Irotoridori no Sekai Review: It’s great but it takes awhile

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.

Slay the Princess: Heart to Nerves

Slay the Princess is an evn, kind of. It kind of depends on how semantic you want to be but I’m putting it in the group. I was writing about it in a different post but the amount I wrote was starting to eclipse the rest. Anyways, it’s an evn but it’s more in the choose your adventure category. I’m not sure if those kind of books still exist, it was kind of a product of its time considering you can just make a game out of it.

The closest example I can give of Slay the Princess is if you mix the witty conversation of the Stanley Parable and the vibes of Baroque. And that’s probably an awful example because I don’t think Baroque was that popular when it came out. But for those who know and had some fun with it, you’re probably going holy shit that’s rad. I think it was first released on the Saturn and it got ported over to the ps1. There was a remake for the ps2 and I think that was ported to the Wii. The vibe was constantly ominous. I only played the ps2 version and apparently the feel of the game in the Saturn was even better. It’s probably some hardware limitation that became a bonus like Silent Hill 1. What was going on in Baroque and what you the player was and how it’d all connect was mostly vague and a good chunk of the fun was trying to figure it all out. Honestly there’s a couple of similar themes going on from that in this one.

I’m skipping the ones that would be considered spoilers but it kind of starts the same. You start with knowing nothing, somebody talks to you, tells you what to do and gives you the means to do it. Due to the nature of the scenery, you already don’t trust them but it’s not like you have any other ideas and it is the nicest thing going on right now. So you go with it for now. Just instead of using the Angelic Rifle to shoot the Absolute God to salvage the world, you use the knife to slay the princess that would destroy the world.

There’s more similarities going on, especially later on but it doesn’t really matter. Maybe I’ll talk about it in the spoilers but then it feels like I’m just gushing over Baroque. The largest difference between them is you actually have someone to talk to and bounce ideas off. He’s the Narrator, and that’s where Stanley Parable comes in. The dialogue is witty, it’s charming and for a decent while, the star of the title. Hell, for some people it remains the star of the show. The vn isn’t linear, there’s around 10 paths you can take. Technically there’s 11And each path has multiple endings and generally have an extra continuation of the plot depending on your choices.

Depending on your choices, you eventually get more voices in your head ala Disco Elysium. They kind of vary, some are great, some are kind if boring. There’s one you always get because he’s the one you start out with. A good chunk of the vn’s enjoyment comes from experimenting around. But my favorite ones are the simp, the contrarian and the opportunist. Though I guess there’s two simps and the best part probably comes when the paranoid shows up. There’s a couple of others, there’s some in there that I still like but those were my favorite. Also, maybe my definition of it is old but the contrarian is a weird one because while he is one, he’s more a clown or a troll. He goes against what the Narrator wants, but only for shits and giggles.

So while it’s kind of a horror game, it’s the type that makes you think. It’s more of a cosmic horror type of thing. There’s a lot of shit going on, but you don’t know any of it. The Narrator is your only source of information yet won’t tell you shit. He dictates and describes what’s around and the actions that you take. He just can’t decide your actions, but once made they won’t stop. Well, that’s generally the case outside of the first day. So basically it’s not the “shit your pants in 1 second” type of horror, it’s pretty tame and you probably scare yourself from all the warnings than what’s actually in the title. Honestly the levity that the voices bring kind of stop any dread from happening. Except for one branch and fair enough, it’s called Nightmare, lol. Even then it’s not all that bad, you still control the pace so nothing really kicks in.

I did the first run blind, and honestly I think I really lucked out with what I got because they were some of my favorite routes after I finished them all. Technically each path would grant you a couple of different lines each in the finale, but I didn’t go that far because I think each path has their own delineation. So I did two full runs and then a lot where I’d reset after clearing one of the paths. I went through Razor, Damsel, Specter, Witch and ended with Nightmare. I didn’t check around but Nightmare and Witch are probably the two of the better paths. Beast, Adversary and Tower were all kind of interesting but it didn’t hit the same highs as Witch or Nightmare. Beast actually hints at a few things on what’s happening. Technically all of the routes hint on what the princess actually is, just that Beast hints at a certain aspect of it better. Though by guessing on what the princess actually is can lead you to what the main character represents too.

There’s a couple of endings depending on your choices on the finale. It feels like most of the dialogue options aren’t necessary at all and it’s more of extra flavor. There’s also a couple of dialogue trees before this that you can’t finish in one run. So you either have to savescum or do another run, it explains what’s really happening and then the finale is like the confrontation of ideals. It’s all good fun but it’d be nice if there were fail states in there where you just fuck up. I’ll talk about some of the endings in the spoilers.

Overall

Overall, it’s well written and it has a lot of charm to it. It’d be a lot less effective if the narrator and the voices around you didn’t have any audio. I’ve talked about it before but it’s one of those things where I’d rather a vn cut out a route to get the budget for the main character. Anyways, the routes are fun and the princess has one voice actress that changes her tone depending on which branch you’re on. It works, it’s just that I find the Narrator more compelling. It’s also more that I enjoy those types of archetypes more.

It takes maybe around 7 hours to finish all of the paths, maybe up to 9~10 hours if you want to hit each of the path’s lines in the finale if you’re super into that but I wouldn’t find it worth it. Your first rotation is compelling enough that you could finish it in one sitting, and that’s kind of great considering my ass gets distracted all the time.

There’s a couple of other things but I’ll go through it in the spoilers. I’d give this around a 9 in terms of tone and writing, but more like an 8 in terms of what I’m looking for. It’s not a title for its plot, but a title about its ideas. And it’s cool, but it’s also not something I’ll probably remember in a year. The easiest way I can explain it is this was more of an experience than a traditional A to B plot. It’s refreshing but I’m not going to stay here. Compare it to being a metal fan and then you listen to Nanowar of Steel. Some of their tracks Norwegian Reggaeton just hits different, it’s funny and refreshing but you’ll go back to Iron Maiden tomorrow.

They are doing a large update eventually and I’ll probably pick it back up when they do. Maybe they’ll expand upon it a little bit here and there and give some more love to some of the paths where I felt like it ended kind of abruptly. The funny thing is when you get it, all those abrupt endings also makes sense in context. It’s one of those weird things where it’s a fine line between adding enough and adding or changing too much that will eventually hurt the experience.

Future Edit

After I wrote this, the devs forked part of what was going to be the pristine edition. It’s mainly additions to the finale and they’re all rather cool. There’s transitions for each of the paths you took and there’s a decent chunk of more dialogue happening. It still feels like it’s two walls just talking to each other. Basically, the amalgamation of the paths you took don’t really seem to change their tone towards the protag. When it’s the specific character during the interims, then you see your choices take into effect.

Some are angry at you, some forgive you and some are happy to talk to you. But as a whole, it’s still the same conversation with the main. As an example, I did a full run of me choosing the paths of being a total asshole and another where I overall got good paths and nothing changed. Which is weird because if you pick one good and one bad, by the end of the second, there is a conversation about the contradictions between them. Or if you’re going full aggro, there’s a conversation on why she’s not super pissed off and that he doesn’t want to keep doing it. But for the finale, that’s just kind of not there.

There’s also more dialogue options during the last phase where you have your last chat with the princess. The scene was already great so it didn’t improve it by much but it was still really nice. Though I guess I’m wondering if there’s extra changes if you did a full aggro run and a good guy run and see if there’s a larger contrast than before. It took a “yeah we were both toxic” approach.

Spoilers

So most of this is just talking about a couple of paths, some endings and I guess to the two main characters. The voice of the hero is always with you because that’s the character for the first route. It’s funny that he shows up if you decide to troll instead and now you have the hero and the contrarian in there. This is actually a condition for a set of different endings because everything is getting fragmented and you get a mesh of 3 types of princesses in one. I think it’s called the stranger.

The princess and the main character are basically gods. They were technically one being split into two. The Narrator is the one that artificially made him, so it’s a man-made god. The princess is the shifting mound, which just means change. Whilst the protag is the long quiet, which is just permanence. Technically you can say he indirectly has the power of perception. From what I can tell, it’s just the princess changing to what he perceives things as. It’s the reason why she changes her forms depending on your actions. If you go in without the knife, thinking she isn’t a threat, then overall she’s not a threat. But if you think she might have a hidden knife, then out of nowhere she has a knife. Or if you shit your pants and run back up the stairs to lock her down there, she becomes the nightmare.

So let’s say she randomly blows up while he’s asleep. And he goes, “oh yeah that tree is a dragon”, it’d stay as a tree. It’d only take effect if she’s still active. It’s the reason why the Narrator never gives any info. All info will influence what he thinks and changes how he perceives what’s happening. So if really just wanted her route, he could’ve just said that the princess was dead, you go “oh ok” and the story would be over. Technically if you avoid the cabin, she eventually comes to you and tell you what to do. But if he initially perceives her as dead, then maybe that wouldn’t be possible.

Either way, it’s why the adversary version doesn’t die, because “Stubborn” thinks she can’t die. And because she revives, “Stubborn” thinks the protag will also keep reviving for this endless fight. And to the dismay of the Narrator, the protag does revive and keeps duking it out. I don’t think the protag can change, his physicality can only be reverted back to its origin. So he can’t become a beast like the princess, but he should be able to shrink her ass back down if Stubborn would die. So again, the Narrator doesn’t say shit because he knows these are the things that would happen. If the protag would only get the “Cold” persona, he’d always win.

They’re always gravitating towards each other because they used to be one being. That’s kind of what the beast path is about and it’ll be your best bet to understand what’s happening before shit hits the fan. But it’s generally a toxic environment because their natures are opposite of each other. It’s not always the case, but it is for the majority, it’s pretty rare for them to have mutual understanding until the end of their path or the finale.

