Jeanne at the Clock Tower: An iffy start but I ended up liking it

So I mentioned this one in the post about what vns came out in 2021, and how I saw no one really talking about it.
So I checked vndb to see what people thought about it, and there’s only 60 votes on it(when I checked). And it’s probably because they saw the middling score and they didn’t bother.
But my dumbass goes for these because sometimes there’s something there that I like. I’m not going to say you can find an 8 or a 9 when the average is a 5 or a 6. Sure it’s possible on a personal rating, but not on your objective one.
And yeah, this was a 6 but a fun 6, and that’s better than a boring 7. It’s why I have those 6+1/7-1 type of ratings.
And the reason behind the score is that it shares a lot of the problems with something like Trinoline. Half of the soundtrack in Jeanne is fucking amazing, though it’s coupled with a really odd choice for one of the villain’s themes. It honestly breaks the mood when that one shows up.
The art isn’t so generic that I could confuse it with 10 other titles and some of the voice cast is done really well. On the other hand, the backdrops for them leave much to be desired, they’re pretty boring to look at. The protagonist looks oddly familiar to Adol from Ys and there’s a funny story about it but I’ll save it for when I talk about the endings. A good amount of scenes are done well but it has a problem with pacing and it drags here and there. Especially the first couple of sections after the prologue finishes and you’re in the clock tower. The funny thing is that I felt it drag a lot harder during the clock tower sections.
One of the largest issues I’ve had with it is how it’s displayed. It’s written in an adv format but it has a huge emphasis on narration and adv doesn’t do it justice. It just breaks the pacing too much and it’d be better off with the nvl format or a mix of the two. Basically the flow was being cut anytime they weren’t talking and it was another page’s worth of descriptors. An easy example that most people have read is FSN/Tsukihime. Where there’s just lines upon lines of text, it’s just better to have an nvl format for it. There’s also something I can’t really pinpoint with the textbox, I feel like I had to move my eyes more than normally so I made my screen smaller. I don’t think it’ll be a problem for most people.

I mentioned the art before, but something that’s normally off is when porn scenes happen. It’s not even that there’s too many of them, because it’s around 16 out of 100 or so sections; Some of them are pretty lengthy, especially some of them in the beginning. And I’m not even blaming who made the art, but whoever decided to take out mosaics. Those are some weird looking dicks. There’s one track that’s used a lot in these scenes and it’s some pretty generic 70s porn track. Those scenes weren’t meant for you to get hard anyway but I’m not sure if I’d rather have silence or some really low horror ambient. Honestly they could remove most of them, they didn’t really serve a purpose. Some of those also overextend their welcome too.

Anyways, it’s not the most well written plot, it’s generic at points but overall I liked it a lot. So the whole plot is that the main character Roland is a paratrooper unit and he alongside his friend gets isekai’d. They find themselves in a forest and are chased by Edwalda, who’s pretty hot. They supposedly die but Roland wakes up near a clock tower and meets Jeanne. Jeanne doesn’t know shit because all she knows is this secluded location surrounded by forest where you can’t really enter or leave or you die. They figure out the mechanisms to move the tower to try to find Roland’s friend and going back to his own world alongside figuring out who Jeanne really is.
And I think most people would like the vn if they hit one or two boxes. Like you might enjoy it if you find history interesting. Sure it’s not a real rendition of it but I had fun going through it. They also made Edward the black prince into a really hot lady. You could also just be interested in an isekai that puts the main character as a holy knight. Or you’re really into anything that puts some semblance of religion into the game. Like I can’t really pinpoint exactly which is my favorite game but the one that usually pops in first is xenosaga and part of that is because was rife with religion. I can make a whole post of my undying love of Xenosaga but not today. Maybe when I finally finish xenogears. There were scenes in it where it’s not something that’s blowing my mind but I was getting emotional just from the combination of the music and Jeanne’s piety. I’m not even religious but that stuff stays with you if you were made to go.

Characters: Light Spoilers:

So Edwalda is my favorite character. She keeps showing up just to be in Roland’s face. And that’s because he contains something specific in him but it gradually just changes that she’s just kind of into that type and just wants to compete and it’s shown a few times. And then they bring it up that her forte is actually in military tactics so she should be more in the backlines but she says fuck it and is also the strongest vanguard in her group.
Jeanne is the main character but she’s honestly kind of boring until the 2nd half. I liked the other Jeanne way better for kind of the same reasons I liked Edwalda. Where they’re just in your face in a way that’s not annoying.
Gilles is an edgelord but handles it well, then there’s Marie that’s also pretty cool on how they wrote her into the plot in two specific points. Honestly Edwalda, Marie and Tiphaine were probably the highlights outside of some of the endings and maybe two other battles in between.
There’s a lot of antagonists with different degrees of severity and the problem is a lot of them are just kind of boring to read about. Half of them are spoilers but it’s mainly Pierre Cauchon. He takes up a good part of the plot but he’s relatively just boring to go through, even the Templar knight who barely had screentime had better moments than him.

