which is something you can't say about most VN-makers in the last few years since Covid hit.
For those who want sappy VN romance, this game has it. If you want a few serious moments mixed in, this game has that too. Moreover, the interactions between the cast of characters are as highly amusing as one would expect from this company, bringing back happy memories for me and reminding me of why I often thought of Yuzusoft games as a method to 'clean my palate' after the kusoge I played so often when I was doing VN of the Month.
I have no intention whatsoever of going into a detailed review at this time (I've read the two paths I wanted to read, and I'm ignoring the rest). However, I can honestly recommend it to people who already like Yuzusoft games.
Blade x Bullet is the latest in the Soleil series (search my blog, I played all but the most recent previous entry in a marathon a few months ago). This series is based off of a series of parallel worlds that proceeded from the end of Ragnarok, the last battle of the Norse gods. Some of those worlds are similar to our own, others are of a greater technology, and others are worlds of magic. The world in this VN is in the midst of its own apocalypse, mechanical monsters from the sky invulnerable to weapons of high technology massacring humanity. The only hope for humanity are the Valkyries, powerful spirit weapons created using the corpse of a human woman (or a living human woman), a weapon that has tasted the blood of thousands or a divine artifact, and a powerful spirit.
By the time the story begins, the failure of the Valkyries is apparent, and the survivors amongst them have been gathered at a castle to compete to gain the power of Odin, in order to birth a new world... after fighting one another to gain the runes that lie at their cores. The protagonist, Yagi Mutsuki, a human warrior from Japan known as the 'ally-killer hero' for the fact that all who accompanied him into battle died but he killed more monsters than anyone else, dies and is resurrected by the Norse Goddess of the Dead, Hel, and given the mission to destroy humanity's hope for the future, accompanied by the Valkyrie Reiganlief.
Mutsuki is... more than a little crazy, probably because he is the holder of the soul of Loki (this isn't a spoiler, since they say it from the beginning), with a love of trouble. He makes his decisions on whether an event is to his tastes or not, rather than by any kind of moral compass. As a warrior, he is unsurpassed amongst humanity, but he is more self-derisive than you would imagine from that. He is also heavily under the influence of his Loki side after being partially resurrected from the dead, so his personal darkness is behind a lot of his actions (he basically rapes most of the Valkyries at one point or another, though that seems to be his twisted way of showing affection... not that even he thinks that justifies it).
This story is heavy on the brutal outcomes, with a general sense of impending doom that is typical of the series. However, it is so excellently written you almost wouldn't think it was written by the same person as Shin Shirogane. I honestly loved Mutsuki's plotting to outwit fate, and the ending is pretty exhilarating... and fitting for one brought about by a guy who tempers Loki's chaotic nature with more human emotions. The game is a bit short, as it is a kinetic novel with a set ending. However, that didn't take away from my enjoyment, as I felt they developed the characters more skillfully in this one than in the last few games.
Overall, if you don't mind the excessively dark themes and some tentacle rape, this is a fun game to play... though I have to say that Mutsuki is the most atypical protagonist in the series so far, being as far from heroism as it is possible to be.
Edit: I should make a correction... he doesn't actually rape Fenrir, Reigenleif, Yorm, Brunhilde, or Grimgelde... but he is so S that it feels like it. I actually think the only time it was actually rape was with Ottlinde... lol
Shuffle Essence! + is the definitive version of Shuffle, which was originally released in 2004. Shuffle was also the first game where Agobarrier, the now-deceased writer of the Tiny Dungeon series, made a claim to fame.
First, I should note that I originally played Shuffle in English and was not in any way satisfied with the results. My primary reasons were the low quality of the localization (though it was better than what MG had done up to that point) and certain differences with the anime involving Kaede. To be blunt, the Kaede portrayed in the anime is a solid yandere, so I was kind of disappointed that she was only mildly yandere in the game, lol.
Anyway, now to the obvious differences between the two versions of Shuffle... Well, the biggest one is the doubling of the number of heroines. Kareha, her sister Tsubomi, Mayumi, Sakura, the teacher Nadeshiko, and the new divine race girl, Daisy are the new heroines. In realistic terms, they actually consist four separate arcs... Tsubomi, Kareha, and Nadeshiko are connected loosely, with the remaining three routes standing on their own with extensive amounts of new text. This is in addition, to adding a second ending onto Shia's path and extensively re-writing it in the particulars. All in all, the length of the game is more than doubled, since the three heroine arcs are very long.
Anyway, the new routes show off something that was only touched on lightly in the anime and the original version of the game... Agobarrier's obsession with harems. Basically, the result of each of the paths is that the 'main wife' of the harem gets picked, and the girls basically make the decision to create a harem without seriously consulting Rin, since he isn't good at refusing them in the first place. If you hate harem situations, this game is pure poison, but if you like your harems, this is good stuff.
Now, to the difference between the English and Japanese versions... it does make a difference, obviously. Actually, there is a glaring difference in style between the new routes and the ones made for the original game. While the original routes were decent and tear-jerking, it seems like the popularity of Shuffle in Japan essentially gave Agobarrier license to do what he wanted with the new routes. More detail is given (including in the original heroine routes) and more loose ends are closed up. Each of the routes has a number of non-ero CGs unthinkable in a modern charage, and they are all of about as good of quality as could be produced ten years ago, lol.
Overall, the end result of this is a vastly-improved game with a much more solid cast of characters. The holdovers from the original version (abandoned stylistic issues like random cameo scenes) are sometimes jarring because of the remade aspects, but the game doesn't suffer too much from that. Daisy's route, which comes across as a 'true' route (since all the might-have-been-fatal heroine issues are resolved) seems to have been specifically designed to satisfy fans of the original who didn't like the feeling that you were 'abandoning' certain of the heroines (such as Primula or Shia) to their fates by picking another. Agobarrier loved his happy harems, lol. May he rest in peace.
First, I recently completed my second playthrough of Kikan Bakumatsu Ibun Last Cavalier... and I'd forgotten how much fun it was digging around in the political violence of that period. It made me remember why I named it VN of the Year 2015, though that was mostly because 2015 sucked, lol. It is a great game for fans of historical fantasy and the Shinsengumi, as well as fans of Grisaia's writer (who also wrote this one). Having a trap protagonist who is also more than a little... bewitching makes it even more interesting, hahaha.
Second, I'm considering a number of VNs for my next random VN... I keep meaning to replay Muramasa (though that one is so over-sized it is hard to get up the energy for it) and Bradyon Veda (ditto). I'm also considering a number of older VNs for replay, as well as Sengoku Hime 7. Last Cavalier was great for sword fights and high ideals accompanied by bloodshed, but I'm kind of in the mood for ambition and war, lol.
April's releases are all short games, so it won't take much time to get through all of them. As a result, I will inevitably play at least some random VNs this time around... what kind of game would you like to hear from me about?
Because I'm a mystery-hater, there is an even chance I'll drop this VN somewhere along the line, so I'll describe what those who are interested should look at when it comes to this game.
For lovers of the Ace Attorney games who don't mind or like ero content, this game is looking to be an interesting one. Each chapter has an evidence-gathering part, followed by a part where the protagonist and his allies (I say allies because several of them are backed by outside influences or are outright under the control of individuals hostile to the protagonist) talk about who they think the culprit is. Last of all is the judgment stage, where the protagonist uses evidence such as physical objects, the shapes of the rooms, the statements of the suspects and others, and other issues to figure out who the culprit is in a public forum, preferably gaining a confession of guilt in the process (this is fairly standard for Japanese police even today, as there is a strong preference for confessions over going to trial).
There is also violence involved, since not all suspects are willing to come along quietly, lol.
First, as I state in the title, I'm coming off my fifth playthrough (all paths and endings) of Tokyo Babel. As such, I am - very obviously - deeply fond of the game. I'm also a fan of the writer Higashide Yuuichirou (for reference, he also wrote Ayakashibito and the scenario for Fate/Apocrypha).
However, in this post I wanted to address some of the complaints I get from those who play the game. First, I will address the major complaints I've taken personally from those who read or have read it untranslated, then those who read it translated.
Untranslated
1. 'This doesn't feel like a Higashide game/isn't as good as his other games!' For better or worse, Higashide went in a different direction, style, and approach in Tokyo Babel in comparison to his previous works. Ayakashibito is the basis for most untranslated Higashide fanboys' love, but it needs to be said that anyone who has played the two games will barely see any resemblance beyond the writing style.
Ayakashibito was about a young man struggling against the world as he tried to carve out a life for himself with his adoptive sister. His emotional struggles with unreasonable and unreasoning prejudice, as well as the active malice of powers both great and small, struck a chord in a lot of the people who read it. Moreover, it is by far the most slice-of-life focused of all Higashide's titles, whereas a huge portion of Tokyo Babel is fighting, preparation for fighting, and dealing with conspiracies.
2. 'I loved Dies Irae and this was recommended to me based on that, but it doesn't match up.' This one makes me laugh. Sorry, I'm not trying to be contemptuous, but, despite some surface resemblances, Tokyo Babel is wildly different from Dies Irae. Higashide is not a poet. Masada is. Higashide is calculating where Masada is impulsive. As such, I can honestly say the only resemblance between the two is that they both have a preference for fantasy and melodrama. Dies Irae is an opera, whereas Tokyo Babel is more straightforward and to the point, in comparison.
3. 'Why is there no ero? All his other games had ero, so why not this one?' I have to wonder if anyone but me was surprised at this one being the third most common complaint I got from those I recommended this game to. Yes, his other games have a mix of good and horrid ero (Ayakashibito is particularly infamous for its side-character scenes), but Tokyo Babel was written from beginning to end as an all-ages novel. Surprisingly, I agree with those who think the lack of ero in Tokyo Babel had a negative effect. To be blunt, I can't see Lilith not finding a way to shove Setsuna into Raziel's futon or failing to trap him in a room alone with Sorami... and that's setting aside several moments in her path that would have made for some great 'desperate and somber H' scenes. Higashide, for all that his ero scenes were sometimes awful (again, Ayakashibito), always made them relevant to the story and used them to enhance its flow... something many chuuni writers who utilize ero content fail to do.
4. 'What the heck is it with this game's weird mix of styles?!' I'm not an art bigot, so I'm not the best person to answer this question. This game's art style differs from previous Propeller games to a significant degree at times. Is that a good or bad thing? Hard to answer... though I do think the decision to make the main characters look younger than in previous games (with some exceptions) was questionable, lol.
Translated
1. 'What is with the translation?!!!!'. Aah... this is the idiot argument. Sorry, but I've said this a thousand times before 'Japanese to English translation is an oxymoron'. Conjueror was pretty much the only translator brave enough to jump into translating something like Dies Irae or Tokyo Babel precisely because fans of this type of game are such a-holes when it comes to translations. Yes, it isn't perfect. Yes, it doesn't somehow magically mirror Higashide's brilliance perfectly. However, I would like to make a few major points for those who insist they could do better...
Japanese has numerous concepts, sayings, and even casual phrasing that simply don't translate into English without a much larger number of words to fill in the gaps in the language. One reason I always recommend anyone who can read a game in Japanese (even if they have to use a parser and text hooker) do so is because it is impossible to perfectly replicate everything in a localization to English. It is possible to get across many concepts with creative language and a wide vocabulary in English, but that sometimes means spending minutes or even an hour on a single line, trying to create something that can somehow retain the best parts of the original. Chuuni translations tend to be awkward (both anime and games) because the language used requires more of this, and it becomes too easy to fall into the habit of robotically spewing out the translation instead of actually writing it into prose (look at the FGO cell phone game and you'll see what I mean).
2. 'This wasn't as dramatic as I thought it would be!' This one puzzles me... but then, I never played the game all the way through in English (I went up through the Miyako fight in Raziel's route to get an idea of what it was like), so maybe more was lost in the localization toward the middle and end than I thought.
