So I finished IroSekai and what I felt on it kind of reminded me of something else I wrote about but ended up shelving. Basically it was on how I score stuff and a subsection was how generally people give a more favorable score if it ends well even if the percentage of what’s good is identical to a movie with a poor second half. It’s more of a talk about people ignoring the faults for the high they’re feeling and giving something a 10 when it doesn’t deserve it kind of thing.
Anyways, the title is equal parts great and generic. The saving grace is that everything has a pointer that explains why x and y are that way. I get that just because there’s an explanation for it, crap is still crap. But it softens the blow of what was happening, what they went with makes sense with the proper context. A lot of my favorite titles kind of handle it pretty well. It’s just until you get there, those sections are generic and to me, massively boring. The school section, the beach section, the eating section.
If the current plot isn’t covering the the alternate worlds and their characters or the two main characters Yuuma and Shinku; Then I was just bored. This one will cutoff pretty early for the spoilers because most of everything I liked was in the finale. Funny enough the sections are pretty segmented this time around but I’ll go over the characters first.
There’s Kana, you meet her pretty early on when she jumps off the lighthouse. That’s not a spoiler btw, it’s in the synopsis. She’s kind of an airhead and wants to be the protagonist’s wife. She wears some maid attire and honestly she’s kind of annoying to me but I feel like a huge chunk of that is that I just don’t like her voice. Her VA was actually in a lot of titles I did like, sometimes even my favorite character in the title but Kana just doesn’t do it for me. She has a lot of good scenes but she was rarely the main focus in a huge majority of them, she’s just there.
Mio is the childhood friend, she’s the classic tsun and her route works. I feel like there’s also going to be a subset of people that disliked how it ended but I liked it a lot. Though it kind of fucks up the flow a bit but I’ll get to that in the spoilers.
Kyou’s another airhead and also a neet. She spends most of her time playing all types of games.
Tsukasa is yet another airhead that’s usually broke and is working here and there to make some money. She’s the most naive of the bunch and more like a mascot than anything else.
There’s a couple of other characters but the remaining important characters are the two leads Yuuma, Shinku and Suzu who’s basically Yuuma’s boss. It’s always apparent that she’s a cut above the rest and knows more than what she leads on but her lazy and prankster nature throws off Yuuma.
Yuuma has horrible memory and forgets anything he deems not important. So anything he deems important has to be written in his book. The book contains Shinku who can’t be perceived by anyone except Yuuma. With her help, Yuuma can heal anybody instantly in trade of some of his memories. It’s a deus ex machina but it’s kept under control considering since it can’t do anything outrageous like reviving people from the dead.
They call themselves liberators and the gist is that randomly people gets messaged by god and they vanish soon after. So they try to save those people if the victims ask them to. Unfortunately, this is kind of put to the side more often than not throughout the vn but it’s always the highlights when they get back to it. If you ever read Tokyo Babel, then it’s something like that. Where the fights are the highlights and the interim of SoL scenes were either fine or just fucked up the pacing.
Anyways with that out of the way, the routes are segmented weirdly. Kana’s route is so long that it can fit Mio,Kyou and Tsukasa inside. And that’s mainly because a good chunk of that is handling other characters that’re used as similarities for her stuff. She’s the only one that gets this treatment. But that’s not to say her route is stupidly long, it’s that Kyou and Tsukasa felt like it took around two or three hours each. Mio maybe around 5 or 6. And there’s actually an explanation on why that is but that’ll be in the spoilers.
Kana is what’s considered the first route. Mio and Kyou reflect back onto Kana’s route but you could technically do Mio’s first depending if you prefer to have some leading questions or just have references. Technically there’s a tiny bit with Tsukasa in Kyou’s route so you could technically leave Kyou for the end. But in the finale, they confirm on what the path normally is but it could be a little busters type of thing that knows what order you did and structure the lines accordingly.
Anyways, you can say that the common route took 30%, Kana took 15 and the other three took another 15. And that’s basically me saying that the final route is actually pretty fucking large. Up until this point, I was not having a favorable outlook on this vn. It had good moments, it had some bad moments but overall a lot of things feeling standard and honestly that’s worse for me than it being straight out bad. Honestly it felt like it was wasting its time with the characters when they had so many avenues available with the alternate worlds and what Yuuma is trying to do across all of these.
The finale extends every important character, anything that you thought that could be stupid is explained and honestly explained well to the point that you can just shelve the complaints away. The plot is written well, the pacing is great and I don’t think it ever stopped being engaging. It goes through the steps properly, it never felt like anything was dragging on and this is where I can see why the vn is rated highly. It just sucks that I had to wait for that long to get to it.
Overall:
Overall, the vn itself isn’t that long but you have to go through a chunk before hitting what makes the title great. But who knows, if you haven’t read a huge chunk of vns then maybe even the generic parts end up being delightful for you. The music is catchy and the art is pretty. Whilst the op isn’t as well designed as the one from Memoria, it’s still quite fun.
I’m giving the common around a 6 and that’s mostly considering the penultimate chapter and a chapter around Shinku, otherwise it’d be closer to a 5. Anytime it spent time in the alternate worlds or what Yuuma was doing, it became a 7. Kana’s route was fine and I had fun with Mio’s route but the other two were too short to really put much thought into. The finale is pretty much a 9 so as a whole I’m putting it as an 8. Maybe with time and me forgetting about the monotonous parts, it’ll feel like a 9.
Spoilers:
So I’m at the spoilers now and that’ll cover a couple of the routes and the finale. Technically you can do Kana whenever, it won’t affect the pathing all that much. The purpose of putting her first outside of it being the more fleshed out route is because it covers both what’s wrong with her, the purpose on Ayumu and a character called Renya. Renya is Kyou’s brother but also Ren’s dad.
