Thanksgiving tasted like Turkey and cough syrup, so I started up this game…
A Visual Novel released by Success Corporation as recently as 2008, Aoi Shiro was translated by Wings of Yuri about two months ago. I was quite excited by this released as not only is the game rather new and thus reflects upon the current level of the Japanese Visual Novel industry, it is a completely Yuri Visual Novel — the only one of its type being translated as far as I know (and no H-scenes, which I’m glad about). Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to put aside enough time to play this until recently…

The game takes about thirty-some hours of total gameplay time. The story is interesting but not very strong, so the greatest enjoyment lay in the game’s artwork and presentation which are absolutely gorgeous.
Score: 75/100
Story : 6.0 x 4
Characters : 6.5 x 2
Artwork : 10.0 x 2
Music : 8.0 x 1
Presentation: 10.0 x 1
Premise
Aoi Shiro is about the Kendo club of a prestigious all-girls high-school going to a remote training camp — a monastery by the shores of a forbidden island with mythological ties. Not knowing that several of them have historical ties to these sacred grounds, the girls get themselves wrapped up in an ancient and lasting conflict, one with its root buried deep in the local folklore. Eight hundred years ago on the nearby island, an Oni king had been defeated and a terrible power was sealed away by the legendary Yasuhime-sama, but today actors have once again gathered on this stage to fight for the power of the Dragon King Palace.
The PC Game Patch is available at the project website. The game demo is also translated and available for download at the Wings of Yuri blog.
Characters (6.5/10)

Osanai Syouko (小山内 梢子) — Main Character
Nicknamed ‘Osa’, you play as the Captain of the Kendo team. Syouko is serious, hardworking, and somewhat shy — mostly since she’s always on the receiving end of jokes. Her behavior (and voice acting) is rather stiff, and there isn’t anything too outstanding about her traits except her courage and decisiveness. A good main character to drive the story forward, I guess.

Aizawa Yasumi (相沢 保美)
The first of the heroines is Yasumi. As the kendo club manager, Kasumi has a weak body — not quite sickly but extremely low stamina. But to make up for it, she’s a particularly hard worker and tries her best at everything, even if she has to strain herself for doing so. Yasumi also has legendary cooking skills — so good it moves all the girls into wishing they could marry her. She also reads a wide variety of books and is surprisingly knowledgeable about things.


I quickly started liking Yasumi thanks to her hard work and guts attitude and the fact her smiles are brightest when she’s helping others. The cute, frilly clothes also helped, not to mention the fact she’s absolutely adorable when she’s forcing out lines while being embarrassed. She also has a genuine crush on Syouko, as her jealous face during the other arcs is also quite cute.

Nami, taken home~
Nami (ナミ)
The mysterious little girl that you find swept up by the seashore during the first night, Nami starts off with neither any memories nor a voice. But what she does have are bundles of cuteness: the soft expressions, the light nods, the curiously focused eyes and the dazed stares, not to mention the doll-like appearance accentuated by her elegantly beautiful kimono. Her child instincts also quickly attaches herself to Syouko and Yasumi. Given the way she showed up, it’s also pretty easy to figure out that she’s not an ordinary human. The developers realize this and doesn’t try to hide that information either… However, Nami’s alternate side personality is very poorly developed due to the relatively short timeframe you get with her and the lack of variation in scenes.

“Tamago, fuwa fuwa desu~”
Oh gosh I think I melted— that was sooooo adorable!! ( >_< ) Definitely on a criminally cute level.
Although, going down Nami’s storyline did make me feel really bad on a different angle. Since choices for her had to be made against Yasumi’s, and I felt really bad for having to be so inconsiderate towards Yasumi as a result…

Kyan Migiwa (喜屋武 汀)
The athletic and stylish obviously-ninja girl whom comes to take a vacation in the same monastery as Syouko’s kendo club. Migiwa has a carefree, my-pace personality that likes to tease others. She’s curious about everything but also bluntly expresses her opinion whether or not it’s wanted. As Syouko puts it upon meeting her — Migiwa seem like the “hard to deal with” type — definitely applies to me as well. You find out very quickly that Migiwa seems to be working for some unknown organization and isn’t happy at all to be sharing her mission-residence with a group of uptown ojou-samas.
As much as I dislike her personality, Migiwa comes in somewhat handy in the story itself. She may not know much about Kendo, but she is a serious practitioner of martial arts, and is the first one to give the reader an understanding of what’s truly going on.

