Kunado Kokuki: Consistent enough that you don’t notice the downtime

So I finished this one recently and it’s actually pretty decent. This might be one of my shorter ones because there’s not really a theme I’m writing around this time. Like the closest thing is just about how consistent they keep the quality throughout the whole vn. Sure I think one section is better than the rest but it’s not like there’s these chasmic dips that some other vns have. I wouldn’t say the title was amazing, there could’ve been a lot more crap slapped on to the point that sometimes you can even consider the characters just meander about once you reflect on it. But the 30 hours or so just went through pretty fast. So it’s more like a 7 in terms of content but I’m putting it as an 8 overall due to how little I can nitpick it outside of subjective preferences. I’ll get to that later on and maybe how it fares with some of their other titles but I’ll go through the general plotline first.

So the world was basically fucked. These robots called the Tekki just popped up and they were massively op to the point that none of the weaponry was of any use. Fast-forward 1000 years, humanity is still in combat with them but much less so. They learned the Tekki’s detection radii alongside their big honcho Kurokami being out of commission. They’re still a threat but people started getting powers along the centuries. Technically I think they started popping up in the first century already but they bang with other people with the same power or a complimentary power to just keep boosting the power level. So because of that, humans have their own area called Kanto, the strongest of them become one of the elites that’re just named swords. Anyways, your guy gets woken up from his 1000 year sleep and gets named Shin. His job is to reintroduce concepts of his era back into Kanto. And that’s basically the gist of it; They spend a lot more time on the foundation of how the town works, their ideology and how to improve sections of it than doing anything with the Tekki. Not like the Tekkis aren’t a concern, it’s just that they’re not shown and just implied to be taken care of by who’s patrolling at the moment. Shin just has other things to do deemed more valuable but that’ll be in the spoilers.

There’s only three routes this time around and honestly that’s fine. There’s an extra character I would’ve liked to see explored but one of the routes was already kind of tapering off by the end anyway. The routes are usually split in two: the setup and their development following by being together if you go into their route. The true route doesn’t really get that treatment but there is a section where it felt like there might’ve been a choice that would either lead to the finale or a bad ending but there’s no options there. The funny thing is my favorite route is Yuuri, the first one available. Her section and route covers the town, the opportunity for individualism and of commerce. It works she’s basically the stand-in to what the town represents. The other two are already swords, the elite. Though really all three have some basis on the rope pull between what they personally want and what’s needed for humanity even if they fail here and there. I feel like Yuri just has the better moments and just an overall better flow to it. The largest issue to some just might be her personality but even then she softened up to the point that I don’t know why anyone would complain. But this is coming from someone that actually liked Chizuru from MuvLuv, where I’ve only talked to like three other people that liked her.
The twins were kind of iffy to me, but it’s mostly that they’re just not my cup of tea. It also felt somewhat rushed in the last 3rd of their first section. Mainly it felt like it needed one extra section between the first and second conflict. It’s like the old saying of “well we got to talking and one thing led to another and now we’re here”. It’s not egregious enough to complain about it but it’s something you’ll notice.

The soundtrack is too same-y. It’s all well done but it’s like Dragon Force where you could think a song from Sonic Firestorm albums is Inhuman Rampage. It fits the mood and it fits the setting but I’m just not going to remember any of it. The art is fine as always, I think the way they handled their clothes isn’t as polished as it was in Amatsutsumi. On the other hand, they balanced out the porn a lot better in this than in Amatsutsumi. The main character is also more enjoyable to go through but that’s more on the case that I was just not a huge fan of Makoto. I wouldn’t put Shin in my top 30 or something, he’s just serviceable.
This one is technically better than Chrono Clock and it’s a lot more consistent in terms of quality. But there is no, I guess I’d call it a hype spike in the finale. It was just written well and you can see where it was going. The funny thing is they actually spiked in Yuuri and the twins. But the message of what they were going for is delivered in the finale, just the spike didn’t do it for me.

Overall

Overall the vn was fine, it’s like a high 7. I think it’s 2nd on top of the purple software titles I’ve read. The twins was the part I liked the least, it suffers from needing a swift resolution to continue the main plot. I could’ve been prolonged and have that be the main thing in their own route. Or just extend the first part like I said, but it’s mainly that their 2nd section was kind of whatever but it’s probably a subjective thing. It does have two things you can use for the next route but honestly not necessary. I think there’s a couple of things they could’ve added to sweeten the experience but it might’ve felt like it’d be too long for what they were going for. A lot of the times it felt like they were just meandering about but it’s actually essential because it’s not a battle-centric vn, it’s one about re-progressing humanity. The ebbs and flows were so consistent that for one you’d barely notice that nothing happens for long strides but when the ride is done, you come to the realization of holy shit things were going at a snail’s pace. And I’m not even mad about it, sometimes that’s all you need. But you’re just never going to get a masterpiece with it, it’s just solid. To be fair, the last quarter was going a lot faster in terms of pacing than the rest and that’s kind of comical in a way because they probably assumed they were close to overstaying their welcome.

Spoilers

So the spoilers will be light this time around, and this is mainly for the people that already finished it or don’t care. But either way I’ll be talking about some characters and I won’t explain who they are for the most part.
So the section/route I wanted was with Shiki. I think more people would prefer to have a Tsubame route but the extra kind of handled what I wanted out of it and I don’t think she’d add a huge amount more to the overarching plot. Shiki on the other hand already had a connection from the twin’s route and has a different vendetta towards the town. Now the 2nd half of the twin’s route wasn’t great for me, it’s serviceable but I thought maybe it was a way to connect to the next section. Like in Yuuri’s case, a couple of things they brought up for the town is still brought up by the finale. In the twin’s case, I think it was the idea of steam powered machinery and the radio. So you could say that Shiki started inventing shit and that’d cause its own conflict that would lead to her section. And that’s kind of the gist of it, I don’t really care if there was no romance at all, it’s a plot point that they don’t really go for. It’s not like they forgot about her completely, but they didn’t do something with her, it might’ve been a budget thing considering Haru also doesn’t have 2 sections. Shiki does have a small section as an extra, but it’s mainly for the hscene.
Another thing is they mentioned three other swords and they’re never used. Obviously they’re just there to fill in the ranks but they explained their personalities and I would’ve liked to see the one that never loses an argument just because she’s that much of an asshat. It would’ve messed up the mood but it would’ve been funny if she showed up in the epilogue just to shittalk Natsu.
The last point was mainly on that they went on for a bit that the world has its own plan. And the kotodama people are basically just tools for their plans and the idea was that even though the child is technically going to be a future tool, Shin and Haru will still go with it because it’s based out of love for each other. But nothing is really done with the child. I assumed it was something along the lines of it being Natsu reincarnated alongside just having a stronger body from some Tekki aftereffect. Or it becomes Natsu with 0 powers. Or that the child gets Shin’s soul but that’d be all kinds of funny weird shit. Because they’re both kind of created from Natsu, you’d think it’d be a strong enough lead to do some kind of shenanigans with but nothing was done.
And then there’s two small things. So the kotodama power still has the same drawback where it consumes your life pool. So there’s a scene where she buffs the whole town to their limits and it drains like 20 years. Keep in mind I think this is the first time they even bring the cost up. Anyways, you’d imagine forcing physics of the world to change on a a dime would be more costly. Like speeding up some trees to grow is one thing since it’s taking the nutrients from the soil. But removing friction from your area is a whole different matter. The other is that in the twins’ ending, they’ve already killed four other kurokamis. And it’s basically saying they’re super op, and they are. But the concept wasn’t that the Kurokami is overall a tank, he could just spam weaponry on a massively stupid level and the only reason he lost was because Natsu could just phase out of existence so she couldn’t get hit by anything. So sure the twins are op, but I doubt they’d survive that onslaught. They tried to explain it away with them taking care of like 12 of the level 3 variants, but from what I remember, the power gaps between the levels are exponential. Something to the extent of like, car>tank>fighter aircraft>Strike Freedom. But honestly a lot of that is just me being too anal on it and just go like, yeah that makes sense.

On another note, I was playing Horizon Zero Dawn at the same time I was reading this. The coincidence was just funny, having similar plots just one is more scifi and the other being more fantasy oriented.

Tokyo Necro: Still pretty good even after entering with high expectations

Edit: I spaced out a lot of the text. It looked like a madman possessed me.

I finished Tokyo Necro recently and it’s pretty good. It’s not as great as I hoped but honestly I knew that was going to be the case since I put a lot of stock on campy shit. Mainly I was expecting a lot of gunkata and dumbass tanks jumping around everywhere. You get a lot of the former but maybe only around two or three times with the tank acrobatics.

The general plotline is held in a cyberpunk setting where mostly everything is fucked and most of the world is iced over due to global cooling. There’s a lot of backstory that it goes through but honestly it’s not overly important. All you have to know is that there were a few wars and eventually they figured out how to resurrect the dead but they would lose their mental capacities in a few days. Necromancers go further and you can get them to keep their emotions for around two weeks but overall the more important aspect is they can basically make them into super soldiers. So the warring countries just found new bodies to throw at their enemies to the point that they made new combat styles to re-kill the new undead soldiers.

Which basically emphasizes on close quarters combat alongside being efficient with ammo since that was also a constant concern. The weather kept getting worse, the wars are over and they dumped the necromancers to the side so now they basically work for anybody but that generally means the mafia and the sort. Speed up to present time, the cast is trying to find the vice governor or something but ends up finding Iria. Iria doesn’t remember anything but apparently a lot of organizations are after her and the plot goes on. And that’s a common trope but the one I remember most vividly is Outlaw Star and it’s a show I’d like to rewatch some day, but mainly it’s because I still remember the two ending tracks.

The cast is a huge mix bag and it’s to the point that I think I’m indifferent because I really only had fun with 4 of them alongside random weeb figurine guy that you see for like 5 minutes. Part of it is that some of the cast is bland and some stuck in an archetype.
I’ll go through the ones I liked first and just go down the list.

There’s So’un, the gun kata guy that’s generally dense but also understands that he’s dense and progressively gets better at it. And a lot of it is mostly that he’s emotionally stunted and socially inept and those are some of his ongoing themes. I found he was the most well written in the cast and was at least interesting to go through.

Next is Tokitaka. He’s written rather well in the sense that his quirk isn’t a crutch and actually an addition to his humor alongside having a decent backstory behind it. He actually gets a lot more screentime than I thought he would and I’m glad that it was the case. He’s basically the support/sniper of the group.

Then there’s Milgram, the main villain of the plot. I find him comical in a deadpan sort of way and basically like 70% of what’s interesting in the vn either comes from him or is setup by him. And that says quite a lot when I find So’un rather interesting on his own.

The 4th is a tie between Pavlov and Con Su, their respective personalities didn’t do it for me but the plot points that revolves around them are pretty cool. Honestly I think Con Su has the best overall route. She’s the hacker archetype but she basically has to OD to go through this data highway(I’ll talk about it later). One of my favorite tracks comes from those times.

Iria is fine, but I see her more as a driving force for other characters that I like more. She’s basically the happy vibes character.

Mitsumi kind of got the short end of the stick. She’s a tsundere hard ass samurai but she’s basically set as the intro route. It builds well to the other routes and as such doesn’t get a huge amount done but I’ll mention it in the spoilers. I do like the references towards kikokugai though.

The rest are kind of bland, one is done so on purpose but the one I generally dislike is Ethica. She has a lot of cool moments but they get bogged down by her incessant issues. Her personality is basically Momoyo from Majikoi. If you actually liked her and not just her route then you might enjoy Ethica. But for me it’s just kind of annoying and reminds me of that grapehead kid from My hero academia.

The art is kind of iffy but I think it’s mainly on the eyelashes and it just makes the face look weird(well outside of eyes but that’s kind of the norm). There’s also this weird pose that Iria does that makes her arm look broken if she’s wearing her gloves and it always make me double take. Other than that it’s pretty cool but for some reason my favorite cg isn’t shown in the gallery at all. The ost is going to be divisive, it goes kind of hard with the metal tracks. I like them but it’s also not my style so I can’t really explain their subsection because I’d say it’s just melodic death metal but I wouldn’t argue if you say it’s deathcore. Though those tracks don’t have vocals so I think most people can at least tolerate it, lol. Re-Elimination is probably my favorite track though Departed is also pretty neat. I would’ve said it’d be Information Warfare but that connects to memories of those scenes making me worry that it’s wearing down my eyes.

It’s got some ballsy choices for the route tracks choices and I respect that, especially the one in Iria’s route. Though really they had their cake and ate it too since they just put the hype track in the finale anyway. I really should check what Galneryus sounds like now, I only know the albums I’ve heard when I was a teen, and that was all with the past vocalist Yama-B. Honestly I thought it was still Yama-B in this op and he just softened his style like how Rise Against’s vocalist did. One final note is that the ending theme is Assemble Rebirth which is like a vocaloid song but it always gets me cracked up because it sounds like she’s saying sadge.