Actual Spoilers:

So here’s where I’m going to talk about the later sections and the ending.
At this point Jeanne and other Jeanne(who is normally just called the Witch) know they’re both part of Jeanne D’ark. Before and after the incident respectively. They’re actually in a land that’s somewhat akin to purgatory. But mainly the ones that reside in there are somewhat attached to Jeanne’s curse when she was getting burnt alive. Roland just got isekai’d there by a specific person that I’ll talk about later. Anyways, Jeanne can absolve their sins and that’s basically her power. And it’s one of those things where a couple of them should just be killed off but she forgives them anyway and that’s part of the religious beliefs in there. Every time she does it, the sins go into her, it’s important for later. Throughout the plot, Edwalda just shows up and impedes them, it’s pretty funny and generally the highlight of the scene. Jeanne and the Witch get captured and now Roland alongside Gille go to the fortress and get them back from Cauchon.
There’s a really good scene with Tiphaine before her part of the story ends in there. Edwalda also shows up but actually helps them out this time around but that was kind of a thing for the last one or two times. Edwalda is just really cool. And then Roland gets invited by Ganelon to serve for Charlemagne. Ganelon is an asshole. Roland agrees to help him out but would only serve Jeanne. But really Charlemagne is an asshole so he tricked Roland to call the forces and these forces just fucked everything up and now Roland and Jeanne are wiping them out. At this point you know Milady is one of the antagonists with no shock by anybody. You also learn that Ganelon is Roland’s old friend Ollivier, again with no shock by anyone. Ollivier kills off Charlemagne and becomes the new king and basically fights Roland with the lance of Longinus to stall for time since Jeanne got captured again. There’s two ways of ending the fight, one being better than other but they finally reconcile their differences. There’s more to it but you can read it yourself. At this point Edwalda and Marie are fighting as well and they killed off each other. And it works but also my two favorite characters just died.
So Jeanne is a semi savior, she’s strapped to the cross and from what I remember what’s sticking her there is the sins that she collected and she herself is still pure. And the reason for that is Milady, or Morgan wants to do some magic and basically birth herself through Jeanne to be the next advancement of the species via removal of original sin. Again there’s different ways of it ending, one of them even having her plan being a success.

Some of the endings

So there’s a decent amount of endings. There’s even one in the middle where if you decide to cheat in a duel, you basically forfeit. Edwalda gets Roland in that ending and is basically a sex slave. There’s one ending where Jeanne commands the lance to stab herself, and because she dies Milday’s control of a few factors goes away and it gives enough time for Roland to impale her. It’s the witch ending, it’s a pretty bad time where Roland becomes the new edgelord. He invades his original world with his powers and also summons basically all the warriors including Ollivier and Edwalda. And honestly, I liked the ending, it’s part of the funny story I was talking about. So I showed it to some of my friends and we’re like, isn’t this Monstrum Nox. And it was basically that Dave Chapelle skit where he joked about Prince using Dave Chapelle’s image as his cd cover and he couldn’t do shit about it. So it was like Falcom saw that and was like, fuck it this is the new game. Because the ending was basically Roland fed up with humanity based on how Jeanne had to die a second time.
And then there’s the Jeanne ending alongside the happy ending. Honestly the happy ending is boring outside of maybe the section where Ollivier and Ondine show up spiritually to congratulate them.
I felt like the normal ending did it a lot better where Roland gets sent off to his own world and his forces find him in the ocean and rescue him. And then time passes until he’s an old man praying to the cross and in his final moments he sees Jeanne again and she grabs him and they’re off.

Overall

So all in all, I had fun with this one. Sure parts of the start kind of drags on, the porn drags on, there’s not a real backlog, it’s basically just jumping back one scene at a time. It’s kind of expensive but I’ve seen it on sale for like 30 and that’ll be worth it. I always have fun when characters like Edwalda show up. I generally have a 50/50 shot with something from liarsoft, and I don’t think the other half is even bad. Most of the ones I’ve tried were great but some are just not for me.