Kaya (カヤ)
As soon as Syouko meets her, she recognizes Kaya for her long-lost Natsu-nee-san, her role model in Kendo whom she thought had died eight years ago. Much of the early game character development for Kaya comes from Syouko reminiscing about Natsu-nee, so it’s rather hard to gauge exactly what Kaya is like. In so far as I can tell, she’s the extremely serious and stiff type — enough to make Syouko look very adaptive and flexible by comparison. Her character is rather flat and one-tracked, which may fit the story but still makes her extremely boring to deal with. The only thing interesting to note about Natsu-nee is that she’s the national kendo champion. Going down her path mostly focuses on unraveling the history between Syou-chan and Natsu-nee from eight years ago.

(O.O)
Kohaku (コハク)
Kohaku is a rather peculiar and amusing character. She’s short, dressing in noble’s clothes from Feudal Japan eras, and could be easily mistaken for a teenage boy. Her personality is on the serious yet sarcastic side, and her speech and mannerisms are both dignified and cryptic, at least until she gets agitated and loses her composure. I find Kohaku to be the most GAR of the characters, and in spite of the game’s genre, I seriously wished they made her character a male. Kohaku’s path gives insight not only to her and her ancient history, but also some insight to Nami’s alternate self.
I fear both Kaya and Kohaku shows up too late to be properly developed as main characters. For one, non-serious/everyday scenes of these two are definitely in lacking…

Migiwa (left), Momoko (center), Ayashiro (right)
Non-Pathed Characters
Frankly, several of the non-pathed characters are probably better developed than Kaya and Kohaku. There’s two that certainly are in my current progress and is likely to remain that way…


Akita Momoko (秋田 百子) is of the hyperactive type. She’s energetic to the point of being hard to keep up, and she has a particularly broad range of facial expression that’s always amusing to look at. Personality wise she’s rather selfish and only seems to act when it benefits her. Her interests on pranking others definitely border on the dangerous edge. She also has addiction to meats and a fascination of the phrase “cattle mutilation”, both of which are loudly voiced. Overall, I say she makes an excellent comic relief character.
To counterbalance Momo-chan, the cast includes Sakurai Ayashiro (桜井 綾代), nicknamed ‘Hime’. As her appearance reveals, she’s the soft-spoken and well-mannered ojou-sama type, except with no hawty personality. Although she’s the vice-captain of the team, Ayashiro is rather weak-willed and is more of a generic Yamato Nadeshiko than anything interesting. Alongside the serious Syouko, Ayashiro does help form the Kendo club’s “Sweet and Whip” (carrot and stick) policy.

Artwork (10/10)
Clean, highly-detailed, refined, and beautiful. I have only good things to say about the artwork, which the production team certainly put a lot of effort in. The art style is cute and colorful, with a touch of sharpness, good enough to meet most people’s tastes in my opinion.
The character CGs are nicely done with a great deal of variation between expressions and clothing. I’m particularly a fan of Yasumi’s and Nami’s intricately-designed clothes — frills and embroidery can never go wrong with cute characters.
There are a LOT of scene/event CGs, undoubtedly the highest ratio I’ve seen in a translated visual novel thus far. Even the bus, which our characters were on for just several lines, was given a CG (rather than the normal sky/clouds background VNs tend to use). I was particularly surprised by the details that went into these event CGs — for example, what the characters are eating in the dining hall CGs actually match their descriptions, and the food changes between different meal scenes.