3. 'The subject matter made me uncomfortable'... Ah yes, this one. To be honest, even I felt the remnants of my upbringing pounding on the doors of my psyche at times when I played this game. To be blunt, to anyone brought up in a devout Christian (or even Muslim) household, playing any of the routes can be enormously uncomfortable at times. By the nature of the process of 'suspending disbelief' that occurs when you read something fantasy, your prejudices and upbringing inevitably play into how you see the game. To be blunt, by Christian standards, this game is blasphemous, lol. In Japan, due to the way the divine is seen (impossible to explain if you haven't studied it, so I won't go into this here), this game doesn't feel that way. However, this game can cause some odd reactions in some Westerners.
4. 'I don't get the humor.' Sad to say, but a good portion of humor in Japanese VNs simply doesn't translate very well. The funniest scene in the game (in my opinion) is the drunken party in Sorami's path... but there are several points in this scene that don't translate (think plays on Japanese wording, puns, and phone number styles) that had me cracking up every time. Sad to say, but, for those playing translated JVNs, this is something you'll just have to live with.
Conclusion
I didn't really refute any of the complaints here... but I did try to address them. Tokyo Babel is one of the few of my favorite games that have been translated (though more of them have been in recent years, including Hapymaher and Dies Irae), but it is also the one of my translated favorites that is most likely not to be mentioned when someone is asking about this type of game.
Yes, I have indeed decided to add books to my regular posts, mostly due to Rooke's suggestion. Understand, if you think I've read a lot of VNs... that is nothing in comparison to the number of books I've read over the twenty-eight years since I learned to read. That number is somewhere in the tens of thousands... and one of the reasons I can be so intolerant when it comes to the excessive reliance on conventions in VNs, lol. Honor Harrington Honor Harrington is both a character and a series written by David Weber, one of the more famous science fiction authors out there. He tends to write military sci-fi, mostly, and in a different way from Ringo (Ringo being the most famous name in military sci-fi), he has reshaped the way I saw science-fiction to some extent. Honor, in the book On Basilisk Station, is the captain of a light cruiser named Fearless that has been exiled to the hardship post/dumping ground of her star nation's holdings for the crime of being an incidental part of the humiliation of one of her more well-connected superiors. Throughout the series - up until this point (there are over twelve books now, and Harrington is both older and wiser), Harrington in many ways embodies all the military holds up as an ideal. She is courageous, intelligent, aware of her duty, and she has a knack for ending up in the worst positions you could imagine (both politically and militarily). Her character, over the course of the series, advances from a somewhat immature young officer to a wise woman who is all to0 aware of the cost of doing her duty. She and her treecat (an alien empathic animal that occasionally forms bonds with humans) survive some of the worst hells, psychological and physical, that you could imagine existing in the mortal universe... and endure the loss of those who don't. Now, a good military sci-fi series is no good without an enemy empire to deal with... and in this one, it is the People's Republic of Haven, a massive interstellar star nation with an apparently overwhelming advantage in numbers... but an economy that is going down the drain to the welfare state and the deliberate sabotage of the education system by the political elites (sounds kind of like a combination of democratic socialism for the first and Republican education policy for the latter, lol). In Haven, over two thirds of the population is on the Dole, the name for their welfare system which basically hands out a living allowance to everyone who wants it... in exchange for making the 'legislature' and all other government positions hereditary some three centuries before. Unfortunately, this has caused a slow but accelerating decay in the system as a whole, as entire generations grow up with the deliberately castrated education system and no incentive to try to rise above their peers. This has led Haven to a very simple - and short-term - strategy... conquer neighbors, gut their economies to feed the worthless mouths of the mob, then include them in the Dole... rinse and repeat, ever expanding outward. Unfortunately for Honor's homeland, Manticore, it has been slated as the next morsel to go down the throats of the faceless masses, and the antiquated but massive navy of the 'Peeps' is planning to make itself the fork. The first few novels are basically preliminaries to the outbreak of open war (albeit bloody ones), where Honor finds herself in some really nasty situations as she does her duty and in the process incidentally foils the best-laid plans of the other side. One thing to keep in mind is that warships in the Honorverse tend to have hundreds to thousands of crewmen... meaning that every breach of the hull can kill dozens, further meaning that even in a 'minor confrontation' dozens to hundreds will die... and Honor rarely gets into 'minor confrontations'. The guilt of a commander that loses men to the enemy is an important theme throughout the series, though not a primary one. Manticore, Honor's homeland, is a small three-planet, two-system star nation at the beginning, ruled by a constitutional monarchy, complete with a House of Lords and a House of Commons... Generally speaking, the position of the monarch is kind of similar to the current one of the Queen of England, both in law and substance... in other words, while she has very little actual direct authority by law, her influence is immensely strong, both as a symbol and as an individual. The House of Lords, which was basically formed by ennobled 'original' colonists who were there before the plague that caused them to bring in large numbers in a second wave, is supposed to act as a restraint on the elected House of Commons, and generally the Prime Minister is chosen from amongst its members. Manticore is probably the most advanced nation in the entire human-ruled galaxy (outside of genetics, which is Beowulf's and Mesa's specialty), at least partially because their prime system is at a wormhole junction that allows a much faster movement from one end of the ginormous Solarian Union to the other. This gives them massive amounts of money and direct access to technology from other worlds that has let them build up a huge advantage in relative terms over the People's Republic, which is an issue that is important throughout much of the series. In many ways, it is easy to think of Manticore as a futuristic version of the British Empire without the colonialist tendencies and racial arrogance. Throughout the series, characters on the 'side of good' are put in situations that are pure hell, forced to make hard decisions, and they frequently live or die by those decisions, with Honor always at the forefront. The series as a whole is really well-written... with realistic-feeling antagonists and easy to love characters on both sides of the war (Theisman from the second book comes to mind for the People's Republic), as well as people that are truly worthy of hate and contempt on both sides. The more serious elements are broken up by the humorous interactions of Honor, her subordinates, and her friends, and there are many times throughout the series when big issues of morality are brought to the forefront (such as the morality of gene-manipulation, stating a big one). If there is one thing you'll notice about any David Weber book... it is that he manages to create characters that make you want to cheer them on... even on the other side. He rarely, if ever produces a side of one of his books' wars that doesn't have people that are good despite the system they work within, and even the best of his people - including Honor herself - have their moments when they show the baseness of human nature's darker side. Honor is the type that leashes her dark side with duty and unleashes it on the enemies of her people... but that dark side definitely exists, chained beneath the surface (as is seen rather clearly in the second and fourth books). My conclusion about this series - which I've reread four times - is that I can honestly recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction and space operas... but for people who can't handle complexity - both of scenario and of moral/philosophical issues - they will probably have difficulty with it. The Honorverse is still going strong, currently... though it has several anthologies and two side-series (one based in the early days of Manticore and another focused on characters involved in the anti-slavery movement). Honor herself hasn't been sidelined... but the story has evolved beyond that small portion of space that contains Haven and Manticore, meaning that it is not so focused around her anymore.
For the sake of those who haven't played the game and don't want to be spoiled, I will endeavor to keep the worst spoilers in a spoiler box, but since I can't speak of what I want to speak of without spoiling things, I'm going to say right here that if you read any further, I will spoil things for you to some degree.
First, it needs to be said that I usually present Izuna Zanshinken in a way geared to take the interest of someone without extensive experience of VNs. To be specific, I usually just call the game a 'vigilante assassin story', and it is that... However, there is more to it.
Izuna Zanshinken follows five main characters on a story heavy with moral and sociological implications and the clash of philosophies. These characters in many ways define how the story is presented and the meaning of what is going on, and, fittingly for a game that isn't romantically focused (though it has decent romance in the usual chuunige sense) the story deals with issues that are hard-hitting for any society.
The Characters
While other characters are involved peripherally, the five characters most closely involved in the story are the protagonist Kotarou (Hitokiri Izuna); the head of the Nine-headed Dragons, Suzuka; her personal servant and best friend Shinobu; Kotarou's classmate and the daughter of a detective, Hikaru; and the Nine-Headed Dragons' 'Wakagashira', Hayatsuki.
Kotarou- Kotarou is Hitokiri Izuna, the protagonist of the story, the latest generation of many to serve Suzuka's family as a weapon against the excessive evils that pop up from time to time in human society. Kotarou's clan, the Izuna, were descended from a mass murdering criminal swordsman who was captured and brought to heel by a magistrate in the early Edo era (think early to mid 1600s). For whatever reason, the perpetrator was allowed to live, and the end result was a clan of incredibly skilled and physically capable assassins who are 'kept' (in the same sense one keeps hunting dogs) by individuals or groups who have a strong sense of ethics/honor in the underworld of Japan. The Izuna are used to to remove the worst cancers from society by force, when the law and society's rules fail it. Kotarou comes from that clan to Suzuka's side as a replacement for his deceased father, and he quickly shows off his clan's incredible skill and utter mercilessness. That said, when he isn't 'working', he is very much the kind-hearted, soft-mannered type, with a tendency toward waffling when matters don't involve his duty. Kotarou has a mature and ethical approach to his own duties, understanding that he is a sinner under the law and by most human moral systems, he nonetheless accepts his duty to cut down those he law can't reach, to take on he grudges of the bereaved and kill those who brought it about.
Suzuka- Forced to take control of an extremely old-fashioned (three hundred years of tradition will do that) yakuza clan at a very young age, she was emotionally dependent to a degree on Kotarou's father, and her manner toward him is often harsh (as it is toward Hikaru, for obvious reasons). However, at heart, she is a warm-spirited, honorable person who cares deeply for others. She has very old-fashioned views on just about everything, and she only really trusts Hayatsuki and Shinobu. Her old fashioned ideas of yakuza chivalry are out of step with modern yakuza, but the presence of Izuna in her employ allows her to keep a degree of peace and freedom in the local underworld that is unseen elsewhere in Japan. She is something of an embodiment of honor and ethics, when used as a literary device, and her views are often extreme.
Shinobu- Suzuka's personal servant, best friend, and confidante. She is also the survivor of an incident where her parents were murdered by burglars and she herself was (briefly) sold into slavery later on before Tesshin, Kotarou's father rescued her. She was driven by a desire for revenge to seek Tesshin's teachings and become an Izuna, but because she lacks the bloodline, she is forced to resort to mechanical aids like an advanced powered suit, a wire gun, and a stealth cloak to make up the difference (Kotarou being something of a cross between a pure swordsman, a martial artist, and a ninja with centuries of deliberate and careful breeding). Shinobu, perhaps better than anyone in the story, is a representation of the fury, the grudges born in the spirit of the bereaved and the victimized. As such, she is the most overtly emotional of the heroines.
Hikaru- Hikaru is the daughter of a homicide detective, a clear-headed, intelligent young shota *coughs* ahem, young woman who has a bad habit of seeing through matters. She also has a very strong sense of conventional morality and is the single heroine who sees the elimination of the death penalty as a qualified positive (she thinks it was done too fast, but she doesn't believe that anyone deserves capital punishment). Her sunny disposition, kind nature, and general normality make her a distinct contrast to the other heroines at first. However, her role as a literary device in relation to the game's themes is as the 'outsider', an irony that doesn't escape me, since she is the one most in sync with society's mores and norms. She gives perspective in a game where it is very tempting to fall entirely into the viewpoint of Kotarou and the others exclusively. Without her, I honestly think that this game wouldn't have been nearly as good as it is.
Hayatsuki- Hayatsuki is the 'Wakagashira' of the Nine-headed Dragons, the yakuza organization Suzuka inherited. He was formerly a programmer and systems engineer, but became a yakuza for reasons I won't spoil here. He often takes he role of a go-between dealing both with clients seeking revenge through Izuna, mediating disputes between the other three yakuza-related characters, and generally smoothing the way for everyone. While he is easygoing on the surface, he is also someone who has seen the best and worst humanity has to offer and has nonetheless retained a degree of his humanity despite that.
