So I finished Aoi Tori and I wasn’t really a fan of it. And part of it is dependent on your mindset, or rather your perspective of what the title is going for. For the longest while, I was going with a different title of just Max Horny. And that’s kind of a joke from the title I gave for Amatsutsumi where I felt like it was having an identity crisis of whether to focus on plot or fanservice. By the second half, I wanted to go with something along the lines of “the ff13 of purplesoft” due to the similarities of it dragging quite a bit until you hit a point where it’s all smooth sailing from here on out. But I’ll back to that point later on.
The Reference
Aoi Tori, just by it’s name is a reference to The Blue Bird. It’s an old play about two kids trying to find a really blue bird to help out this other sick kid. I read through it during Sayo’s route and it was still quite fun, you can go through it pretty quickly. The kids journey through multiple I guess what you’d call planes of existence to try and find it. There’s a theme going for it, it ends with leaving it open ended to have the audience think about it on their own and it’s one of those things I’m skipping over because you might want to read it yourself or skip it entirely until after you finished the vn. It was a weird experience for me because I have no recollection of reading it before but I did know parts of it. I thought maybe the library staff played it when I was a kid. But it ended up being that I watched the movie with Shirley Temple.
Anyways, you don’t really need to know about it mainly because the characters themselves go over the important parts of it in the final route. Anything of importance would be covered and you can have fun retroactively piecing some of the parts together. So it’s more of preference if you want to know when you start or near the end but it still wouldn’t ruin the vn itself if it went over nothing. There’s a couple of vn titles that kind of go through the same idea and overall you never really need to know the source material to enjoy the vn. Some of them can even end up spoiling you on some reveals that would’ve been handled later on.
The Premise: Plot or Nukige
So now I’ll be talking about the premise, or rather what you could gleam from the description. Sure you can go in blind and that’s its own thing I’ll mention later. You look at vndb or any of the stores and you find two parts in the description that I found more valuable
He has the power to bring bliss to those he touches, and that ability is enhanced if the contact is sexual in nature. Never once has he set foot outside the academy grounds, which protect him from demons lusting after him. But the girls of this academy come to him, believing he’s their guardian angel, and he obliges.
Which makes it sounds like a nukige. And the second part
For he is burdened by the death of a girl, which strengthened his resolve to make others happy.
This constant mix of the holy and the sinful has him just barely holding onto his sanity.
Which makes it sound like it’ll be an interesting psychological thriller. It’s also the reason why I was interested in it to begin with.
So what actually happens in the first minute, it’s an hscene, lol. On the other hand, it ended quite fast and I’m thinking, hey these aren’t going to be so bad. Only it was a trap because that scene wasn’t even counted as an hscene. The actual hscene happens almost immediately afterwards, and it has like 70 iterations of 3 cg. This scene is fucking long, but it’s basically the same length if you read Amatsutsumi. The following sections don’t even cover the 2nd part of the description I talked about, it covers the third part that’s about Mary. She’s one of the leads and her thing is that she’s a vampire. Now I forgot to mention, some parts are harder to go around without any spoilers but anything I’m covering that’s specific happens in the first few hours anyway.
This beginning section with Mary really got me going there. Sure the set piece in Amatsutsumi had a lot more impact going for it but it’s also like three times longer too. Basically, it was a great way to start the vn, it shows that they know what they’re doing and they already got at least their initial theme setup with Mary. It’s just that they’re also really fucking horny. Throughout the plot, there’s 16 hscenes and then another 9 extra hscenes. One which felt like it lasted half a route, it was basically a joke where it felt like they were aware that the title felt like a nukige at times. Half of these scenes go on forever, to the point where some routes felt like only 1/3 of the length of the route was actual plot but I’ll go through that in the routes section.
Honestly, the two extras that were more like jokes are just randomly unlocked. I guess they get released with whatever route you pick first, but I chose to go with the teacher who had nothing to do with either of the two extras. Especially one where I think that character talked one line throughout the whole route.
In the end, this title is closer to a nukige until the last route, where it still has bunch of hscenes but the plot is consistently in the front instead of the last few sections. There’s nothing wrong with the hscenes, the art is great and some of them are tied to the plot itself whilst others target what the character is going through. It’s just that they’re really long. Like the title itself feels maybe around 15 hours if you took out all of the hscenes. The vndb average is around 28 so I guess a normal range would be like 20~25 hours.
The first three routes
By the end of common, you have one choice that’ll send you to one of the 3 routes. It’s mainly about Mary having a chance to write a play and she wants the MC to choose the female lead to help him fall in love with somebody. She thinks it might counteract with his powers but it’s more so wishful thinking.
By now you understand that the main character has the power to suck up negative emotions, I think it comes up immediately. I already mentioned Mary and that her part of the common route is great. The problem is at the same time he meets Mary, he also gets acquainted with a devil through his phone. I’m skipping a few steps because it’s not important here but basically the main protag is a big deal and now she’s devising shit in the back to get him to her side. Mary is too much of a positive influence so the devil brings in her own piece to sway him back, Sayo. Sayo is the MC’s twin sister, they have similar powers but his stronger. Their hscene also happens almost immediately and it’s another really LONG one.
