Meteor World Actor: Pretty good but who knows when it’ll finish

So I finished this recently and it’s from the same person that wrote Akatsuki no Goei and you can tell right away. And that’s good and bad thing. He excels at banter and he’s pretty decent at setting a premise and having the world feel at least somewhat alive. He sucks at routes and he sucks at romance. Though really his worst point is he can’t finish a plot to the point you can consider him like a fantasy novelist except each release is pretty sparse in terms of content. There’s also times where a chapter is used to setup something or someone that might not bear fruit or even show up until the next part. I like the concept of one character and it’s mainly the reason why I wrote all of this, but it’ll be by the end of the spoilers.

The main character is called Ruka, he’s a rundown detective in the Seventh Republic, a country that accepts any race after doing the proper paperwork. He’s comical and skirts the protocols to the point he should be fired. He’s good at his job but he’s pretty immature about most things and that overall leads him to work at the 13th department which basically contain all of the problematic personnel. Almost none of them really matter, they’re used more for some banter and/or plot devices in terms of their skills or knowhow.
There’s Claris, the newbie recruit that’s partnered up with Ruka and she’s around for the most part. She’s one of Ruka’s foils alongside Ikuta, the superintendent. She’s also one of the routes but is more used as a window to Ruka’s past and some more exposition for the overall plot that’s going on. And I guess that’s something the scenario writer likes doing, a good chunk of Goei’s cast and the other three heroines in here are used to explore a plot point or a theme but the characters themselves are somewhat throwable. In here, it’s more to cover other races and the methods of other countries though not overly as often. I think the 3rd title will just introduce more characters from the remaining countries. At the same time, there’s enough setup that he could just ignore them and just expand on the races the title already delved into because honestly it’s not a whole lot and I’ll talk about it in the spoilers. Anyways, that’s the gist of the plot, Ruka is a detective and he gets chucked into random investigations, some below his paygrade and others where the whole organization is being mobilized. Whilst that’s happening, there’s a couple of organizations plotting around and Ruka is trying to destroy one of them for years. Throughout the plot he gets some useful pieces/pawns and some useful leads. Some might be dead ends, some might betray him, it’s a typical plot but it’s a standard for the genre.

The routes aren’t treated equally and I’ll get to that in the spoilers but the worst one by far was Chiffon. Part of it is expected since hers starts at least a chapter early. And because there’s such a timespan between this route and the finale, the plot points presented in there can almost be forgotten. Mel’s route isn’t actually all that much better but at least it’s used to tie up an old thread from the main plot.

The banter isn’t as comedic here compared to Goei but the overall writing quality is better. A better way to explain it is that it doesn’t sound like every few lines contains a punch line. The immaturity in Goei can give you more laughs but it makes sense it’s toned down considering Ruka already passed the young adult stage. Even worse considering he started working when he was like 12 or something and has spent more time in the homicide division than being a kid. Honestly it also kind of saves the romance in the way that it’s somewhat realistic. Sometimes it just works out for no reason and sometimes it’s a booty call that eventually becomes a serious thing. Other than that, the porn is a lot better than Goei’s but that’s not saying a whole lot. Mainly it’s kind of repetitive but I remember enjoying listening to the sax while I was doing other stuff.

I don’t really have a favorite character this time around but a lot of them are pretty decent in their respective roles in the plot. I find Ikuta rather comical even though he’s meant to be the straight-laced asshole that’s trying to keep things in check. I also liked Harrelson, his screen time is pretty minimal compared to others but the out of touch father figure is generally pretty funny to me. I guess my favorite would have to be the character that refuses to give his name and pretty much the reasons why I like him are due to potential plot points that might come up or he could just be discarded. Outside of that, I guess it’d be Chiffon just because of on her points of being peppy about having 5 dollars to her name.

The art’s kind of hit or miss but generally on the positive side. Sometimes it’s got everything going for it and usually it’s above average. Sometimes the shading feels off but no one is really going to notice it unless you’re paying attention to it because it still looks good. Other times it’s just kind of whatever and a rare few times where only the subject is given any attention and the background is slapped on which is kind of weird since they actually put a lot of effort in their background when exploring their world.
It has a huge amount of music tracks but realistically it’s going to feel like it only had 10~13 tracks. Part of it is those are the ones that get repeated a lot, some feel like they only get played twice and other tracks sound like an alternate for different tracks. I don’t know what they were going for with the ending theme for the first four routes. Tt doesn’t really fit the mood and it’s to the point where I’d prefer if they played Troublemaker or Starting Shot instead. And a good part of that is while the routes aren’t great and mainly to setup plot points for the main route, the endings are laughably bad. There’s open ended and then there’s ending a random episode of a sitcom.