The vn is split into 4 routes and then the finale. Though technically it’s the intro, common 1 then the two choices that specify which route to go to. This leads to common 2 with like 15 minutes of different dialogue depending on your choices. Then common 3a and b depending if you choose Iria and Mitsumi or Kiriri and Con Su. Then it’s finally hitting their own routes if you can call it that because most of the routes share the spotlight between multiple characters. Hell, Kiriri’s route covers some character more often than herself. The order given to me was Mitsumi>Con Su>Kiriri>Iria.

Mitsumi is a good starter, it goes through the cast and leads to Kiriri or Con Su pretty well. Unfortunately I felt the route was kind of weak on its own. Especially the 2nd to last area where it just meandered quite a bit but I’ll go through that in the spoilers. Iria is last simply because it’s the best path towards the finale and honestly her route should be locked if it isn’t. It also assumes you know most of what’s going on so whoever did her route first is probably kind of confused at some points, lol. I dislike Kiriri’s route, and that’s kind of to be expected when I don’t really like Ethica half the time.

She just sounds like a petulant crybaby to me more often than not. And yeah you can somehow put it in the gap moe somehow but it’s in the tastes that I’m into. You can’t go from “I’m a huge player” and then shit your pants when somebody you like shows up whilst also raging at your dad at just the sight of him. It doesn’t help that really there’s really only one exclusive plot point that ends up being important. A plot point that could theoretically be put inside Iria’s route but then you’d lost on a decent amount of pretty cool fights. Funny enough those are better than the final fight in this route too.

Con Su’s route was amazing and I wouldn’t even be mad if Tokyo Necro ended up being a kinetic experience with just this route. Overall I’d actually rate it higher since it excludes a lot of the sections I wasn’t into. Funny thing is that I wasn’t even sure I was in Con Su’s route for quite a bit because there’s a fair amount of scenes with Kiriri. Which just further adds insult to injury because I felt like they went over more of her stuff here than in her own route.

It’s just kind of rough for Kiriri’s route because she technically has a great common 3, it’s just that you’ve read it in Con Su’s route already. Technically Kiriri and Con Su are interchangeable in terms of route order. There’s somethings that spoil each other and other parts that’re only important for the overall plot. I’d say Con Su still edges out as the better 2nd route but also it splits the quality a little better. Otherwise you get like 2 middling routes back to back.

The final route is fine, it’s what to be expected and it’s written well but it’s also the least “nitro” of the stuff I’ve read. Honestly Con Su’s route kind of went harder in some aspects and shit was hype. I’ll go over it in the spoilers.

There’s maybe three important hscenes. They could be worked around easily but there’s still relatively useful info in there. One revolves around Ryouko, either or of Con Su’s h scenes and one with Ethica. Though one actually kind of fucks up a minor plot point.

Ok now that I most of that out of the way, I can gripe about a few things before going into the spoilers. It takes forever to start the game, you have to go through a faux terminal that’s basically simulating a couple of errors. You’d assume this has a purpose but I haven’t been able to find it. Then you can interact with it but there’s not much outside of typing search to start the 2nd loading screen.

You do get some new commands after you finish the vn(or maybe just one route)but I also didn’t find anything useful. I thought maybe some commands were hidden but even the basic sudo wasn’t in there. And it turned out that su wasn’t pertaining to the linux command, but a text adventure that starts with Con Su in there but it’s a joke and you can just skip it. Overall it’s only a problem if you don’t read in long strides. Another thing, and this one is mostly my fault but loading or saving takes awhile but I found out that you can spam click and it’ll skip the animations. It does look cool and I thought it was going for a defrag motif but it was actually something else though technically I guess you can still consider it a sort of defrag.

Throughout the vn, they’ll highlight specific words that you can click to get some notes. For the most part these are really barebones compared to other titles where you can get some witty comment about it or a paragraph info dump. Most of them were self explanatory, explained in the next line or something that you wouldn’t even know about. I just stopped looking at them after the first common but they also decreased a lot by then. The worst one I can remember was the Pavlov note where all it says is that he works for Milgram. You haven’t seen Milgram’s name yet, so you just assume the guy next to him is Milgram. They do get updated but not won’t actually keep all of the info that you experienced.

The pacing is kind of off in common 1 where a lot of just drags and there’s a lot of jargon to go through that’s not overly necessary. There’s other times where they info dump your ass, it wasn’t necessary for the plot but just for the background info of how the land is being run. There really wasn’t a better way of doing it but they were basically going through like 8 different organizations in one go. The action scenes are kind of hit or miss and it’s dependent on the reader. At first I compared to something akin to the n64, where it’s a advancement in tech but like an in between before the fully realized concept is made. It’s not something that can be really fixed.

The issue is that there’s some movement and then it freeze frames for the dialogue. But that actually worked around this for later fights and especially my favorite fights and it wasn’t even one of the route finale ones. Where there was extended action and the dialogue happens when they’re taking cover. There’s also some scenes where the action is overall beneficial to the story telling since it portrays what happens before it explains it down the line. If this was reincorporated into Hanachirasu, I might’ve liked it more. Outside of that scene that was being played out in the fortress, I guess my other favorite scenes outside of that one that was based inside the fortress, it’d be the whole common 3b where the gang basically goes blasting in this street with no way out and eventually moves up only to get another cool fight with Pavlov and Milgram.

The two choices are kind of iffy and you don’t really know what choice goes to where. The outcomes themselves are somewhat explained after awhile but even with those it doesn’t really make a huge amount of sense why this choice leads to Iria and this one leads to Mitsumi.

Overall

Overall I entered the vn with some expectations that I knew weren’t going to be met but I still had a good experience once it all ended. Sure I think some characters are kind of bland or annoying, sure some scenes kept on going but you can tell they were trying to go big with it all. If the vn only contained Con Su and Iria’s route I’d give it a 9. Hell if it was Con Su alone, I’d give it a 9 that’s slightly higher even though it’d lose some of the impact. With everything, I’m giving it an 8 but one that barely got there. The gunkata stuff was fun outside of maybe two or 3 semi shit fights, the spider tanks were awesome when they show up and the villain was pretty fun even with him being one of the most down to earth when compared to something like Demonbane and Muramasa.

Spoilers

So for the spoilers, it’s going to be all over the place.

The fist thing is the choices, there’s one for Ethica and one for So’un. One leads them to die and become a living dead, the other lets them live. So you have 4 outcomes in total. The Ethica choice is a 50/50 bullshit and makes sense with context at the same time. She dies if you make the same choice she’s thinking of. The distinction is she turns off her ex brain at some point, so she gets her thigh stabbed and basically not have enough time to process the scenario and dies. She turns it off because it made the same decision in the beginning. So she’s like, this is a piece of useless crap but it’s actually doing it right. She thinks highly of herself, you both reached the same conclusion, so it should be kept on. But with context of some of her sections in the ongoing routes, she’s constantly rebelling against the ex brain’s choices as a form of rebelling against her dad. I’ll come back to this later.

The choice So’un does kind of makes sense around Kiriri’s route but gets explained fully in Iria’s route. He lives if you decide to save Iria first, but die if you go try to finish Milgram first. The reason he dies is because the bullet he was using is kind of dumb and he gets disappointed that So’un isn’t at his father’s level. But if he goes for Iria, then he sees her as a constraint that can be used as a way to power up So’un. Consider the whole Gohan vs Cell bit from dbz. It still kind of made sense without the context, you knew something was going on in Milgram’s mind.

Anyways, back to Ethica. I actually like her when she’s a living dead, or rather when her emotions have deteriorated. She’s no longer assmad every time her dad shows up. She contemplates on what’s important to her throughout all her sections, it’s actually pretty awesome on how they handle how she goes out. So in Kiriri’s route, Ethica finds something out and believes that she has the same mother as Kiriri and that screws it up because she was finally going to confess after being a baby about it forever. But actually that was a surrogate mother, her genetics actually come from her dad Hokoyasu and So’un’s dad Takeyuki.

I forgot if the latter was dead or already but I don’t think so, but he doesn’t know about it. Basically Hokoyasu is in the closet and ashamed of it. Then he figures out that Ethica is also gay and he’s an asshole about it. But really the larger point is she now reminds him of both what he dislikes about himself and also a reminder of Takeyuki that crossed a way bigger line that fucked up So’un’s psyche along the way. So he technically still loves her as a daughter but he’s got too much baggage to accept it and he stonewalls everybody he knows. He’s a huge doomer at the present point.

Anyways, because Ethica is never acknowledged by him, she cemented herself in this rebellious stage where she’ll continuously do the complete opposite of anything that’s related to her dad. Which includes the ex brain since her dad made it. Now when you’re job is pretty dangerous and you can randomly die in any mission, you’d think you just take that bitter pill and use the fucking equipment. Especially when there’s others that depend on you being efficient and the person you love the most is always stupidly worried.

And it’s completely valid when these are the choices you make. It doesn’t really help that this plot point happens in most of the routes. Honestly, she most likely would have died if she wasn’t basically an overpowered character due to having genetics of two super soldiers(albeit Hokoyasu being way lower). They also introduced her learning how to dual wield chainsaws in secret but this is never used outside of Kiriri’s route. And that makes sense because it’d be a spoiler if you did Iria’s first. But that just goes back to asking why that route isn’t locked until the other 3 are done.

Pretty early on you’re introduced to Ryouko which is basically the manager of the agency that So’un, Tokitaka and Ethica work at. They were all trained by Ikkatsu, Ryouko’s husband that died a few years back. Ikkatsu worked with So’un’s dad, so that’s why So’un is there. They’re all there for basically the same reasons. Anyways, all you have to know is Ryouko really loved her husband. So you get put into an hscene with Tokitaka and Ryouko. At first that’s kind of fucked up because they say that they’ve been banging even when Ikkatsu was alive. But by the end of Mitsumi’s route, you just find that Ikkatsu is one of those power cucks that get horny from telling his wife to bang other people. And it was pretty funny overall because you know Tokitaka likes her but in the finale, his goal was actually to beat Ikkatsu and take Ryouko. So it just so happened that Ikkatsu was into that, it’s ironically funny.

Ikkatsu shows up a lot but always dies, it’s pretty weird how it’s setup. He’s out of his armor crap in Mitsumi’s route and shows he was resurrected by Milgram. It’s the only time without his armor and it’s one of the worst fights with So’un because it’s more to show the effectiveness of this bullet that the Energy Mega Float corporation is making. Because it pretty much kills them in 15 seconds. It’s one of the larger leadups for one of the other routes but in the end it’s actually not used a whole lot. Ikkatsu, Ryouko and Tokitaka’s stuff gets resolved in Kiriri or Con Su’s route since it’s part of the common 3b route.

Most of Tokitaka’s screentime stays in there and it’s great. Like none of the cast even knew it was Ikkatsu in Iria’s route, he was no longer relevant. Overall Tokitaka got the most action during Kiriri’s route but the most development in Con Su’s route. Another thing for Ryouko is that you’d assume she was killed off in Mitsumi(and I guess Iria’s route if you did hers first) during common 2 but she was just in a district that had a conri mesh jammer. Only for her to die in the other two routes and the only hint is that the food she made was spicy.

Which is obvious enough but I assumed it was just rehashing that So’un and Ethica’s sense of taste have weakened drastically due to them already being dead for a day or two. Overall I didn’t find her all that interesting and is more to build up Tokitaka but I guess one thing she was possibly there for was to demonstrate that the living dead generally keep their strongest principle/emotion with them. So even though they fucked her brain up, she still knows that she’s happiest with Ikkatsu. But this was demonstrated in the other characters anyway.

Mitsumi has a decent amount of Kikokugai references but it’s also kind of iffy at points. There’s this boat section in the middle that drags on forever and it’s also where So’un and Ikkatsu fight. Honestly I find it one of the worst sections in the vn. Ethica’s version in Iria’s route is better done. But that’s also because they don’t talk to Ikkatsu and it’s more action packed. Mitsumi being around the same caliber as So’un and Ethica is kind of weird in itself for quite a while since she doesn’t use an ex brain.

The ex brain is just software that tells you the optimal decisions during the fight. I’ll come back to this later on. Anyways, Mitsumi and So’un kind of compliment each other in their fighting styles somehow. But by the final fight, they were both doing better against Milgram alone than they when they were fighting him together, lol. Honestly it was kind of dumb but the important part was that So’un was actually improving and this only comes to fruition during Iria’s route alongside what the ex brain’s full potential can be.

The Ex Brain is actually a really interesting concept that wasn’t really used as much as I thought it’d be. Basically it analyzes the enemies and what what the user is capable of. It’s constantly growing to the point that concepts from yesterday can be trashed for better ones today because they can communicate with other Ex Brains. This was shown a few times and I thought this idea would be expanded more often but doesn’t because the finale was done differently. It was still there, it was just Ethica’s ex brain communicating to So’un’s conri. And this is getting convoluted, but the conri is short for connection ring, there’s basically no more internet, so it’s kind of like each ring is a hotspot and you can contact people throughout the city using the rings like network switches.

But really there was back and forth communication between them, if anything it’s kind of funny that they went with the role reversal for the finale. Where So’un overall surpassed the ex brain whilst Ethica is finally getting over her grievances and using everything in her disposal. If she actually had her shit together, I think she’d be on a higher level than So’un. They both basically had their own mental handicaps they had to go through. But So’un basically fought with a cheatsheet/instructor always on and continuously training him whilst Ethica is all instinct.

