Iwaihime: Visual Novel Review

Note: Video at the bottom of the post

So I read Iwaihime in October for the Halloween spirit of it all. And it’s not bad, depending on your expectations. It’s written by the guy that wrote higurashi and umineko, or Rose Gun Days if you know about that one. If you’re expecting something like that, then you’re not going to like it all that much. If you’re expecting something like Kaleidoscope, then maybe you’ll like it a bit more because while this does seem to have a budget behind it, the plot is more akin to a b rated horror movie. Horror isn’t my thing, but the general campiness from the b rated ones are quite funny.

It’s going to be a short one until the spoiler section, even then this isn’t going to be anywhere near as long as the chaos;child/muramasa/musicus ones.
So there’s nothing to complain about in the art/music or even voice actors. It’s the parts where you can see they dumped money in to. They even gave the main character a voice and that’s pretty rare. Funny enough, I find him to be the weakest of the six even though he’s had the most roles outside of the nurse who’s in a lot of known titles. Though outside of the nurse, the one I could differentiate from was the best friend character, Natsuya. He’s been quite a bit of titles that I’ve read but I always known him as the guy who’s similar to Hiyama, the hype screechy guy from Bleach,Gurren Lagann and Genshiken, pretty sure he did Karen in Scarlet Nexus too. I used to be a pretty big fanboy of his, lol
I’d say the characters themselves are kind of janky for the sake of having their crazy expressions so they put more attention towards lighting and how the clothes crease depending on their posture, it’s pretty topnotch.

The plot itself is the issue. It starts off pretty good, and it’s probably one of the better scenes in the vn itself, maybe top ten. Honestly, I quite liked the first chapter, that in itself could be a movie. It’s not unique but it handles everything well. The protag is just a guy that moved in to a new area and started school, everything is fine but there’s one person everybody ignores. He doesn’t and shit starts to happen and he keeps digging himself deeper in this mess. Each chapter introduces or goes deeper into a specific character and then eventually it culminates to the finale, or maybe not.

I’ll be going to spoilers but I’ll just handle the overall rating now now. It might contain some small spoilers but they’d only spoil if you knew what was going on anyway. So the first chapter is quite good, the next chapter is somewhat of a reset but basically how everything begins stays the same, it’s just diverging enough to make it further than before, just like higurashi. The problem is that eventually after the fourth or fifth chapter, none of it makes any sense, it just can’t function the way it’s trying. Ryu7 has this problem where he doesn’t know where to stop, and I think most people have that problem. I wouldn’t even blame him, it should be the editor to slap those ideas out and give a hard stop.
I would give this an 8 as a campy horror flick with some strong scenes, but it eventually goes down to a 7. And when I read the dlc for the remaining plot, I dropped it down to a 6. Each of the chapters were fine if you look at them standalone. It’s when you have to group them and finish the plot without some weird continuity issues. Riria’s chapter was probably favorite whilst Tsubakiko is probably my least, if you exclude the dlc.
One cool thing that I liked was that the history behind it was called Noroihime and made it into Iwaihime to lighten up the town’s history to get more tourists. Thus further throwing all the evil shit further into the background while the sacrifices keep on piling up more suffering throughout their lives.

Spoiler section(Also includes the dlc)

So I mentioned it before that each chapter resets itself slightly. And that’s simply because the worlds gets hit by a calamity from the curse. This actually gets explained away but not really in the dlc. The first 4 chapters are only half done, letting it be fully developed by the upcoming chapters. Like the chapter with the past goes with the first chapter, though that one doesn’t finish until the end. I forgot but I’m pretty sure the protag fails again in saving her and the calamity happens again. The other 3 can be taken in any order, and it’s because the hauntings themselves are based on their traumas. I find that it’s probably better doing Tsubakiko last, the other two can be done in whatever order but I did them how the chapters beforehand were dealt. Honestly I don’t know why they gave you the choice, you have to do them all and you could make everything more consistent if you took it away. And that’s because each of them have their own mini end where the girl just kisses the main protag, these scenes are canon. That also means Natsuya fell for the same trick three times in a row. And each one is always surprised in these three scenes, it’s the first part that doesn’t make much sense.

So now they’re all ok, the protag finally broke the bell in a pretty cool scene but he ends up dying. The deer god gives the girl one wish but he can’t revive someone, they’ll just be alive momentarily and die again. But somehow he can create an alternate universe where the main girl 1000 years in the past gets saved. I feel like that’s a lot harder to do. They get saved and the town remained cursed but after many years of hardwork, the curse is lifted and now they also get a wish. So they ask to make the girl from the future find some happiness. So they go back in the future and revives the protag. Now it’s summer vacation and do a lot of comical shit with some SoL in there and that kind of ruins a lot of nuance going on. Imagine if there was an extra 10 minutes of Terminator 2 and it’s just them going to play volley ball. It was funny and all, but none of this needed to happen. And a lot of it is the four girls trying to get the protag’s attention. A couple of good scenes happen but he ends up dead anyway since it really was a momentary thing but she got her feelings reciprocated. But the nurse did some fuckery so the girls are kind of spiritually intune again so the cast can see the protag whenever they want alongside the nurse. But doesn’t that lead them to getting normal hauntings again? Sure it’s never to the same extreme since they cut their traumas by the root but I imagine you can get random ones now.

And now to the dlc. I don’t even know when this is even placed, lol. They’re all suffering from the hauntings so you can assume it’s somewhere around chapter 5 or 6 since the nurse knows the protag has an alleviating effect on them. But by the end, it’s stated that they already took care of at least the first 3 but I’m pretty sure it’s all 4 so it’d be in the summer vacation chapter. But at that point they were already cured. So how is this working? And the funniest shit is now the deer that were continuing the curse were also being cursed and the new big bad is Orochi, who gets shit on in a few minutes. So was any of this necessary, no not really. Sure you get to know what’s up with the nurse, but it’s not like you needed it to understand the main plot. It’s just placed really weirdly and would probably be better off if this was handled without the protag showing up, so it could actually fit in in any of these chapters before the protag handled it.