Ayumu is someone that has around the same feel as Yuuma and technically his goal is to save Kana due to Kana taking care of him when they were younger. Except Ayumu was a cat back then. It’s brought back up in Mio’s route but just in the way that’s telling the reader not to worry about Kana because he doesn’t need Yuuma to save her. If you don’t do Kana’s route first, it just feels like something as a pointer that he’s important to Kana’s route and that’s it.
It’s almost at the same level of doing Tsukasa’s route before Kyou just because you learn that the town cares about Tsukasa. It’s surface level stuff that doesn’t really matter. So it’s more that you get more out of your time with Kana because you might be peeved with how short Tsukasa and Kyou’s routes are if you did them first.
Anyways, for awhile I kind of assumed Kana’s voice was fake and it was a way to get endear Yuuma or make him remember who she was. In the sense that it was her voice when she was young and considering what was happening to her, she was mentally kind of stuck due to her condition. And once it was remedied and she got everything she knew and learned back in one go, I thought how she acted and her voice would drop. And I guess how she acted already shifted midway, her voice sadly stayed the same.
In Mio’s route in ended up being that she wasn’t the same person Yuuma knew at the start. A lot of shit happened and this was another Mio from an alternate world. OG Mio’s parents were killed and she took this Mio’s parents. Technically it was a request for a few days and then she just got Shigure to lock down the path to that world so this Mio is screwed. The people here could go to other worlds through this clock in the basement.
The ending happened to be that she was able to go back but some things happened and the clock got screwed up and now she can’t come back. So years pass and eventually Yuuma and Mio can see each other even though they’re not in the same world. This goes back to the initial allegory of the ocean and sky always being close but never joining. It’s like their whole thing. Honestly I quite liked the route. It’s not as short as the next two. It has a couple of things going on and even the SoL stuff was pretty fun. Though I guess a huge part of that was Mio playing an otome but secretly also a kusoge.
I’m skipping what happened in the next two routes and jumping to the finale. The finale is basically a retcon of what was going on so far. It’s just like a different popular title where the sequel just tells you that the protag handled all of the issues even though it doesn’t really make sense with some of them. And that’s pretty much the case here too. It says he saved one of them each year. Starting with Kana and ending with Tsukasa. Ayumu is around in Mio’s route, he’d already be gone by that point if Kana went first. Either way, Mio’s route would fuck it all up because the clock was broken in her route. So any back and forth messaging in Kyou and Tsukasa’s routes wouldn’t work. Not to mention that Mio’s route ends with him waiting years to the point everybody already left the dorm.
It doesn’t really matter, it’s just saying that he resolved all of it. And the premise behind that is because the world is a replica, it’s the colorful world. This was set through a lot of hoops. But the gist of it is Yuuma was the current manager of the library they mention. Where every person becomes a book and then he sits down with the more downtrodden ones and help them make a new story for them. He wanted to know what love was personally, so he schemed around it and got down to earth. This fucked up the system and now people are just vanishing all over the place instead of just once per year. And even then, it was a misconception because these were people that either accomplished their dream or were one of the downtrodden ones.
Anyways, the town is pretty much dead once he gets there. He meets Shinku, who then introduces them to Kana and Mio. Tsukasa, Kyou and Ayumu were already taken. It’s the reasoning why their routes are so short. He just has less background info to fill out their stories, but I’ll get to that in a bit. So the basis is that he now understands that the library is screwy so he’s going back. This is speeding through the plot, it makes more sense in the vn. But Suzu helps him out to create this fake world where he can solve the traumas that the kids have, considering that was also one of Shinku’s wishes.
While on flipside he has to throw away his initial wish since once complete, he’ll go back to the library as a book instead of an entity that can manage it. The idea is that the library holds a lot of crap that power hungry people want. So since he left, the door is wide open. And I felt that was kind of cartoonishly evil and I don’t think that needed to be a thing. All those entities left once he got back but a more practical thing would be that the library has some level of automation to it. It’s just that it’s shit at its job and the thresholds before running an action were too low. So any little event would fire up the steps to take the humans away and that’s what was happening. What they did still works, but it does feel like something that was put there just to explain it away instead of it being integral to the plot.
And I’m finally at the last point, and it’s going back to the short routes. Or rather the idea that anything you thought was weird or dumb has a reason for it.
Why are the routes short? He only knows what Shinku told about them.
Why is Kana so much longer than the rest? Because he spent the most days with her.
Why does he forget everything everyday unless he writes it down? Because he’s been around for countless years and it’s a safety mechanism for his sanity.
Why is Suzu always messing around? It’s kind of some hazing for what Yuuma has done without realizing. She cares about him now but it’s something that she probably won’t drop even though it no longer mattered.
Why does he use his healing powers all the damn time for the most mundane injuries? Seriously, the amount of times he healed Kana was crazy. It’s because he wants to wipe his memories of Shinku, he’s always afraid that he’ll revert back to his original wish of wanting someone to love. And the more he forgets, the easier his decision will be after he resolves the rest of the issues from the rest of the cast. Because getting his own wish was something he refused to do considering how much damage he was causing just from being there. Honestly, I was assuming something alongside the lines of him going back and just taking Shinku to the library after a year.
All in all, I had a lot of fun when the plot revolved around Yuuma or Shinku. Tsukasa and Kyou’s routes could’ve been removed and just reworked to something more involved in the common route to the point it could’ve been arcs. Or just having them have more screentime inside Mio and Kana’s route. Even the cover images only consist of the Shinku, Mio and Kana, lol. I get what they were going for and having nothing for them would just then bring a different subset of people asking why they didn’t get a route.
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