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Saku Saku Route Quality


Akshay

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Alright So I just finished playing konami's route

Its baisically 5 hours of justifying inscest. I actually don't mind incest in VN's at all, but spending the entire route trying to justify, push the theme that true love makes everything ok is so irritating. No real development, rushed characters, no plot movement at all... 6/10 if I'm being generous.

I pretty much think it's garbage. So my question is, what can I expect from the other routes. Are they worth playing? Is there a significant increase in quality? Cause I am nearly at the point where I will drop the game. 

Please do not include spoilers for any routes except Konami's

Edit: So I ended up continuing, and finished Mio's route. I mean it had a couple decent moments,but the scenes that were supposed to be emotionally moving (reason that she got her phobia), actually made me cringe. It was that stupid. And the ending was definitely cringe worthy.  It would have been better if they just had the slice of lifey moments and then trailed off.. They actually ruined the route by trying to add some semblance of plot.

Edit 2 : Finished yuri's route. While parts of it seem to have been written just to give tina a reason to leave, it was at the very least decent.

So far I feel that, this is an ordinary slice-of-lifey moege. Nothing wrong with that. In fact if they just had fun time together, dated and then ended it I would have been fine with that. By trying to push a somwhat "complex" plot into it made the routes feel kind of unnatural and might have reduced the quality.

Edited by Akshay
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I haven't gotten around to actually starting it up yet so I can't say much but I will say that it seems like you should probably avoid incest routes in their entirety as that same plot seems to be the premise for at least 90% of other imouto routes from the vns that I've read at least, most of them also having the same shortcomings.

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I've played Yuri, Mio, Ann and Tina.

Yuri: too long to me. At first very entertaining, in the middle boring, and in the last hour rises up a bit but not too much. Hanako makes it a bit more fun due to her personality.

Mio: My favourite route this far. The androphobia plot was really moving to me, I think the writter (and of course the translation team) was very capable of transmiting the sorrow of the MC when being unable to comfort Mio when she was crying, or whenever he felt the need of caressing her.

Ann: It could've been worse. I usually like the mysticism behind shinigamis and stuff, but here I expected at least a comfrontation between Ere and Hyberion, but that never came. Also, I didn't like that sudden "Ok, I've lived enough, now's your turn to have some joy" decision at all. I think there could've been more ways to work out that aspect.

Tina: I expected this to be more like a true route, with a deeper backgroud story of the MC and his family but it didn't turn out that way. Needless to say that  I expect Konami's route to dig into this aspect now.

And the common route was very enjoyable. 

Edited by Benji Price
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It seems so haha

Although my opinion it's only based in the fact I like Nakige (if i'm not wrong that's the correct term). If we take an objective point of view, the fight between Mio and the MC was pretty bad, and her throwing herself to save him the same. I would've liked a better inflexion point in the story (maybe jealousy to the other women that can be touched by the MC without problems, or maybe her losing confidence about recovering from her condition due to somebody elses experience, I just don't know) , but yet it offered me a better plot than the others, that's all.

Still, even tough I'm normally reluctant to brother love stories, maybe Konami's route can offer me the family background I expected from Tina's route. Won't know untill next week.

 

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dunno, i thought the premise would be far more interesting but the common route was kinda dumb after a promising start

 

halfway through Yuri's route, its better than common, I prefer girls like Ann but she annoys me so ignoring her for now lul

i'm still pissed no sensei/step-mother route :kosame:      :pyaa:

Edited by Freestyle80
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I don't have anything to do with this game for the moment, but as for the incest... I've only read a couple of incest routes and they were all terrible. Crazy drama turned into bad romance and always this thrill about blood relationship or not. So I really would shrug at the incest route being bad because I really think that's the trend.