The finale is kind of weird because there’s this whole debate section where she summons all of the “vessels” that you went through to explain their line of thinking. The vessels are just the princesses you’ve perceived. Anyways, whatever you say doesn’t really matter outside of like, “ok you’re right let’s go”. It’s just two stubborn gods not agreeing with each other. And it kind of makes more sense with the protag because he’s permanence. But I think the idea is that she’s now her fully realized self, his perception doesn’t really matter anymore but it could be that he’s just too far gone to do anything about it. He’s in awe of this being and he can’t revert it, basically he’s fucked.

By the end, the voice of the hero comes back and he pushes you back to where it all began. This time you can meet the princess that has a sense of self. It’s different depending if you’ve did the stranger section or not, so she either has three faces or one. It’s basically the same amalgamation from what I can tell, it’s a mix of Prisoner, Witch and Damsel. It’s really sweet with the three faces if you choose to leave with her, because it’s the one time you see the Prisoner smile.

Anyways, there’s three endings you can get in here. One where you kill her and change is gone. No one can die but the world will now be stagnant. The one where they choose to start from the beginning, knowing that the chances of doing the exact same things are pretty high. And the one where the protag is tired and doesn’t want to be a god. He just wants to leave the cabin with her. At this point, the huge shifting mound that was outside of the cabin is gone, the perception that she’s anything out of the ordinary is gone. She’s now just a normal person and they’re going to figure out what’s outside of those walls. Because the basis was that change is everything, the chance that everybody else in the world is already dead is pretty high. Change consists of basically everything.

So was the narrator really lying? Not really, he was just playing with his words to help out his own cause. The cabin just contains her influence. If you do nothing, the house can eventually decay and then her influence is back in effect. This kind of happened in one of the Prisoner paths. Because just increasing the temperature a degree every minute and we’re basically all dead. And even without the extremes, death is just natural and it could be that the world was already in the brink of annihilation anyway. So she just nudged the ball into the goal.

Nukitashi 2 Review: I liked this a lot more than the original

So I finished Nukitashi 2 and overall I had a fun time. I think I gave the first one a 7 for a couple of reasons but that I get why people see it as an 8 or a 9. This one is kind of conflicting because Nukitashi 2 is basically two parts. The new plot and their respective routes, and then just afterstories for the rest. There’s 9 scenarios in total but technically there’s a really short 10th one.

The first scenario is the common plot and where most of my praise goes to. You can technically just end it right there and leave with a consistent 8 or maybe even a 9.
The general gist is he got too into this fleshlight and somehow transported himself into an alternate reality. The three prominent FS characters from the original -Ikkuko, Rei and Touka- barged into his house and were sent along with him. The only difference between the worlds is basically that Jun accepted the offer that was given I think in the 3rd and 4th route of the original. It might’ve been the 2nd one too but I forgot. Anyways, he’s now basically the new face of the island, but all four of them are trying to get back to their own world. A lot of hijinks happen but in general is just Jun being in the opposite side this time around.

There’s some higher highs in the original but that’s mostly because the final move isn’t as cool and overstayed its welcome at the same time. I remember talking about that the original had a lot of repetition in its humor. That it reminds me of people that made a funny joke but then repeated it every day and we’re just like, ok we get it move on. That’s pretty much gone in this one scenario. It’s still kind of there depending on the option you picked but it’s still relatively minimal. Speaking on the option, it should’ve been placed later on. It’s one of the only slight issues I had with the common.

Each choice will lead you to a different route after you finish scenario one, so basically the first half six to eight scenes for each route happens in the common route. But the first or two scenes cover things that’ll be referenced later on, like some of the other members in the FS. Or in Touka’s case, it covers the FS as a whole. Sure their sections eventually revolve around themselves, but sometimes one of these minor characters end up talking and you just have to go by context. As an example, I’m not sure if I’d even care about the FS if I started with Rei. Touka feels like the character you have to go through first. But then later on you have no idea about these two others and your only thought is, ok they’re part of this or that squad. And if you go on a different order, then you know those people, but I’m not sure if I’d care about perspectives as much. I’d still say just go with Touka first, and it does tell you that Touka is the 2nd scenario and that is your clue. Then again, the original has Misaki numbered after Hinami but that’s just a step back.

Anyway, none of that is actually a big deal, it’s just more noticeable because everything else is pretty much done well. The writing is consistent, the flow never feels like it’s dragging, overall it’s a great time. The easiest way to explain it is that I finished scenario one in a weekend and then Touka’s route took the whole next week. It’s not even that her route is bad, but I’ll get to that later.

The basis of the first one was more so on perspectives and how easy it is to stay in your own echo chambers, each side had their own merits but all of them just kept fighting for their own and demonizing the rest. This one is mostly on acceptance, it’s just a gradual expansion of the first and it was done really well. To the point that I think the whole experience is lessened when you consider that there’s 8 more scenarios to go around after. So I can make an argument of just ending the vn right there, it ends at a great note. But the characters themselves get an epilogue after finishing Fumino’s after story, which I’m pretty sure that it at least needs scenario 1 to be finished.

Anyways, the following 3 scenarios do still cover the whole acceptance aspect but it’s no longer the main attraction. Depending on your one choice, you’ll hit one of the three.
They cover the routes of the three prominent FS characters from the original. It was one of those things where I haven’t talked to anyone that didn’t prefer them over the nlns members. Overall their routes are fine.

So I’ll be covering a little of each route, but if you’d rather just finish one route and then leave:
You can go with Touka if you want a continuation of what they were going for in common.
Go with Rei if you prefer the humor.
Go Ikkuko if you want a moment like the Erectus scene in Nukitashi 1.

Routes:

Rei ended up being my favorite, and it was one of those characters that was already loved in the original. She’s the most comedic outside of Misaki and overall what you get from her route is what you’d expect. It’s more that her route was just funny and how she’s a total mess half the time. It’s a constant teetering between cute, funny, heartwarming and cringe. A bunch of her hscenes is what I’d expect from Nukitashi. It’s a lot more comical, the voices are kind of unhinged at times to the point that it’s a good compromise between an actual nukige title and a kusoge.

Ikkuko was the one I was most interested in and I ended up not being a huge fan of it. I think the finale’s impact is something more reminiscent to the original and it was a lot of fun. On the other hand, her route had a lot of repeated conversations and I guess if your specific kink is getting made fun of, then it’s the perfect route for you. Like it’s funny, but it goes on for so long. It’s also the first time I felt the hscenes went on for far too long, something that wasn’t really an issue in the original. This does happen in the following scenarios, it just started here. In the end it was still good, but it’s one of those things where I actually liked her more in Misaki’s route than here. There was a couple of things they could’ve gone with but maybe it’d become more of a lecture if they kept bringing stuff up from the first scenario.

Touka’s route is probably the best continuation from the first scenario, it carries on the idea of understanding others and that they can be trying their hardest. Not to say that the other two routes, it’s just more prominent in Touka’s route. Sure, she’s an extreme edge case. No one could fault you for giving up on this one, she’s specifically built to be an exaggeration of savant syndrome. Outside of her job, she’s at the same functional level as a baby. Outside of that, her hscenes were boring and there was one where I felt like it was paused three times so in the end it was also a really long ass one.

Asane’s route was kind of waste in a way. The first half is hilarious and it’s just them coping about what they’re doing. But the second half is just boring and it ends up with something I have no clue about. So apparently there’s this relative, they could’ve been mentioned in the original but I don’t remember. Anyways, this relative gets mentioned in the epilogue of the last scenario, and I still have no clue who it is because the dialect could point to three people. I’m not sure why it was even brought up or how it’s relevant to the plot. I asked about it once, I searched around and couldn’t find anything about it. So tell me if you do. Anyways, before I started it, I assumed this would revolve around World B’s Jun and Asane. It’d be a lot more interesting than what we ended up getting. But if all you wanted was an FD experience, it delivers.

Nanase’s after story is actually a huge improvement over her route from the original. A lot of that was due to how Jun acted back then, but the hscenes were pretty shit then. They’re still not good now, but the scenes around them were hilarious. It doesn’t hit the levels of Misaki, but it’s still great. It also concludes stupidly well and it’s more of a callback on the original because it was basically left as a bad end.

Misaki’s after story is as immensely retarded as her original route, and so it’s my favorite once again. They end up trying to make an eroge of just different versions of Misaki. But they’re broke and just make a mockery in some parts of development. They know it’s a kusoge and pushed harder into it. Some of her hscenes are really long though.

The rest of them are basically the same as before, even Misaki. Basically if you liked their characters before, you’ll still like them now. There’s enough tomfoolery going around, it’s fun and it covers what they wanted. At the end of Fumino’s after stry, you get an epilogue on what they’re all doing and how it could technically be a stepping stone for future titles.

Overall:

I liked this one a lot more than the original. More so with just the common route. It’s written well, it’s consistent and it never broke it’s own flow so it’s easy to go through it all in one burst. The characters are still great, the jokes are less redundant considering the context. You care about the characters more often than you did in the original, there’s even a part that can match Rei’s section in the original. Funny enough Rei gets another scene like that, I feel like they really wanted Rei to be the main choice, lol.

Spoilers:

It’s been awhile since I read the first one, I don’t remember Rin being this annoying. To be fair, she wasn’t around all that much, but still holy shit was she repetitive.
Teshima wasn’t around all that much, which is kind of sad since he was one of my favorite characters in these titles.

Instead of the Erectus move from the original, he made some spiderman webslinging stuff where he just has to repeatedly cum. And it was funny at first but it felt a little too drawn out. And I think that was more because Erectus was shown, made a huge impact and then it was over. The webslinging thing was also a lot less in terms of the rule of cool. The rule of cool gets put in Ikkuko’s route, where he basically does a big bang attack out of dick to blow up a meteor.

