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.

It also feels kinda of weird to play this right after Aoi Shiro, as they’re com­pletely different…

Premise

One day, Tsukasa (MC) finds an ille­gal immi­grant girl who col­lapsed in a back alley and takes her in after a request from his boss. How­ever, one encounter soon leads the way to more as other peo­ple began to gather around him, all of them with one com­mon trait: they’re all social mis­fits and out­casts with no fam­ily to rely upon. After join­ing hands to solve a hous­ing prob­lem, the group decides to form an alliance where they will try to live together and sup­port each other just like fam­ily mem­bers would — and hence the Fam­ily Project was born.

How­ever, things aren’t that easy, as the project include mem­bers who have spent their life avoid­ing inter­per­sonal ties due to the pains their fam­i­lies once brought upon them. It also doesn’t help that each fam­ily mem­ber is also being chased by their own prob­lems, be it debt, drugs, mafia, or past social dis­as­ters that won’t let go…

Char­ac­ters (8/10)

The main char­ac­ter is Tsukasa. He’s not that dif­fer­ent from an aver­age Vis­nov main char­ac­ter so I won’t men­tion much. His most notable traits are his fierce sense of inde­pen­dence and his dis­trust of inter­per­sonal con­nec­tions, and much of the story involves him slowly grow­ing out of that.

Kawara Mat­suri: The loli of the cast whose actual age is prob­a­bly 16? (first year of high school men­tioned). Mat­suri is hon­est, hard­work­ing, and always try­ing to cheer every­one up. Despite her poverty-stricken life of liv­ing in card­board boxes, Mat­suri has a sur­pris­ingly opti­mistic and refresh­ing atti­tude for oth­ers. Yet, she has no con­fi­dence for her­self and believes she never deserves any­thing good. Out of all the project mem­bers, she wishes for a fam­ily the most.

Mat­suri took my sym­pa­thies first with her hard work atti­tude and some traits that reminded me of Kaede (Shuf­fle), espe­cially that one moment of des­per­a­tion. I also feel that she has the true path of the story, as she has prob­a­bly the longest story, the most con­clu­sive epi­logue (set 10 years in the future), and even a scene which reveals the truth behind Tsukasa’s par­ents and child­hood. Her path is very pol­ished com­pared to the oth­ers and her end­ing is by far the happiest.

Haruka / Wang Chun­hua: The Chi­nese ille­gal immi­grant Tsukasa picks up who appears to be an inno­cent nat­ural air­head. Haruka is end­lessly opti­mistic and has a heart filled with kind­ness despite what hap­pens. Her voice act­ing is rather awk­ward but intended, since she doesn’t know how to speak Japan­ese at the begin­ning and slowly picks it up along the way. Her motives for com­ing to Japan is to search for her mother and she has a care­free atti­tude towards the Fam­ily Project. At the same time, she’s also plagued by the most dan­ger­ous prob­lem of them all…

I found Haruka’s route to be the most touch­ing one, as it’s the one where Tsukasa becomes most attached to the Fam­ily Project and thus made it all the painful to let go. The betray­als, the break­ing of bonds, and the help­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion also boosted it. The part when they brought the Chinese-Japanese racial hatred into a Visual Novel story was par­tic­u­larly shock­ing to me, since I do rec­og­nize that as being a major prob­lem in main­land China.

Ookawara Jun: Tsukasa’s ex-“girlfriend” is a miser who is utterly unwill­ing to open up to oth­ers. Jun has a seri­ous per­son­al­ity that cares too much about money, so much that she’ll take on any job to obtain it. She also has some kind of aver­sion to food and won’t con­sume any­thing except nutri­ent bars. Her path delves into the ori­gin of her food-trauma and just where all the money is going, which shows that her rea­sons behind all the shady work is actu­ally very benev­o­lent. She’s also my sec­ond favorite character.

Takayashiki Aoba: A devil tsun­dere ex-ojou-sama with a seri­ous atti­tude prob­lem and is con­vinced that she’s the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Aoba is dis­owned by her fam­ily and pos­sesses only a house (but not the land under it). She extorts money from strangers through her draw­ings, which are so bad they look like mate­ri­al­ized curses. Aoba also appears to be des­per­ately search­ing for some­thing pre­cious hid­den within the house. Unfor­tu­nately, her prickly demeanor makes her a bitch until nearly the end. Although the story of her illu­sions is quite touching.