And this part should be near the end but might as well just go over it now. So throughout the plot, there’s this being called Sub-Concept that’s trying to get into contact with Iria. Consider it like a Hatsune Miko or whatever, it was created by basically a huge mesh of everybody’s personal data that’s used from these Connection Rings/conri. Anyways, how the plot is setup is that there was technically no Con Su, Kiriri or Mitsumi route. There was only Iria and then it was Subcon going through multiple iterations of whatifs to try and find the solution. I thought she was actually accessing the Exbrains and working with it to expand what options they could have in the past.

So it’d be like, the ex brain from Mitsumi’s route would share info with the one in Con Su’s route and it keeps on going until the Finale’s ex brain. And it’s technically still about the ex brain, but only as a way for subcon to communicate with them. Except at this point, only Ethica is still using the exbrain and it’s just a way to incorporate her into the final fight because honestly not much has changed. Maybe the idea was that Milgram had to be away from that room for SubCon to do her thing towards Iria because it’s not like much else has changed.

I’d still prefer it being a cluster of all the ex brains working together to find the best solution and providing it before the final confrontation. Mainly on the merit that they put a lot of effort and attention to this tool and then it’s not really used as an actual piece. Because yeah, SubCon communicated with Ethica through her ex brain, but I don’t see why the conri wouldn’t suffice for that. Both Kiriri and Con Su’s routes spent time showing that the ex brains are basically replications of themselves, and So’un’s actually being of his dad mentoring him.

Con Su’s route was done the best, it shares the spotlight with basically half the cast and that’s what it made great. It fleshes out Tokitaka, Con Su and So’un alongside developing Kiriri and Ethica. It reveals Milgram’s plan, or rather shows what happens when it’s successful. It covers what the fortress was about and why Iria was there in the first place. It has some pretty cool fights throughout the route. It’s still pretty cool watching them swap out fast responsive time with the most bullshit elimination methods now that they feel no pain and can spare a limb and some organs. Whilst also providing a new experience with So’un diving into the data highway. In her route, both Ethica and So’un are dead. They try their hardest to retain their emotions and what’s important to them.

Con Su figures out that the ex brains can be used to slow down the mental deterioration. Iria is continuously going deeper in her depression of what’s happening around her, trying to escape into the data highway whilst SubCon is going wild and trying to consume all of the living since she now considers it a nuisance after her betrayals. Only to learn from So’un, the person who’s initially socially and emotionally inept but started experiencing everything when entering the highway.

So while SubCon was done with humanity, So’un showed there’s more than the negative feelings that she’s experience at that point only to be immersed in the myriad of emotions once Con Su broadcasts her new virtual program showing the world when it was still hospitable. While Con Su is doing that, Ethica is figuring out her own issues while fighting replicas of every dangerous character they fought through the vn with some help from Tokitaka. There was even some spider tank movement throughout the sequences when trying to avoid getting consumed. In the end So’un assimilates into the highway while telling Iria to live on, to be happy and experience everything the world can still offer.

All in all, I had high expectations and while I find it lower than Demonbane and Muramasa, I still had a lot of fun with it. If it was just Con Su, I’d give it a high 9. And just a 9 with just Iria and Con Su. Ethica made it a low 8, she’s enjoyable in multiple instances near the ends of each route but I was tired of her rebellious phase, I’m just too old for that now. Get off my lawn Ethica.

Notes

Day 1:
It takes forever to start the game but there’s probably a reason for it. It’s probably to unlock the final route. Honestly it just takes too long if you’re not a marathon reader.
Another thing is outside of the quicksave( that might be a new addition from the original since it doesn’t fit the theme), loading/saving takes too long. I get it’s part of the defrag motif but it’s still a bit much if you only read a little at a time. That being said, it does look cool and it reminds me of the ps1. The defragging thing is probably going to be finished once the 4 routes are done and it forces the game to close just to see a menu show up.

The notes are kind of jarring, there’s a lot of them and I’d say the majority of them aren’t really helpful. A key example is a note on Pavlov, where it only says he worked for someone else. Except that person wasn’t introduced yet so it was a pointless note. Other notes are actually explained in context in the next line too so half the time you can skip them.
I like the preview image of the next cg, you can use it to infer what’s going to happen next. Though I can understand if others dislike it.

The beginning fight scene is kind of a hit or miss. I compare to something akin to the n64, where it’s a advancement in technology but like an inbetween before the fully realized concept is made. It’s not something that can be really fixed. The issue is that there’s some movement and then it freeze frames for the dialogue. In some instances that can be pretty cool but that’s not really the case for the first fight. You can make it so the dialogue is happening in the bottom while the action plays out smoothly and then return to a basic adv during the stare downs. At that point you can scroll back up to get what you missed, but I don’t think a lot of people would enjoy that method anyway.

I like the math sniper guy, hopefully he has a decent amount of screen time. For now I still prefer Kikokugai and Demonbane more. It’s mainly that the setup is taking awhile.
So far I’m not really a fan of Ethica, but it’s only the start and she probably gets developed better. Right now it just reminds me of Momoyo from Majikoi. Though overall I’m not a fan of pervy characters as their starting point but I’ve seen it work well.
So’un is fine, he’s kind of socially inept but I think he understands that he is so there’s probably more development towards that in Iria’s route.
The rest of the cast so far is kind of whatever so far.

Mitsumi route:
I hit the branching paths and I finished the first route. I was told that the route order should be Mitsumi, Con Su, Kiri and then Iria. The branching paths are kind of weird, or rather the one based on Ethica. I guess the idea was that going to the roof like she thought made her think she doesn’t need the ex brain’s input and thus getting stabbed on the leg that leads to her dying. She thinks really highly of herself and it’s double edged because it mean either I’m too good for the brain. But it can also mean something around hey the brain that’s built for the best option chose what I wanted to do, I’m rad let’s go. The fights are pretty cool but So’un’s idea for his bullet was pretty stupid. After that section there’s basically common section 2 and I was kind of confused at times to the point I thought maybe I wasn’t on Mitsumi’s route and instead on Iria’s. I’m assuming the reason for the route order was that it’s the one that doesn’t talk about Ethica being a living dead but it’s not like they were hiding it from the reader anyway. Funny enough I like Ethica a lot more with her emotions somewhat downgraded. I also thought Ryoko died and was going to be the actual surprise, but it looks like it really was just a shopping trip. I wasn’t really a fan of common section 2, it kind of took awhile to get anywhere.

The fight in the fortress was really cool and basically handled it like I mentioned before. Sadly that was my favorite fight in the route and it didn’t include Mitsumi. Honestly the whole fortress section was favorite part of the route. The ship was pretty middling and the fight with Ikkatsu was also pretty whatever. The way it was setting it up, I thought it’d be a bigger spectacle. Part of me thinks he’ll be a more reoccurring character and be cooler the more routes you go through but I think that’ll just be placed on Milgram. There are some references to kikokugai and I liked those a lot. There was a scene with the spider tank near the end and honestly outside of the gunkata, that was the shit I was hoping for the most. Hopefully it gets more screen time. The final fight was kind of cool and probably the first time where the motion helped the delivery since it shows the reader what’s happening before they deliver the outcome a few lines later. Not the most amazing thing but I appreciated it. The setup is still kind of dumb because they’re still losing when fighting together which was told that they’re filling in for eachother’s weaknesses. Yet after that fight, they each get a solo fight and doing better than when together. Part of it would’ve done better if Mitsumi also had a ex brain feeding in info like they did with the fortress fight. I guess the idea was that she’s a prodigy and is used to not to use those things and she was learning whilst So’un was fighting and getting better after each impact.

I feel like Mitsumi’s brother, or at least his final scene is a plot setup for So’un in someway in the next 3 routes but I can’t see what it can be. Like some resurgence of will, or at least keeping one purpose or emotion in them and that part doesn’t wane. Overall the route was fine but nothing I’d be going holy shit about. So far it’s probably the weakest of the titles that I’ve read outside of maybe Hanachirasu but I’m kind of biased on that one.
One last thing is during common 2, it was kind of shown that Ryoko still loves Ikkatsu but apparently has been fucking the math guy before he even died. So that was kind of fucked up but actually Ikkatsu had a cuck fetish or something and it became pretty funny. There could be something important in there that’ll be revealed later but also a lot of these hscenes feel super unnecessary so far.

Con Su route:
I liked this one a lot more. Honestly if this was kinetic novel and it was just this route, I’d be fine with it. It still kind of has the slow pacing that I wasn’t really into but overall I’d give it a 9. On the other hand, most of the time it didn’t feel like I was in Con Su’s route. It felt like it had a good deal of attention towards Kiriri to the point I was thinking maybe I was in her route like I thought I was in Iria’s route during Mitsumi. Really Con Su only really shines at around 80% of the route. This does lead well from Mitsumi’s route since the Energy Mega-Float section was basically the last stop in Mitsumi but is like in the first 30% in this route. So’un actually realizes he’s dead a lot faster than in the previous route with Ethica. Or rather he wasn’t in a soft denial since he got immediate proof. So I’d agree with the route order so far. The fights are a lot cooler this time around but I don’t think it hits fortress levels but also I don’t think it was trying and going for emotional impact. Or rather the last 20% was, the section before the energy area and during that area were still high impact.
It builds on the math guy a lot, to the point that I’m fine if he stops getting screen time. He gets more than I expected and I’m glad the side guy is actually important. He’s probably the most relatable out of the bunch, and that’s still pretty far out there.

At this point I’m wondering how Kiriri’s route will go because it feels like this route should be closer to the end of the structure. It handles Iria and Con Su a bunch, the highway stuff is way more in-depth and it goes through Milgram’s plans already. Maybe Milgram is actually not all that important and at this point maybe So’un’s dad is still around as an obstacle. Overall the route was pretty grandiose to the point that the vn could’ve ended here and I’d be fine with it. I do appreciate that the title screen is updating with every route finished. I think I noticed something after Mitsumi but I thought I was just remembering wrong. I think I/O kind of does it better but at the same time the amount of choices kind of make it hard to do it in the same fashion.
Also Ryoko did die this time around and I was wondering if she was actually also dead in the previous route without being found out. But it was just a tell based on her cooking, where it was too spicy because she couldn’t actually taste test it.

At this point I feel like the title page represents the ex brain and how doing all of the routes gives it enough new data points for it to open up the true route. Maybe So’un’s dad shows up them. Though it’s more likely it just represents the subcon and that’s not that cool. Part of the map kind of looks like that baby thing from earthbound

Kiriri Route:
Half of it is the same as Con Su’s route. I think you can technically interchange this and Con Su as the 2nd route. I wasn’t really a fan of this route, it brought up one important detail. And it’s mainly that Hokoyasu was gay and Ethica was made by combining his dna with So’un’s dad. Maybe the double chainsaws will play in the true route, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she uses the pistols after she resolves her issues in the true route. Maybe she’ll do some double overdrive and it’s basically pistols or nothing, but it’d be pretty cool if she uses one of each.

It just couldn’t be merged with Con Su because they wanted the relationship aspect that wouldn’t happen if Ethica is dead. A good part of the issue is that this felt more like an Ethica section(it almost feels like Kiriri had more to do in Con Su’s route), in the sense that she took most of the screentime in comparison to So’un and Mitsumi. It really doesn’t help that I’m not an Ethica fan. And when I am enjoying her sections, it’s when she’s being self reflective during her gradual mental degradation. The best part is actually everybody’s fight with So’un.

A funny thing is I was making some farfetch’d crap to explain Mitsumi staying alive because the it’s all a delusion would be kind of copout for them. Only for them to validate the farfetch’d crap in like 10 minutes or so. What’s kind of fucked up is the ex brain didn’t do it for Tokitaka.

Iria + true route:
Yeah it makes sense why this is chosen as the final route. Honestly I feel like it should’ve been locked. There’s not much to say on Iria’s route, it uses a good bit of the sections that you go through from Mitsumi’s route but the ship section is shortened to speed up the process. Ikkatsu fights Ethica this time around and it’s a lot better. Though that’s more on how boring the fight was in Mitsumi’s section. Pavlov gets a good section, and it also progresses So’un’s tactics to what was being shown in Mitsumi’s route. Basically everything was kind of expected but done well enough so I wasn’t amazed or disappointed. The true route sections were pretty cool but nothing that would cum your pants. For now I do see it as the weakest compared to Muramasa and Demonbane but those titles are hard to compete with. The double chainsaws never showed up but Ethica did start using the pistols and it became a 2v1 with Milgram. It was cool but I kind of preferred the Milgrim fight in Iria’s route. I

Snow: Don’t talk to me or my daughter ever again

So I finished Snow recently and I had a good time with it even though it’s really a mixed bag. Technically the plus version is what got translated and I feel like it lessened the experience than when it just had the base 4 routes and I’ll get to that later. This was made by Studio Mebius who kind of made questionable titles; they’re also under visual arts but they got so many subsidiaries that I’m not surprised at this point. Funny enough I knew two of their titles but I thought they were from a different dev that just makes titles based on other IPs.