So Touka vomits when she tries doing things that goes against her beliefs. So if you can work around it and word it in a way to coincides with her style, she should be fine. The common one is using stairs. It would’ve been funny if the epilogue shows that Touka can walk up to the second floor but still vomit going down back to the first. Instead she just vomits even though it’s been like a decade. I get that it’s part of the message, and that she’s still trying and Jun is still being understanding and appreciates the effort. But at least give her some barebones progress, lol.

My favorite scene with Rei is probably when she’s a belligerent drunk. It leads to probably the most funny hscene in the title alongside making fun of her a couple of times about it afterwards. Overall her route is pretty average in terms of spectacle, but that’s exactly what Rei wants. She and Ikkuko had pretty shitty pasts. They could’ve done more with Ikkuko but I feel like they were trying to not overdo it to the point that it becomes repetitive.

Nanase’s ending is basically them doing what they did in route 3 or 4 where they went and saved Fumino.
I think I broke down laughing during Misaki’s route where they were running out of time to make their eroge and they just put in gunshot sound effects for when the character cums. And all of them were like, this shit is genius. I think it happened again later on and I just laughed again.

Piofiore no Banshou Review: Great but with a lull in the middle

So I finished Piofiore and it took a lot longer than I expected. I think it’s probably around 40 hours but it felt like 60 by the time I finished. There’s a sequel to it but more so a continuation of this one. So I’ll just be calling this one 1925 and the sequel 1926(it’s part of the name). 1925 kind of has its own conclusion but it’s basically telling you that the plot isn’t over and that you should get the second one. I considered maybe reading the sequel before going over this one but I decided against it since I don’t have the right mindset or energy to continue it right now, especially considering that the sequel is just as long as this one. So I’ll be talking about just 1925 and it’ll help stick my memories to make 1926 a better experience for me.

I’ve written about a different otome before but I don’t think I ever released it and I should do that eventually. This one is mafia based and honestly there’s quite a few of them. The mc is an orphaned lady raised in the church, the church resides in a town that’s run by three mafia groups. Depending on your actions, she either get saved or abducted by the guys and you explore their territories and how they handle things. There’s an overarching plot revolving other major powers and the protag is a key piece for some factions and a bargaining piece for others.

The soundtrack is snazzy. There’s 24 tracks but some are alternates so it’s more around 19 or 20. Some tracks are massively overplayed and it sucks because that’s the ones that you’ll remember. They went crazy with the clothes but especially with the flower motif. The backgrounds didn’t interest me all that much but they’re also stupidly varied. But really the selling point is the hair. It’s kind of gotten to the point that the illustrator for all of it was really super into it, felt like they got a really good contract or wanted to keep their mind occupied.
My favorite character is probably Gilbert with Yang being a close second. But I guess the best set piece was done with Nichola. Technically I liked the main villain, but I felt that was more that I liked how he sounded than anything else he provided to the plot.

I think you can only start with Nichola or Yang depending if you’re overall nice or skeptical respectively. It’s best to start out with Nichola’s route since it covers most of the important cast outside of Yang’s group. It’s kind of weird that the emphasis on the cops are strongest in this one and then just semi forgotten for a huge chunk of the title. It does try to tie in by the end but honestly it was more like a footnote and probably just a stepping stone for the sequel. Which is kind of sad since I had a lot fun with the relationship dynamics between Nichola and Roberto.

Roberto is the angry detective that wants to drive the mafia off the land. He’s funny in a few ways, mainly that he’s the stereotypical standoffish detective like the one in persona 5 or the one from Cartagra. But the main one is unintentional, his last name means ugly in my language. So every time he gets a name card, it’s calling him ugly. There is a dry spell with Nichola around the middle and you have to power through it but it ends well enough. I guess I should say that each route has three endings excluding the bad endings of her just dying. So the best, normal and bad endings. Though really it’s put as the best being the prologues to 1926 and the bad ending being the sad endings.

Anyways after Nichola covering most of it, Yang covers the china faction. He’s interesting and overall he’s a fun character to read because he’s unabashedly a shitty person that just wants to alleviate his boredom. Basically each character has a main attribute like Dante being overly strict, Orlok being docile and Gilbert being playful. Nichola and Yang are kind of like the two sides of the same coin and just a nudge can push their stations. But Yang is also rapey so there’s going to be a sour taste to at least a portion of the fanbase. But really, if you removed it all and then had a poll of who’d the most likely to do that, it’d probably still be Yang. He probably has the more interesting sad ending too, though I guess Orlok’s bad ending was kind of funny if you have a screwed up sense of humor.

I’m not sure when the others are unlocked, but the route order is better off with Nichola>Yang>Orlok>Dante and then Gilbert. Gilbert’s common is used as the base for Finale. Honestly I think they used too much of it, you can consider it like maybe 20% changes. And overall that’s the major issue with this title. Each new route after the first two doesn’t really delve to whatever they’re about too deeply. So it’s more like 10% new context of what’s going on, and then the rest is setup and follow-through of the guy you picked. Sure it’s not my demographic but you can tell it could’ve been done better.

It’d be a different case if the title was all about the guys but they’re supposed to be sharing the spotlight with the overarching plot. I think most of the issues I had stems from the antagonists being the same. So you you’re always against some or all factions until one time where there’s an antagonist that unifies the three factions for that period. And overall that’s fine but let’s say if Dante was the antagonist, he acts relatively the same throughout the routes, this can be said for all of them. And that’s good in terms of consistency but I just got bored and you can assume what’s going to happen even more often than normal.

And the sad thing is that Orlok and Dante aren’t all that interesting to me. They’re routes cover why the main character is important but really that was already covered in Yang’s route. They just go deeper into with their own factions and fill out the remaining pieces. These two slowed down my reading pace considerably. It’s not even that they’re bad characters, they’re interesting in their own right but just got screwed over not being the first routes. Because like I said before, now you’re just getting small increments of the remaining plot. For those that really just care about going out with the guy, then most likely you wouldn’t even notice the sluggish pace of the overarching plot.

The finale was also really dull in terms of what a finale usually entails. A lot of it is already in Gilbert’s route. Even without that, it was just kind of dull, the routes themselves were more interesting. Sure the finale puts in the remaining pieces but it’s more so a way to bridge the two titles than ending with a bang with some foreshadowing to the next.

Overall

Overall, if this was only Nichola and Yang then I’d probably place it as an 8 that was closer to a 9. With all of it together, it’s more like a 7 but closer to a 6. Really it blurs the line and I can see it as a 6 that’s closer to a 7. The art kind of carries the title but the characters are interesting semi regularly but more often with Yang or Nichola. I also had fun going through Gilbert’s route but the ending felt lackluster in comparison to the first two. I felt like they could’ve added more scenes with the cops but that might just be me since I found the two interesting.

Spoilers: What I liked

So the spoilers are kind of on stuff I talked about offhandedly before. Roberto is pretty much a crazy asshole that’s different from Yang. And that’s more on that he can be fooled, he gets a lot of tunnel vision. The dude is all about justice but he goes all Kira and just starts killing off whoever is in his way. But that’s only in Nichola’s route and he’s semi gone for a huge chunk of the vn. He does come back in Gilbert and the true route and he’s pretty cool there too. He’s no longer crazy and kind of has that bro rivalry with Nichola. Basically he sees what the old detective was always talking about and sometimes you have to play along to get shit done.

Yang is pretty fun for kind of the same reasons. The dude is just bored and is basically and adrenaline junkie. If he doesn’t find you interesting, you’re dead. Hell you can be the most important piece to get business done and you’re still most likely going to die. He has a lot of action scenes and there’s times he reminds me of that Madara guy from Naruto when he’s fighting either Guy or Hashirama. He even gets a little mopey if his target just wants to do something else and this happens with him and Orlok. Because Orlok is somehow a super beast and can one hit kill most people. And that’s pretty funny considering Yang is also seen as a super soldier type guy. He can get shot throughout the whole fight and still keep going. There was one scene by the end of his route where he just throws the mc to the ground just to get an extra second of distance. His bad ending was also pretty neat, he ends up killing the mc because he found her boring. But by the end he kills off this other lady because she told him that he had someone he loved but he didn’t notice it. So the basis is that Yang is an asshole but he’s entertaining to read about.

Orlok is kind of whatever. He’s the goodboy of the group but his plot didn’t have much. He’s like a tsukihime nun. His combat stats is basically Leo from Rose Gun Days but none of the charm of Leo. His plot does key in some details of the bishop and this other guy. It’s interesting but the funniest thing about him is his bad ending. Where Orlock gets captured by Dante and Dante just cucks him whilst he’s imprisoned. And it’s understandable considering he was raised with minimal social interaction.

The main bad had a great voice actor that just shittalks the rest of the group. It’s rather short but it was entertaining while it lasted. He’s also pretty decent in his own route and I think he’ll play a larger role in the sequel but but I didn’t look into it

Kira Kira: Down Memory Lane

So tokyo necro is coming out in a few days and it’s probably been out when this gets on youtube. I’ll be pretty busy on tokyo necro so I’m doing some side stuff just to fill in the time. It’ll be shorter than normal, some might be about the games I play that’re kind of old or I haven’t seen that much attention. But for this time, it’ll just be about one of my favorite vns, Kira Kira. It’s not a review and there might be spoilers here and there but it’s more on how it made me feel and what it is than about the structure or how well it’s written. Well, the first Kirari route is going to be spoiled by the end. It’s mainly me shooting the shit on why I like it so much whilst also just giving it an 8. And generally I feel like I’m too lenient on it and should be a 7.

