Much thanks to Dakko­dango Trans­la­tions for trans­lat­ing this game, although they really should think about invest­ing in a game descrip­tion page; I almost skipped this because I had lit­tle clue what it was about.

Eien no Aselia is a visual novel strat­egy game hybrid made by Xuse nearly a decade ago, and unlike the usual visual novel, it’s got enough game­play to be com­pa­ra­ble to true SRPGs. While its story is rather straight­for­ward for a vis­nov, Eien no Aselia remains remark­able in its own right by envelop­ing its audi­ence with a vividly-depicted orig­i­nal fan­tasy world while engross­ing them in an epic story bal­anced along­side addic­tive turn-based strat­egy mechan­ics. It’s essen­tially an epic fan­tasy adven­ture x mil­i­tary fic­tion stuck into a JRPG… some­what like Utaware­ru­mono, except bet­ter imo. Read the rest of this entry »

Bad social rep­u­ta­tion is some­thing the Visual Novel fan has learned to accept. But if you thought the whole Rapelay inci­dent didn’t really hurt our inter­est that much, think again…

The recent edit war between Minori (Wind, Ef) and the trans­la­tion group NNL may just lead to the com­plete scrap­ping of the Eden trans­la­tion project, one that is highly antic­i­pated by the vis­nov com­mu­nity and reviewed by Choux to be “one of the best” with Shinkai-Makoto-worthy art­work. But while an entire com­mu­nity vents against Minori for being xeno­pho­bic, Minori explains them­selves in self-defense, which included:

“Each coun­try has their own cul­ture.… we real­ized that there are coun­tries that pun­ish mere pos­ses­sion of prob­lem­atic forms of expres­sion… Cur­rently, The bill that allows to lim­it­ing the con­tent to all ERO­GEs is being dis­cussed in the Diet because intel­lec­tu­als and politi­cians said ‘Japan­ese EROGE were being prob­lem­atic and trou­bled with the for­eign coun­tries.’”

Pick­ing my mem­o­ries brings up that Minori started their xeno­pho­bic streak because of the Rapelay inci­dent.

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My first impres­sion was that this game is just out­right ridicu­lous: premise of steam-powered trans­form­ing mechs launch­ing from a secret base beneath a Broad­way the­ater, stereo­typ­i­cal char­ac­ters as flat as their card­board cutout pre­sen­ta­tion, plenty of super-shounen tropes in the story… It’s even got wee­aboo cul­ture all over — espe­cially when the open­ing scenes involve a half-Japanese half-Texan cow­boy samu­rai fea­tured as the main hero­ine… Wat? （￣～￣;）

But you know, I love not grind­ing, or wor­ry­ing about expe­ri­ence dis­tri­b­u­tion, or max­i­miz­ing expe­ri­ence gain from every bat­tle. Because in Sakura Wars V, you level up by talk­ing and forg­ing inter-party bonds, visual novel style; kind of like Per­sona social links, except bet­ter since it actu­ally lev­els you up. So take all of that frus­tra­tion out and add some fresh inven­tive­ness to each bat­tle (Valkyria Chron­i­cles style, this is by the same dev team) and you have some real Tac­ti­cal RPG gam­ing, like hop­ping between sky­scraper roofs destroy­ing artillery or an aer­ial bat­tles in the New York City sub­way — yes really.

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Netto first got me think­ing when he reported the eroge indus­try to be in a state of peril, but I’ve been put­ing it off until this past week­end, when I (finally) fin­ished Per­sona 4 and got started on my UK ver­sion of Agarest Wars. As one might guess, those two games are very much on the topic here.

Tears to Tiara Visual Novel on the PS3 (those graph­ics aren’t bad at all)

The bound­aries between JRPGs and Visual Nov­els has always been blurred. After all, IGN recently iden­ti­fied the JRPG “talk­ing card­board cutout” tra­di­tion in their Top 10 Ways to Fix JRPGs, and the most rec­og­niz­able image of Visual Nov­els has got to be that win­dowed screen­shot of bishoujo char­ac­ter CGs atop a class­room back­ground with dia­logue box beneath it. Not to men­tion, there are Vis­nov pro­duc­ers like Alice-soft (Rance) and that branch of Leaf/Aquaplus (Tears to Tiara, Utaware­ru­mono) who seems to spe­cial­ize in import­ing RPG ele­ments into their Vis­novs. But com­bin­ing JRPG and Vis­nov ele­ments goes far deeper than just the graph­ics corner-cutting of pre­sen­ta­tion or the addi­tion of a basic com­bat system.