At the start, the title had a huge Kanon vibe but eventually resembled much closer to parts of Air. So it’s more that the town and base setup reminds you of Kanon, meaning it’s kind of generic but in a wintry town. Kanata is just a guy that goes to his cousin’s hotsprings with a really menial but labor intensive task. One of the first things you’ll notice is that most of everybody is charming in some way but mainly in a comedic sense. I mean, the first scene you get is Ouka dropping boulders back onto his body when he got hit by a rockslide. Outside of the main characters that I’ll cover later, there’s Tsugumi the danger prone cousin; Seishirou the doctor that’s constantly crashing his car and leaving his patients to joke around with Kanata and Sayori, Sumino’s mom that gets clingy after a sip of alcohol. There’s also some random people but they’re mostly there to setup some of the jokes here and there. If you’re having a bad time during the first half hour, then you might as well drop it because it’s more or less constant until drama happens and then the quality takes a nosedive more often than not. Funny enough, one of the main setups is later on used again on a more current Key title that also felt too close to Air at points. And honestly, I think Snow nails it a lot better, or rather that it sticks its landing. I think the easiest way to go about explaining it is that you got to kanon-like town but the whole town is full of slightly smarter Sunoharas and Fuukos.

The art is old as hell but I still like it, but I’m also pretty old to some people at this point. The ost is mainly fine but the vocal tracks kind of hardcarry the sentimentality it’s going for. It even contends with Air on specific tracks, I think Beyond the Snow is the last track they go with and it’s really snazzy to the point that I can put it in Tekken 4 with a bit of touchup and removing the vocals. But even with that, it just can’t compete with the normal ending track called Footprints of Two.

Sumino is the main girl, too bad she’s the one I liked the least because they took the airhead trope too far. Her route is one of the two possible ones you can start with and it’s also the worst one out of the base 5. It’s used as a setup for everything else going forward and I’ll go over it in the spoilers. Technically you can say this is Sumino 1 and there’s like 2 others but she’s not the main focus in the 3rd one. One last note on her is this was during the time where you wouldn’t question the main lead spamming a certain sound or phrase in pretty much every line they get. And in this case, it sounds like she’s saying eww to the Kanata’s face all the time and that shit was unintentionally pretty funny for awhile. Eventually there’s so much of it that your brain starts ignoring it.
Asahi is a rehash of a route from Kanon. It’s done better but that’s not saying much when that was maybe the second one I disliked the most. It works fine, it feels like it’s somewhat padded but I’ll take it over the pacing from Sumino’s route. I know someone that didn’t like her in particular, but honestly she’s fine for like 70% of it and that’s kind of the same with Sumino just that Asahi’s worst part doesn’t measure up to it. She’s just kind of dumb and doesn’t have common sense but the reason why is brought up pretty early on. And that’s kind a common occurrence throughout the vn, it’s like a shounen where you know what’s going to happen but you’re going with it to see how the protagonist reaches to it.

Then comes Legend, it more or less explains away most of anything you were wondering about the first two routes and also enough background info for the rest of the routes. Honestly it should be apparent what’s going on with just Sumino’s route but Legend is there just to reinforce your ideas.
With that out of the way, you can now enter Shigure’s route. You’ve seen her once before in the previous routes and honestly it feels like you could’ve just removed her from the plot and 90% of it would stay the same. But that actually applies to a lot of them and I’ll go through that in the spoilers. She’s mainly the shy one, she keeps trying to run away and lives in the mountains away from the village. Most of her route is kind of whatever but Kanata is still pretty funny throughout the sequences. I think the bad ending was pretty interesting and probably done better than some of the endings to the point it reminds me of cartagra where my favorite parts were two specific bad endings.
The true route centers around a good chunk of the cast but mainly Ouka. And outside of my aversion of dropping anything, she really was the main driving force for me to finish this vn. To the point that I feel like one of the extra routes should’ve been unlocked before the true route and the other one being merged into it but I’ll get to that later. Ouka constantly talks in an old fashioned manner and is the most charming in the cast. But really I think that mainly applies if you have kids or at least have younger siblings/relatives. She’s generally up to her shenanigans near the shrine either finding food or building snowmen. She’s actually the first character you see and it’s probably the worst interaction that you’ll see of her. I actually got nothing to nag about it and it was worth going through the vn just for her route. It wouldn’t surprise me if it becomes my favorite route this year or at least in the top 5.

The two extra routes are centered around Meiko and this random girl. The random girl is a mess and I don’t know what they were going for. The ending is fine but I also feel like it shouldn’t be a thing overall but I probably just missed something. Meiko’s route is actually pretty decent, it just doesn’t have the highs of Ouka and that’s to be expected since that was the base finale.

Overall

Overall I’m giving it a 7. When I finished Ouka, I was going to give it an 8 even though I felt a lot of stuff wasn’t entirely needed but it all made sense. Parts of it still felt like ass but you can see what they were going for. But the two additional routes just lessened the experience, it’s akin to scoring a goal and then dropkicking the referee and getting a red card. It doesn’t help that parts of the initial routes are really iffy and it’s mainly that they have the ideas but don’t know how to properly go through the motions to reach what they wanted. Part of it is that I didn’t like the direction they put on Sumino’s VA and it didn’t make me really care about it. Sometimes the va work can salvage some iffy writing but that’s not the case this time. If this was like a 10 hour vn where it just incorporated sections of each route and just did a beeline towards Ouka’s section, then I’d give it a 9.

Spoilers

So there’s a couple of things going on but I guess the first thing I’ll go with is that some of these routes are really just there as an option and don’t really add anything that couldn’t be merged in with the rest. And this mainly a nagging feeling because the routes themselves are fine, but I’d want better reasoning if some routes are needed to unlock the others. The easiest one to point out is Asahi. But for that, I’ll just reveal the obvious stuff because these characters are going to be showing up. Kanata, Sumino and Ouka are reincarnations of Hakuou, Kikka and the child. Whilst Shigure and Meiko are the same characters from Legend. Asahi is the rabbit from the painting and you learn the last 10% of it or so in Legend. Basically she’s sealed until someone can take it out or is inspired to leave. And Kanata was the first one. I think her ending is actually really nice but it doesn’t really add much to the overarching plot. She comes back in the true route but nothing is really done with her outside of giving Ouka an extra chore but she already had the cat.

Shigure’s route is more of a what if where she falls for Kanata just like she did for Hakuou but didn’t hold back this time around. I think her main thing is just to explain away how Kanata just randomly wakes up at the inn when he faints in different routes. Most of her route centers around Kanata possessing Hakuou and being kind of a goober. It’s pretty funny but the gist is that he doesn’t hookup with Kikka thus not causing the dragon god’s curse. Basically showing that the reincarnation understands the rules/lesson and the gods forgive him. And there was a couple ways of handling this but I don’t think they did anything. This was done in some other Key titles and also done in a different way in Iwaihime(well it does this multiple times but it was done well once). Basically there’s no time rotations, there’s really no acknowledgement of time shenanigans, the route ends and the timeline is done. So when starting the true route, the curse should still be in effect. Hakuou does ask Kanata to fix one last thing but I’m pretty sure he means saving Shigure, not the future reincarnations of his wife/kid. Another funny thing is her bad ending, where Kanata bangs her and she disappears the next day. He tries to find her and stays at the summit with the graves and the epilogue is that the cops find two more graves than what we know of, but no bodies are in there. So the dragon god got so assmad that they spirited away Kanata too as his curse, which he’s probably ok with.

Sumino’s route or rather what it entails is kind of cool but the drama itself was ass. She gets dementia in like 2 days and remembers nothing. She’s always hungry even after she ate and goes on temper tantrums. But the route itself doesn’t really matter outside of like the last two or three days. He knows she prayed 100 times and that involves going all the way up to the shrine each time and thinks that’s what saved him. So he does that, uses rocks as counter but the blizzard fucks it up and he eventually faints. He wakes up in the inn and he doesn’t know if it worked or not. She’s completely fine again but dies the next day. You can think of it like he really did fuck up so she died. You can also consider that the last two days was him freezing to death after fainting and none of it actually happens. But Shigure’s part explains the random fainting/getting lost but still finding his way back. Legend explains what was actually going on and it’s mainly that the curse is fate and no matter what you do, it’s going to happen. So sure, the dementia was cured, well fuck you and now x happens and if you cure that, well now here’s y.

So it’s either that Shigure’s route fixes the curse indefinitely and it’s not well done. Or it’s about Ouka being around and I missed the reasoning behind it. Also one last thing about Sumino/Kikka, she also had dementia in Legend and she forgot she was pregnant. So there was a scene where she got a stick and started hitting her stomach thinking she got fat. And it’s meant to be a dramatic scene but I kind of started laughing at the concept that she thought that hitting herself with a stick would somehow remove the fat.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Meiko’s route, it’s just unlucky that it came after Ouka’s route. I don’t really see any reason for it to be locked behind Ouka either. It’d work perfectly fine after Shigure. I was kind of waiting for her route to show up because I was interested on what her book holds. Because every ending has her book showing the cgs of the specific route you were doing. But it was just her diary, I thought it would be something grander than that but it works well and probably the right call.
Then comes the last route and it’s all kind of crap. It’s obvious what’s happening and who she is but also feels like a whole different feel from the rest of the vn and should’ve been axed off. The epilogue section was fine and could have been part of Ouka’s route to begin with but I guess it would’ve lessen the impact and importance of Ouka. So before going forward with it, it’s just about a curse on this doll; the curse originates from one of the bandits that Hakuo killed off. Technically he just sliced off the bandit’s hands off but the dude most likely died from blood loss. Anyway, Ouka’s cat grabs the doll and runs off only to be found slashed up and the doll missing. So now Kanata and Ouka are getting summoned into this dreamscape by the mysterious girl and both have to run and fend off this girl until they wake up. They eventually find and purify the doll but the keep getting pulled into the dreamscape. Nothing else in this vn is remotely similar to this, it kills off the vibe. In the end, it was the cat being possessed by the curse, apparently the cat Ouka’s guardian. This was never a thing in Legend or anywhere else in the base vn from what I remember, it’s randomly shoehorned in here. She offs herself and hopes to be reincarnated to spend time and play with Ouka. She becomes her little sister in the end. The epilogue is actually fine, it doesn’t hit the same beats as Asahi but it’s well done. It’s just that I don’t see a reason for the route to exist.

And that’s the crux of the issues I have with it, a lot of it felt unnecessary and my thoughts on it became a mixed bag. If they combined Asahi as part of Sumino’s route, keep legend. And then add a good chunk of it all under Ouka’s route and keep it around 10~15 hours, I’d give it an 9. Because at that point, it’d feel like Kanata would know everyone, instead of him seeking for help randomly and getting mad at people who are kind of strangers to him.
Also, I went through the first couple of routes to see if they added anything extra and that isn’t the case. I did find the base bad ending though, where Kanata goes back with Sumino running behind the bus. So I don’t know when this gets unlocked because it’d actually spoil parts of Sumino’s/Ouka’s route. It’s not huge but it’s something that only gets brought up in Ouka’s route. So it’d be pretty funny if this part only shows up after Ouka’s route as well. Maybe it was unlocked from the start but I tried failing both before and got placed into Asahi, so it was either locked or Asahi has a really small amount of flags to get into her route.

The future radio and the artificial pigeons: Pretty decent but I’ll probably forget about it

So I finished future radio and it wasn’t as great as I hoped for but it’s still pretty decent. And a couple of things popped up in my head when I was going through it. The first being that it gave me a lot of Trinoline vibes even though they don’t really hit the same subjects and it didn’t really it as hard. They could’ve got harder with it but I guess that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. The second thing was more on the lines that even though I don’t think it can compare with Cyanotype, I also liked it a lot more than the newton title. So maybe if there’s ever a 4th one, I’ll like it even more than Cyanotype. Future Radio feels kind of short and I finished it in a couple of days. So because of that, what I’ll talk about it also kind of short and the spoilers section will be smaller.

The setting is based on these robotic pigeons being super efficient and boosting the speed of any signal to the point everything was overhauled to use it. Then out of nowhere the pigeons started consuming all of it, basically killing signal before it reaches their respective destinations. So basically any technical communication is dead. So one of their airports becomes abandoned and the other becomes the university the cast goes to. This setting gets used in Cyanotype and funny enough a huge portion of the soundtrack is moved over to Cyanotype for that case as well. It does its job well and it makes sense why it was transferred over. The vn is split into around 5 pieces, though really it’s 7~8 for completion sake. Overall each part was fine and it leads itself well but they don’t really hit a high outside of maybe 3 moments and I’d say only one of them felt paced well. I’d say maybe adding an extra 2 or 3 hours would’ve done them some good. And that’s kind of funny because I’m generally in the opposite camp.