The reason why I started with this one outside of how important it was to me is just because it’s a decent segway to how I score things. Because generally people consider 7 as an average, and it’s like oh man this guy is an asshole how is he giving this a 6. When really the only time I’d be wary of something is if it’s going under 5. I actually got a lot of 5s and 6s that I could recommend to people. It’s just either the pacing is iffy, there’s sections that feel out of place or it overall shits the bed here and there. It might be that the idea or premise was good but I didn’t find it well written even outside of pacing. There’s a lot of crap I can go into about scoring but it’s not really the point of this one so I’m skipping it.

There’s still some bias to the rating but I try to cut that off unless it’s beneficial to the experience. There are easier examples to use than Kira Kira, like Maitetsu. But basically if you enter the vn that has specific themes and it portrays them well enough and resonates with your own experiences or hobbies then it warrants it’s bias boost. For Kira Kira’s case, it’s if you’re a fan of punk and if you’re young and trying to find yourself. Bonus points if you’re down on your luck. And that was basically me back then, I read it around 2012 or 13 and a bunch of shit happened but I kind of got myself back up and running like 2 months after finishing Kira Kira. In terms of sentimentality and personal shit, this is my highest rated vn and honestly it was really important to me. So basically it just resonated with what I was going through and it was just a lucky in the right place at the right time type of thing. So it’s more of a practice of knowing how to dissociate what’s your favorite and what’s the best, an obvious statement that honestly trips people over more than it should.

Anyways, I think the first thing I’d have to say is that you don’t really need to know any prior knowhow on punk to even enjoy it. Each generation has their own popular punk band anyway like Ramones, Clash, Green Day, Offspring, Misfits, Rise Against. Either way it doesn’t really matter because it’s kind asinine to try to pinpoint what is and isn’t punk because it’s more relative to attitude than anything else. Patti Smith is considered punk even though she herself doesn’t think so. From what I remember, Kurt Cobain still held himself as a punk band even though somebody slapped the grunge label and it stuck. Really punk is just punk and if somebody like Mark Wood shows up to a random underground punk venue with his electric violin, well that shit is pretty punk. But if I had to point to a band that makes me remember Kira Kira, it’d probably be Against Me, specifically the White Crosses and Transgender Dysphoria Blues albums. There has to be better example but I’m like slightly below surface knowledge in that iceberg principle crap, mainly because there’s subgenres that I don’t like and I dabbled more into power metal.

So your protag is called Shikanosuke, he dropped out of his tennis club, got dumped right after and just kept on trucking along. At this point you’ll notice that the way it’s written is kind of funky. But it’s written in a semiway that he’s narrating it all and it becomes kind of charming. The funny thing is you don’t really start there, the vn starts in the venue where Star Generation is playing. The mc is kind of nonchalant about it until the music starts blaring and he’s like holy shit that’s rad. You see this scene with then the added context maybe an hour in. By then, the only main character you get introduced to is Kirari, she works with him and she shines like no other to the point everybody eventually gravitates towards her. She’s also dirt poor.

Anyways, you fast-forward a bit and they’re basically ghost members of the literature club from what I remember and they got to do something for the culture festival. So inspired by venue, they make a band with the rest of the cast and the mc gets a rinky-dink bass from his tennis friend, Murakami who’s really the one super into punk. The two remaining characters are Chie, the childhood friend and Sarina, the sickly rich girl. They’re all pretty shit at it but gets help from Kenta, one of the guitarists from Star Generation. I remember one scene where he makes them play in front of some grocery store and he has to pretend that he’s the best or get crushed by embarrassment, shit was pretty funny. And I think that scene shows a lot of what I liked about overdrive, they hit different. A lot of it is just going through parts of punk and basically rewiring their brain to not be overly considerate of everything and just doing what they want. I think there was a phase where they thought just cursing up a storm would make them punk and the others just looked at them weird. Anyways, the festival starts, I think Shikanosuke was forced to crossdress just to make it an all girl band or something but everybody liked their performance. I think it was the sister that uploaded it, but either way they started getting attention from the internet and they just did a summer trip/tour around the area. And that’s basically the gist of it, the cast goes through a lot of hijinx with new characters along the way, learning how shit is done.

And I mentioned Pattie Smith before, and I kind of got the same energy from Kirari. She doesn’t really care about the preconceived notions and just does what she wants to do. In one of the final concerts, she starts playing a new song that’s basically too poppy and people are kind of jeering that it’s not punk. She just tells them to shut the fuck up and she’s going to play what she’s feeling and what she wants to play. She doesn’t care if half of the audience hates it as long as it’s the message she wants to portray at the moment. And then they’re all in and go “holy shit that’s rad”.

Kirari’s route(spoilers)

Note: I’ve mentioned a lot was spoilers near the beginning, just mentioning it again
I think they let you do any route first but really Kirari’s route works best as the third. Honestly I don’t know how it could even work because you’re just setting yourself up for the largest impact in the vn and then just cruise through two average routes.
So I’ll be skipping every route except Kirari’s first route. They all kind of intermingle around family at one point or another but I don’t think I’d keep this as high up if Kirari’s route didn’t end the way that it did. Not to say that the true route doesn’t have its own merits, I think it’s well done. It’s just when I remember Kira Kira, I remember the last 10 minutes of that first Kirari route.

So basically the road trip ended, Shikanosuke and Kirari are going out at this point. Turns out that she’s going to be pimped out because her dad’s in debt. It’s been awhile but I think she knew that was going to happen so it brings home the mentality of seeming cheerful even when shit is happening to them. The day before it happens the dad just burns down the house while everybody is sleeping. Kirari gets sent to the hospital but dies when talking to Shikanosuke. And this is typical drama, I think it was done fine but it’s not going to be for everyone. And if it was just that, I’d like it but I wouldn’t have it as one of my favorites. It actually goes on for at least another 2 hours.

So after that, Shikanosuke’s life just spirals down the drain, flunks high school but joins Murakami’s band and some of the people he’s met throughout the tour. They’re not doing great, I mean they got their fans but it’s not like they’re getting enough to support the lifestyle and they generally doing part time work to compensate it. Basically he’s contemplating of just quitting the band. Then he randomly goes home one night and sees Kirari. He figures out it’s an illusion but she kept on showing up and it led to final rendezvous at the school. I’m skipping all that since I can’t do it justice alongside it’d make the piece a lot longer and I’d have to backtrack to other sections. it leads him to accept what’s going on and that things will finally get better for him. He starts up the band, makes a new song that’s based on an old recording of Kirari humming. He sees a couple of old friends along the way for his next live, he goes through what needed to fixed, what relationships needed to be resolved and back to actually living and finding what’s next in line for him.

And that’s it for the route. There’s no grandiose magic aspect, there’s no time travel, no hidden antagonist that plotted against him. It’s just a person accepting the cards he was dealt with and just taking his next step. It’s not the only title that does it, and it’s not even the first one I’ve read that had that, considering this was something like the 60th vn I’ve read. I just read it at the right time in my life and I was grateful for it.

Even though time passes and memories fade, your song will lead me to embrace tomorrow.
Forever Wherever

ONE Review: You can tell it’s an earlier work

So I finished One, it was something I wanted to read around a year ago but I heard of the remake so here we are. I’m always confusing this title with Moon which is supposedly kind of on the more fucked up side. I read some of the og One while going through this one just to see if I’m missing something and overall it’s kind of the same. Sometimes the fantl does a better job, other times this one flows better. The worst aspect is whoever handled the choices because there’s times where the answer is like, “yeah I guess” to some theoretical question. And the new one just puts “hmm”. You choose that thinking that he’s giving it some thought but then the convo is about how he’d do it. There’s also this quiz near the beginning where it was pretty comical in the og but they pretty much removed half of the humor. Basically the quiz is just doing synonyms but the og also gave you an example sentence with a blank and the shit was pretty funny. The new one removed that part and it got pretty bland and it kind of gets on your nerves because you have to this every new run.

I only went through two routes in the og, I see no differences in terms of plot. So nothing was really taken out and nothing was added when it really should’ve been but I’ll get to that later. Some of the backgrounds are more barren since they removed the Moon characters that were used as a cameo. I didn’t go into it, I’m just assuming either they don’t have the rights or rather just remove the association from that title anyway. The hscenes were rather poor in the og but honestly the routes themselves are poor in their own right anyway.

So some background knowledge is that this is some og type of thing. I think this was Maeda’s second go on writing after Moon but apparently he worked on this Chaos Queen thing that I never heard about. Anyways, don’t get your hopes up because it’s kind of bad. It felt like something a bunch of friends made when hanging out in the bar. The best way to illustrate it is that it feels like all of the important scenes were storyboarded but one came back to add the filler in between to make it all flow well. So the end product is that the routes themselves are like an hour each. And not only are they an hour or two each, a good chunk of it all is the same in every route due to the main aspects being about the main character.

I was told to leave Akane for last and I can see what they were going for. But on the other hand, I could also tell you to goof around outside of Akane’s choices and just leave the vn after that route. Which is weird because the cover image is on Nagamori and I’ll go through that in the spoilers. Really it could be any character, just Akane is the better option. It’s really weird that the routes are so rushed considering the common route has a lot going for it. You can already see what makes his titles great in there. Kouhei is the main character and just like Maeda’s classics, he’s pretty much an asshole. And it works, generally it’s a fun time because of it. Sure there’s not much going for him but he’s still not vanilla. Some prefer the faceless avatar that you control, but it’s not for me. I guess another thing I should note is that he only did half of it and Hisaya did the other half. I can’t guarantee it but almost anything you liked about Kanon also came from this guy. Maeda only started blazing once it was Air. Anyways, the characters that were handled by Hisaya and the ones handled by Maeda don’t really interact with each other outside of a few lines like introducing them to Nagamori.