The Main Themes
The main themes in his game are the clash between the rights of the accused and the convicted vs those of the victims, the ethics of vigilante-ism, a thought experiment on what would happen if you suddenly outlawed capital punishment without giving society a chance to adjust to the idea, and many other ideas, most of them relating to crime and punishment.
For now, I'll focus on the ones I think have the most impact on the story:
The Victim and the Bereaved- Modern law assumes innocence. This is generally a good thing, as it, in theory, makes false convictions less frequent and puts more hurdles in the way of a prosecutor trying to prove a case, theoretically making it more difficult to railroad someone into a conviction. However, this VN primarily focuses on the failures of the system. A minor who commits a sadistic rape-murder and is getting away with it because of his youth, a serial killer enjoying the fame brought on by his actions in prison with glee, a woman who framed her husband for arson-murder so that she could divorce him and marry her rich boyfriend... the list goes on and on.
Vigilante-ism- This theme is touched on most intimately in Hikaru's path, where Hikaru's morality and Kotarou's way of life inevitably clash. Kotarou kills the worst type of criminals, often in a horrifying manner, and while he has a strong sense of ethics and honor, that doesn't whitewash the fact that he is killing people outside of the law.
Capital Punishment- Izuna's setting is a Japan where the Prime Minister suddenly and unilaterally made capital punishment illegal. As a result, many criminals are taking advantage of legal and societal loopholes and getting away with a horrifying array of crimes, often becoming more vicious in the spirit of 'well, if life in prison is the limit, that means I might as well do everything I feel like doing'. Kotarou often ends up facing the results of this policy in his work, and he once comments that 'I will kill more than even my predecessor.' Considering his predecessor was called 'Senningiri', essentially meaning that he cut down over one thousand men, that is a very heavy statement.
Conclusions
Like a lot of chuunige, Izuna Zanshinken tends to make a broad attempt at being philosophical in addition to being over he top, and, surprisingly, actually succeeds to a degree. While I think the theoretical Japan showed in this game is extreme, it is not nearly as extreme and out of this world as some of the dystopian theories I've read about in the past. Moreover, it feels possible in the visceral and logical sense, an important element in suspending disbelief, which is an absolute necessity when trying to enjoy fiction.
Those who talk to me regularly or pay attention to my lists will notice that one of the VNs that comes up fairly often is Draculius.
This is a VN that has had a surprising amount of influence on modern VNs... or rather, the Western VN world. Oddly enough, that influence is mostly indirect rather than direct (it isn't translated, so the VN's direct influence is rather limited).
The most obvious point is Grisaia... to be straight about it, it had the same writer as the Grisaia series, a fact that made me nod in recognition when I discovered it. Replaying Draculius, the points of connection are blatantly obvious... such as the fact that Misao's basic character is obviously the prototype for Makina or that Rian's characterization was the prototype for Michiru (though honestly, she is better than Michiru, lol). Zeno is Sachi's prototype (think if you added insane protectiveness and a tendency toward violence to Sachi and removed the good girl obsession). Last of all, Rika is Yumiko (except that the dependence comes out faster and Rika is a lot less weak-willed under the surface). It looks like Belche got split into multiple characters, probably because her role and characterization was so complex that building on her as is just wasn't possible (Amane, JB, and Chizuru).
Now, do I even have to mention how much influence Grisaia has had on the Western community? I'd be preaching to the choir at this point, I think.
A less-obvious point is Kyuuketsuki no Libra or Libra of the Vampire Princess, which is getting a localization through a Kickstarter sometime this year. To someone who played and loved Draculius, the older VN's influence on Libra is extremely obvious... Iris, who serves as an antagonist in the VN, is to some degree based on Belche (right down to her attitude toward humans and tendency toward obsessive love hidden under a cold exterior). The actual situation is a dead copy (play on Belche's special power, for those who have read the VN, lol) in the sense that both Jun in Draculius and the protagonist of Libra are young men who are the children of born vampires who died, leaving the child's mother behind, who then died before the story began. There are a number of differences of course... and I won't spoil the VN by telling you where a lot of the deeper similarities are (though I will give you a hint... the truth about the vampire hunter organizations).
Other than Dies Irae, I honestly can't think of a VN that has had more impact on the community without actually being translated, and as I re-read this VN for the third time, I find more and more common points with the VNs that came later on, lol.
Fuyu Uso
Fuyu Uso is the fourth and final game in Campus’s ‘Lies’ series, based in a mammoth school with a hidden population of magical beings.
As a bit of a recap, the protagonist of this story, Sakurai Souichirou gained the power as a young child to sense the lies of others through a magical tool within his body called ‘Red Line’. In the game, this shows as lines of dialog literally being highlighted in red when a person is lying (at the precise part of the dialog they are lying). As a result of or despite this, Souichirou has become a young man who never lies, though he is capable of forgiving the lies of others (having made peace with his ability). As a former normal human being, Sou (as he is called by Eris) is incapable of producing the magical energy necessary to feed the magical tool inside his body, and as a result he has to supplement it through magical contracts, where he performs a service for someone in exchange for a price that results in the formation of magical energy to infuse the contract. This price is entirely random and it is apparently designed to balance out the difficulty of the request. Sou, being honest, tells people about this price, and as a result he has a lot of bad rumors going around about him, lol.
Anyway, Fuyu Uso focuses on Setsuka, the final of the four heroines and the one who is by far the most mysterious. She is always smiling but Sou finds her presence uncomfortable for reasons he can’t even explain to himself.
To be blunt, this is probably the ‘heaviest’ of the four paths by several degrees. Eris’s Aki Uso had some heavy moments, but in comparison it seems far less intense. This game/path also reveals the ‘why’ of Setsuka’s fascination with the protagonist and her true personality… which – for someone who hardly ever lies – is pretty scary.
More than any of the paths, this explores the duality of people’s views on the nature of lies, which is fitting for the conclusion of a series with ‘uso’ in the titles. I honestly found the presentation of this game to be awesome, and I couldn’t help but empathize with Setsuka’s life (I seriously cried at several points).
Overall, this VN is a great conclusion to a series that surprised me with its quality, and I can honestly recommend the series as a whole to people who like fantasy VNs that don’t involve swords and bloodshed.
Hatsujou Sprinkle
Hatsujou Sprinkle is the latest release from Whirlpool. It is based in a world where descendants of demons (mazoku) are everywhere, just waiting to be awakened. The protagonist, Souta, meets a mysterious turtle who causes him to awaken as a mazoku… thus gaining the power/affliction that makes both him and all the women around him become aroused.
Normally, this would be a concept perfect for a nukige, and when they first started out, it is likely Whirlpool would have done just that (their early games show that). However, instead they made it into a charage with something approaching an actual plot. That isn’t to say that the story is anything worthy of note in and of itself. Unlike this companies best games, the story elements are rather weak and mostly used as an excuse for comedy and ichaicha.
This VN’s heroines are pretty standard-issue, though they have their quirks. Koharu is your standard yurufuwa ero-oneechan (meaning that she is slow-talking, loves to spoil the protagonist, and is generally erotic, lol), Hadzuki is a straight-out tsundere (with the quirk that she randomly switches from relying on the protagonist to insulting him from moment to moment), Mio is your straightforward ‘innocent just waiting to be corrupted’, and Shizuku is a nice ‘nearly-yandere’ jealous heroine.
The magic in this story is based off of the Seven Deadlies, with Hadzuki being Pride and the protagonist Lust, for instance. Most people have a single ability (though certain abilities come standard, such as durability and quick regeneration when transformed), which rather limits the setting (standard practice for a fantasy VN like this one).
Now… is this a good game? As a charage, it is decent. The heroine paths are a bit heavy on the ichaicha (well, duh) and the protagonist isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the block (again, no surprise there), but overall, it was an enjoyable experience. At the very least, it made me smile frequently, even if the story itself isn’t memorable. It stands above works like Kujiragami or Magistalic (by the same company, but if I compared it to Suzukaze, Lunaris, or World Election (again, by the same company) it falls short by a long shot.
For those who like Whirlpool’s less story-focused charage, this is one of the best choices. However, it isn’t a game I’d go out of my way to play a second time, lol.
Hikari no Umi no Apeiria
This is the first game by Silky’s plus Dolce, a sister company of Silky’s Plus Wasabi, which created Nanairo Reincarnation and Akeiro Kaikitan. That’s not to say it has the exact same staff or themes… the writer is different, for one thing. However, the game’s quality turned out to be consistent with what I’ve come to expect from a Silky’s Plus game.
This game is a futuristic sci-fi kinetic novel (there are choices, but they lead to the same ending in the end) about a young man named Reiichi’s quest to protect his beloved AI Apeiria. That said, this game starts out and continues for the first four hours or so as a largely humorous story.
Reiichi is probably the single most straightforwardly-perverted protagonist I’ve ever seen in a VN. He is also so open about it that, instead of it being disgusting, it is just hilarious. What’s more, that aspect never quite disappears, no matter how far into the game you get (it really is just the way he is, lol).
There are four heroines in this game. Their names are Miu, Mashiro, Kuon, and Apeiria (incidentally, this is the order in which you see their stories as part of the main game).
Miu is a straight-laced tsundere who met her stepbrother (Reiichi) in the worst possible way… by having him splatter semen in her face. To be honest, this scene was the one that set the tone for the first part of the game, and I ended up laughing so hard simply because it was so ridiculous.
Mashiro is a ‘modern girl’ and also a heavy gamer with a tendency to fall into a dialect of modern Japanese known as ‘wakamono kotoba’… a dialect that alters drastically as new words are born and old ones die, meaning that each generation of airheaded teens has a completely different sublanguage, lol. Hers are relatively easy to interpret if you are used to navigating Japanese dialects in the first place, but for those not accustomed to that, there is an explanation early on in the story. Her handle name is ‘Do-M Hentai’.
Kuon is a yurufuwa osananajimi oneechan with a tendency to regress into chuunibyou at random intervals. She is a heavy manga addict, but she is terrible when it comes to understanding science and machines. She and Reiichi have known each other since early childhood and are quite close.
Apeiria is a ‘strong AI’ (an AI with emotions and self-consciousness) accidentally developed by Reiichi early on in the story. She is very curious and loves nothing more than for Reiichi to give her orders. Her innocence resembles that of any number of other loli true heroines in VNs I’ve played in the last half-decade, but her manner of speech is really, really odd. One thing you have to keep in mind is that she is really immature psychologically, and her origins as a machine shape the way she speaks (she tends to cut up her statements into equivalent segments, use template speech patterns, and oddly fails to create proper grammar at points).
This game’s story, despite the sexual humor, is very much geared toward the crowd that loved Ever17, I/O, and the Seasons series. It twists your brain up in knots trying to wrap your thoughts around the explanations of what the protagonist and his friends thing is going on, and every time you think you’ve grasped it, you end up with a new development that leaves you in the dust.
There is a lot of H content in this game, though, for those who prefer the low-H approach most games of the type have tended towards in the past. A lot of this is because of the protagonist’s personality as written, so I have no choice but to shrug and look helpless if you want to complain about that aspect.
There are a lot of excellent emotional moments throughout the game, but I was honestly getting fatigued toward the end, due to the amount of information they kept dumping on me. For people who enjoy this kind of thing, it is a drug, but I honestly hate having people infodump on me to this extent. The changing theories throughout the story are interesting intellectually, but I honestly didn’t go into this game with the expectation of the kind of experience I got. As a result, I ended up becoming more tired than I anticipated.
There are numerous battles of wits throughout the game, which will probably make some of you excited. Some of them are really complex and multilayered (the protagonist is extremely intelligent, as is his enemy), and even I found them interesting at times. I will say I did get tired of wheels within wheels after a while, though, lol.