Anyways, the first part revolves around the main protag Sora creating these radios since he figured a way to bypass the signal eating pigeons. So he’s giving them out to the rest of the cast. That includes Ishimaru, his best friend that has connections to closed down electronics store/warehouse due to the pigeons. He’s got his immature side alongside Sora and honestly it feels like them and the majority of the unnamed characters all have a switch where they lose most of their social development. This is doubly so for Mizuki, his younger sister. But really she’s mainly a joke character which transfers over to her route. She pairs off well with Akina and Tsubaki but for different reasons. Tsubaki is one of the professors alongside one of the programmers that helped develop the pigeons. Akina works at the coffee shop and is probably the least important in the cast outside of like two integral plot points that could honestly be retconned without much trouble. And that’s because she’s the trigger for the next section. The final character is Kaguya, she’s the main girl and resides in the abandoned airport and gets the final radio.
The second part is about them finding that they’re getting 1 minute broadcasts from the future every time at midnight. Eventually one of the broadcasts mentions something and the gang goes on trying to prevent it. And the way how is creating more radios because it just so happens that they affect the pigeons and if there’s a large enough disturbance they can resolve their dilemma. A huge portion of this section is just the cast building up their relationships.
The third section is them figuring out there’s complications with what they’re doing, I’ll skip the rest because it’s mainly building up Kaguya. The last couple of scenes were done well but also felt like the pacing for this section was going by too fast. Part of it is kind of expected because you can consider this the first part that leads to the true route but at the same time I felt it was going by too fast to get the required push that it needed.

The 4th to 6th sections are the routes where they’re all kind of useless outside of Tsubaki. She’s the only one needed to unlock the true route. The other two give some hints on what’s going on but those are also given in Tsubaki’s route anyways. I think it’d work better if Tsubaki’s route was locked until you did Akina since it’d be a gradual leadup. Akina’s stuff gets brought up in the hidden section so it’d be pretty funny if someone skipped her route and just gets spoiled in 10 seconds. The one with Mizuki is just kind of far out there and the idea they were going with wasn’t used in the subsequent routes. Maybe they had more to go with but just shelved her to just being a joke character.

The 7th is the true route and it’s fine. There’s a high in the middle and it was led to it well but there was also a lot of missed potential. A lot of the side characters could’ve enhanced the whole process but they didn’t do much with them. And I think that’s the underlying theme I’m going through this time around. That it’s just fine, it’s overall streamlined well but I’m probably going to forget about this one in a few months. I think the largest issue is that Sora stops feeling like a character and becomes more of a plot device. He does what’s needed but a lot of other emotions that should be happening and processed die out quickly to continue to the next scene.
The 8th section is technically the aftermath that can only be seen through the extras menu. Why they added an hscene with a character not even in the main plot is beyond me and almost made me want to drop a point from the score.

Overall I gave it a 7, it’s closer to a 6 and I know I have some other titles in a 6 that had higher moments. But the overall quality rarely dips so I’m keeping it as a 7. Parts of the plot felt like they cut off a lot to save time because they felt it would be wasting the reader’s time after already hitting the section’s high point. And sometimes that’s true but in other sections I felt like maybe they should’ve extended the sections before the high point so the progression would feel more impactful.

Spoilers

So this is the spoilers, I’m not going to explain everything and this is more for the people that have already read it. The rest can still follow along but you’re going to have to do some leaps.
There was a couple of points in the plot that I expected some bouts of explosive anger but they don’t really show up. Especially one with Mizuki where it felt like it was being built up for the scene but then it was pretty milquetoast.
Honestly I thought they would go harder with Mizuki and a couple of the other characters. Her route handles that Sora can somehow also find her. And the easy basis is that since he’s connected to the pigeon mainframe. And it’s just the pigeons seeing her and he’s doing a query in the system. But it could also lead to Mizuki actually being a third user in the system and they could’ve done some extra plot points with that.
Another thing, and honestly I’m glad they didn’t go along with it because it’s deux ex machina all over. Though I’ve seen it a couple of times where it ends up being really cool.
So because Tsubaki’s route going into the true route shows that they can transfer a lot of data through the radio and having the pigeons just put it into their system; all the knowhow should be in there. Parts of it are explained like how Sora understands how to fix shit and that’s one of the leads to say that he was in the system in the first couple of sections. He’s basically got tutorials in his brain. It’s how the radios became a thing in the first place. Anyways, he has the knowhow and he can probably explain it to Tsubaki again. Technically it should be in the system and she could just log in and learn it whenever. So really the whole waiting game in the finale wasn’t really needed. Because once they figured out how to improve the system, they could just send the data through the pigeons again. Thus taking away any of the stakes. Really they could’ve even done it where Izana gets all the data and resolves it before the plot even begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall

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

Spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

Soukoku no Arterial: It’s smt but with cards

So I technically didn’t complete Soukoko no Arterial since the dragon quest spoof section just crashes on me. Either it’s my pc though it’s most likely that I installed it incorrectly. Honestly I was kind of glad that happened since I was tired of playing this vn and I’ll get to why later. I did finish the main stuff and it took awhile considering you have to play the whole damn thing for every character.
It’s edited mtl, generally something you wouldn’t want but also you’re either going to make time to learn the language or never getting the chance to play it when it comes to Eushully. I’d say the same for softhousechara but one did come out by Shiravune but I don’t know if it sold well.

Premise:

The plot is basically og smt-lite, just not that interesting overall.
Your guy, Shuuya, is in a random town that’s relatively run by MHI. MHI has the leading advances in most fields though mainly medical, base materials and weaponry. And they used most of their new advancements towards their new plane that singlehandedly compete with another country’s army, it’s super op and thus it’s a plot device. Shuuya goes to one of the MHI schools and wants to be a doctor since he and his sister were saved by their medical breakthroughs. You meet most of the cast but more importantly his two best friends Kaito and Akari. Hijinks happen, Shuuya and posse get warped to a distorted world and what you’re basically going to see for the majority of the game. Shuuya finds his friends, find a cube. The cube is dumb and a temporary mcguffin. Finds a boss and gets his ass handed to him and learns he has the power of blood manipulation. They win and they want to leave since it’s pretty dangerous over there, gets a way out but regularly come back until more of the town gets warped and you have to find a new exit.
Soon enough they see angels and demons and by chapter 3, you choose what side to be on: angel, devil or human. Unlike other games where you actually take a mentality of your chosen faction, you just side with them and try to find a way to get back to your normal world.
The angel route is probably the easiest but if you know what you’re doing then the human route is probably easier since you can cheese the final boss. The devil route didn’t feel all that hard outside of a specific custom deck but this could also be because I already had functional decks at this point.

Battle System

It does have a more unique battle system for Eushully where it’s no longer an srpg, but a card game. It’s kind of neat but also really boring for a long time. For the most part of your first playthrough, you’ll maybe have one grade 4 card, and the rest are grade 1&2 and a few 3s. The problem is most of the grade 1 and 2 cards either have no ability/passive, or a shit ability. Also the grade 1 and 2 cards will generally get oneshot. There’s outliers and you’ll use some of them but most of those are also based events with your party. There are specific builds you can make but that’s also something you only do in your 2nd or 3rd playthrough because you need really specific cards and I’ll get to that shortly.
You have a leader card, and for the most part that’s going to be Shuuya outside of a few events in every route and also the rest get unlocked after you beat the postgame scenario that eushully either does a lot or always does. The exchange is that they have unique effects but lower hp and lower control unless they get an extra control from capping their level. And that control is more useful than anything they can give since control is needed to summon higher grade cards. Grade 1&2 give 1 control each. You generally want to do a triangle formation for most of the game since it’d give at minimum 3 control to the bottom center card. Then you move shit around so bottom center gets 6 control and you have most of the cards available. There’s grade 7 and 8 but it’s not really feasible until ng+. Technically, there’s a way but I’ll mention it after I go through that crap.
So now that cost and control are over, the last piece is your FA. It’s your finisher move and overall you can use it twice per boss fight since the charge rate is kind of long. Unless you use an attrition build, then you can use it for more. They all have different abilities: some do decent unit damage, some do lower aoe damage, some heal. There’s a lot of niche ones that can be useful for a fight or two, and some I see no purpose for. They also use the exp gauge and a lot of them are kind of shit until levelled highly. Honestly you can ignore the FA most of the time outside of specific ng+ fights and maybe the last chapter of each route. It’s dependent on who you’re partnered with in the menu, it’s under the spoiler, you can click on it.

FA info

Generally speaking you’d always want Madoka on for the majority of your fights. Not because her particular FA is great, which it kind of is since it can give you a few more turns before you die. And eventually it’ll cap out to healing 100 hp though it’s rarely needed. But because she increases the exp gained per fight so she’s responsible for levelling up the other FAs.
Narumi does aoe damage, it’s rather low and you most likely have a strong deck once it’s strong enough to wipe the enemy field. At most it’s to kill the grade 1&2 in the back to lower the amount of control they have.
Kaito lowers the enemy FA gauge but also has the same issue where it’d only be decent in a few fights and it’d only delay it slightly until you’re so high levelled that your deck won’t need it.
Unless it’s just translated badly, Akari’s FA is total garbage and there’s a better version of it on one of the demons you can get.
Shuuya caps out at 30 damage and isn’t worth it.
Mirai has uses for specific fights but it’s not like those cards would be free anyway. It basically copies the last X units you destroyed on the enemy side. So you can summon some crazy shit on very specific fights.
Arisa’s FA sounds whatever but it’s actually one of the more op ones. Even at level 1, just having a turn where you can use three grade 1 cards will grant you a 6 grade control spot instead of the 3. It’s the only time it’s possible to get your 8 grade outside of consumables or specific accessories which I think you can only get in the ng+ scenario. And it doesn’t end on being useful. By the end, I believe you get 9 turns of control+1. Technically you can make a build of around 6 cards or so. Two grade 3 cards, have a specific card that fully heals your team ready, get your couple of 6 and 7 grade card and your one 8 card
Shanelle’s FA is kind of shit. It heals your normal cards but overall you wouldn’t waste an FA for it. She does have a great passive if you build a deck around the three friends.
Sayane’s whole thing including her FA is about fucking both you and the enemy. You can make some pretty cool builds with it but are risky.
Atori’s FA is used for builds that revolve around discarding cards for buffs and damage. At level 9, you get your whole deck back.
The append 01 characters have pretty good FAs but I never used them, one of them is especially broken because it heals, the FA charge rate is tripled and also makes the opponent discard some cards.

Each has a cost and it’s equivalent to their grade. Going through the plot lets you get new versions of the leader card and you’re never going back to the old versions.
There’s some pretty good cards but most of it is fluff.

Decent cards

So I’m dropping out the devil decks and some of the discarding decks, they weren’t my style.
-The easiest deck is the attrition deck, but you’re either going to need to finish devil route or the dream palace ng+ content. It’s a generic angel deck that can be put a lot of random shit but you need two or three elmir cards. It just returns all discarded cards back into the deck once summoned. Once it dies, another copy will bring that one back, it’s hard to lose. Really that card is meant to be used in conjunction with more solely a rufadiel deck. You discard a card to do direct damage even from the backline. The damage is shit so I’d go against it. You can couple it with some of other cards that discard any card to summon a grade 3 monster. They’re not great but there’s uses for it, especially when your cards on hand are too high grade to be used.
-The easiest card is just about completing Shanelle’s route. You get a card that fully heals anything as long as she’s in the back. It’s the one card that makes a deck full of high grade monsters viable. The grade 8 is basically unstoppable and it removes the need for some other cards where their passive is basically healing 10 hp for themselves or healing based on their damage. There’s also specific cards that reduce an ally’s hp for an attack buff and you can use it as a combo but it might be risky.
-The dream palace route card is decent in the sense that you can keep her in the back and get an extra free 5 damage with no conditions. Generally you’d need the position infront to be empty which also leads the leader card to take more damage than necessary.
-The SR Arisa that has the passive to remove an enemy card back to their hand or deck. Useful for niche fights. I think you can also combo with certain FAs to then remove it, lol.
-Some Madoka cards have a passive to not take indirect damage. Useful for like two unique fights where the boss does like 5 indirect damage a turn to the whole frontline
-Specific Mirai cards that cause blood control, it lowers boss damage by 1. The card can die after its use.
-Sayane’s cards has this whole thing about lowering enemy cost but having certain units ignore damage if cost is down to 0. It’s a ballsy setup
-The bath cards, though especially Atori/Narumi/Mehisha. They’re put in the back and have a control of 2 like normal, basically gives certain card types an hp or attack buff.
-Basic Kaito cards that can equip a type of pistol that instantly kills off grade 3 and under units. Basically you send it as an inverse triangle formation and have your dumb 3 hp units to kill off something that can have 10~12hp. It’s more for the control to summon your grade 3 monsters while also slightly cleaning the enemy deck. A good example of this is you can use that instead of a unit that has that passive built in but has a cost of 3 instead of 1. Especially useful in niche fights where the enemy takes half health and your deck doesn’t have the counter type or sniper to deal full damage.
-Basic bitch MSC Soldier, it’s like the opposite of the small Kaitos. They’re there to die and make it draw a new card. So you used it to get a grade 3 and then have it get removed by blocking damage for the leader.
-There’s a grade 1 card for Narumi where she blocks all damage if their attack power is at an odd value. You can add a Mirai to cause blood control to force an odd. More often than not it’s useful for a turn or two. Technically speaking you can have 3 mirai cards and then 3 of this card and only hit the leader repeatedly but the fight will take awhile.
-Narumi’s route end card is situationally op. You’d need Shanelle’s card and have the leader in the back since her damage to the enemy leader is 25% of your Leader’s current hp, and without using the cheat dungeon, that like 160hp with an item, so something around 40 damage, higher than a grade 8. Though there’s another card of hers that messes this one up, where she doesn’t take damage but the Leader takes 10hp. Thus messing up this card.