There’s this option that puts out a small image of what choice affects which character. Some of them are flags, some are just points for some scenes. It feels like you can miss around 20% and still be fine as long as they weren’t the important ones. I’m not sure how it is on steam, but it was on by default on Jast. I’d say just turn it off for your first run, it kind of messes up with the magic. Like I went all over the place in my run where I was just relentlessly bullying the tsun character and out of nowhere I’m taking care of this child whose apparently only two years younger. Then out of nowhere she’s just not brought up again and I got into a route with the mute girl.

Rating this one is kind of weird because I feel like I either misunderstood it or I don’t see the point of it. What is One, is it just about the singular bond that he craves for. Is it the unifying of both places, is it just learning to enjoy the one time he gets to experience with his friends. I don’t know, I don’t think it’ll affect my score all that much but it becomes a little more empty to me than what I feel like they were going for. Kanon and Clannad technically does this too for some, but it’s more apparent with what they were going for. And I know people that aren’t a fan of Clannad and they consider most of the routes just “hang out with X girl” when there’s more to it than that. So I’m wondering if there’s something like that here too and now I’m in that “hangout with girl” group.

Overall

If you ever read the og, then I don’t see the reason to read this one. Otherwise, go with this one. The art is great, you understand when the hscenes were going to happen. The mute girl actually gets some sounds, the other characters sound like what they were going for. Maybe the largest difference is Nagamori where it feels more like a mom than a caring airhead but both work in different ways. The routes themselves are kind of crap and sometimes I’d even give them a 4 overall because a good chunk is the same and it’s resolved is basically the same. It’s one of those things where it feels like it wasn’t intended to fully complete it and just do a run or two. The common route itself is like a 7 and that’s great considering the common route is like 80% of the vn.

Spoilers

So most of the spoilers is basically around Nagamori. But before that, the child I was talking about before was Mayu. Supposedly she graduates that year and I think Kouhei was at 2nd year, so either 2 or 3 years. With her mannerisms, I thought she was a lot younger and the og route is kind of fucked up but I think that was during the time where lolis were pretty popular. Anyways, after knowing she wasn’t that much younger, honestly I thought she was severely autistic but apparently not.

There’s these monologues happening at intervals where it’s a different Kouhei talking about the other world and how he wants to leave it but he knows he’ll eventually be there once again. I think he’s supposed to be younger in these and there’s a young Nagamori talking with him. Part of me thought maybe these were conversations they had when they were young but some of them are just too weird for that to be the case. Anyways, it makes it look like Nagamori is essential to the plot. She’s the cover, she’s in the logo, she’s the main focus in the op. Technically you can say that because she’s always around Kouhei, part of her world is disintegrating once he eventually disappears. And you can see it like, oh she’s the anchor and she’s the one that tethers him to this world. But the plot always has her forgetting about him unless it’s her route. So you could say that he’s been tethered down a lot longer than he was expecting due to her but it’s finally running out. None of this happens, I don’t understand why she’s so integral.

There’s this whole thing with his dying to eventual dead sister, I assume she had cancer. I felt like maybe that was a trigger point and that’s how he first got into contact with the other world, but I think that was also around the time that he met Nagamori. My best guess is she forgot about what she told him when they first met, so the tether is weakened enough again that he’s vanishing. Why he can come back after a year, no clue. I assume hope would be strongest early on, not after a year, lol.

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly and Ashen Hawk: Could’ve been better but still fun

Note: This was written around the time Tokyo Necro came out and I kept pushing it back.

So I don’t really read that much otome, I think it’s still in the low single digits and something I was interested in trying. For the random person that doesn’t know, the otome genre is catered to women but also the main character is female. It’s not my field so I don’t really know how these are compartmentalize. I read one or two titles catered to women by accident and the plot is generally pretty cool, but since the main character was a man it somehow doesn’t count as an otome. There’s some titles I’ve read that are closer to like all ages with a hint of bl but at that point, is it catered to bl fans or just more general feminine audience? Overall I don’t really care since I just care about the plot or the interactions between characters. I feel like they put in more effort for the background scenario but that’s probably just the popular ones that get localized. There might just be as much of an overabundance in highschool backgrounds in these generes. Honestly it’s mostly marketing, but I still find it fucking lazy.

I wrote my notes on the first Psychedelica before I got to read Bustafellows, simply because these two Psychedelica titles were like 7 dollars each, lol. Bustafellows fairs better but I had fun with these two. More so on the first one but the second one has its own merits that I’ll get to later. The 2nd one is loose sequel to the first one so it’s kind of weird on how to go about it. So I think I’m just going to right about the first, then second, then the spoilers.

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly

So the protag wakes up in a mansion without her memories. There’s monsters around and she finds other people pretty fast and find their safe room. They can’t leave the mansion and it’s always raining at night. They also get assigned to hunt down these monsters to get these crystal shards, and in return they’d get their memories back alongside a way to get out of the mansion.

And that’s the gist of it, it was kind of fun for like the first half. It just turned kind of boring afterwards and it’s because the fun nature of just having shitty brats just interacting with each other eventually stops and it focuses on the route’s character. Except that half of their routes are pretty much garbage even in an objective level. Like I know a guy that hates most kinds of drama so he’d hate a specific character but the overall steps of that route is fine compared to some of these that are just outright bad and I’ll talk about it in the small spoilers sections.

So there’s a couple of characters in here and I can already see that some of these are probably overused archetypes.
You got the angry loner boy Yamato, the hardass Hikage, the dainty sophisticated Kagiha, the energetic smartass Karasuba and the weird airhead Monshiro.
There’s locked scenes that need to be seen in order to get certain endings. There’s scenes with all of them interacting with each other, some where it’s a one-on-one convo with the protag and sometimes it’s two characters bickering about some irrelevant topic but overall it’s a fun time.You unlock them by doing the shooting minigame, which you’d think it’d be a reoccurring gimmick through most chapters but they’re barely in the vn. Which is weird since that’s part of the plot, a lot of that gets handled in the background. And I’m not saying that’s a horrible idea, I can see it being rather monotonous after awhile but then you might as well skip the gimmick altogether. Where you just show an action scene and that’d be it.

Anyways, you do the minigame, get the points and unlock the scenes. The extra scenes are probably my favorite section in the vn since everybody is interacting with each other. Like I found Karasuba enjoyable when he’s around and interacting with the other characters since he’s just shit talking the others. But his solo scenes were probably the largest stains in an overall decent vn, he just doesn’t got much going on. I feel like that’s a problem with a good chunk of them, it’s just more apparent with Karasuba.

Getting an ending is kind of annoying half the time since you basically have to start from the beginning each time. Let’s say in Yamato’s case, he has two endings and you did his first ending before the good ending. And I think you need to do the normal ending before either of his endings. So you reload a chapter behind, you’re just going to get the normal ending again even though you read through the flags before. This also happened to me in Karasuba, where I did his first ending, went back a choice and got the normal ending again, so I guess it wipes out your choices after an ending, I’m not sure.

For the routes, I’d give Monshiro a low 8, Hikage a high 7. Then the normal ending and Yamato as a middle 7. And those were in my notes and I’m kind of wondering why I have Yamato lower than Hikage when I remembered having fun with that character. And I think it’s because Hikage is kind of on its own branch so it was breath of fresh air but more so that it interacted with different characters and I just had a better experience with it. It helps that I read it after Karasuba’s route too. Karasuba and Kagiha are just failures for different reasons, I’m not sure what I’d give them but I’ll talk about it in the spoilers.

All in all, the plot setting is cool but they also don’t really do much with it after awhile, it felt more like it lost steam the longer it went on. I felt the final chapters to be its weakest points and it was kind of boring. It was more like they were trying to figure out how to resolve everything. Depending on your drama tolerance you might have some trouble with a specific route, it’s really by the books but it was written well. I’m not sure if it was that one or Yamato that was my favorite.

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

So for the second title, it’s now in a town filled with snow. It used to be a trade town but the snow kind of ruined everything to the point it’s kind of pain to even leave for a different town at all.

The intro starts out strong but it dies out soon after. The protagonist is a girl that dresses as a guy due to his eye sometimes turning red when she’s emotional. Basically there’s a myth goes that if you see a lady with red eyes, then she’s going to fuck up the town so they have to kill her. I thought this would be more akin to that Salem game where you have to gaslight the people on what transpired but that’s not really the case.

I didn’t find the characters this time around all that charming and their interactions are more generic than in the previous title. But mainly in the sense that most of the guys are already attracted to the character, some from the beginning and some when she’s not dressing like a guy. I find it pretty boring even in a moe game so a bunch of guys isn’t going improve how I feel about it, lol. Not like that wasn’t a thing in the first title, but at least it wasn’t everybody. Personally I liked Levi the least and Ashen Hawk the most. Most of them were at least slightly interesting but Lugus was put higher than the rest. There’s actually a few characters that are from the first title and those were also fun but I’ll bring those up in the spoilers.

I think it was chapter two that goes on for way too long. And it’s because all the exposition comes from there. Most of the character interactions, parts of the setup and what the main character is about. And it’s mostly a complaint on why it couldn’t be split into two parts because chapter two is as long as like the next three chapters put together. So after that chapter, it’s for the most part a kinetic experience. The amount of options drastically diminish, it’s like a flag or two and I’m wondering if most of those are even necessary because you might just be able to get any route by the choices you make in the last chapter. I don’t think you even need any of the interaction scenes, just the mandatory story scenes. And maybe this was their way to fix how much you had to redo from the first title. And that reminds me of how Xenosaga 2’s art style changed so drastically due to feedback and I was there like, what did you do.