Little things like these icons can be a real help.
Presentation (10/10)
First of all, the characters speak, not just in voices but their mouths are also animated. They’re probably using some engine as it’s not that well synchronized, but it is a nice touch (although requires some getting used to). The animated special effects with SFXs, from flame bursts to moving fog to creepy curse lines, were also matched to every drastic atmosphere/mood switch. The ambient background chatter was actually quite distinguishable and specifically fit to each scene, even if it did get noticeably repetitive.
The interface is absolutely gorgeous, with lapis lazuli buttons that serves a special purpose in the story. The main character also voices all the buttons and controls, putting forth some additional help to get the reader in character. When skipping scenes, the game will enter all the text that should have happened up until then into the log — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been lost at a decision-spot when I choose to skip scenes in Fate/stay night. Lastly, they even have the option of customizing save file categories with character icons — a real nice touch that makes organizing saves easier. There is also a flowchart to help track progress and analyze where you went wrong; not to mention the glossary in case you forgot terms or weren’t paying attention during a myth-telling scene. They’re not translated in-game, but you can access a translated version from the project site.
The CG transitions are very polished. The game routinely zooms in on different parts of scene/event CGs to emphasize the main character’s vision focus, and this isn’t just done as transitions as it is in most games either, but throughout each scene — you never have to look for the details, the game brings you to them.
Overall, I give presentation an almost perfect score.
Music (8/10)
The music is well-composed and accomodating. It’s not exceptionally good, but it did an excellent job of getting the mood across. The BGM pieces for scenes where the characters talked about the ancient folklore is especially fitting, using traditional instruments (e.g. erhu) and styles with a touch of modernization. I was surprised by this since very few composers bother making traditional music for scenes since they mostly have little or no experience with it.
The pros lies in a few very nicely done pieces of climatic music. But the cons lay in the inconsistent action/battle music, as there’s a lot of sudden and abrupt tone switching, even to the point where it feels like the beat changes.

Story (6/10)
Aoi shiro is really different from my expectations of a Visual Novel story, mainly as its plotline is resolved in just 4~5 days (or 2~3 for some of the bad endings). These few days are action-packed to the brim, with every scene providing something in terms of character development, setting exposition, or plot advancement. Yet despite this, everything still felt rushed. There wasn’t really any time to get to know the characters before you have to select a plotline to proceed down, and all of the climatic moments felt like it came too quickly, too fast, without sufficient buildup — there weren’t many hints being dropped beforehand to steadily raise those anxiety/anticipation levels before the climaxes.
Furthermore, despite the short duration of the storyline, the beginning of it felt really slow. I was literally on the verge of falling asleep when they kept going on about different parts of the folklore, some of it feels only barely connected to the story (at least for now — I’m haven’t finished). The ghost-stories scene took especially long, and felt mostly like they were just going off on a tangent. Then, when the action and plot did pick up, everything sped up so fast that it just feels… off balance…
It doesn’t help when the action scenes themselves feel rushed. One thing is for sure — unlike the writer of Fate/stay night or even Princess Waltz, the author of Aoi Shiro has no talent in writing combat sequences. The combat maneuvers of the characters feel really basic, and the descriptions are definitely in lacking…
What makes all of this worse is the complete loss of tone consistency within Aoishiro’s storytelling. It’ll be serious, dramatic, put-your-life-on-the-line intense in one moment, then suddenly switch to an easygoing or even comedic scene in just seconds without even a proper transition.
Lastly, Aoi Shiro has a total of 56 endings, but most of the bad/normal endings are rather brief and lacking in any conclusion. I’ve only seen Yasumi’s happy ending thus far, but even that felt somewhat lacking — it certainly didn’t clarify on just how the Syouko x Yasumi relationship went afterwards. My guess is most of their epilogue efforts went into the grand ending, so hopefully at least that will meet my expectations…
For a game where the art and presentation was so well polished, the story certainly felt… clumsy… as if it were rushed out from the writer.
Translation
As far as my limited Japanese can tell, most of it seems relatively solid. Although what I don’t get is why the translators chose to purposely skip out certain words like Genki (spirited) or Tsubaki (camellia). I mean it’s not like they’re ambiguous. Most of this is rather harmless, although it starts to hurt during the folklore storytelling scenes when most of the definite articles and people’s titles are left completely untranslated…
But anyways…
To be continued when I finish (dives back into game)…
I want Syouko x Yasumi with Nami as their adoptive daughter end! [Edit: and apparently I was disappointed ]