The issues that it has

Now that I got those things out of the way, there’s going to be some spoilers here and there but overall should be fine even if you want to play it. The largest issue is that the character routes themselves suck for the most part. And that’s because the 3 paths barely change at all. I think the only time it actually happens is during the human route if you choose Mirai, Shuuya’s sister. Basically the game doesn’t take almost any consideration of your choices. So for example, the first route I did was Arisa, she and Shanelle are Mirai’s friends, they’re generally together. I was trying to hit Madoka’s route but Arisa’s quest line is a collectathon and I didn’t want to bother doing it again. Then one of her scenes sold me and in retrospect, I think it’s probably the best route out of the bunch outside of the ng+ content and possibly Mehisha. Anyways, you’re by the end of the angel route and the groups are doing their pep talks and the one with the sister group is both Arisa and Mirai scheming on how to make Shuuya fall for Shanelle. But why would that happen? This dialogue happens if you pick Shanelle or any other character too. It’d just be a flag check. This is also the case for Akari in the same angel route. And also the case for Madoka where she jokes that she knows Shuuya is fooling around and he gets surprised. And that would’ve been the case in the first route since I was pretty far in Arisa’s route, but not in this playthrough where he did nothing outside of the one time in chapter 1 or 2. The devil route also has that issue just in a different sense. In this path, the harem is a forced default unlike the other two. You can get Akari or Sayane’s ending, but the harem ending plays after that’s done.

So the gist is that if you want to finish every character route and collect their cards, you have to beat the game from the start a total of nine times alongside finishing the ng+ content in one of those runs and getting some missable scenes in the devil route.
And that’s also assuming you didn’t pick Narumi as the first route, I’m not sure if you’d have the cards to win the fight that’s required before her last scene.
Also some characters are locked to specific paths, which isn’t a bad idea but also has a lot of favoritism. There’s no real unique heroine for the human route, the best you get is a different hscene for Narumi because she’s also still available in the angel route. Madoka and Mehisa are locked in Angel, Sayane is locked in devil. It’s mainly in the sense that some routes have more events for certain characters or they arrive earlier. I’ll cover parts of who I’d personally restrict to what route in the spoiler section.

The worst part of it all is that you can’t skip any fight with the custom deck, they should be skippable after you finish that route once. I feel like the angel route had the most shit going on in terms of combat and minigames. Even speeding through all of it will take you like 3 or 4 hours. The third chapter is the worst, there’s a mini game where you have to prevent the devils from going upstairs. And there’s 3 sets of units to beat then in 3 locations. But who wins is random,  sometimes you barely have to fight, one time they all died and I fought like 12 rounds before the boss showed up. It’s another one where a qol update to skip it after you beat it once would be nice.

So you’re going to want to enter the cheat dungeon to get the extra leader hp so you can auto the random encounters. You might also want to do that in the first run just to save yourself some frustration. I remember I was malding in a few boss fights because overall they’re not playing with the same rules. It feels like they draw more cards but that might be an innate passive some of them had. They start with multiple units on the field. Sometimes it’s a full roster and you can consider it like, oh the enemy gets the first turn to setup but can’t attack. But nope, they always start with the same units and they’re generally impossible mathematically when some of these bosses have a control of 1 or 2 but all the surrounding units are grade 4 and above.

The main routes themselves are kind of boring. Especially the human route where it felt like nothing was happening until the last chapter and then it felt somewhat rushed even though it was still cool. This is also where they give a peak to the ng+ content, it was probably my favorite part until I saw the new content. Because you don’t know what it was, the unknown being could’ve been the player treated as a different species, it could’ve just been a higher being or even a 4th wall break from the company itself. Anyways, it’s not like nothing was happening, it’s more that it would seem like big deals but they’re confronted and dealt with faster than the time you spent traversing through other areas in the angel route.

The devil route is kind of generic and it’s more of the horny section but it introduce a few decent ideas. It covers things that the other routes alluded to and also explained how the mc was getting stat boosts of that magnitude. And you can say it’s bullshit and they just added that to explain the hscenes away. That’s mainly true, but it was also covered partly in Shanelle’s route, and explains away what was happening in Arisa’s route. This happened in the other routes in lesser degrees, like Akari’s power up and possibly that angel ritual is kind of bullshit and they’re just covering it up. And that was a theme that was in the background for quite a bit throughout the routes. Where yeah the devils are assholes but you know what you’re getting out of them. The angels are just being cordial since humans are useful tools. Sure the cast befriends them, but this also when they’re already invaluable. If they randomly lost their powers, they’d probably just be dumped in the city and forgotten about.
Part of me saw the human section as the true route, since it’s combining ideas from the other two. But then again the background image when loading the game up is a cg from the devil’s route. But it was all pushed aside with the dream palace/ng+ content. Basically all routes have happened, so they’re all technically the true route.

My favorite was Gillezel, too bad he’s only really enjoyable in the human route but that could just be the case of being enjoyable in small doses. There’s also not much going on with him in the devil route anyway, I assumed there’d be more. My favorite of the normal cast is Madoka, and then maybe Mehisha. Though Sayane is overall the more interesting character where her alliances and what’s she’s doing is determined on what Shuuya chose to side with and I’ll cover that in the spoilers.

Overall

All in all, I give this a 6. If you only do the 3 routes and not also all the character routes, then I’d put it as a 7. The bgm The deck building is fun but only after a whole run or two. And the first run will take the majority of your whole playtime, so basically you’re stuck with a boring build longer than not. The ng+ content is fun, honestly it was pretty easy compared to the other title’s ng+ stuff. It needs a few qol updates to speed up the process, otherwise it was a pretty fun ride. You should pick whatever character you like the most but if you want one of the better cards, then do Shanelle’s first. She was the second to last for me and it was a pretty big kick in the balls.

Spoilers

So I mentioned that some characters are locked behind different paths. And part of that is because depending on the scenario you just don’t interact as much with certain characters and the prime example is Sayane and Madoka. Madoka gets her arm blown off and Shuuya becomes her assistant for awhile, most of her cards come from this route too. In the other routes, she’s more of a scout and that’s it. Arisa doesn’t get her route in the devil section because I think there’s one or two locations are blocked off and they contain required items. Shanelle is blocked off because her ending mentions her grieving over the creature she bonded with in the warped world. In the devil route, they keep their powers, Shiro might come along. I don’t think Narumi or Mirai have any reason to have their route blocked off in the devil faction.

Personally, I think it’d be better having Arisa, Mirai and Narumi locked to human route. Having Shanelle, Mehisha and Madoka being locked in the angel path. Akari being either human or devil. The only reason for that is one of the scenarios near the end is Kaito getting mad and also confesses to Akari even though he knows she likes Shuuya. And that’d be fine unless you’re actually doing her route since Kaito is super chill and wouldn’t do that. Honestly it’s more likely for him to go after Narumi or one of the angels
There’s also the dream palace/ng+ content route and I’m not sure if it’s available in every path. I did it in angel and it made a lot of sense. I think it’d be pretty laughable in the devil route. And that’s because the dream palace states that each path has happened and Shuuya gets it all through his memories. And he notices that Atori never ends up with him so he chooses to continue through the palace and deepen their relationship with the time they have since they’re going to forget once it’s over. Only for her to remember and drops it at that whilst Shuuya has an uncanny feeling and doesn’t know why he feels empty and sad but doesn’t have the bandwidth to pursue it. And it works, and it kind of can’t in devil for a few reasons. She wants to kill him since her dad/creator is dead because of him and constantly wants to fight. Except she loses and they bang to give her energy, we’ll come back to that. Anyways, in the harem ending, there’s orgies and I’m not sure the limitations because I think Shuuya restricts some from participating. But Mehisha and Atori get moved around and that’s just kind of fucked up if you follow the dream palace in that route, lol.

And since I’m mentioning the devil route, I’ll just skip to Sayane. She’s one of the more interesting characters, her shit is kind of inconsistent but how it happens is pretty cool. So for the angel route, you see her with Gillezel. In the human route, she’s at Gillezel’s area and nukes the place and figures out that he’s not there. She waits and he eventually shows up and has the convo that Shuuya didn’t join the angels or the devils. She’s like oh shit hardcore I should do that too and goes off to MHI. And that points to why she was with Gillezel in the angel route, since Shuuya went along with the angels and she didn’t get inspired. In the devil route, she’s raiding an area but really still trying to get on with Selberg but figures out that the humans and especially Shuuya can be useful. The funny thing is she has more plot going on in the human route and it helps with character and her relationship in the devil route. Otherwise some parts just lose impact without it.

VNs that got released in 2022

So there’s a lot of vns that got released this year and this covers most of them. I’m dropping what I’m pretty sure are just straight up porn. There is an image for the ones I’m iffy on but they might still be porn. There’ll be a checkmark on them if I read them. Green means that I enjoyed them or that I’m interested in reading it. Yellow is middling/slight interest, white is no opinion and orange is most likely not.
Honestly, a lot of these intermingle.

I’ll talk about some of them but also skip the ones I’ve beaten since I got a post that covers all of those already.

Moe/SoL:

Café Stella and the Reapers’ Butterflies
The Seventh Sign -Mr. Sister-
Marshmallow All the Way Home: These are the same guys from Primal Hearts. And I didn’t really have a good time with it in the sense that it became a 90% porn nukige once the routes happen. Maybe it was marketed that way but I didn’t see it and it irked me. I heard Steady Steady was like that too so I’m just assuming this is also the same.
Ima Sugu Onii-chan ni Imouto da tte Iitai!
Snow: It’s the only one I’m really interested in, sure there’s the Phantom Trigger but episodic stuff has generally been a huge or miss to me.
Grisaia: Phantom Trigger Vol. 8
KamiYaba: Destiny on a Dicey Deadline
NEKO-MIMI SWEET HOUSEMATES Vol. 1

FD:

Trinoline Genesis: I heard the Shirone section is set in the middle of their route and that’s some coward shit. I’d buy it day one if it was the continuation of her route.
Kinkoi: Golden Time
Hoshizora no Memoria -Eternal Heart-
Icha x2 Study: This is the FD for Primal Hearts, so I’m not bothering, lol
Making * Lovers: Geki Icha After Story

Otome:

Muyuu Senkyou Romanesque: Chronicles of Refugia
Lover Pretend
Paradigm Paradox
Piofiore no Banshou -Episodio 1926-:
Birushana: Rising Flower of Genpei
even if TEMPEST: Yoiyami ni Kaku Katariki Majo
Taishou x Alice: HEADS&TAILS

Yuri:

Distant Memoraĵo
FLOWERS -Le volume sur hiver-
Himitsu no Kiss wa Amaku Yasashiku
Watamari – A Match Made in Heaven

BL:

Tokyo Onmyoji -The Tale of Rei Tengenjibashi-
UuultraC
Slow Damage
The Patient S Remedy

Gameplay:

Evenicle 2
Dōkyūsei: Bangin’ Summer
GNOSIA
Digimon Survive: I didn’t have the time for this one, I’ll get around to it this year
AI: Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative: I still have to beat the first one, I was going to beat it this year but I didn’t get around to starting it.
Kurokami-sama’s Feast
NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE
Yotsumegami
Yurukill

Popular:

Deus Machina Demonbane: Roar of the Machine God PS2: Really the only reason I didn’t drop everything for this is because I already read the og and it’d be like 70% of the same and I got of other stuff to go through first
Summer Pockets REFLECTION BLUE
Cyanotype Daydream -The Girl Who Dreamed the World-
Gore Screaming Show
Mahoutsukai no Yoru: I’ll get to it eventually
Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm – EXTRA2: I have to start the first one, I somewhat liked that character better

Comedy:

Ryuusei World Actor: Badge & Dagger
Akatsuki no Goei
Renai X Royale

Not sure:

HimeYoku: A Sacrifice of Lust and Grace
Miko no Kanata: Curious Tales from Oguni Shrine -Cycles-
A Housewife’s Healing Touch
COSPLAY LOVE! Enchanted princess
Virtual Maid Streamer Ramie
NinNinDays2
Star Melody: Yumemi Dreamer: It’s made from the devs of Symphonic Rain, it’s not the same scenario writer but I see they supervised it so maybe it can be decent.
DeadΩAegis

Rest:

Loopers
Amatsutsumi
Mamono Musume: Spider & Harpy & Cyclops
Tokeijikake no Ley Line -Asagiri ni Chiru Hana
Hokenshitsu no Sensei to Shabondama Chuudoku no Joshu: I actually finished it, it’s surprisingly good but it’s straddled with a decent chunk of hscenes and it’s basically impossible to recommend.
ALPHA-NIGHTHAWK
fault – StP – LIGHTKRAVTE
Seventh Lair: I’ll get to it this year
A Clockwork Ley-Line: Daybreak of Remnants Shadow
Higurashi When They Cry Hou – Rei
Hello Lady
Hatsumira -from the future undying-
9-nine-Shinshou
Amagami

Actually on time VNs I’ve read in 2022

This is the 2022 roundup of the vns I’ve read.
It’s split into a few sections and they’re mostly understandable outside of maybe the “has potential” and “weird ones out”.
Has potential is basically a title that I either liked but would’ve put in a lot higher if x or y was done differently.
If the name is in orange, then I wrote something about it and it’ll lead to that post.