Honestly, it’s kind of written well but in the sense that with some slight changes this could just be a normal YA fantasy novel. It ends strong, to the point that it’s somewhat close to one of my old favorite animes from like 10 or 15 years ago when I used to watch a decent bit.

Overall, kind of a weaker experience. They both have strong starts but this one kind of meandered around for awhile and then ended strong. It retreads some old topics from the first title and did those well. Some of the happy ending stuff kind of fixed some of the kind of whatever sections in the first title’s happy ending. Basically I found the true ending to be done better than what was in the first but the actual routes are a lot weaker considering it’s much closer to a kinetic experience. It’s like 95% the same for each route except some extra routes that can be unlocked after your first ending. I’d say my favorite route ending outside of the finale is probably Lavan’s, and then the solo ending.

There’s some extra endings, I think they get unlocked after you get the finale. Overall they weren’t as good but it does cover the final open topics still going around so I think they’re a fine addition.

So for the two titles combined, I had a lot of fun. Not the greatest and honestly I probably got a few dozen titles in my backlog that I’d like more. But as a way to at least give a couple of more tries into a genre I’m not used to, I had a good time and I already got a few more titles that I’d like to go for. Though I’m also kind of worried that these two and bustafellows are more on one side of the otomes and I might randomly get one that’s just a trash heap. But who knows, maybe that’ll make a decent video. These could be some pretty decent anime titles though, especially the second one.

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly Spoiler Section

So by now, you either don’t care about spoilers, already finished it or at least finished the normal ending because I’ll be going over some lategame stuff, mainly some of the characters. I liked the normal ending, everything made sense and it ended well, but the 2nd endings for Yamato and Karasuba are kind of whatever since it’s somewhat appended to the normal ending. There could’ve been some very slight alterations in the last conflict but nope. And since I’m already on the topic, I pretty much dislike Karasuba. He’s kind of a creeper. He’s funny as one of your group but he’s a bunch of red flags once you mix romance with him. He’s also a whiny bitch.

At least Yamato just has the rough exterior cliche so he’s a cool dude after he softens up. Kagiha doesn’t really even have an ending, and it makes sense since he’s actually dead. I thought they were going to do some asspull ending like he actually had amnesia in the real world since they never found his body. But they made him stay dead and they just live in the mansion. And what I meant by him not really having an ending is that it’s around 5 minutes long. I actually don’t mind what they were going for, it was just too abrupt. There is a “happy” ending where they’re all alive but that’s kind of a copout. It’s still nice and I don’t think the game itself is going with “hey this is the actual ending”, and that kind of got reinforced with the seconds title.

Hikage is kind of a funny one because he kind of acts like an old man and he’s has some outdated ways of socializing, only for him to be a guy that shot himself ages ago and was just stuck in the mansion. And that’s why I put him as a 7 because he alone isn’t the most interesting but it’s similar to the case of Sunohara and gang in Clannad. Where the route is interesting because of an amalgamation of characters instead of just one.

I liked Monsahiro’s the most, yeah it had the most soap opera drama in the whole vn but it was still pretty good. I think Yamato’s branch has to be finished before being able to unlock this one, and that makes sense since you get part of his backstory over there. I feel like it’s also where the protag’s VA performs her best. And Monshiro’s plot picks up a previous bad ending and uses that as part of it’s setting and I generally really appreciate when that happens.

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk Spoiler Section

So the main thing on this one is that the parts I found most interesting weren’t about the main cast, but what was happening in the setting overall. And that mostly pertains to Ashen Hawk, and the two residents in the church. Lawrence is obviously Kagiha from the first title, and Elric is almost as obvious with him being Hikage. But for some reason he has blond hair this time around. Like if the rabbit wasn’t there, I thought it might’ve been a fusion of Karasuba and Hikage. Fun fact is that Elric is voiced by the guy who did Karasuba.

They actually don’t have much relevance to the plot, they’re most as plot devices to move a couple of key aspects or explain how x and y happen. But because they’re in the town, you can see that the town isn’t normal and it’s probably another dreamscape or whatever they called it. That just gets further tacked on with Hugh who from what I can tell is the original butterfly. His ending basically revolves around it and that he finally found a new butterfly to be with. But in the finale, he’s basically the story weaver and he’s finally done and finally went to meet up with his old mate all those years ago. It was really heartwarming on how it was done. The protagonist also ended up being Ai’s friend from the first vn. Elric and Lawrence show up too, but as reincarnations instead of whatever they were doing in the first title. And it also looks like they made Kagiha kind of interested in Hikage’s sister.

Ashen Hawk’s ending is almost as abrupt as Kagiha’s ending in the first title but honestly most of them are kind of abrupt here. He’s also not one of main interests in this title anyway so it’s not as bad of a feeling for me.
The anime I was alluding to before was Code Geass. It’s not as good and also nowhere as big in scale but also no weird additions like in the second season.

Actually on time VNs I’ve read in 2023

Note:Tier lists are in the bottom. First one is overall, the other is based on hype. They get explained better in the video coming up.

So another year’s done and read a decent amount again. I’m kind of changing on how I rate things, I’m not sure if I ever got around to uploading how I set up the conditions but basically the first batch will go through them more objectively. Then I’ll put what I had most fun with and then another that places them on their highest point. So basically what has the highest impact or a great route even if the rest is mediocre.

Most Liked

Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu/Hokejo

This is actually a great vn that I can’t recommend because of the hscenes. The mc has a job or something to guide spirits back to the cycle. There’s a lot of factions but the one he’s in is the only that tries to do it peacefully. He basically only took the job because he thinks his sister is a spirit somewhere and he doesn’t want any of these factions to get to her first so he’s going to the town in this vn. There’s like 3 or 4 subplots circling around whilst he’s doing his own thing.
There’s a part in the middle that drags on but overall the pacing is great. It starts great, it has a couple of great resolutions but the last 10 minutes or so went back to being fucked up to me. There’s actually another title in here that had a similar ending but I was ok with that one.

Tokyo Necro

Tokyo Necro is a lot of fun. It’s just a gang of people killing what’s basically zombies for money. had issues in there but a decent bit of it was how they wrote Ethica. It was a 50/50 shot of either liking her or finding her intolerable. It just varies a lot where some parts are amazing and other parts could’ve been ripped out. I think Con Su’s route was the best one out of the 4 routes. The others have hype moments that can make them great but it wasn’t consistently good like this one.

Jack Jeanne

Jack Jeanne is amazing and I put it as 9. It’s funny because what’s great about it is more on the flow and how everybody interacts with each other than the plot. The plot is actually pretty basic. Really the voice acting kind of hard carries what the characters are going for and I’d even put this as a 10 if it wasn’t for the repetition needed to fully complete all the routes. I’d consider this more of a mood piece.

Runner Ups

Tsukihime Remake

The Tsukihime Remake is kind of a weird one to score because you can look at it in two ways. In terms of a remake for the first two routes, it was done fairly well. There’s some bloat in Ciel’s route and I wasn’t a huge fan of how they handled the new ending but the foundation is solid compared to before. So as a remake, I can see it as something like a 9. But in terms of just Tsukihime, what makes it standout is the other three routes that aren’t included in this part of the remake, so you can even consider it a 7 but I find it closer to an 8, it’s still solid.

HiraHira Hihiru

And then there’s HiraHira, I think it’s written rather well to the point it can probably just be considered literature. It’s a two plot system and the interesting one is about the doctor working with these patients that have a mix of dementia and some super lupus combo

Weird ones out

Nukitashi

This is probably my controversial one. I wasn’t a huge fan of the title but a lot of that is mainly on the first route. There’s a lot of wishy washy going on with the tone where it tries to be serious at times and then it goes back to doing porn jokes. And it can be funny here and there but it gets tiring and reminds me of that guy who made a funny joke and then ran it to the ground for the next few days and you just want to go home. Misaki was actually pretty fun because it didn’t try to be serious, it was just balls to the wall crazy so I never had the expectation of looking for anything serious.
Overall I had fun with it but I just had a lot of things that I could nitpick but generally tonal whiplash is a huge pet peeve of mine. The finale was pretty funny though.
Basically you’re pretty much forced to go back to your old town that’s based on this island but the town forces everybody to go bang people they’re into. And they’re all down to it and the whole thing is you guys don’t want to. So you’re trying to find ways to avoid it alongside trying to dismantle the system and it goes back and forth with if you’re even the good guys or just as bad as the people running it now.

Kunado Kokuki

Kunado is kind of weird because I really like the first common section with Yuuri and that included her route but then it kind of tapered off for me. There was still interesting sections going on but I wasn’t fan of the overall content between the other two routes. They’re still fine and had their great moments but if I had to say what was the best part, it’d be when Yuuri was the focus.
You’re just a guy that woke up and it ended up being like a millennium ahead and now there’s basically no tech because there’s these mechanical beings that kept destroying their civilizations. But now they have magical powers and the strongest ones can be in this elite faction and that’s where you’re setup.

The Great Ace Attorney 1

I wasn’t really a fan of the first one. Sure it sets up the foundation but everything in the court cases felt too simplified which can work if you’re trying to focus on the story instead of the gameplay. But the amount of plot that happens is pretty minimal so I don’t know what they were going for.

