How I think Clannad should be played in route order

Honestly, you can play the routes is almost any order and it’d be fine, give or take some confusion.
And what I find to be the correct order is going to be a hassle as it requires to do Nagisa twice(like 95% is skipped since the novel knows you read it already).

Before I go along with that, here’s the normal order most people take(because it’s part of fuwa’s walthrough)
Misae -> Tomoyo -> Yukine -> Ryou -> Kyou -> Kappei -> Sunohara -> Ichinose -> Fuko -> Toshio -> Nagisa+after

This is how I went through it:
Ryou/Kyou->Misae->Yukine->Tomoyo->Sunohara->Kappei->Ichinose->Fuko->Toshio->Nagisa+after.

Which is kind of a weird way to do it.

The remaining after the new order is just explanations of why it’s ordered that way.
So, I’d go with Yukine->Misae->Ryou/Kyou->Kappei->Tomoyo->Fuko->Sunohara->Toshio->Ichinose->Nagisa.

When I say Sunohara, I don’t mean the joke gay ending. It can also be called Mei’s ending or the Sunohara Siblings ending. But Mei is just another catalyst, it’s really about Sunohara and Tomoya.
Ryou is optional, but it’s short and it flows better with Kyou and Kappei’s routes, so do it before those two.
Sunohara should be done before Toshio.
Honestly, I don’t see much with Misae and Tomoyo. It could’ve been any character but most stories don’t have the MC go to the festival so it leads to Tomoyo’s route that gets you the orb.
Ichinose should be played right before Nagisa as it’s good to keep the concepts of her route in mind for After Story.
Yukine and Misae should be played together. It all depends if you want to know the answer and then experience Misae, or experience and then get the answer from Yukine.

Now, there’s another way to see the routes in, but that alludes to my next post so I’ll leave till then.

KaraKara: Short Visual Novel Review

This one will be short, honest. And I feel obliged to say that I put some money into this vn(I think this one was in indiegogo( my name should be in the credits as well), and normally you’d think I’d be biased on it. Except, the novel sucked major balls.

Now, it wasn’t all bad. I could see what the scenario writer was going for, and honestly it’s a decent scenario. Except it’s stupidly short, and what it was going for was referenced maybe three times throughout the novel.
I think the largest issue is simply the tone of the novel in combination with the length. It’s generic and cute, just like Nekopara. And it would be fine if it was just that, a 1-2 hour novel about three people handling their business. However, the scenario is about how the world is dry and that also reflects on how the hearts of the remaining inhabitants are also dry and can’t seem to be reverted. Only to realize that the people around you are slowly nurturing it back to health while you having the same effect on them. Which again, would be fine, if it was longer than 1~2 hours. For example, Rain Marginal kind of focuses on something somber like Karakara was trying to do, but it was around 4 hours, and that’s all it handles. So it’s short, but it tried to do one thing, and did it decently.

Lucia is cute, and a short story of just them handling their store will be decent enough.
Aisia is kind of the dumb one, so you’ll enjoy it if you like that kind of trope. A short story of her and fleshing out her unique skill and if the reason why she has it would be changed(because it’s dumb), it’d be decent enough as well.
I quite like the ost though, especially the Move On track.

In short, it’s really short and the story suffers because of it. I’d give it a D due to wasted potential. I can’t really do the comparison thing on this one as it’s actually pretty low on my list. I enjoyed Nekopara more, but it’s not the same theme. I’d say Lucy, or maybe Planetarian. Sure, they’re not completely voiced and the art isn’t upto par with KaraKara, and it’s only a little longer. But they concentrate on the story. Get Karakara over ‘Love at first sight’ and ‘Discourage Workers’.

Numerical Ratings are mainly a waste of time

Now, this might seem hypocritical, as I place a score on the VNs I talk about(yes, they’re grade based, but you can translate pretty easily to a numerical value). To be honest, I think those are a waste of time as well. It causes more issues than it solves because you have to regulate it with everything else you ever talked about. For example, there are some B+ novel where I would put as B because I thought it wasn’t as good as FSN, something I placed as B+. Now, you could say that’s just a way of saying that FSN should be in the A tier then, but it doesn’t. I don’t feel that it should be an A(mainly due to the fate route). I can talk about that some other time, but the main reason is always, I score it by the whole experience, not just one arc(otherwise KiraKira would be way higher for just one route).

Reviews in general are hard to do, if all reader cares about is a score. A score doesn’t tell a story, it doesn’t illustrate the experience of some act here and there. Even in a no spoiler review, it can grab the reviewer’s emotion somewhere, normally by tone. So just hearing 7/10 doesn’t really help, most people don’t even go under 6 unless it’s near unplayable. The main point is that the numbering system adds no substance. You can have a guy who hates RPGs review an rpg, guess what even if it’s great that person is going to give it low score. Or another way of seeing it as the same person gives it a 7, a decent score, but still hates the genre; Then doesn’t that mean that it deserves to have a better score? Even without those, a person is going to have good and bad days. Sometimes we’re just a little off or just don’t feel like playing X genre. Maybe you want to watch a brainless action movie even if that’s not your thing.

I wrote a lot more about this but honestly not many really care about the examples. I brought up points like accepting a review on madden from a jrpg fan can be rather absurd. Basically, take everything with a grain of salt because it might just be a person who has no enjoyment on playing what he was asked to or maybe a high rating solely because they love a particular series.

In the end, a system that’s based on numbers is pretty useless because the numbers differ from person to person. Which is why I believe the comparison rating model is better overall. For example, DMC3 is normally favored over DMC1. So just saying DMC3 has X pros and cons and is better than DMC1 in several parts can conclude a review that doesn’t require much reading into the guy’s emotions or intentions. This also takes away the problem of having a person with bias. Sure, the guy might hate all jRPGs, but if he says he liked X over Y, it still says that if you(the person that likes jrpgs) liked Y then you’ll probably like X too. At least it’s something there than just a 4/10.
There’s also “the Completionist”‘s way of doing it and basically just have a play/try/finish it rating which I think is also really nice.