Overall, this is a game that the people who love complex stories will either love or hate… they’ll either love it for the complexity or hate the way the humor interacts with the story as a whole. I suggest just sitting back and enjoying the ride. I will say that I didn’t figure out the central truth until the second to the last chapter, which is extremely unusual for me in this kind of situation, so you can look forward to the mystery aspects.
Shin Koihime Musou Kakumei – Souten no Haou
This VN is a rewrite and update of the original Wei path for Shin Koihime Musou, with added characters and a greatly altered text. In addition, the battle system was revamped completely (it doesn’t even really resemble the old one).
First, I should say that Shin Koihime, unlike the original Koihime Musou, is an incredibly well-written work with solid writing and scenario design. It has its flaws – for one thing, I didn’t see the point in making Keifa a heroine, though her scenes are rofl-worthy at times – but the game as a whole is one of the best ‘guy goes to another world and makes his own way’ games out there.
Of the three paths in that game, Cao Cao’s Wei was probably the most interesting in the details. It goes into the minutiae of building a nation to a degree that the other two paths don’t, and Karin (Cao Cao) has a far more practical approach to building her country up than the other two. In particular, she doesn’t hesitate to use Kazuto’s knowledge where it might be useful (though not the technology or historical knoweldge), and Kazuto is far more active in the nation-building in this one than he was in the other two paths.
In this game, that aspect hasn’t changed… if anything, that aspect has been enhanced immensely by an almost complete rewrite of the first seven chapters or so (there are sixteen in total). Kazuto gets involved in almost every aspect of building up Wei as time goes on, and the new heroines serve to connect him to his various roles in an interesting manner.
The rewritten story itself is also far more interesting and complex than the original Shin Koihime story, the added characters adding flavor, though there are points here and there where a new heroine simply takes on a role one of the original heroines had previously. In particular, the parts of the story involving the Imperial Court are much more detailed, due to the addition of characters such as the Empress, her consort, and the great general He Jin. (The Empress and her younger sister are apparently destined to be future Shu path heroines, as are several other new characters that appear in the Imperial Court early on).
However, the differences in the main story start to go down in number late in the game, and by the time the Battle of Red Cliff is over, things have pretty much gone back to the way they were in the original game.
The scenes for the new heroines, read between chapters, are of equal or better quality than the ones in the original game. However, the old heroine scenes are pretty much the same (except for updated visuals) if you ignore the fact that sometimes new heroines take on roles that old heroines had in the previous game at times.
Perhaps the only real negative impact of this polishing of an old title was the ‘revamped’ battle system. I’ll be straight with you… I hate games with excessive random elements. The battle system in this is a combination of strategy and skill card battles that is immensely irritating to me. The randomness of the skill cards often leads to turns where you have no choice but to do nothing, and the battles themselves just don’t have much of a strategic element outside of ‘look at the timeline’. There is a skip function, which I went ahead and used after the first half of the game, because I was tired of the battle system.
The ending is perhaps the part altered the most besides the opening. In the original, the ending stops right after the final battle, but in this new ending, it extends far beyond that and gives you an idea that there might be something to look forward to, later on.
Overall, this game was a definite improvement over the original Wei path. It has its flaws, but those flaws are more in the gameplay portions than the story, so I honestly feel I can praise it without any real hesitation. For those who have yet to play Shin Kohime, you might consider playing this instead of the original, and you might also consider waiting for the other paths. For those who played the original already, I suggest you wait until the other paths are out… it is more than a little frustrating not to be able to play the other paths now, hahaha.
Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro Desu
This is the latest VN from Marmalade, the company that brought us the Primal x Hearts series. To be straight with you about this… those who liked the Primal x Hearts series will like this game, most likely. The protagonist is of the same general ‘type’ as the protagonist from those two games, it is based in the same general area of the city, and the atmosphere/comedy style/etc are identical.
There are differences though… the biggest one is that there is almost no emphasis on the school. Slice-of-life portions of this VN are mostly based outside the school, with the majority taking place in the cake shop that is the center of the story.
This game falls into a sub-genre of moege known as the ‘sweets shop romance’. This type of VN is generally excessively moe-romance focused, is virtually brainless, and frequently tries to bury you in sweets-making trivia and mindless cuteness. Thankfully, this game escapes most of those archetypical turns, primarily because it actually has something approaching depth.
The game begins with the protagonist, who is homeless (living in the park in a cardboard box), being picked up and brought back to the cake shop by Kanon, the main heroine of the game. Naturally, some antics follow (primarily because of how dirty he is), but he eventually ends up living above the shop as a tenant+worker at the cake shop. Despite the expectations of the non-Kanon girls, he turns out to be immensely useful, popping out ideas and taking actions to restore the faltering cake shop (which has been in the red since Kanon’s parents died the previous year).
The common route is primarily taken up with the protagonist helping Kanon and the other heroines to rebuild the business, building bonds with the other people of the shopping arcade at the same time. Since the protagonist is fairly ingenious, he is able to, with the help of the girls, restructure the business completely, causing it to make a profit… whereupon things immediately turn to the romance aspect, lol.
I can’t help but feel that the common route was the best part of this game. The romantic parts of this VN are cute at first… but they are interminably long as well, in the style that was common a few years ago, where massive lumps of ichaicha enveloped every granule of story. Not to mention the long, excessively hot h-scenes (Marmalade’s h-scenes in general are excessive, but this one was particularly bad when compared to the Primal x Hearts games).
The endings are actually decent, though I really wish they were a bit ‘longer term’. Nonetheless, I was something close to satisfied with them.
Overall, the game was reasonably fun to play, but the way the romance was handled was nothing to write home about. The common route was excellent, so it is possible to power through the heroine routes based on love for the heroines built up in the common route. Nonetheless, I felt it sad that the game sort of stuttered there.
Grisaia Phantom Trigger Volume 3
Mmm… there really isn’t any difference between this one and the previous two chapters, to be honest. Sure, there are new characters… but it is like watching an episode of an anime where each one stands alone to a certain extent. I know the characters, I know the setting, and I knew I was going to like it.
So… quite naturally, I wasn’t surprised that I enjoyed it. This was a fun read, but I find it interesting that each of these episodes has a number of CGs equivalent to that of your average charage, despite being only a few hours long. That says a lot about how much money they are pouring into this game, but it does lead me to question just why they didn’t wait until they had a lot more done before they started releasing episodes.
If you liked the previous episodes, you’ll like this one. If you didn’t, you won’t. It is fairly straightforward. I did like the Black Lagoon references in this episode, though...lol
Sakura no Mori Dreamers 2
Sakura no Mori Dreamers 2 is a sequel based off of the protagonist not having chosen any of the girls’ as a heroine in the previous game. It is split into two parts… a mysterious world where Madoka hasn’t died and the protagonist was never consumed by revenge, and the world where he pursued his revenge against Madoka’s killer (the world of the original game). These events happen in parallel.
My first statement on what happens in this VN is that… they added more weird to it. It was already weird, but the new ‘red dream’ makes the dreams in the original game pale in comparison.
That said, this feels almost identical subjectively to the original, and as an extension of the original’s story it works just fine. However, don’t expect this VN to stand on its own, since it requires you to have experienced the fullness of the hunt for the serial killer Joker from the beginning. Quality-wise it is about at the same level, with the only difference being the alternate timeline and the presence of a harem ending, hahaha.
VN of the Month July 2017- Hikari no Umi no Apeiria
June 2017 Final
Haruoto Alice Gram
Haruoto Alice Gram is the latest release by Nanawind, the makers of Alia’s Carnival and Yuyukana. This one is based in the same setting and shares a few characters with Alia’s Carnival. To be specific, both games have the Arcane Cards which pull out a person’s possibilities and manifest them as a semi-magical ability called ‘future science’.
Unlike Alia’s Carnival, where the characters compete using their abilities, the protagonist and his friends only use their abilities in secret and the general population of the school is unaware of them. The protagonist, Soutarou has a card that increases his ability to concentrate by an immense degree, in exchange for pushing him to the point of exhaustion.
I’m going to be blunt… this game is immensely long for a charage. The common route is much longer than the heroine routes (for me about eleven hours, which probably means an average of twenty to twenty five hours for most people) and there are five relatively short (say two to three hours each) heroine routes. The length of this game led me to feel a bit impatient by the end… and I honestly felt that, for a game that had science-fantasy as a genre, it was less than impressive in that respect.
Soutarou has one of those qualities I inherently dislike in a protagonist with powers… an unwillingness to use them unless really needed and no curiosity about their limits. In my opinion, this game would have been a great deal more interesting if he ran himself ragged by overusing the ability, rather than only using it five times in total in the common route.
That’s not to say this game is terrible… it has its high points. The heroines are very well-developed during the common route, which gets most of that messy stuff out of the way before you pick one of them, and they were attractive enough individually that I actually changed my mind several times about which one I wanted to read first.
Sadly, I can’t really say the routes do the heroines justice. Oh, the routes deal with their issues… but they can’t really be said to be satisfying. They tend to reach a climax just a bit too fast after the slower pacing of the common route, and there is no aftermath, the after-stories just being h-scenes with no context.
Did I enjoy this game? At times… but the sheer length of this game is daunting, considering most of it is slice-of-life and hints of personal history that only get revealed in some of the paths. I honestly felt extremely tired of the game by the time I finished, and I doubt I’ll ever look at it again, now that I’m done. lol
No VN of the Month for June 2017
Edit: Yes yes, I'm adding yet more text onto a post that was already monstrous in size... but I felt a need to actually insert my own voice in after simply copy-pasting all the posts I wrote up while Fuwa was down... June was an incredibly sub-par month, whereas July had a lot of releases... but only two that really would have ever had a chance at VN of the Month on their own... Kakumei and Apeiria. However, by all rights, it wouldn't have made sense to make Kakumei VN of the month, since it is essentially just a remake of the original Shin Koihime Wei path. While it was rewritten, it simply reused too much text to be considered a standalone VN of the Month candidate.
In particular, I was disappointed that they kept the story flow for the last third of the game the same, since that was the part I thought needed changing the most if they were going to do a remake that would fit in with the Eiyuutan games, which was what I assumed they were aiming for. New characters, like Shan and the various Cao siblings, had a very strong impact on the first two-thirds of the game, to the point where a lot of it was only recognizable at key points.
Oh well. I'm still looking forward to the Wu and Shu paths...lol
This was one of the group of about forty VNs I played in my first year after I began playing untranslated VNs. It was also the fourth chuunige I played that was untranslated. For those who are interested, this game was written by Takaya Aya (the writer of several kamige, including Komorebi no Nostalgica and Otoboku 2). He is a writer who can handle just about any genre, including nakige, chuunige, charage, serious drama, and deep science fiction.
Alicematic is his first chuunige, written in 2006, during the 'golden age of VNs'. It is based in a version of our world where the dimensions that comprise reality are collapsing, and as a result entire swathes of the world are becoming unlivable, the survivors driven mad. The protagonist, Marume Kuroudo, is summoned to an experimental facility based on an artificial island in the Tokyo Bay in order to participate in an experiment to alter the currently unavoidable extinction of humanity and the end of the world as we know it.
He and the others summoned, are told that they must fight to the virtual death (pain and sensation included) in a virtual realm to supply the mental energy to alter the fate of the world.