Clover Days

I got Clover Days because the synopsis made it look a lot better than what it actually is. At first I was hoping for something like Yotsunoha but done right. But it’s basically the same if not a little worse at some points except the voice acting kind of hard carries the vn compared to Yotsunoha. The premise was basically a fake out and it’s something you can write in an hour. They made a promise, they came back and the promise is back on. This title is great for people that dislike heavy drama, half the time it’s them goofing around. There are drama segments and they shine due to the voice actors but they consist of maybe 5% of the vn. The twins were the worst route and there’s a route that has a supporting character overshadow the own heroine. She had nothing going on after the confession scene anyway.
Really, if you gave this to anyone, they’d consider it a 7 or an 8 moe vn. I’m just being petty because I was expecting something from that synopsis. Like Mirai is higher just because it delivered on what it was going for, it’s a better title but not as cute.

The Alchemist of Ars Magna

Ars Magna was more on that I wanted to try a ninetails title at one point but I also didn’t want to deal with tentacles. I think I’ve seen this one is kind of worse than the other titles and hopefully that’s the case because I was kind of bored at times outside of the finale where it randomly turned up a couple of notches. There’s also a chaos route but it’s terrible and it doesn’t really give any nuance because anything there can be gleamed from the normal route. There were some interesting sections but overall it was just way too long for my liking.

Had most fun with

Note: This excludes the most liked

Snow

Snow is pretty much a key title and it’s pretty funny in a 90s sort of way. The common route is the best part and that’s basically just due to them goofing around while you’re helping out the inn. They left all the drama in the routes. Some of the routes are ass but the big thing is that you can basically give it two scores depending if you read snow or snow+ that has 2 more routes. One of the new routes was pretty much unnecessary and it’s more that the overall flow to the original ending is done better. So og Snow is closer to low 8 and the expansion puts it to a 7. If you’re not a fan of the humor, then drop it by a point or two.

Meteor World Actor

MWA is written by Shougou. Like a few others, he has a specific style and you either like it or not. His stories either take forever to finish or in this case might never finish. But what you have is a decent foundation to the world and a great slap of crude 90s humor if you’re into that. It’s a lot better written than Goei 1, but it still has the issue of almost nothing actually got done. It’s a great starter for a trilogy where it sets up the city and the other important regions alongside the antagonistic forces from some of them.

Aokana Extra

Aokana extra is kind of what I want in most fandisks. Awhile ago I was going to write about the how varied fandisks can be and how some of them are pretty ass but I scrapped it.
Generally some end up being whatifs or pseudo sequels. Some are straightup just fanservice and some are more like expansions that just handle the rest of the cast that never got a route. Then there’s stuff like this one where it’s just giving a character another 4 hours of screentime whilst still showing the whole gang. There’s even a decent chunk where the mc isn’t even present and it’s just the rest of the cast helping her out. I wish fandisks were handled more like this more often.

The Great Ace Attorney 2

The 2nd one is a lot better, the plot picks up and the gameplay is more of a happy middle ground between the baby level of the first one and the occasional leaps of logic that the original trilogy contained.

Had potential

Soukoku no Arterial

I technically almost finished Soukoku no Arterial last year. I was just finishing up missing routes. It’s basically smt but in general the cast gets transported to a place that demons and angels are fighting over for. They’re just trying to survive and get back to their own world. Anyways it’s fine, I’d probably put this as one of the weakest Eushully titles I’ve read but a large part of that is because of how they handle routes instead of the characters because they’re overall fine. There’s 3 factions and in those factions there’s character routes. So once you beat the final boss, you see the faction ending and then the character ending. You also get to transfer over your progress and cards, so you’re technically playing through it like 9 times. This also assumes you’re doing everything right because there’s faction specific cg that can be missed.
The gameplay swaps from their usual gridbased strategy rpg to a card game and it’s a breath of fresh air. Really your deck only expands after ng+. Sure there’s some gimmick builds you can start with but they’re pretty shallow until you can buy character cards after the ng+ plot or have the MC cards with higher control. The plot in devil faction route is ass but it’s also the place to get a better deck at the first run. Though it’s also probably harder to finish than the Angel faction route.

A lot of the issues stem from the repetitiveness if you want to 100% it since the new content per run is like 5%. A lot of the routes are also mid, and there’s others where it’s ok but their end card is op so you might want to do their route just to get it.
I’m putting this as a 6 but it can be jumped to a 7 if you only do a sequence of angel,human and then ng+. The ng+ route is more like a low 8 but really each faction has their moments.

Future Radio

Future Radio had a lot of potential but it just kind of flops in the true route. And that’s kind of fine if you look at it with the mindset of Cyanotype being better so it’s a gradual process of getting better with each title. The common route and the teacher’s route is still pretty good on their own. It’s basically just a title about being screwed over by humanity’s own inventions. They made a new communication network and it went haywire so now all communication is dead because it keeps getting intercepted and consumed.

Piofiore Fated Memories

Piofiore is a mafia based otome. It’s fine, you’re going to have the most fun with the first two routes but it eventually gets kind of tiring because of a lot of it is rather similar. I still quite liked it but there’s a sequel and I’m not sure if I have it in me to read another 50 hour vn based on these characters. Nichola, Yang and Gilberto are probably the best routes to go through but I’m not really sure since I think you’re forced to do Nichola and Yang first. So it could possibly be that whoever is your first route would be one of your favorites.

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

Ashen Hawk is the loose sequel to Black Butterfly. Technically more stuff gets unlocked after you finish the normal path and that resolves the rest from the first title. Ashen Hawk starts out interesting but it takes forever to leave exposition canyon in chapter 2. The characters are weaker than in the first one but overall it was still a fun time but it’s not something I’d push people to read. I enjoyed some of the endings, they weren’t original but one of them is pretty uncommon and is always fun to see. Because the whole premise is like Town of Salem but it’s not carried the way it usually is. Basically her eye can turn red and that’s a natural indication of the witch, so he’s hidden as a guy.

Disliked

Making Lovers FD

Which leads to the Making Lovers fandisk that’s around 2 or 3 hours that holds all 5 after stories that also include 2 hscenes each. The times when they’re goofing around is still fun, but it’s so short. I don’t know why they went this route, everybody I saw talking about it was always about the comedy, either it being funny or cringy. Maybe people in japan preferred the hscenes

Everything else

Bishoujo Mangekyou 2.5

And that leads to Biman 2.5 where it’s just a 2 hour nukige. It loses a lot of what made the first one fun. The art is still great but you can tell this is just an intermission between the actual titles. It’s good for what it is and it has a pretty good scene halfway through.

Eiyuu Senki

I actually wrote about this but I never pushed it out. It’s basically like someone just rolled you like some gacha and now you go around conquering every new place to unify the land because some evil shit is going to happen otherwise. It had a lot of promise at the start but it kept decreasing with every new faction. There’s still sparks of fun throughout but it didn’t know when to end. To the point that I was just having a bad time with their constant “and then this shows up”. It really was a quantity over quality type of thing and honestly it’s understandable but that doesn’t mean the score won’t lower.

Tamayura Mirai

Tamayura Mirai is fine for what it is, it’s kind of generic at times but you’re here if you like one of the characters over the plot itself. Not to say that the plot is passable, there’s just a lot of better titles for that. You’re just a sorcerer that tries to keep the humans and spirits balanced. Basically trying not to piss them off and settle their disputes. The true ending was pretty fun even though you can see where it’s going in the common route. Really, I just bought it because of Hanako

Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram

I started this ages ago where the only tl was some guy on youtube playing it on his xbox. And I only got up to the end of the first story so I was kind of pumped to finish the rest. Too bad the first story was basically the best thing out of this whole thing. There’s a couple that I had fun with but overall it’s one of those titles where I’m wondering what was the point outside of maybe 4 stories.

Loopers

Loopers is like 4 hours long and it’s kind of funny in the sense that they have to rush a lot of things to make it work but it’s written by Ryu7 that loves to elongate things. So it’s like the tiger vs dragon theme. The title is just a day that’s constantly looping so the new guys have fun doing shenanigans but the older guys are getting bored and shit can happen because of that. So now they show a new way of having fun while trying to find a way to get out of the loop.

Inochi no Spare

Inochi no Spare is kind of a simple concept of the main girl being terminally ill that has a way out that she doesn’t want to take. Basically she has to take her sister’s heart. The sister wants to do it but the main characters wants the sister to live on. It can work but it tries to put too many story points in there alongside the main guy taking a large portion of the screen time. So it would’ve been better if the plot either revolved around the sisters and their drama or the romantic relationship and the drama that comes from that. The ending was still done well, but it’s kind of easy to emotionally trick you into caring.

Tsui No Stella

This one is fine. The setup is done well, the main character is understandably annoying at first but she grows on you and she naturally develops throughout the segments. The latter half is a lot more enjoyable, I’m putting this closer to a 7 but I’d imagine people would put it as an 8 more often than not.

Ginka

It had a couple of things going for it but the first two hours was kind of a chore to go through and that’s mostly what’s represented on the synopsis. I was having more fun when you get into the 3rd segment where the plot finally picks up. If you wanted another vn that revolves around summer or how it felt to explore during vacation, then it’s better to look for something else. The first two hours felt more like a checklist of stuff they have to do to setup the rest and what they actually wanted to write about.

Overall

Based on impact

This one is based on impact.
Generally it’s based on the severity of the impact but some get bumped up if there’s a lot of them throughout the title.
Jack Jeanne is kind of the latter and Ars Margna is the former. Some of the 8s and 7s kind of go back and forth.
Sometimes I want to drop Future Radio, Ginka and Nukitashi to 7 and raise Clover Days to 8.
Honestly anything in the 7s have at least one good impact scene

HiraHira Hihiru: It’s Setoguchi

So I finished Hihiru, it’s something that was written by Setoguchi and you could really tell. You probably heard of him through Swan Song more than anything else but I know him from Kira Kira. I don’t think he was ever credited in a vn that didn’t use the nvl format, and really that’s one of his strengths. I don’t think the adv format would work for him, sometimes what’s being put down is long-winded but it’s always cohesive and you know where he’s coming from. The only one that felt off so far was that fandisk for Kira Kira that I still didn’t finish, I wasn’t really feeling it and then I saw that he apparently only did the scenario draft. Anyways, generally what you get from him is a spectrum of fun, somber or stoicism on human nature.

