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

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.

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Char­ac­ters

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.

Kyan Migiwa (喜屋武 汀)

The ath­letic 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. But over­all, splen­did comic relief char­ac­ter with a love of dan­ger­ous pranks and obses­sive of “cat­tle muti­la­tion”.
There’s also Saku­rai Ayashiro (桜井 綾代) to coun­ter­bal­ance Momo-chan, nick­named ‘Hime’. She’s the vice-captain of the team and the weak-willed Yam­ato Nadeshiko type; generic.

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Art­work

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.

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.

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Pre­sen­ta­tion

The sheer amounts of detail that went into the game’s pre­sen­ta­tion astounds me. First of all, the char­ac­ters speak, as in ani­mated mouths (which does requires some get­ting used to). The CG tran­si­tions are very pol­ished, espe­cially with the spe­cial effects and SFXs. 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.. The ambi­ent back­ground chat­ter was actu­ally quite dis­tin­guish­able and specif­i­cally fit to each scene.

The inter­face is absolutely gor­geous, with even the menus voiced by the main 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. The option of cus­tomiz­ing save file cat­e­gories with char­ac­ter icons is a real nice touch that makes orga­niz­ing saves eas­ier. There is also a flow­chart to help track progress and ana­lyze where you went wrong; as well as a glos­sary for all the terms.

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Music

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 incon­sis­tent bat­tle music how­ever, is the OST’s main weakness.

Story

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 packed to the brim, but… the expo­si­tion was too slow and drawn out with all the folk­lore, but the main story was felt too 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 and with­out suf­fi­cient buildup — there weren’t many hints being dropped before­hand to steadily raise those anxiety/anticipation lev­els before the climaxes.

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.

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.

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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…

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I really wanted Syouko x Yasumi with Nami as their adop­tive daugh­ter end! But no… denied ;-;

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 18:55 and is filed under Visual Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.