Overall

Overall I had fun with it. Parts of it felt kind of padded but they’re full of everybody shittalking each other to the point that it didn’t feel bad to go through outside of maybe once or twice. The rating is going to be based on your sense of humor, but considering the plot is a major step up compared to Goei, I’d say the range of it is closer to a 7 or 8 but I’m leaning towards 7. If you hate the humor all together from the start then you might as well skip it and give it a 5 because it’s a strong factor in the experience. The routes are rough and they’re not really hiding it considering the true route contains the important aspects of the plot from all the routes. And that makes Chiffon’s section like 5 minutes long and Mel’s to maybe 30 minutes. I still generally dislike the episodic format considering it just leads multiple scenarios left unfinished just for the final chapter to resolve most of it. I’m giving it a 7, it has enough setup for a decent sequel and the humor is up my alley. Sometimes it feels like Ruka’s foresight is inconsistent, where sometimes he falls for the most basic shit but usually is smart enough that he focuses on the right things that’d only be obvious to the reader.

Spoilers

So I mentioned that the routes aren’t treated equally, and that’s more so on Mell and Chiffon. I’ll go over those and then I’ll get to the guy with no name.
Chiffon doesn’t really have anything going on for the most of the route in terms of plot. The majority of it is about her not being able to stop moving when they’re sleeping. She’s a segitt, so the route was meant to explain them further but it didn’t really go that much further. They’re a lot more resistant to medication and the only way to make her stop moving is to bang and have a child. The only real important aspect of her route is that there’s an organization that’s doing some shady shit in the back and are sending these monsters called Delgas to the Seventh Republic and Chiffon sets off to making a team to combat them. That’s it, it could’ve been 30 minutes inside the main plot.
Mel’s route consists of like 5 days or something and can consist of a few things but who knows if they’re ever coming back to them. The first one is that there’s another race revealed to the readers where they suck the life out of the people around them and it can tell that Ruka isn’t completely human either. The new race just peaces out, there’s not a huge amount of them but they might be brought back up in a sequel. Other than that, another agent was sent to kill off Mell but you no longer see Basil. Daz stays quiet on it, so either Basil keeled over or he joined one of the other organizations and will show up in a sequel. Everything else is mostly porn.

Komachi’s route is actually kind of fine, outside that it’s mostly impossible considering she has the prince charming issue that wouldn’t really break even with the white knight scenario. It really feels like this could be its own chapter compared to the pretty trivial ones from Mell and Chiffon. The whole thing is they found out that one of the big bads revived and they’re trying to figure out why. Going through the whole thing and apparently the big bad made a deal with the cops where they look the other way and he won’t kill them and their loved ones. Except the ending wouldn’t really make a huge amount of sense. He no longer has Komachi as an attachment and the only way to have stopped him is because he just figures that he doesn’t have the resources for it at the moment and is just keeping it in the backburner. Technically you can say that he was ordered by the director to stop but Ruka doesn’t really listen to anybody.

Claris is also pretty much fine, just bits of it were kind of head scratching. So there’s a part where this pixie called Melissa who gets really sick, and the only thing that’ll cure it is this stupidly expensive plant due to it’s rarity. And this can be a callback to Chiffon wasting a shit ton of money on these seeds. And you can make the connection that it’s like, oh shit Ruka lucked out. But it’s not even questioned if maybe she has one of the plants. And the plants were brought up in Chiffon’s route and were also not used there. So either it’s a decently large waiting game on the final episode or it’s trolling me because it already had two decent setups. And the reason why it couldn’t be used is because now Ruka can go to the Elf country to find it over there, just to setup that race for one of the sequels, and that’s pretty cool, just have a two liner of “nah I don’t have that type of plant”. Anyways like I said before, Claris is mainly used to further explore Ruka and it makes sense since they converged paths once before. So it goes through his past when he just first started working and you meet the other three guys that you saw through the story. It also goes through Mushashi, Ruka’s mentor that he mentions here and there. It’s not a huge reveal, it’s kind of expected but it’s still done well and brings up a lot of points that can be covered in the future. And a lot of that can be pointed back to the guy with no name, but there’s really nothing left for Claris. Her route was all frontloaded so really you’re just going to get porn outside of the scene where Ruka decides to trade info with the big bad of her route. And that is mainly to leadup with the following episodes.

So for the guy with no name, dude is just referred as No-Name. He’s technically shown pretty early but gets implemented into the plot around chapter 4 which kind of felt like a filler chapter. Ruka has him onboard for a decent amount of the chapters ahead and most if not all of the routes since his power is technically a sort of time travel. It’s basically him starting a timer and he can pick whatever decisions he wants and rewinds if the outcome was shit. He can get shot and still rewind but it at least gives him some mental damage. Anyways, he wants to work with Ruka and Ruka keeps promising but nothing gets done throughout the whole vn. And that’s both the dumbest and smartest move he can do. The guy is pretty much op with very few weaknesses and he considers Ruka and his assignments fun but said he can just be a criminal if he gets annoyed of waiting that long. If everything works out well, he can be one of the strongest in the force but really would shine in interrogation even though it would be kind of fucked up. But there could be a lot of outcomes. He could be part of the cult, he can be related to Musashi. He can become the 2nd Ruka and that might scare Ruka. Or he could be yet another team on its own and he needs something from the office. And considering his time limit, it’d work best if he’s actually a part of the force.

Overall, that’s what I’m interested in and the comedy is just a bonus. The dude can make a pretty good setup, you just don’t know if he’ll ever finish it or if it’ll land.