And that’s basically what revolves around Hihiru. It’s about this disease that you can contract where you’re medically dead for a period of time and come back to life. The damage done to the person depends on how long it took for them to come back. It can’t be cured, but there’s medication to slow down the detriments it brings along. Mainly loss of brain function alongside your skin constantly degrading to the point you look like a zombie. There’s medication for it to severely slow down the process to the point they could live a normal life but the mental aspect can fuck with the routine. Because it’s basically dementia with super lupus. They have delusions, they can think something is conspiring against them or that the medication is poison and so on. So either you come back kind of ok and deal with the symptoms with medication, or you’re super fucked and become a husk of a human being.

Then comes along that some don’t want to take the medication at all, others don’t have the money to take care of these people because they’re basically outcasts and lose their jobs. And there’s others that find that the disease isn’t going to be solved with medicine and it’s more of a religious curse type thing. It used to be that the ones that were more heavily afflicted were just pushed into their own type of prison cells. Eventually there was a law made that makes it so a room has to be made inside their caretakers home and they just stay in there. And now there’s some hospitals that take care of them with the limited space that they have. It’s more like a retirement home combo’d with a psychiatric hospital. Consider it like a hospice for these people.

There’s two plots that you go back and forth. If you ever read Sorcery Jokers, it’s something like that. So there’s one plot with this doctor named Masamitsu, and the other is with Takeo who’s a student living with some of his dad’s friend and his family. Masamitsu was a lot more interesting and the time just flew by. He’s a doctor in one of those hospitals, he gets to talk with different patients. He eventually gets tasked to go around the country to take notes on these homecare cases to basically make a point that they’re insufficient to handle this disease and the government has to step it up with making more hospitals and some in-between normal life and hospital care. The whole basis is that the Hihirus aren’t really treated as humans in the public eye. And it’s understandable to them considering for the longest time, the people thought it was more of a curse and that it can even be contagious. Masamitsu is kind of a weirdo but that’s what makes him work, he has a different mindset that works for his occupation but the general populace would see him as a pretty weird guy.

Takeo does have his own plot with the Hihiru but it’s a lot more boring considering he’s just a student that’s studying law. His stuff is more spoilers so that’ll be in the spoiler section but overall his was fine. Like there’s parts that are interesting, especially when it concerns his friend and his issue with a specific Hihiru but overall you could have him removed and a lot of the context would still be around. Maybe it’s a more human approach and how all of this is affecting normal families but overall kind of whatever considering parts of his plot are just more in-depth sections of the families Masamitsu meets.

There’s a couple of choices but overall I think maybe only three mattered. There’s a specific one near the beginning where you can give this poor family some money or not because they are trying their best to support their Hihiru son but they’re all in a recession and they’re fucked. And the choice entails more if he’s impulsive with his emotions and really cares about anything infront of him, or he’s impartial and he’s all about treating his patients. This does change some dialogue in the upcoming chapters but after the next major choice, it doesn’t seem to change anything at all.

Overall:

Overall it was a pretty good time. It’s not a vn for everyone, but Setoguchi isn’t going to work for everyone anyway. This is closer to normal literature than an actual vn and I’m all for it. Then again, I have fun reading traditional books anyway. I think it’ll still work for most people that’re into vns for the plot instead of solely for the haha quirky/cute girls and hscenes. I’d give it around an 8 that’s closer to a 9. It would’ve been a 9 if it was all about Masamitsu. Most of it is pretty concise and you stay for the writing. It’s not breathtaking, there’s no impact spikes, it’s just well written throughout.

Spoilers:

There isn’t much I’ll be spoiling this time around. I mentioned choices beforehand, and I think Takeo has more choices overall. I think he has three bad endings overall but there’s one that I didn’t try so either that could lead to the same bad ending or you can salvage it to the good ending. Basically you need your friend to help you out and also not run away when shit hits the fan. Either way, Takeo’s plot hits home depending on where you are in life but the thing is Masamitsu hits the same strides. So it’s another angle of looking at the subject but it’s also not needed.

There was this whole thing about him studying law so I assumed somebody in his group was going to become a Hihiru and then this job crosses paths with Masamitsu to speed up the process of getting shit down. They do cross paths, but it was just a doctor, there’s no grandiose setup for it. And honestly that works, the plot stays realistic, this is just some random normal kid.

There’s a part where Masamitsu contracts the disease and if it wasn’t Setoguchi writing it, you’d assume he’d make some huge breakthrough to further advance the ways they’re treating their patients. But nothing happens, he just keeps on doing his job, he does appreciate the chance it gave to expand his worldview on the matter but otherwise the status quo stayed the same. And I was all for that, other vns handle these issues the same but it’s somewhat on the rare side.

The thing that made me think more often was Masamitsu’s ending. They talked about how his reports helped out his superior to get the government to actually look at what’s going around and that they made more hospitals. But the abolition of the homecare system took another 30 years. It gave me some Hamilton vibes. But it could be about two things, but it’s probably about both. At first you can say like, hey Masamitsu’s mind is still going strong 30 years later. But really it’s shitting on the government and how something that was a problem was explained and given steps to correct it still takes forever to get any traction. Or the time lapse could be hinting that Takeo had a role in getting shit done. Basically it’d take awhile for him to be of any worthwhile status and he might’ve travelled with Haruko.

Stella of the End: Quickie Review

So I finished Stella and it’s going to be a short one considering the title itself is short and it’s not like it’s inventing anything new.It’s fine, it has its strong moments but it takes a lot of leadup to make it work and it can be pretty annoying at times.

So the main cast just consists of Jude and Phia. Phia is some newtech android that wants to be human and Jude’s the guy that took the job to get her to his employer. Think of it kind of like the Transporter movie but it’s actually about transporting this time around. So it’s basically just going from place to place, she keeps developing throughout the number of crises that happen on the way. And that’s basically it, the first half was a drag and sometimes even annoying but it eventually became pretty fun at the latter half.

The best way to explain it is by comparing it to that Walking Dead game from like a decade ago. Almost everybody and their mom either played or watched a playthrough on youtube. At first my mind was comparing Phia to a fusion of Clementine and fucking Kenny Jr, or Ducky. I don’t think I ever met anyone that liked Ducky, but he’s just a naïve little kid that was also annoying because he didn’t think before doing shit. Which some kids naturally do. And that’s kind of Phia, she has no skills and her naivety keeps putting them in danger. But really, she’s more like Ben. She’s just good-hearted but fucks up more often than not. Unlike Ben, she eventually grows out of it and the story naturally becomes better because it stops being like an escort mission. Consider it like she upgraded from being an RE4 Ashley to a The Last of Us 1 Ellie where she didn’t suck yet.

I’d consider this more of a starter vn like the other two key vns: Harmonia and Planetarian. Each one kind of has their own strengths and downfalls. Harmonia’s ending makes sense but is lackluster. Planetarian needed more time to bake while Stella has a rough time in the 20% to 50% section of the run. I’m giving this a 7 but I’m pretty sure most people would put it as an 8 just due to the ending. I don’t fault them, it’s the last experience that’s ingrained to you so it makes sense. Overall the content is kind of simple in the sense that there’s not much to think about. The setting itself and the reveals are fun but the characters themselves are straightforward and there’s not much in there to second-guess yourself. What you see is kind of what you get. And that’s pretty much what I expect from the writer, Romeo. You’re either amazed on how he could pull off some of these titles or you’re just cruising along and having a fun time.

Spoilers:

There’s not much to talk about it terms of spoilers. The parts where I was talking about how when she’s annoying is when Jude keeps telling her that specific places and people are dangerous. And she doesn’t listen like a normal kid wouldn’t. So she sees this kid up above and found an entrance and ran after her. Jude caught up in time and the girl wasn’t anywhere so it was kind of close call but right after that time she gets captured. It goes through this whole sequence of Jude gunning people down and they were basically trying to break her legs so she could be another sex slave or something. So she gets saved before than happens, more people getting gunned down and she’s still trying to negotiate when clearly these are just people reverted to their primal state. Anyways, she gets yelled at, a lot of time passes and she finds an sos type call and she wants to help. And Jude is like, BRUH. And they get captured again, lol.

Not to mention that I don’t know how those initial people were actually surviving out there with the population that they had. It was mentioned that this train is going back and forth and it’s for delivering food to the lower sections. But everybody up there is dead so you could say that oh it’s the AI that’s synthesizing food but it later gets brought up that the AI no longer sees humans as human so how’re they getting food.

They did reference Tomorrow’s Eve by the end and that was kind of interesting. I never read it myself, I only knew it from something else I’ve read about Pinocchio and how it’s the inverse idea. Basically saying what if they start with the flesh and what remains to be human is their mind. It’s one of those things where it’s placed by the end to make the reader think about the whole setup retroactively. And that’s either a hit or miss, I think the concept itself was pretty clear early on and the use is stronger when things are ambiguous.

I appreciate that they didn’t delve further by the end where everything is basically resolved emotionally and it’s just them travelling and just expanding her horizons. The sections would’ve been great but you could see how it’d all work to the point it’d just be a mood piece. It was basically still well written and you understand the emotions they were going through just with the excerpt given.
And that’s pretty much it, I guess the last thing I’d mention is that the new baby crimson eye is cute and I wouldn’t mind a fandisk of just the new three interacting in a one time job.