Now, this game has a pretty diverse cast. The protagonist, Kuroudo, is a wild, pure-hearted type who knows his own limitations as a person and devotes himself to the things he feels are important without hesitation (he uses the odachi). Sayane, a young woman constantly dressed in the goth-loli style, is a master swordswoman with a passionate heart and an iron will (she uses the standard katana). Kuroe and Shiroe are twins, with the older sister Shiroe being hesitant and gentle and her younger sister Kuroe being an overprotective siscon (their weapons are kodachi). Iori is an unsociable young woman whose hobby is observing people (her weapon is an executioner's sword). Rikka is a cheerful, talkative, and active young woman (and the most normal of the heroines) who wields a crescent-spear. Fuyume is a blind and innocent miko who is also a talented onmyouji and can see the souls of people and objects. Nobotsuna is a seemingly light-hearted womanizer who quickly befriends Kuroudo and the others, his surprising wisdom coming out at just the right moments. Kei is a cross-dressing young woman who is also a master of western sorcery (also a confirmed lesbian).
Common Route
This game's common route changes depending on what choices you make throughout it leading up to the heroine branch-off, the events occurring after the prologue changing the most dramatically. While there is a lot of repeated text, it can mostly be skipped using the skip function on subsequent playthroughs. This is a technique used a lot in early chuunige, because events tend to accelerate rapidly in chuunige once you get into the heroine paths. The differences mostly lie in which heroines you interact with the most and the fate of a certain antagonist that appears early on... as her fate is usually related to how things turn out in the heroine paths, somehow.
Route Order Suggestion
I honestly suggest that you use the exact route order found in the Foolmaker walkthrough: http://sagaoz.net/foolmaker/game/s/alice.html
The reason is fairly simple... despite not restricting any of the paths but Fuyume's, there are assumptions made about your preexisting knowledge for each path.
Sayane
Nine out of ten people who play this game through the end of the prologue without picking a heroine will choose to do Sayane's path first. Why? Because she is the heroine who leaves the most vivid impression in the prologue, by far. As a result, for the second time around... I ended up picking her again (it was a toss-up between her and the twins). Sayane's rather twisted value system is the basis for why the actual buildup to relationship formation is so... long. However, the reasons make sense, given the events of the prologue, and the romance is... beautiful in a sense that is rare in visual novel romance in general.
The battles in this path are first-class (really all the battles in this game are), and the last battle is just... superb. I laughed, I cried (a lot), and I felt my heart wrench with empathy for Sayane and Kuroudo. This is an excellent path, and, even if you play none of the other paths, this one would make the game worth playing (though I might end up saying the same for some of the others as well, lol).
Kuroe and Shiroe
I just ignored my own advice... but I don't like Rikka, so that was inevitable (her type of heroine is my least favorite, because they are so common). Kuroe and Shiroe are a pair of twins that are one year younger than Kuroudo. Shiroe is the older sister, a gentle-mannered girl with a tendency to view her own motivations negatively, particularly when it comes to Kuroe. She is rather obviously in love with Kuroudo almost from the start (the incident that brings it on is fairly obvious). Kuroe is the younger sister, and the dependent half of the pair (most otaku media twins operate on the theory that one is dependent and the other dominant). She loves her sister first, second, and last, lol. She is also an aggressive violent tsundere with a fondness for jump kicks and a generalized dislike of men.
Kuroe and Shiroe's path has a much different focus than Sayane's... the swordsmanship aspect is far less important (the fights in this path are mostly short ones), and it is very much about the twisted psychology of the twins' dependent relationship, their past, and how it effects the experiments when Kuroudo gets mixed up with them (hint: the results tend to be mixed). Generally speaking, the path itself can probably be called one of the weaker ones in the VN from a chuunige perspective, but it is emotionally rich and generally enjoyable to read.
Rikka
I'll say it right out. Rikka is the heroine I like the least in this game. She is mostly a comedy relief character. She is genki, she eats a lot, she makes random sexual jokes, and she is in a deep manzai relationship with the protagonist and other characters.
That said, her path is of even quality to the others so far. This path... will probably be hard on people who like Sayane (I won't go into details), and I had to wince at some of the things that happen to the characters here. However, in exchange you get a series of three first-class swordfights, a bunch of lesser fights, some seriously crazy turns of events, and a nice ending.
Iori
Iori... by the time you get to this path (I recommend doing it last amongst the initially-available paths for reasons I'll mention in a moment), you'll have some idea of her personality. On the surface, she is calm and collected, but underneath, she is very much like a lonely child who desperately wants the love she never received from her parents. However, she also has a tendency to instantly make decisions others would procrastinate on, and there is little in the way of hesitation to her personality.
Her path... is split into two parts. The first part, which is treated pretty much the same as the other heroine paths, is a sad ending (almost like a Tsukihime-style normal ending), that feels bittersweet. It is also fairly revealing about Iori's personality and her limitations as an individual. The second part has you start from the beginning of the game from a slightly different point, and it dramatically alters events when it comes to how Iori, Fuyume, and Kuroudo interact with one another and eliminates a major story element common to all the other paths, including Iori's first path. How it differs most radically from the first version, however, is in how Iori deals with her personal issue that pops up in almost every path of the game. Let's just say that the issue is confronted much earlier, at least in part because Iori held close contacts with the others at a much earlier point. This is also the most revealing path so far for the Cthulhu Mythos elements in the story.
Fuyume
Because of Fuyume's tendency to refer to herself in the third person, whenever she talks, I get the feeling she is putting herself down (my backbrain keeps interpreting her name as Fuyu and 'me' as that deliberately servile appellation some retainers to wealthy or socially high-ranking individuals use for themselves). However, her personality is fundamentally kind-hearted and gentle with a strong flavor of curiosity about new things and a tendency to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.
This path... is very emotional, both in the romantic and in the story/drama parts. While this path doesn't have any superlative fights, the flow of the story is the most 'complete', and I honestly loved the way the relationship between Fuyume and Iori strengthens throughout the path. I smiled, I laughed, and I cried... and in the end, I was left with a sense of completeness, as this path put an end to the story as a whole.
Overall
This game is one of those that was hard to appreciate fully on the first playthrough. Part of it is that, when I first played it, I was unfamiliar with much of the terminology (occult, scientific, and swordsmanship) involved. However, the largest part was that I simply didn't have the understanding of the concepts involved necessary to fully appreciate how this story plays out. Most who read this game will be satisfied entirely by the sword-fights and the story, but, later on, if you have a wider understanding of the concepts involved in this game, it becomes a much richer/deeper read.
I've been saving a replay of this VN for years. My original opinion on this VN was excessively influenced by the fact that this VN is filled to the brim with Masada and Dies Irae worship. However, it is also the VN that, separate from that, defined the second Light team's style. The base character archetypes, roles, and numerous aspects of their settings were almost universally drawn from Dies Irae, if you strip away the specifics. This is the biggest reason I had so much trouble properly rating this VN the first time around.
First, I should mention what is perhaps the most defining element of this team's VNs... there is at least one Mercurius/Reinhardt type in every one of their VNs. I don't mean in the specifics... but in the sense that those two were 'spontaneously generated absolutes'. Both Mercurius and Reinhardt were characters who, at the core, were already 'complete' from the beginning. In each of this team's games, there is at least one character of that type.
The reasoning for including such characters is probably because 'absolutes' tend to create powerful emotional reactions in people and naturally become catalysts for conflict. As a tool for progressing chuunige stories, they are an ideal element. Since these characters are transcendent from the beginning, they tend to change very little during the progression of the story, further pinpointing their role as catalysts. I could name each such character for you, but I'll limit it to this game... Akizuki Ryouga.
Akizuki Ryouga is the protagonist of Zero Infinity, a young man who has a rather... unusual philosophy and a mentality that is like that of a person born already close to achieving enlightenment. Quite naturally for a chuunige, he gets dragged into an underground war between powerful cyborgs called Imaginators, rebels and hunters from Holologium, the organization that rules the world.
The setting is 1967 Japan. The Japan of that era had achieved a 'miraculous' economic recovery after WWII and was approaching its peak, its population recovering rapidly from the loss of the previous generation.
The structure of this story is identical to Dies Irae's, at least in how it handles the route order. It gives you a choice of two 'initial routes', and if you finish one you can access the route of the first main heroine, whose path reveals the truths ignored or left untouched in the first paths, and after you finish the first main heroine's path, you can complete the second main heroine's path, where all the loose ends are tied off and you get an untainted good ending.
Now... one thing I love about this game is the way it humanizes the antagonists. Setting aside the antagonist who is a heroine (Elizavetta), Ivan Strigoi, Alexandre Raskolinikov, and even Apollon leave a powerful impression. Ivan is the only one I can talk about without spoiling things to a ridiculous degree, so I'll focus on him.
Ivan Strigoi is something of a tribute to the Einherjar of Dies Irae (all the characters are tributes to Dies Irae ones... lol). He is a man wrapped in bandages who has lived his entire life on the battlefield. He is a believer in the value of heroism and loves those who strive (both in war and in everyday life) above all other things... including those who he kills or try to kill him. Like Elizavetta, he is also a former Soviet soldier, turned into an Imaginator after death and recruited into Gears to hunt rogues. I'll be straight... this kind of smiling warrior who loves with a passion all those who stand on the battlefield with resolve never once brought out negative emotions in me, despite all the crap he put the protagonist's side through. It is just so hard to hate him, lol.
As for the story itself... well, it is a Light chuunige. Stripped of the irritation over the excessive tributes to Dies Irae, it is actually right up there near the top. After all, this is the team that made Vermilion Bind of Blood and the Silverio series. I will say that this game is significantly better balanced (lol to anyone who has read this VN) than the Silverio series, as that one put so much emphasis on the main/true paths that the neglect became painful in retrospect. That said, its flaws are actually glaringly similar to a lot of the greatest of chuunige... the antagonists remain in your memory more strongly than the protagonist and heroines, lol.
Years after playing this the first time, I still remembered Alexandre and Ivan clearly, even though my memories of the heroines were getting blurred... and that is fairly typical of my experiences with a lot of the better chuunige out there. There is something about the genre that demands a strong set of antagonists to bring the story to life, which is why chuunige with pathetic antagonists tend not to remain in memory.
Anyway, this VN's theme is more than a little painful for anyone born into modern society. The characters are rather blunt about their feelings about where society is going as a result of scientific progress, and it plays pseudo-prophet when it comes to the effects of the internet on people's psyches. As such, the first reaction of some people when it comes to the philosophical ramblings of the characters (an inevitable side-effect of this being a chuunige) will probably be more negative than is the norm.
I could spend several days analyzing this VN... but I'm going to stop here. For people who want a heavy chuunige, this is a good choice, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone else, since it is so blatantly a chuunige in every particular.
Now that I have confirmation from Dergonu that the game he was playing is not VN of the Month quality (he has stalled on it), I will move on to finally announcing VN of the Month for March and April.
March
March was a decent month, since it had three potential candidates for VN of the Month. Those candidates are:
Butterfly Seeker
AI Love
Unjou no Fairy Tale
Now, despite my rating of it, I'm going to go ahead and disqualify AI Love. Why? Because it is essentially a borderline nukige. It made its way onto my Chicken Soup for the Soul list, but, as I've stated in the past, that isn't necessarily an indication of kamige status. Rather, it is an indication of how good the game is at soothing and relieving non-violent stress.
So, this comes down to Unjou no Fairy Tale versus Butterfly Seeker. Based purely on my personal tastes, I'd probably go for Unjou no Fairy Tale, since I'm an admitted fantasy addict... but in the end, I had to (reluctantly) admit that Butterfly Seeker was the better VN. The depth of the story, the characters, and even just the details of the important events was such that I couldn't honestly give Unjou no Fairy Tale the victory for VN of the Month, March 2018.
My reasons for excluding Etatoto from the final running are... that fun2novel's own review and private comments didn't leave me with the impression of VN of the Month quality. Worth reading for a certain portion of the community? Yes. Worthy of being recommended on a larger scale... no.