Most Liked

Amayui Castle Meister

This one was pretty fun. I like it more than Kamidori even though the world building is worse. Almost all of your units stay relevant and some of them actually become powerhouses or staples in your team. The funny thing is the bad ending had more impact than the good ending(though it was still decent). Some of the side characters have less going on or ignored for the most part after their arc is done. On the other hand, the main heroine carries the plot to the point that you don’t even mind.

Summer Pockets

I was kind of iffy on this one halfway through because it focuses on two themes. Summer and basically Key. The key section is closer to Clannad level compared to how blunt Little Busters was. But it also felt like it was written just because it’s a staple for Key. The routes that concentrated more of the summer feeling felt a lot more vibrant than the rest. I think the new routes were pretty good but the only one that shined was Shiki’s. I think I spent more time on ping pong than the common route. All in all, I felt like they were trying to create the same spark as the older titles when it had its own magic going for it.

Cyanotype Daydream

I originally gave this an 8 because I wasn’t into the 2nd case. And I’m still not but there wasn’t anything relatively wrong with it and it works on a technical sense so I bumped it up to a 9. The first case is still the best while having the last case closely behind solely based on some scenes that I felt were just there to start drama. Otherwise I’d put it at the highest. Funny enough I’d give it a 10 if it only had case 1 but I’d rather have it as it is.

Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen

So I have the og at an 8 because the mid section felt aimless compared to the beginning and ending. A lot of the main villains didn’t have any presence to them and one of them just leaves and pops back out way later which is probably a few months. It gets explained but it still felt weird. The first couple of hours alongside the last two or three hours are a 10, it just gets bogged down and sometimes feels like you’re on a conveyor belt.

What surprised me

Kimagure Temptation

I’m giving it a 7 based on them going crazy with the sprite animations and they made the character charming. Otherwise the plot is serviceable but it becomes pretty campy halfway through and I want to say it was intentional but there’s other scenes between them that were quite good. So what I’d consider spikes of quality are somewhere around an 8, but they’re too infrequent to actually change the rating. It’s closer to a 6.

Edelweiss

I was expecting kind of a shitshow since it has a certain negative stigma due to the initial translation but I had a lot of fun with it. It’s got language that really isn’t safe anymore but it really feels like some 80s/90s guys had a bbq and just hashed out a plot just so they can have the cast be retarded and fuck around. The routes are mainly just passable, everyone I talked to had a different favorite route. Mine was Mizuki’s, but I didn’t like her character much. And that’s kind of funny because my favorite was Rin, who has the worst route.

Had potential

Jeanne at the Clock Tower

I think it actually has a lot of potential. The ost tracks are great but a lot of the hscenes were not. It’s also an isekai and I’m not really into that genre but at least the main character is generally trying to go back to his own world. And a lot of probably works just because the main character isn’t just a loser. He has military training, he was fighting in world war 2, he wants to go back. So he’s helping out to find an attempt to reach his goals. Sure the main onscreen villain is garbage and I think that’s my main gripe but also all the subvillains were pretty decent to fun. I think if you raised Christian or Catholic but also not anal about the details, or you’re into Jeanne d’ark

Christmas Tina

I felt this also had potential but it wasn’t really going anywhere for a decent chunk of it. The male voice actor needed a better mic, or really just have him take a step back because it was peaking a lot. It’s just about two people that don’t speak the same language but both got the same job just squatting on an abandoned station. I did enjoy that they went a different direction that most of these vns just go through. I think this would’ve been better done as a movie than a vn. It basically has ideas but also didn’t know what to really do with them.

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly

Butterfly is an otome and it’s been awhile since I read one. I thought it started out pretty good until the gang stopped being together and constantly shittalking eachother and had to concentrate on their routes. Some routes were pretty good, some were awful. If the 2nd half kept the energy from the first half, it’d be in the higher 7s.

Hello Lady

Hello Lady’s main issue is the quality of their routes. It’s not all bad but it’s padded up the ass and I got bored, especially in the 4th route. And that’s kind of sad since I really liked Comyu even though it also had issues. What saved it was the expansions and the main character, otherwise it would’ve been a 6.

Weird ones out

Akatsuki no Goei

This is a variable one depending on what’s important to . If you go solely on it’s comedy just like how I’d rate Doukyuusei on the nanpa experience, then it’s an 8 if you’re style of humor. The plot is kind of trash and I’d put it at a 5 or a low 6. So I’m just leaving it as a 7. It’s the first part of three but I think the 2nd was just a fandisk. But I brought that up mainly to say it wasn’t that great of an exposition piece for the next title either but it’s serviceable.

Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth

I’d give the 3rd one a 10 if they cut the last third out and took its time with a sequel. Because the final villain felt rushed, the last couple of stages felt same-y and some of them were exactly the same units from the previous level.

Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception

The 2nd is more of a stepping stone to the 3rd. It felt a lot more tropish than the first one and that just feels weird. A lot of its issues is that a lot of the scenes feel redundant where it’s spamming the same joke multiple times. Also the final boss had a huge stat spike and it was pretty annoying to complete compared to the rest of the game. Everything outside of that was great and I’d give it a 9 if it was just that. And it’d just be like, removing 2~4 hours.

Amatsutsumi

This would’ve been an 8 or maybe even a high 8 if they took out two hscenes of each character and added those scenes on the main menu. Their routes are glorified fandisks that take 10% of actual plot as hostage. Otherwise, it has a great start and then varying degree of subpar to decent routes until a pretty good ending minus some ideas that I felt were pretty dumb.

Higurashi Kai

I really liked chapter 7, it was my favorite. I felt that chapter 6 had too much padding near the end. Chapter 5 was well done but I still remember the main points from the first season of the anime so I couldn’t get the same hype. I kind of liked chapter 8 but there’s parts in it that was kind of iffy to the point that I preferred chapter 7. I’m writing something on it

Kinkoi

I had this an 8 but I kind of want to move it to a mid 7. It’s mainly a moe vn outside of the last route that references and somewhat jokes on the other routes. I think the route is pretty good and carries the rest of the vn. There’s a theme of improving yourself and being golden but it’s not always done well. If it only had two routes and migrated some of the plot points of the other routes into them, I think I’d give it a 9.

Disliked/Disappointed

Primal Hearts and Love Duction

This one and Love Duction has the same issue where it doesn’t handle the genre shift well and it go annoying because of it. Primal Hearts was a moe game that shifted halfway through the vn to then have a 10/90 split between scenes and porn. Love Duction was a kuso game throughout and then became coherent during the routes but they’re generic and could’ve just stayed with everything being retarded. The true route brought it back but the last extra felt tacked on

Suzukuri Dungeon

The gameplay is kind of fun for awhile but it eventually gets annoying. And that’s also the same thing with the plot, it feels like it all dropped off around 30% the way through. Where they kind of stopped goofing off and now it’s just Karin needing money and the main guy wants to make dungeons and money so they just keep on cooperating. Almost all of the cgs are from the hscenes.
There’s some level spikes, any strategy outside of complete burst is generally useless. The 2nd extra map that you’d assume is there to help you level up is harder than it should be to the point you can just beat the game if you finished the whole map.

Evenicle 2

Honestly it’s just not as good as the first one. And all of it comes from it felt like the gameplay added a lot of padding to it. You have limited healing so a lot felt like you were just playing a numbers game and you don’t really need any strategy. Because you can’t really play as a wall, you have to burst them down before you run out of healing.

Renai x Royale

I was hoping for more but it was kind of normal. Sure everybody is retarded but the routes still had structure and that was something I thought it wouldn’t have due to it being a love royale. I thought the main character could randomly leave routes but that wasn’t the case. I did like the idol routes, which is kind of funny since I’m not a fan of idols. It’s hard to complain because it’s better to be safe marketing-wise but without it going balls to wall, I’ll forget this title soon enough.

Everything else

Doukyuusei

I’m giving this an 8 mainly for nostalgia. It just brought back old memories of trying to figure shit out on a convoluted map on these old ass games. Though this one is pretty fair in comparison outside of maybe 2 routes. You just explore the map and interact with the characters and their respective plots continue if you hit enough flags. Some of the routes could be pretty decent routes if they were focused on them but mainly the humor carries it.

Cafe Stella

I gave this a 7 at first because I actually liked most of the routes compared to other Yuzu titles. Kanna is basically a derivative of a route from a different title but they cut down the padding that one had. But then I remembered how bad the common route was and how the protag is one of the more boring ones from their catalogue so it gets shot down back to 6. Though it could be 6p

Edelweiss Fantasia

It’s just the fandisk. It technically has less hijinx but the routes are better and basically rounds itself back to 7. And it’s mainly that the hijinx is more focused on the two characters instead of the whole cast, but it still works.

Ima Sugu Onii-chan ni Imouto da tte Iitai

I was expecting more out of this one. It has the same writer as Koichoco but it didn’t really have the same spark for me. There were some threads that didn’t really go anywhere and there were some cliches that felt like spoofs, but then went along with it anyway and fucked up. The focal route is the weakest of the bunch. Mao was my favorite. There’s nothing wrong with it but there’s nothing in here that stands out from other titles.

Dohna Dohna

It lives and dies with its gameplay loop. You can savescum a lot to save time. Mainly to get the right stats and to get upgrade materials without wasting a day. The plot itself was working well too but it drops the ball by the last 3rd or so. Not like there was much going on but it had some neat ideas and they didn’t really follow through with it. Also the gameplay is relatively easy and items basically break the game. It’s mainly a game for horny people but it actually has better spacing between scenes than a large amount of moe games due to its gameplay loop. There’s also a decent amount of scenes where you have to lose and that takes awhile on certain maps, like I don’t know how you’d be expected to lose.
On gameplay, art design and the pacing between gameplay/porn/plot alone, it’s an 8 leaning towards a 9. But having to waste time trying to get upgrade material was annoying. Also some of the unique talents are kind of fucked up statwise once you get their scenes and I liked some of their designs so I had to savescum to get the crappy stats out, lol. My fun note is that I kept the first talent I had throughout the whole game, even though she became a resource pit.

Dies irae ~Interview with Kaziklu Bey

It’s just the fandisk. It’s decent, it’s fun because of Bey but I feel that he wasn’t as funny as he was in the maingame. But I generally disliked Ren so maybe I just don’t like how they handle the main character’s writing. The fights were also boring in comparison but that’s kind of fair considering the length. Part of my rating is how I view edge, where you think it’s cool in your early teens, stupid or pathetic in your early 20s and eventually coming around and thinking it’s funny on hard it’s trying to outedge the others after your 20s. Without it, I’d see it more as a 6.

Chronicles of Refugia part 1

It’s just the first part. It has potential and the side route is pretty decent with how they set the mood. The funny thing is that the main plot section was the weakest part that it offered. It’s mainly exposition so far so it’s hard to rate considering not much has been covered. But considering other episodic titles covered more and usually better quality, I’m putting the main plot as a 5 and the side story as a 6 or maybe a low 7.

Bustafellows

I feel it’s more like a 7 but it’s mostly an 8 with how consistent the quality is. There’s some archetypes I don’t like and they’re always going to be around because it’s a popular one and I feel like it’s unfair to lower it just because of that. Some routes were better than others but also felt like they weren’t really needed for the finale, otherwise I’d feel like the 8 would be totally justified or even a 9. There’s other small issues that would be spoilers but generally it’s outshined by the quality

13 Sentinels

I felt like it was kind of overhyped. But then again, I generally rate things lower than the average. Overall I had a lot of fun but some of the characters felt somewhat pointless and maybe would rewrite their sections. But the main gripe was that some scenes felt incomplete and doesn’t really intertwine with the rest but you get what it’s implying. Mostly it felt like it needed 10% more scenes to fit the rest of the pieces but overall I liked it it a lot. I played the switch version where they changed a few attacks and it kind of fucked me over when going against a specific mob.