There’s this whole theme of trying to find their own happiness alongside the danger of just giving up and throwing it all away. It’s a reference back to the blue bird and all that. So I went through the order of the teacher Risa, Mary and then Sayo because it felt like the proper order. I lucked out and it did feel like it was but honestly I left Sayo for last because I liked her character.
I guess this is the best time to mention that each route kind of invests the first three of four sections about the play. The theatre aspect is lackluster, it’s honestly probably the worst part of the vn in terms of quality. Sure the hscenes are horrendously long but I can understand that there’s a fanbase for it and it’s really well done so they’re happy. But the theatre aspect was just too bland and the writing felt like someone that wanted to write about a casino heist but then had to read up on all of the card games. Another point to the play is to reference back to a couple parts of the original play. Where near the end of the route, almost every heroine goes “fuck your bittersweet ending, I don’t care if it makes the play better. I want things to work out for me”.
Anyways, Risa’s route sucks ass and is completely irrelevant. You could even remove these two characters and basically nothing would change in the true route. They even had a setup that could’ve been used because basically the idea was that she raped the guy it was mainly glossed over. It’s even joked about later on where a character is asking what was even the point on this route. And the devil is basically doing the eto bleh meme and says it’s fun once in awhile. Basically, this was the closest thing to a nukige title in here. Honestly I was probably more interested when I read Biman, which was a nukige title.
The route was written by Ono who wrote a couple of things but I’m a huge fan of his latest work Cyanotype. I think I talked about it before where I look at his work and he’s constantly getting better but this is apparently the exception. But it does feel like they just asked him to do whatever like how Maeda’s routes in Kanon were just kind of random because the conversation about what the plot about was kind of minimal from what I remember from the interview.
Anyways, going towards Mary’s route. It’s pretty middle of the road. There’s nothing wrong with it but anything brought up here is also not really used for the true route. There’s sections near the finale where you think like, ok they’re going to reuse this concept to get one over the devil but it doesn’t happen. It can be used as a pointer back to the original play. But I find Sayo handles that better. The idea is that the two kids find multiple birds and trying to get them or release them causes different reactions to them. Some die, some change color. So I guess the idea here is that it’s using the same idea with different routes. In the end, it’s a decent route. It’s not something I’ll remember and there’s been way better routes in other Purplesoft titles but it’s way better than Risa’s route. Basically, she’s the haha she’s cute route. There’s more to it to juxtapose her personality but that’s also pretty late into her route
Sayo’s route is kind of treated as one of the main routes. Technically, they’re all main routes by the end in a sense but there’s more focus with Sayo. And this time it’s not even a biased take just because I like the character. This route is probably one of the shortest but it’s not faffing around. There’s a lot of cute sections, the drama comes sooner and it ends in a way that leads well to the true route. If anything, the title would’ve been a lot better plot-wise if it only had Sayo and the true route and slap the rest as extra/fandisks. It’d be concise, you’d have impactful moments at a steady pace. Basically, when I mentioned this was like the ff13 of purplesoft, this is what I meant. If you bought the title wanting a decently darkish plot with maybe having the mc having some mental breakdowns; You’ll be disappointed for a long while. Even then, it’s not the greatest.
I’m not going to talk about the true route, it’s something better to be experienced yourself. It’s not like Chrono Clock where the true route actually makes the first branch of routes better so there’s no real reason to talk about it. It’s kind of the main focus of the vn and the references to play start around the 3/4 way point of the route. It’s done well and without it I’d honestly say it’d be better to skip the title all together even though I liked Sayo’s route.
Overall
Overall, the rating you get is dependent on what you wanted from the title. If you expected more of a darkish plot as an undertone for a title that had a lot of hscenes, you’ll be happy. It might even be a 9. The art is great but the audio mixing is kind of messy. I feel like one of the three updates fixed the major issue where the hscenes are way louder than the rest of the vn. But there’s still spots where they play this one track during the sad moments. And the problem is mainly the characters are generally very down or whispering during those scenes and the bgm is randomly loud in comparison to the rest of the title. This happened in Muramasa too and this also happened in a couple of the otome titles that I’ve read.
Anyways, let’s say you came for the plot. Then it’s closer to a 6. I thought maybe I was too harsh on it until I saw I gave Amatsutsumi a 7. And I remember the reasons why and basically I can’t put Aoi Tori at the same score so I’m keeping it as a 6. I am in the middle of remaking my huge ass tier list and ended up splitting between overall, hype and what I had fun with. So in terms of hype, I can see putting this at an 8 or maybe even close to a 9. People have different ideas on how to rate stuff but I’m not a fan of overlooking a large chunk of the title. But in a different way, you can look at what you decide Amatsutsumi was and place it one grade lower.
It’s one of those types where the protag just doesn’t have a strong personality for large parts of the plot. Sure this is actually explained this time around where he sees himself more as a tool due to some trauma back in his past. But just because you have a reason doesn’t make him all that more entertaining. This gets brought up again in the true route and outside of Sayo’s route, it’s probably the only times I found it fun to read. The title could’ve gone in a different direction where the mc loses control of himself more often and that could cover different types of plot points or even different hscenes. But overall it felt like it was still playing it safe when the setting could’ve gone wild with it.
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