April
Having dropped Taiju for the moment (SofthouseChara's newest SLG), I was left with only one viable candidate for April... Yuusha to Maou, to Majo no Cafe. This is perhaps the weakest VN of the Month candidate I've put up in quite some time, but it still easily won over Kari Gurashi Ren'ai, which is the only other game that hit my baseline standard. Naming it as VN of the Month, April 2018 actually troubles me a bit... given a choice, I wish that Unjou or AI Love had been released in April so I'd have a better candidate. I almost decided not to name one for this month, but I reluctantly decided that it meets standards.
First, VN of the Month 2016 basically comes down to a competition between two titles, World Election and Tsumi no Hikari Rendezvous. The other stuff from February was mostly... disappointing. Shugotate 2 is great... but one of my rules is that direct sequels and continuances of previous games can't compete if they require knowledge of the original to enjoy (and in this case that is true).
Both games in the posts above are solid VN of the Month candidates... and if they were in separate months, it is likely they'd both end up being the rulers of their individual months. However, looking at it objectively, Tsumi no Hikari Rendezvous edges World Election by a hair (actually, either one could be named VN of the Month, but I had to give Tsumi extra points for my bias).
That aside, lets move on to talking about what titles I'll be playing from this month.
March Releases
Might or might not play the VN below.
https://vndb.org/v18237
Giving Lose the benefit of the doubt, despite the ridiculous look of the VN below.
https://vndb.org/v18131
I avoided the anime so I could read the VN below without bias, so I'll be playing it.
https://vndb.org/v14303
I wouldn't be Clephas if I didn't play the VN below. However, since it is a side-story, it isn't eligible for VN of the Month.
https://vndb.org/v18685
I'll definitely play the VN below... but if it is as bad as its related VN (Koi no Aria) I'll probably drop it.
https://vndb.org/v18635
Almost certainly won't play the one below, unless I get extremely bored. Astronauts sometimes does really good work with fantasy rpgs, but most of them are straight rape-tentacle things.
https://vndb.org/v18761
Edit: Almost forgot these two, even though they were on my list of to-play VNs at the beginning of the year... March has a few too many releases though, lol.
https://vndb.org/v18651
https://vndb.org/v18495
First, I should probably say that this isn't a nukige. It looks like one, it has all the outward qualities of one, but it isn't one, strictly speaking. The ratio of story and character development to H-content is too high, for one thing.
This game focuses on a young salaryman named Touma, who has just completed his training period, and he is given his first trial with one of the departments of his company. He is assigned to a more experienced senpai, a capable young woman named Mai, at the orders of another heroine named Shinobu, and gets addicted to the lunches from the small lunch-making business Mikoto (the final heroine) works for.
I should warn you that there is sex in the common route. To be specific, there is drunk sex in the common route, lol. Anyway, the protagonist is a nice guy who is generally capable, though not a specialist by nature, and the two fully adult heroines (Mai is in her mid-twenties, Shinobu in her late twenties) are both immensely capable and more experienced than him. Mikoto is a sweet, innocent genkikko who helps her mother support her little sisters.
The three main paths are fairly straightforward love-romance types, save for the fact that he has sex with both the older heroines before getting into an actual relationship with them. This isn't a long game, so don't expect hours of endless slice-of-life... but there is just enough detail to properly develop the characters and their relationships. As a result, this game comes across as an enjoyable experience in general, even if it isn't something that is going to make it onto anyone's list of absolute favorites.
There are 3p stories for each heroine route and a harem route... but they are all fantasy-dream types, so it isn't a big deal.
Anyway, this is a decent VN if you want something nice with adult heroines and an adult protagonist.
Edit: Sorry if it is a bit excessively short, but I'm trying to cram as much activity into my off days as possible, so I'm a bit fried. This VN was a fun experience, reminding me of why I liked Pulltop Latte's first game despite its huge faults. This isn't VN of the Month material, but it is worth a read if you want something with adult main characters. The biggest sticking point is the 'have sex and forget' attitude in the common route (incidentally, the 3p extras are basically if the girls didn't choose to forget) for the average reader. Since the protagonist has sex with both Shinobu and Mai in the common route (Mai has two versions of her route with minor differences, depending on when you branch it off), I can almost guarantee that someone amongst those who read this will inevitably complain about the protagonist's moral fiber... *sighs and wonders at the ridiculousness of caring about the moral fiber of adults in an eroge*
Izuna Zanshinken is a VN put out by Akatsuki Works Black back in 2011. It is a super-violent chuunige with a vigilante assassin called Musumi Kotarou at its center. The game is split into two main parts... the common route and the heroine routes, which are accessed at a click of the mouse (convenient). Save for the end of each heroine route, choices are mostly a matter of seeing different scenes or the same scenes from another perspective. Each route is split into chapters, each with a defining incident that (save for a few exceptions) ends with the protagonist executing the criminal in question. Most of these chapters are extremely emotional (the normal chapters have the client screaming their rage, hate, and sorrow at their loss, save for a few where something horrible happens that just requires that Izuna take action), and there are a lot of deep sociological questions buried in the game relating to the death penalty and the functionality of the law... but that isn't why I'm posting here. I've already reviewed this game once in the past, so now I'm just going to introduce the main characters to whet the interest of those on the fence.
Musumi Kotarou
Musumi Kotarou is the latest in a long line of vigilante assassins (his father was famous amongst them for having killed over a thousand people during his work). However, his daily manner is literally mild (lol) and easygoing. It is only when required by a threat or his work that he switches over to the cold, merciless, and vindictive Hitokiri Izuna. As Izuna, he dresses in a sort of modified ninja costume, armed with kunai, a pile-bunker style claw gauntlet designed to cause pain before death, and a demonic katana (youtou) Kooumaru. I'll be straight with you... the difference between his daily self and him as Izuna is pretty startling the first time you run into it (in the prologue), but it seems to be genetic in his line (his father was apparently similar). His voice, body language, and manner of speech all change between the two. However, they are merely aspects of the same person, as is evidenced by Kotarou's frequent regrets for the necessity of his work, once the bloody rage passes.
Kuzuryuu Suzuka
The head of the Kuzuryuu Family, the yakuza group that controls the criminal underworld of Yuunagi and Kotarou's mistress. Having taken her position at a young age (fifteen), her manner tends to be stoic, easier to show anger than concern for others. However, she is compassionate and loving to those she is closest to. Unfortunately, her position as the young head of a yakuza family pretty much ensures she'll be unable to have an equal relationship with anyone, and while she accepts this, it doesn't mean that she is happy about it. She is a really Japanese-style heroine, with a preference for simple old-style Japanese cooking, wearing kimonos, and wearing her black hair long.
Himekawa Shinobu
Suzuka's attendant and a student of Kotarou's father before his death. At a very young age, her parents were killed in front of her eyes by thieves who raided their house, and over time her heart was corroded by what is probably PTSD. Eventually, she asked Kotarou's father to train her, and, after refusing numerous times, he finally gave in. When working alongside Kotarou she wears a mechanized suit that lets her approach the physical superiority of the Izuna bloodline (the Izuna bloodline heals faster, is stronger, has higher dexterity and agility, and is in general physically superior to the average person, even without training). The suit contains a blade, a function that lets her launch herself high into the air, and a wire for strangling or capturing enemies. Shinobu is typical of a lot of emotionally-scarred young fighters in otaku media in that she tends to be a bit over hasty, jumps to conclusions, and is easily blinded by emotion. Nonetheless, she has the potential to make an excellent Izuna, simply because she grasps the central tenets of the Izuna way quite naturally.
Agano Hikaru
Hikaru is the androgynous daughter of Detective Agano, a police officer who tends to run across Izuna incidents rather more often than he'd like. She has a strong sense of justice, but she believes that no crime is so terrible that it needs to be paid for with death. As a result, she is negative toward Izuna's existence outside her own path. She is very inquisitive and intelligent, but she is also very tomboyish, indulging in hobbies like playing with a yoyo and wearing boyish clothes. Once she takes an interest in something or someone, she can't help but want to learn more about them, which can sometimes be a good thing but is more likely to get her in trouble, by the rules and probabilities of a violent VN, lol.
There are other characters in this game, but that covers the main heroines and the protagonist... and it is hard to touch on most of the others without spoiling the game fatally.
This is the latest VN by AXL, and it is also the latest in its 'swords fantasy' (there is very little magic in these games) series (I say series, but they are just a line of similarly-designed games). The previous games in this series include Princess Frontier, Hyakka Ryouran Elixir, Racial Merge, and Ou no Mimi ni wa Todokanai. This is also AXL's fifteenth game, making it one of the most prolific companies (ignoring subsidiaries) still active.
Like all the games in this series, it is based in a world whose tech level is medieval with bits and pieces of higher levels of technological development here and there. This one falls in an area similar to Ou no Mimi, rather than Princess Frontier or Hyakka Ryouran, meaning it has a somewhat more violent turn almost from the beginning. The protagonist is an antique dealer (thus the game's name) named Rowan who, due to the loss of his parents during an adventure at the highest levels of the tower, has had to deal with an aversion to the tower that is at the center of the town that serves as the center of the game's story. This changes when a young girl bearing a greatsword named Linaria comes into the picture, and he finds himself guiding a young group of adventurers through the lower levels of the tower.
Rowan is not only an antique dealer but an exceptionally talented dagger-user and toolmaker. He is also the only individual in the town that can repair the various machines that come down from the tower. If I were to pick his class, I'd consider him to be a cross between an engineer and a rogue, with excellent crowd-control techniques and stuns. Like a lot of mature protagonists, there is a disconnect between his emotions and rational behavior, and as a result, he will often take the logical path, even when it conflicts with what his heart wants, thus leading to him being a bit dense about emotions in general.
The tower is much like a lot of roguelike rpg towers (though this game isn't an rpg) where people climb the tower to gather treasure, fighting monsters and robot-like Guardians as they do so. The power gems taken from the Guardians can be used in various devices made from parts taken from the tower, and this is the source of most of the setting's higher technology. The tower itself is self-repairing and self-defending, deploying seemingly endless numbers of Guardians and monsters. No one knows how high it goes.
The three heroines are the young princess Karin, the protagonist's adoptive sister Mira, and the newbie adventurer girl Linaria. Karin is a sort-of tsundere who very obviously is in love with Rowan from the beginning. Her father is the second King of the country (that consists of the tower, the town, and the land around it), but she only realized she was a princess at a relatively late age due to the closeness of the royal family to the people. Mira is a responsible girl who takes care of most of the chores and the account books at Rowan's shop... and has an unnatural attachment to the spiky ball and chain she uses as a weapon (the first time you see her flushing after squashing an enemy says everything). Linaria is the daughter of a deceased adventurer who came to find out why her father abandoned his family in order to seek fame and wealth in the tower. Though she resents adventurers as a profession, she is too kind-hearted to actually take it out on anyone.
Common Route
The common route mostly accounts the trials and tribulations of Rowan and company as they rise through the lower levels of the tower to be acknowledged as full-fledged adventurers (novices are called 'virgins' until they reach town on the Twentieth Floor). If you like AXL games' style of character interaction, you'll like the slice-of-life elements, and the battles are actually tactically interesting (something that is unusual for AXL). There are a few emotional moments dealing with Rowan's past, but the common route mostly serves to familiarize you with the characters.
Normal Ending
This is an ending you get if you fail to pick one of the three main heroines. It is basically a joke ending where the results of his actions in the common route come home to roost, lol.
Karin
Karin's path starts out with a lot of light ichaicha and a somewhat annoying get-together sequence. However, at roughly the halfway point, it suddenly turns dark and violent... and outright bloody. The violence in this path startled me a bit, as it is out of character for AXL (AXL generally restricts violence to one or two scenes in a given path, and never on this kind of scale). However, the story was interesting, and I left the path feeling satisfied. The actual progression from lighter atmosphere to darker one is common on AXL's games, and anyone who has played one will probably recognize the pattern... That didn't bother me, though, since it was interesting in and of itself.