A Clockwork Ley-Line 1&2
So this is a trilogy that I put money in kickstarter for ages ago. The third one is out but I’m taking a break on it because it’s honestly pretty average. There’s a couple of things wrong with it. And I think the thing people will complain about the most is the side routes. And yeah they generally suck but I’m kind of fine with them, just treat them as fandisks for the characters because outside of like one detail in one route, there’s no plot to it. Honestly that detail kind of spoils the main route a little bit. But yeah, my main gripe is that it just feels padded, I could see this being around 20 hours at most, and it’s like 30~40 depending on your reading speed. I’m putting these two as a 6, there’s parts that I liked but I was bored more often than not. The Ushio sections are fine, they were done better in the 2nd one but also my brain just keeps saying that she has a 5head

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

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

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

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

Characters: Light Spoilers:

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

Actual Spoilers:

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

Some of the endings

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

Overall

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

Amayui Castle Meister: My favorite out of the four

So I kind of finished Caslte Meister. I’m missing two images and I know where they’re from but one of them basically requires me to play the whole game again. And that sounds awful but if you’re levelled enough to finish the append material, you can finish a new game in maybe 4~5 hours if you just do the bare minimum. I just don’t want to, it’s a waste of time. And that’s coming from someone who finished each spirit’s training section, I’ll talk about it later.
So yeah, the game is huge but it’s a lot easier to go through than Kamidori. So I’ll do some comparisons and then I’ll go deeper in just castle meister. For one thing, money becomes irrelevant after like 5 chapters and you also don’t have to pay rent like in Kamidori. I guess you can buy basic materials to skip some farming but overall the material you need isn’t going to be in the store. I’d have to look at it but there’s probably less stuff to craft compared to Kamidori as well, except that’s not saying much and it’s still a shit ton. I also feel like there’s less side quests compared to Kamidori too but that might be my memory failing and thinking they had more than they did.
This game only took around 120 hours but that’s with a lot of material grinding. If you just don’t bother using the spirits at all, you can save quite a few hours. I did save a lot of time grinding where I just cheated in the exp so you level up once after every fight instead of every 10 to 20 kills. You can technically cheat a lot of stuff in to skip the grind, honestly I should’ve done it for the spirit training but I didn’t, lol.
There’s only two routes this time around but they’re much higher quality, but the append and new game plus material is overall weaker. Like they both end strong whilst the Kamidori endings where pretty whatever compared to the character interactions. In Kamidori, Asmo gets introduced in ng+ and it explores the concept that the world has cycles, that the world we live in now was in the past of kamidori, and that it’ll eventually get to that point again. Alongside that, Dion eventually becomes the meister, a rank that you can’t get in basegame. In Castle Meister, it’s just a group of solomon demons invading Avaro’s world. It gives you 50 turns and you really only have like 45 since there’s some waiting involved. Most of the cameo eushully angels aren’t around and even the one you do have basically has no scenes from what I can tell. You do get cup noodles after collecting a bunch of cards but that was Black Eushully’s gimmick, not the normal white one. It is kind of harder than Kamidori but since keeping your units alive is so much easier, it’s not really a problem. And that’s because you have hp potions up the ass and it doesn’t cost a turn to use them. They also removed the costume system and put in a monster capture system, and that’s used to buff your 6 spirits. And this fixes one of the issues in Kamidori where most of the units get benched once you hit the 60s since they stop getting large stat boosts compared to the main 4 characters. Except now it’s to the point that if you spend the time, these spirits will be better than any of your units for a long time. Until again the 60 to 80 range where your normal units get double action by default whilst the spirits need a 5* monster and they’re pretty rare to get. Basically you get them when you’re fighting the extra areas after the solomon demons, and I think you can get a few during the demons but not the elemental ones. It’s kind of poorly designed when you’re basically finishing their training and there’s nothing else to really do outside of ap05 and even then, that’s easier than the dungeons you do to get those 5* monsters.
The side characters are also kind of 50/50, they’re a lot more streamlined now. And what I mean by that is a unit could be introduced early on in Kamidori, and scenes would be sprinkled here and there and eventually goes over a story point that revolves around them. And it was to the point that the side characters outshined the main cast, which also happens in Rhapsody. In Castle Meister, outside of maybe Kisnir and the dragon, the units get introduced and their arc is probably over in the next chapter. Not that they’re gone from the story all together, but their best scenes have already passed. Like the fire fox was extremely well done and the closest you have to that is the dragon who’s optional.

Anyways, that’s all for comparisons. Some parts were kind of short since I was going to handle it here anyway. The plot is actually a lot better this time around. It focuses on Fia extensively compared to having 3 lackluster routes that Kamidori had. Fia is the best part of the vn, the easiest comparison is that she’s Aqua from Konosuba if she was useful and giddier. The voice acting on her is top notch and carries the rest of the group. The rest still fill their role, like Ior and Dieter, but Fia handles the scene.

Honestly I don’t know why Avaro, the protag doesn’t get voiced lines for at least the endings since they’d come out better with them. He does get voice lines when a mission begins so I don’t know why they couldn’t do the two endings.
So the plot starts out with Avaro starting a job in some ruins as a technomancer. A technomancer is basically a mechanical engineer that delves with magic. You don’t absolutely need to have a grasp with magic but you’re going to have a harder time. Anyways, Kisnir is the acting bodyguard, they get attacked and fend off some enemies. Avaro falls and finds Fia in a crystal, it breaks and they enter a contract. Turns out she’s a god but Avaro thinks it’s bullshit for awhile. The ruins is actually a fort and Fia can move it, Avaro uses it as his work station. Fia has amnesia and wants to go to a specific place that’s off limits due to some religious rules. They get in better terms and eventually get together whilst doing requests, gaining new allies, converting some enemies into allies and fending those who just want the fort.
Each chapter has something going on, it’s a good vn to go through when you have a backlog of videos to watch. The gameplay goes on for awhile and it’s just longer due to how much I farm in atelier type of game. I’d rather it lean more to what it was doing in the first 3 or 4 chapters where they’re just going places and making stuff for the people around the area the protagonists are travelling too. I get that it’s not the main point of the game when they’re meant to be going to their destination but some of these villains are kind of annoying. It doesn’t help that Avaro changes slightly in these scenes and becomes pretty preachy and won’t shut up about what’s right. It just happens more often than I’d like and it gets annoying.

So there’s two endings, and you’re most likely going to get the good ending without even trying unless you actively try to speedrun it and ignore most of the optional scenes. Like you have to fuck up multiple times to get to the bad end and I think it’s intentional because I find the difficulty in that route to be tougher than the good ending. There’s a couple of mobs in there that act like regenerators from dead space, they just keep coming back and it’s just pretty annoying when they’re both damage sponges and do an ok amount of damage. But yeah, you have to actively do some shit trades; they give you evil music when they show up, they’re not trying to hide it. Alongside that, you have to actively ignore the dragon Katorit. Funny thing is that I think you can do that in two ways. Not talking to her at all or just ignoring her after she leaves the party for a specific mission but I haven’t tested the latter. You have to finish both routes to unlock Append 5 from what I can tell, though it doesn’t have to be on the 3rd ng+, you can reload a past save and it’ll be unlocked there. I only knew about that after I did my 3rd run.
Speaking of Katorit, she’s really cute and it’s kind of weird that she’s into Avaro once she can transform into her adult form. I wouldn’t mind swapping the first part of append 5 and gave her some more scenes hanging out with the group. She has a couple of good scenes but she can’t compete with Fia. But none of them really can, they all have their moments but I think Mikeyu is the weakest of the bunch, then maybe Mikschana but that mainly pertains to her character interactions. My favorite characters are Dieter and Yourin, the fire spirit. And since I got to Yourin, he had an interesting bit in the start where Fia doesn’t really feel a link with him and I thought that’d be brought up later but it never does. Maybe they meant it as a foreshadow that he was a spirit that belonged to one of her family members but I’m not sure. And I guess I’ll get this out of the way. In kamidori, the elemental spirits were a main focus, not much at all in those one. And it’s a shame because the first four were full of personality and could be used for further character interactions but they never did. I think they might be optional, I never tried not capturing them, it just sounds like a bad investment. There’s a few scenes with the wind spirit but the others are basically ignored outside of another scene that leads to a dungeon for ng+ content. They do have their own append in ng+ and it’s great, I wish there was more of it. Honestly I’d rather they spent time expanding them and the other units instead of adding a Yuela cameo that lasts for awhile.

The units vary in usefulness depending on where you are. Like Avaro is pretty useless endgame whilst Dion was useless to competent since he became such a damn tank at that point. You could technically feed him stat ups to get to that point but you could also just feed it to better units. The best thing about him is that he doesn’t have a cost. Fia is kind of whatever for a long time and the main thing she was good at was summoning the spirits. Where if you did a proper formation, she became the best tank. But once you beef up your summons to the max, you can honestly just let her stay in the back. Ior is generally always good, she has high attack and speed, and her evasion is high enough to counter her low defense. Kisnir was complete ass in the beginning but gets to shine midgame and higher where she becomes a boss killer alongside having really high evasion. Dieter kind of sucks, but he has some range. Mikeyu was too glassy at first but eventually becomes useful when her damage is high enough but honestly she’s still on the weaker side compared to some of the other units, Roseline is in the same circumstances. Liche was a beast at midgame and still holds out ok in ng+. The amount of defense she has lets her tank a whole squad of units by herself, the downside is her attack isn’t the greatest and there’s maps with high spawn rate so she suffers in those maps. I think Katorit is also kind of midtier and so is Mikschana until she gets a specific spear. Outside of Lily, all of the ng+ characters carry too high of a character cost for you to run them. Like you can carry two level 90 units and be around the same cost as one level 50 unit. I’m not sure why I didn’t use Lily outside of her own content, she’s really strong. And then there’s the 6 spirits. I rarely used the ghost ones, the wind and fire ones are op. Especially the fire one, Yourin. This dude not only hit like a truck, but he also tanked for days. And he comes in with Prevail relatively fast which buffs your damage if your hp is under half. The earth one is a weaker version of Yourin. And the reason why the wind is better than water is because she has projectile defense and drain, she just couldn’t die as long as the enemy wasn’t strong to wind.
Before going into spoilers, I’m giving this an 8. There’s a good mix between scenes and gameplay. Gameplay eventually takes a lot more time if you’re doing NG+ stuff and I’d recommend cheating in the exp because that’s a huge grind. I feel like Kamidori had some better parts but Castle Meister has a much better plot going on alongside livelier banter. It’s one of those things where I feel like the 3 main plots in kamidori is like a 5 or 6 but the side characters were a 7 to 8. Whilst this one is more like an 8 in the main plot and then it varies from a 5 to 8 for the side characters. The training system is way better than the clothes but I wish there was more sidequests. It didn’t have the town cohesiveness that Kamidori did. They bring them up here and there and they’re important as plot points but you never see them hang out randomly in town.

Spoilers

So the worst conflict points are on the Infrus Royalty. You meet the third prince Gilch or whatever his name is and he’s just an asshole. And since he’s the first you see, you’re thinking oh this is the over the top one used as a parody. Basically the black sheep of the group and he really wants to take the fort and is willing to use a whole city as bait to get it. And that’s how he fucks up because the people notice that your party members go and help out everybody to evacuate and they all turn on the prince. So now he’s super butthurt and you beat him again later on and he’s the final “you didn’t win” move and launches himself out of the building and dies. But by the end of the game, you find another royal member and she’s just as annoying. And it’s kind of understandable because maybe she and Gilch might’ve been better to each other since they’re both royalty. And it’s not like she wanted the fort, she just wanted to destroy it. Until you play the bad ending and she’s just as bad as Gilch. And it was to the point where I think the game was trying to show how much destruction this fort can cause and why it needs to be controlled. And true enough, but I was basically rooting for Gaidal at that point because the Infrus Kingdom should be overrun, their leaders are complete ass. Like it’s to the point where if there were no drawbacks and Gaidal just found another fort and did what he’s doing, I wouldn’t even feel that bad, fuck those people. On the other side, a pretty good enemy was the Ice Duke Kalmerg. Yeah he’s technically an asshole but you can see what he was going for and he has his own morality. It helps that he’s a dragon so it could be like a culture thing but once he loses he steps inline and helps out the team.
The good ending has some really cool scenes, I was streaming parts of it and the last couple of bosses were going pretty crazy. The last boss ended up being kind of boring but it was a pretty good setpiece. The bad ending has something similar but it’s pretty whatever in comparison but I liked the overall plot. It gave me some small kira kira and Kana Imouto feelings in there.
After awhile the gameplay becomes kind of annoying where a lot of things become tanky or you’re overrun by mob spam. All that is only really shown in the ng+ stuff and the final fights. The fights and where they’re placed is a lot cooler than Kamidori but also weaker than Rhapsody’s ng+ stuff. There was one funny scene where one of the Solomon demons got really butthurt because I took their treasure so the boss fight became somewhat harder but at that point I was pretty high level to compensate for it. There’s also a couple of dragon ball references but my favorite was one of the Mikschana’s spears where it could hit anything from like 9 spaces away so I was poking everything. Too bad her damage output wasn’t the greatest but part of that is because I never got her stupidly overlevelled, I think she got to 77 after I finished everything. Which is still kind of high, the most endgame stuff is around 85~90. Though I did have Ior up to like 90.
There was also some annoying enemies where they had too much shit going on for them. Like they would have soul shield that blocks a lot of damage, and then Projectile Defense, Drain and Prevail all at once. And that point it’s like, fuck off. And most of that is only ng+ stuff, like the first two parts of Append 5 were ass to go through. The mob spam was just too annoying. Though, if you put in a lesser extent, the final boss in the bad ending was also pretty annoying. Where you basically had to fight a boss while trying to not die from the 5 mobs attacking you that will just revive in the next turn if you kill them. And it’s not like they die in one hit either, it was just a waste of turns, at the most I’d kill the wind one in the back since her damage was pretty high against two of the units I used.