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.

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: 81/100
Story : 9.5 x 4
Char­ac­ters : 8.0 x 2
Art­work : 7.0 x 2
Music : 8.0 x 1
Pre­sen­ta­tion: 5.0 x 1

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 >_< ]

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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After I fin­ished play­ing Aoi Shiro over this past week­end, the most sig­nif­i­cant thought bub­bling about atop my head is that SUCCESS needs a bet­ter sto­ry­line writer. Fine, it wasn’t bad, actu­ally I quite enjoyed Yasumi’s and Kohaku’s routes, but it was def­i­nitely skewed com­pared to the work their graph­ics and pro­gram­ming teams have man­aged. My sug­ges­tion to the aver­age Visual Novel player think­ing about try­ing this out: Yasumi’s route and all the art­work is def­i­nitely worth a run, but as for the rest of the story — not really much point bothering.

Espe­cially since I’m start­ing to have a case of too many Visual Nov­els that needs play­ing rather than too few, given MangaGamer’s immi­nent release of Hig­urashi and Soul Link.

See here for my more com­pre­hen­sive and non-spoiler review (edited with updates).

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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: 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 (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.

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.

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…

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.

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 ]

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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