Linaria
I recommend that anyone that plays this game play this path last. The reason is is that this is the only path that deals with the tower itself and climbing to the top as its subject matter. It is also the only path where certain major issues involving the protagonist are completely and finally resolved in a direct manner. This is perhaps not surprising, seeing as Linaria was being presented as the 'main heroine' almost from the beginning. However, it is a situation where anyone who plays this path will be a bit displeased with the other two if they played it first. The path itself is a lot less bloody than Karin's (to be blunt, Karin's path is the only one that gets bloody and serious to that degree), but it is still a good path, with a more emotional focus than Karin's.
Mira
Mira is my favorite of the three heroines, so I left her for last this time. She is the protagonist's adoptive little sister, and she falls under the archetype of the 'imouto who scolds her beloved oniichan but adores him'. Mira is a serious girl who cares deeply about the antique shop they are running, and as a result, most of her path deals with the economic issues of the city and the tower. It was when I finished this path that I came to the conclusion that Mira's path is the 'merchant' path, Karin's is the 'nation' path, and Linaria's is the 'adventurer' path.
Mira's path is full of secrets and conspiracies, and it has some really good moments for Verbena (who is incidentally my favorite character in this game). It is also frequently humorous in ways the other two paths didn't manage, which was a plus for me.
Some thoughts
A few thoughts/complaints about this game. I honestly liked this game a great deal... but it seriously needed a grand route to put the themes of the other paths into a single one. The issues in each path weren't going to go away just because they weren't dealt with in those individual paths, and it bugs the hell out of me that there was no single path that brought them all to a resolution.
I also think Verbena should have had a path other than the normal ending. Sure, she is a slut, a heavy drinker, and takes pleasure in unleashing her spiky weapons (ranging from morning stars to kusarikama)... but her personality is just awesome. Seeing that kind of character go all deredere is one of my favorite AXL events (AXL does really good 'haraguro' heroines).
Conclusion
If you liked any of the other 'swords fantasy' AXL games, you'll like this one. It has all the elements that make those games great, such as the protagonist being equally or more important than the heroines, decent action without being focused on the action, and a mix of light humor and serious story that keeps slice of life from getting out of hand. I'll be the first to admit that AXL doesn't change its art style or character archetypes, but that never seems to effect whether their games are good or not.
This one is a doujin VN by Initial, a doujin group that seems to have pretty varied tastes. To be honest... I wasn't expecting what I got with this VN. This is a kinetic novel, meaning that there is only one story that is progressed without any branches or choices. You progress through the story by picking your chapters, which go in in order from one to forty-six. The game itself is about eight hours in length, and it is a science-fiction/fantasy VN.
The story begins in a city walled in from the outside world, where people called 'Canaria' who can use esper-like abilities called 'Scratch' live isolated from the rest of humanity. The story takes a lot of seriously whacked-out turns (so much so that you have to ask why they put on the Love Comedy part most of the time) throughout its length, and it is pretty heavy on the kind of esoteric science fantasy logic that those who loved Ever17 tend to like. Personally, if it wasn't so short, I probably wouldn't have been able to finish it... not because it isn't good, but because I don't really have much of a taste for that kind of thing.
That said, the actual story is told in a very interesting manner, and the writing is pretty high quality.
However, it also suffers from the downsides of being a doujin VN (meaning a limited to nonexistent budget). All of the music is basically public stuff and rearrangements of public material, and as a result it doesn't have the impact a commercial Vn tends to have. In addition, it uses a pretty ugly set of background wallpapers that will have art-lovers hackles rising. On the other hand, the character designs (all four of them either heroines or the protagonist) are actually pretty good-looking for doujin work, with enough variation in expression to satisfy me for the relatively short ride this VN was.
I honestly felt this VN was worthy of praise, so I'm going to outright recommend it to non-art-bigot lovers of the type of stuff in I/O, Ever17, and Remember11. I do wish they'd put some effort/money into the backgrounds and the music, but considering how limited their budget had to be, I've decided to forgive their sins in this case.
The 'Uso' series by Campus is a series of games, each focused on a different heroine who is in love with the same protagonist. That protagonist possesses the ability to hear lies (note that he doesn't hear truth), due to a magical artifact accidentally implanted in his body half a decade before the story begins. The last game in the series, Fuyu Uso, will be coming out in July and covers the final heroine, the school president. The other three heroines are Satsuki (Haru Uso) the school idol who lies as a matter of course, Izumi Aoi (Natsu Uso) the protagonist's somewhat straight-laced kouhai and ex-girlfriend, and Eris (Aki Uso) the vampire who lives with the protagonist and is his partner in the Cat's Hand Club.
The Cat's Hand Club is a club the protagonist created to give him an excuse to take requests from people, which grants him the magical energy to keep the artifact inside his body from killing him outright. It has a terrible reputation, primarily because the 'price' the magical contracts that give him his energy extracts from his clients. Those prices vary based on the contract and are either something unpleasant to the client or of value to the protagonist. As an example, one client has the price of dropping his wallet at some later date.
The protagonist of the story is highly perceptive... outside of romance. His experiences with his ability to hear people's lies have given him a solid grasp on most of the reasons why people lie, as well as helping him come to peace with the naturally deceptive nature of his fellow humans. However, he himself refuses to lie, saying what he thinks outright most of the time, attempting to be honest both in word and in action inasmuch as possible, as well as avoiding promises that might be broken later.
Haru Uso
This game is the first one and the others that come after are based off of the story of this one having progressed to a certain point (which they don't make entirely clear). It is focused on Himeno Satsuki, the biggest liar in the school, who also happens to be the most beloved girl in the school. It begins with her confessing her love to the protagonist and it really gets started with her convincing him to take a request to be her boyfriend for ten days.
If I can say one thing about this one, it is that the way the writer presents the romance in this game is... twisted. The relationship born from Himeno's request is interesting, and Himeno herself is an interesting character. She is highly jealous, aggressive in love, and more than a little bit of a schemer. The writer in this game did a very good job of building her character from the ground up, as well as constructing the basic outlines of the protagonist's relationships with the other heroines.
Natsu Uso
This one is focused on Izumi Aoi, the protagonist's kouhai, a member of the student council, and the protagonist's ex-girlfriend. In the same spirit as Haru Uso, it begins with a startling scene where the protagonist wakes up naked in Aoi's bed with no memory of how he got there. Obviously, this is the beginning of yet another relationship twisted by circumstance into some really odd directions. A lot of the twisting comes from Aoi being a classic tsundere much of the time (saying the opposite of what she means), and the rest comes from the protagonist's inability to tell lies but unwillingness to tell her the whole truth of what is going on in his life.
The bare bones of the relationship with Izumi put together in Haru Uso gain flesh in this path, as the protagonist recalls the events that led to them becoming lovers and breaking up. Aoi herself is extremely twisted up inside by that experience, and the protagonist has an intense sense of guilt coming from the events of a year before, that tends to lead him into some misguided actions. This makes for an interesting romance, to say the least. Similar to Haru, this game does a good job of building up the heroine, though it had less work to do in that direction due to Haru Uso.
Aki Uso
Aki Uso focuses on Eris, the heroine that is arguably closest to the protagonist, both in terms of living quarters and their relationship. She has known him the longest of the four heroines, and she fell in love with him first, though she has done a pretty good job of suppressing it. She is also a pure-blooded vampire, a wannabe NEET, a heavy gamer, and an extreme otaku. If you asked me who makes the biggest impression at first glance, it would definitely be her, simply because of the degree to which she gets along with the protagonist.
Naturally, Eris's issues with the vampiric world are the largest focus of the story, with the romance occurring alongside and as a result of those issues. I will say that Eris's family sucks and her maid is a bit weird, even compared to her.
Of the first three heroines, her character is perhaps developed the most effectively, though this is more a matter of her placement in the story than any other issue. It is also in her story that you start to get an idea of what Fuyu Uso's heroine is like under that constantly-smiling mask of hers, though only indirectly. Again, I am going to praise the level of detail in the character development here, and the romance is once again twisted by various issues, both external and internal between the two. Since this seems to be the pattern of the series, I wasn't really surprised by the time I got ot this one, though.
Conclusion
An interesting series, so far. I do wish that I'd waited until the final game came out, but I lost to my curiosity. For those who like deep character development and weird romance, this is a good choice. I won't recommend this to people who prefer the straightforward romances common to charage, though.
Ok... as random choices to play go, this one was probably a horrible choice. Yuyukana starts out as and rarely escapes the standard charage model (there are some tear-jerking moments at the end of some of the routes, but it isn't at nakige level).
First, you have the tsundere osananajimi. Then you have the ojousama who mysteriously comes in every morning to cook breakfast for the protagonist whose parents are not living at home. Third you have the mysterious transfer student who professes her love for the protagonist. Fourth, you have the fushigi-chan girl whose first loves are books and dried squid.
This is about as standard and archetypical a cast as can be found in any charage (literally, I felt like the protag from Kami nomi zo was in the back of my skull whispering about the archetypes), and that is easily the biggest downside of this VN. The mysterious aspects, which could easily have been used to shape the story into something more complex and interesting, are left to the very ends of the heroine routes, making for a singularly boring standard common route and heroine routes that are frighteningly shallow for something made in one of the best years in the past decade.
The humor was stale three years before it came out, the heroines feel like 'standard-issue waifus', and the protagonist is a dense-as-lead non-person who is accompanied by an equally standard-issue 'perverted best friend' character. Character-wise, you don't get any more shallow and lacking in flavor than these.
Worst of all, they never do manage to draw you into the characters or the story before things get serious in the heroine paths. The weak character development and lack of anything resembling intelligent design in the story (incidentally, it is so formulaic it makes Shuffle seem unique) make this a perfect example of what not to do when making a charage post-2008.
Despite that, it falls short of kusoge level... it just isn't something I would gladly go back to play again.
Edit: Also, no Yayoi path is a huge minus... the biggest problem with 'modern' charage is that unwillingness to pursue interesting adult heroines, lol.
VN of the Month September 2016
My final conclusion after playing Sen no Hatou was that none of the games that came out really stood out enough for me to consider them VN of the Month material. Sadly, I have to condemn September 2016 to be one of those months devoid of a winner.
I've raved on tropes before. Many times. However, as I have also said many times before, tropes and stereotypes do have an important place in fiction of all sorts. The important part is to balance the use of tropes to create something interesting and unique, rather than just using them to copy a previous work or works.
1. The 'standardized' voiceless protagonist- For better or worse, there was a long period of time when VN protagonists outside of chuunige were forbidden by industry custom (unspoken, unmentioned) to have a personality beyond the standard 'nice guy, dense, harem-building' protagonist with no voice-acting. I'm going to be straight with yall... this kind of protagonist is a long-standing attempt to create a convenient means for self-insertion into a situation, because his personality is nonexistent, he has no voice of his own, and in some cases you can even name him. Obliterating the individuality of the protagonist became a common tool in VNs around the turn of the century, even as story-focused VNs became more and more distinct from their nukige and moege brethren. This protagonist is an outdated, absolutely worthless relic of a time where people had forgotten the cardinal rule of interesting fiction... a boring point of view makes for a boring game.
2. The osananajimi heroine- Unlike the standardized protagonist, this particular trope is not evil in and of itself... it is simply misused on a massive scale in VNs. When used properly, the osananajimi heroine frequently becomes the most attractive of the heroines, her depth of character far outweighing that of even a well-designed protagonist (Kagome from Comyu, Selma from Bullet Butlers, Suzu from Ayakashibito, etc). However, when misused, an osananajimi heroine is simply an excuse for laziness in character development. I don't know how many times I've run into osananajimi heroines who had an easy relationship with the protagonist but absolutely no depth of character, no past episodes of interest, and no really deep connections to make you want to make them the protagonist's lover. I'm sorry, but a decade of hidden puppy love is not sufficient for me to take an interest in a heroine (incidentally the most common osananajimi heroine setting). Moreover, such heroines almost always have that stupid 'transfer from friends to lovers' issue pop up... and it is basically a similar issue to that of the sister to lover one, on a smaller scale (and without the delicious fragrance of immorality to make it interesting).