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6 hours ago, Freestyle80 said:

dunno, i thought the premise would be far more interesting but the common route was kinda dumb after a promising start

 

halfway through Yuri's route, its better than common, I prefer girls like Ann but she annoys me so ignoring her for now lul

i'm still pissed no sensei/step-mother route :kosame:      :pyaa:

Same here... or at least a shared route between her and the nurse :wafuu:

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On 11/10/2017 at 5:01 AM, Freestyle80 said:

i'm still pissed no sensei/step-mother route :kosame:      :pyaa:

Seconded (I wanted both the step mother and the nurse), I am hoping for a proper route for them in a fandisk some day =(. I swear there is not alot of love for older sister type romances

Edited by FinalCloud
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I'm not sure if there's any major differences in the writing style between the Denpasoft release and the original fantl - but having read the fantl, I actually liked Konomi's route. It's a rare thing for incest in a VN to be treated as an actual taboo - it gave it some interesting weight. The development and plot was about coming to terms with the feelings, and facing the societal bias (and the consequences) regarding the taboo itself - pretty heavy stuff tbh. "Pure love making everything all right" Wasn't really the end message I got from it, I got "there will always be adversity." And it didn't exactly end "happily ever after" - there was no real way to know what their future holds (again, based on my experience with the fantl).

And even it it did, what's so irritating about the notion of "pure love should make everything all right"? John Lennon himself said "all we need is love". People all around the globe could learn a lot from such an outlook - and as someone with "many" years and hardships under my belt, I can truly admire such a unjaded belief/desire. :sachi:

But what can I say? Cynicism's bitter weight tends to get heavier as the years add up on some old farts like me - it's more enjoyable to see sappy ideals like that from time to time. :makina: 

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On 10/16/2017 at 9:54 AM, Suzu Fanatic said:

I'm not sure if there's any major differences in the writing style between the Denpasoft release and the original fantl - but having read the fantl, I actually liked Konomi's route. It's a rare thing for incest in a VN to be treated as an actual taboo - it gave it some interesting weight. The development and plot was about coming to terms with the feelings, and facing the societal bias (and the consequences) regarding the taboo itself - pretty heavy stuff tbh. "Pure love making everything all right" Wasn't really the end message I got from it, I got "there will always be adversity." And it didn't exactly end "happily ever after" - there was no real way to know what their future holds (again, based on my experience with the fantl).

And even it it did, what's so irritating about the notion of "pure love should make everything all right"? John Lennon himself said "all we need is love". People all around the globe could learn a lot from such an outlook - and as someone with "many" years and hardships under my belt, I can truly admire such a unjaded belief/desire. :sachi:

But what can I say? Cynicism's bitter weight tends to get heavier as the years add up on some old farts like me - it's more enjoyable to see sappy ideals like that from time to time. :makina: 

Its not that they treated incest as taboo. But that point was bluntly repeated over the course of 5 hours. Further they didn't actually face any taboo's from society, mainly just from his mom (who married a guy 30 years her senior) and the nurse.

As for character depth, take characters from VN's such as fate, ef, or grisaia and you will be able to analyse them deeply in several ways. They are deep multi-faceted characters.

Konami's entire depth is that she loved her dad, which was then passed on to her brother. And she teases him. Thats literally it. [Read - She has as much depth as a brick] Not very good for a 5+ hour route at all. If you want to see a much more realistic VN that gives you "there will always be adversity", check out ef.

As for "pure love makes everything all right", it's not that it's a bad thing per say, but it just seems to be used as a justification for everything nowadays. It would have been much more interesting if the public judged them harshly, they were forced to break up, yet they stayed together despite the scorn they received.

Further, this kind of open ending is one of my biggest pet peeves for VN's (though this is a personal thing, maybe not an actual flaw).

Unlike an anime, which you finish in a few hours, a VN is a large time investment where you dedicatedly follow the path of a character. An open ending is the easy way out when you don't want to write a harsh ending so you just leave it up to the reader. 

Further, characters are there but unused, such as Tina, in other routes pointless events are created literally so that she has some meagre purpose. In this aspect VN's like Majikoi, with an unbelievably varied and deep cast is far superior.

I actually liked konami in every route that wasn't hers. Its just that the writing made me feel they had some idea for a plot, but wanted to make it several hours long so repeated the same thing (the taboo relationship) for several hours, and then (even though by then you may have stopped caring) leave it with an open ending that tells you nothing, but "let's see what the future brings us" (seriously cheap shit)

 

 

Edited by Akshay
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