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It’s fam­ily in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent fla­vor from Clan­nad, but I loved it nevertheless…

It sure took me a while to get started with this vis­nov. Despite hav­ing top rat­ings on erogamescape and claimed to be KEY’s inspi­ra­tion for Clan­nad, there sim­ply wasn’t that much hype about it. I mean heck, the title doesn’t even have a wiki page! The fact it was trans­lated by JAST / G-collections also made it par­tic­u­larly easy to dis­miss, as com­mer­cial ero­ges have a pretty poor reputation.

But Fam­ily Project really struck a chord with me. Its sto­ry­telling style may still be lack­ing com­pared to Jun Maeda of KEY, but it cer­tainly brought up a far greater range of con­cepts and emo­tions to drive in their theme of “What is fam­ily?” Iso­la­tion vs bond­ing; betrayal vs trust; exploita­tion vs reliance; mis­un­der­stand­ing vs love; it’s these opposed feel­ings that FP uses to bring forth its tear­jerk­ing story. After all, one must heal the heart first on the route to hap­pi­ness, and that’s what FP is paced best for.

One thing I really like about the story is that they really hit the darker sides of soci­ety. Failed busi­nesses, child abuse, mafia debts, drug deal­ing, arson, pros­ti­tu­tion, gang wars, human traf­fick­ing — the writ­ers seri­ously didn’t hold back. It really helps to accen­tu­ate the drama and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment by show­ing just what kind of cesspools the char­ac­ters had to pull their lives out of and how ardu­ous the jour­ney was.

I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend at least try­ing the Mat­suri or Chunhua/Haruka route, the two most touch­ing ones in my opin­ion. You can get the game at JList.

Score: 78/100
Story : 36/40
Char­ac­ters : 20/25
Art­work : 9/15
Music & Pre­sen­ta­tion : 9/15
Misc Impres­sions : 4/5

I can’t wrap my head around why Erogamescape regards Kazoku Keikaku as one of the best (but then, I don’t see Clan­nad that way either), but the poten­tial is cer­tainly there.

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Toradora is the sec­ond series in my win­ter catch-up blitz, and it left me speech­less. There is no excuse why I did not pick this show up, even if it aired was dur­ing my the­sis semes­ter. And I call myself a romance-drama fan? *rage@self*

The show sucked me in as early as episode 2 (if I had only watched 1 more ep back then!). By episode 19 (Christ­mas Eve Fes­ti­val), it was already com­pet­ing for my top spot for anime in both the romance (Clan­nad, ef) and drama gen­res (Kanon, DC2SS). Two episodes later when Taiga uncon­sciously voiced her love, it crushed its com­peti­tors and moved onto con­sol­i­dat­ing its posi­tion. By the time the epi­logue rolled, I was left a com­plete emo­tional wreck: happy and rejoic­ing for the cou­ple, but also utterly drained. I had long lost track of how many times tears were brought to my eyes or how many min­utes I was left sob­bing loudly before the pro­jec­tor screen.

[ Shit shit SHIT, I don’t know what hap­pened but some­how I hit the pub­lish but­ton while work­ing on the draft right before going to sleep. That was not sup­pose to hap­pen. I hur­ried to fin­ish and re-published this, will add pic­tars once I get back. This is a dis­as­ter >_< ]

Kita­mura gets my Most Valu­able Char­ac­ter award

Look­ing back to com­pile my thoughts, I was left won­der­ing just why Toradora! destroyed my other beloved romance/drama series so hand­ily, from Kimi­nozo to Shuf­fle! to Clan­nad . It only took me a minute to real­ize that the oth­ers were almost all Visual Novel adap­ta­tions (do Japan­ese guys love cry­ing more than girls or some­thing?). It took me much longer to pin­point just what aspects of the stan­dard Visual Novel sto­ry­board­ing rou­tine caused it to be so out­classed by a light novel series.

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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: 73/100
Story : 24/40
Char­ac­ters : 12/25
Art­work : 20/15
Music & Pre­sen­ta­tion: 14/15
Misc Impres­sions: 3/5

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Read­ing Eternal’s review on the themes of Fate/stay night has got­ten my brains crank­ing again regard­ing this epic sto­ry­line that Nasu (and Urobuchi in Fate/zero) have envi­sioned and brought to life before us. Eter­nal high­lights how the three paths of Fate/stay night — Fate, Unlim­ited Blade Works, Heaven’s Feel — are brought together to con­cep­tu­al­ize the ques­tion of “what is the def­i­n­i­tion of a hero”. Although, this same com­par­i­son may be made to sev­eral other themes within the Fat­e­v­erse. To broaden out the scope, one can say that Nasu’s writ­ings are a crit­i­cal analy­sis by sto­ry­telling on “the def­i­n­i­tion of ideal within dif­fer­ent scopes of black and white”.

Typ­ing this reminds me of the days when I played Fate/stay night before it was trans­lated, rely­ing on a dic­tio­nary and lots of guess­work… result­ing in migraines and a desire to never do so again.

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