3. The 'week-later' ending- This is a type of ending/epilogue that pops up that ends a very short period of time after the climax of a path or story. Charage in particular tend to use this type of ending, because they want to be able to put out a FD to milk the fanbase later if the game turns out to be popular. These endings fail to provide the closure the reader desires, and it leaves you at loose ends in the wake of the story. If you love the characters of a story, don't you want to see what their lives are like down the road? I hate to say it, but by the end of the average charage, the reader is generally bored of school life and wants to move on. This type of ending is always a huge let-down, especially for readers like me.
4. Slice-of-life as an end rather than a means- Slice-of-life is something that has become inescapable in non-nukige VNs, for the most part. That, in and of itself, is not that much of a problem. If you want to get to know a character, there is nothing like seeing a bit of their life outside a stressful situation to give you an idea of who they are. However, there is nothing more boring than a game that doesn't have any conflict, which is slice-of-life from beginning to end, with no rough spots or speed bumps to make things a bit 'spicier'. My problem with this is that slice-of-life for the sake of slice-of-life has become a trope in and of itself, which means there are enough VNs out there of that type to make it easy to consider it to be such.
5. The TSUNDERE- Yes, I went there. Despite the efforts of an entire decade of otakus, the tsundere still hasn't died. The tsundere is a character who acts negatively on the surface toward someone but cares for them underneath, to put it simply. Around the turn of the century, tsundere heroines became a huge boom in anime, manga, and VNs, starting with the violent tsundere and moving on to the Taiga-chan 'barking dog' style, then finally into more and more varied types that plagued otaku media like a virus. My problem with tsunderes is that more than ninety-percent of them literally don't have a reason - personality-wise or otherwise - to be tsundere. These characters unnaturally react to the protagonist or other characters, and they don't have a reason to do so. To be blunt, this type of behavior pattern got old long ago... and yet otaku media creators inevitably include a tsundere in almost everything produced.
6. Teenaged characters- Primarily due to the moege genre and its influences, better than ninety-percent of VNs made today consist entirely of young people as main characters. I have to say this... I'm seriously tired of every protagonist and heroine being a kid. At the very least, I'd like to see a larger percentage of youthful adult protagonists, for a change.
7. School-life setting - Sorry, I'm tired of having to experience kids wasting their youth. In particular, my biggest bone to pick with a lot of protagonists is that happy-go-lucky tendency to forget about planning for the future. School-life consists a very small portion of the average human's lifetime. It might be a time many are nostalgic for, but I honestly can't take an interest in it anymore.
There are others, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately, lol.
Tsukiakari Lunch is an oddball game that, despite the fact that I was in a particularly miserable state when I originally played it, I couldn't help but fall in love with. I was playing it in thirty minute snatches in between some of the hardest work I've ever done, and it took me almost two weeks (that's a long time for me) to finish it. Because of the way I played it, I've always felt that I didn't really do it justice, so I have wanted to go back and play this for years. I recommend it to people, but I couldn't really say I had a clear memory of all that went on it.
This game's structure is setup so that you first see the prologue (without going to the menu screen) and once you are done with the prologue, you go to the menu screen and start the main game. When the main game starts, you are immediately asked to pick one of the four heroines. The individual paths then proceed from there (and are of a pretty good length, though not as long as a chuunige path) to one of two endings (a bad ending or a normal/good ending).
This story is based in Hoshikage Gakuen, a mysterious school where it is always night and during the two hours of 'Lunchtime', a creepy period where color seems leeched from the world, shadows attack and individuals called 'Witches' seek to devour anyone else they find. The protagonist of this story, Shiki Haruhiko, is a wannabe teacher who wakes up with Fuyu, one of the heroines, sticking a gun in his face (what looks to be a Mauser C96). The situation that proceeds from there eventually leads to him meeting the four heroines... and finding out that one of the ways to leave the school and return to their various worlds is for someone to grant their wishes... with the catch that none of them remember those wishes (so remembering the wish is part of the journey). The nature of these wishes is such that they could not, under any circumstances, be granted in the worlds from which they came.
The Heroines
Fuyu- Fuyu is the first heroine the protagonist meets. She is an emotionless girl with an extensive knowledge of fighting, survival, and killing who always acts in a rational way and displays (and for the most part, feels) no emotion. Like all the girls in this game except for Aki, she lacks common reference points with the others, because her world is one that has been at war for so long that they are down to children and young women... and nobody else. It is so bad that she seems to honestly have no idea of the causes of the war or why anyone is fighting, save for survival.
Aki- The second heroine (and the one unlocked after all the others). Aki is a quiet, kind-hearted girl who tends to keep her emotions bound up inside. She is the most 'normal' of the girls on the surface, and she can generally be depended on to give good advice at the right times. She is probably from a world similar to that of Haruhiko, because she understands his perspective well and naturally enough (they share reference points). However, this is not certain, because she has no memories, including her name (Aki being the name Haruhiko gives her).
Natsuno- The third girl to arrive, a bundle of curiosity and smiles from a world where technology has advanced to the point where people are overseen by their computers, kept locked into a virtual space from birth to death, without any interaction with one another. She is a genius, capable of creating machines to do just about anything in minimal amounts of time, and she is curious about everything, especially other people. Because she has never had any real contact with others, her innocence is sometimes jarring on matters of interpersonal communication.
Avrill- A young princess from a world where humans wield swords and magic desperately to fend off hordes of monsters that plague their lives every day. She is definitely a leader type, with a tendency to forge ahead and take control of situations. However, she is rarely without a smile on her face, and she can be depended on to tease Haruhiko constantly. Above all the others, her personality is the most mature, most likely because she has, unlike Natsuno, experienced the dark sides of the world, and, unlike Fuyu, understands the emotions and feelings of others.
The Witches
Nishino- The individual responsible for summoning Haruhiko, an ever-smiling witch who loves nothing more than toying with others and watching their reactions. Like all witches, she loses her ability to think rationally and is driven by the desire to devour non-Witches during Lunchtime, but most of the time, she is actually fairly helpful. She is an alchemist and doll-user.
Kitayama- The resident witch of the infirmary, a handsome male witch with a tendency to sit around just putting his life into his research. He is a sorcerer type (magical attacks and the like). He is very wise... but like all the other witches, he too loses his rationality at Lunchtime and is driven by the desire to devour others.
Azuma- A cold-eyed witch who wanders the halls of Hoshikage at random, searching for quiet places to be alone. While she is apparently close to Nishono, her reactions even to her tend to be very kuudere-ish. She really does resent interruptions and having people chat her up, and she likes even less other people asking her for help.
Minami- A kind-hearted witch who ends up serving as Haruhiko's assistant homeroom teacher. Her gentle manner and inability to handle sexual jokes hide a surprisingly sharp mind. She warns the most strongly of the witches about running if they meet her during Lunchtime, and she can be made to blush easily by Haruhiko's stare or oddly suave words (since he never talks that way to anyone else).
The Paths
Fuyu
Fuyu's path begins with the protagonist, Haruhiko, gradually gaining understanding of her as an individual, pulling out the emotions she cut away to allow herself to survive. Fuyu's transformation from what amounts to a living doll to a warm-hearted and deeply loving (almost motherly) woman is one of my favorite parts of this game, even aside from the reasonably good battle scenes. This path is highly emotional, in part because her wish is so basic that in any sane world it would have been possible to grant without being dragged into Hoshikage Gakuen. I spent the last thirty minutes solid crying.
Natsuno
This is becoming almost a theme for this VN, but I spent most of the last part of this VN in or on the verge of tears. Seeing Natsuno evolve from a true innocent into someone who understands at least something of how actions have consequences was interesting... and the relationship between her and the protagonist is gentle and beautiful. Sadly, I can't go into details, because that would spoil the path... but it ends on a somewhat bittersweet note (the bad ending is sort of sexy).
Avril
Avril's path, while having a some dramatic moments at the beginning, is mostly a gentle one. Like the previous two paths, this path was about the heroine's personal growth and her achieving a personal salvation that wasn't possible on her own world, a world plagued by endless hordes of monsters. Like Natsuno's path, the road to the ending is full of love, joy, and salvation... even for the witches. The ending, true to form, is bittersweet. I also recommend that people play this path third, regardless of the order you played Natsuno and Fuyu's paths, because the after scene is too revealing about what lies behind the scenes of the stage they are acting upon.
Aki
Of course, Aki's path is the final path, revealing everything that lies behind the curtain (as opposed to merely hinting or giving you bits and pieces, like the others). You find out what precisely the 'witches' are and the how and why of Hoshikage Gakuen's existence and purpose. However, like all the others, it begins with opening the heroine's heart to the protagonist... but in the process, you also learn about the hidden aspects of Shiki Haruhiko's own presence in the school. This path has a happy ending, and it also shows ending parts for the other three heroines that tell you what happened to them 'afterward', leaving you satisfied as to their fates.
Conclusion
As I always thought, I definitely underestimated this VN due to my situation at the time I originally read it in 2013 (I already updated my rating of it on vndb). Though I knew most of the important details (remembered them), I still laughed, cried, and enjoyed the process of figuring out the school with them. One thing that I didn't mention above is the degree to which the paths reveal individual witches' fundamental humanity, which periodically switches to the monstrous shell they wear during 'Lunchtime'. I should note that the Bad Endings for Natsuno and Aki are worth watching, simply because the endings are in the best tradition of such endings.
Overall, I can honestly state this game is a kamige. It has everything, good music, good visuals, an excellent plot, near-perfect pacing, and great characters. The stylistic choices in the writing at certain points were a true work of art, and I can honestly recommend this game to anyone who wants a good cry.
First, this was written partially by Morima Marimo, one of Light and Campus's writers who specializes in naki-scenes and SOL. Marimo has always sort of stood in the shadows of the other Light writers, but in terms of multi-genre versatility, he (she?) is worlds above the other writers employed by Light.
This game is one of the few 'ladder-style' story structure games that haven't driven me into a rage. The simple reason is that the main story is more interesting than the little side trips into heroine-land. This is surprisingly rare in this type of game, where many games using the ladder-style tend to accidentally make a side-story or character more interesting than the main or do it inconsistently. The other reason, obviously, is that it is also a fetish-game. This game has twelve mimikko (kemomimi, animal-ear) heroines, more than enough for any of us who love this type of thing. I can forgive a lot of things for a set of cat ears.
The story focuses on the protagonist, Akinari, who can speak to animals, a skill that has led to him being somewhat isolated from most of his peers, with rare exceptions. At the same time, it is also the story of the anthropomorphized 'etogami' (the twelve animals of the zodiac) who are suddenly thrust into his life as family.
Akinari is an altruist. He gives out love to those around him (and no, not that kind, though accidents happen, lol) without reserve, and he has the strength of personality to empathize with just about anyone, given a reason.
This story is something of a nakige, told in fourteen chapters (common routes>12 zodiac heroine arcs>true arc). Except for the common route, which took me about six to seven hours to complete, each individual chapter, if you don't choose to read the zodiac girls' romance paths, took between one and a half to two hours, depending on the heroine. Most of the heroines have a cathartic moment (exception is Takami), and the last arc is heavy on the catharsis, as you discover just why the 12 etogami suddenly ended up gathered in Tenbu (the name of the town).
If you like cry-worthy back-stories and stories about affection beyond reincarnation, this is a great VN to read. However, those who want more extensive heroine paths will inevitably be disappointed, because the main story is the focus of the game. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and not just because they somehow managed to create such a wide variety of heroines without any real overlaps in personality.