Itakura Masumi: A for­get­ful and gullible mother who is com­pletely unre­li­able. Masumi is bipo­lar and extremely inse­cure about her age, mak­ing her a very clingy per­son who relies upon oth­ers for every­thing. Tsukasa first meets her by sav­ing her from com­mit­ting sui­cide. Her story is rather annoy­ing because of how utterly help­less she is.

Hirota Hiroshi: The dad of the fam­ily is a self-proclaimed “cor­po­rate war­rior” who is actu­ally a failed busi­ness­man on the run. Because of his lack of com­mon sense for most of the story, he is the des­ig­nated comic relief char­ac­ter who has far too many tal­ents. Yet at the same time, Hiroshi is the one who pro­posed the Fam­ily Project and also the most depend­able per­son dur­ing its direst hour. He’s also voiced by Norio WAKAMOTO which auto­mat­i­cally makes his char­ac­ter awe­some, not to men­tion hilar­i­ous since Wakamoto is fool­ing around too much.

Story (9.5/10)

The story of Fam­ily Project is all about what it takes for trou­bled, emo­tion­ally scarred human beings to form inter­per­sonal bonds, break­ing down the shells they erected in self-protection to recre­ate the trust and love a nor­mal fam­ily takes for granted.

Fam­ily Project has an excep­tion­ally long com­mon route where the bulk of the char­ac­ter devel­op­ment takes place. The indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter paths them­selves are at the end and rather short, thus it helps a lot to plan ahead and use a FAQ to min­i­mize redun­dant game­play. Most of the com­mon route is a slice-of-life story with some dra­matic moments and lots of inter­spersed com­edy, most of which I really enjoyed, espe­cially all the poverty jokes. The long com­mon route also pro­vide an advan­tage: it allows all the char­ac­ters to act as sup­port for whomever you pick as heroine.

The best family/relationship drama are mostly near the end once story pathing has been estab­lished. Unlike many games which unravel and resolve the core drama within a con­sec­u­tive series of cli­matic events, Fam­ily Project breaks it into sev­eral pieces and han­dles it in stages spread far apart. The result isn’t quite as pow­er­ful, but far more real­is­tic and helps the audi­ence fall inline with the char­ac­ter more as they change step by step. That being said, the buildup to the dra­matic scenes tends to be in the lack­ing, and the scenes them­selves are under­em­bell­ished: this is the only rea­son why this visual novel didn’t exceed say, Clan­nad. After all, the poten­tial is cer­tainly there.

Art (7/10)

For back then, the art style is actu­ally pretty good, and the tex­ture style helped add to the story’s mood. How­ever, there is a seri­ous case of art­work incon­sis­tency, as the same char­ac­ter would look notably dif­fer­ent between dif­fer­ent poses and Event CGs. Fur­ther­more, the game had a dire defi­ciency of Event CGs and ECG vari­a­tions. There were a few impor­tant scenes where they only showed the sky while the dia­logue went back and forth for min­utes, and in many oth­ers the ECG was com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the descrip­tions because the ded­i­cated only one vari­a­tion for the entire scene.

Music (8/10)

I found the music to be quite good and very fit­ting. The OP (Under the Same Sky) and ED (Phi­los­o­phy) by Kotoko were excep­tion­ally beau­ti­ful pieces, and so is the OP’s piano BGM ver­sion (Think­ing of You). How­ever, points got taken off for a lack of vari­ety, poor BGM replay-loop pro­gram­ming, and no char­ac­ter theme songs.

Pre­sen­ta­tion (5/10)

The pro­gram­ming is absolutely min­i­mal­is­tic, as I’ve never had more trou­ble oper­at­ing a Visual Novel. The lack of onscreen but­tons really hurt as every­thing had to be done through the menu (or hotkeys once you remem­ber them). The long com­mon route could really have used a skip-scene option. Other lack­ing include the absence of CG tran­si­tions and poor spe­cial effects (the unskip­pable blur-shaking effect is really annoy­ing). Maybe I sim­ply got too spoiled by Aoi Shiro?

Voice act­ing is avail­able for every­one but the main char­ac­ter, includ­ing all the sup­port char­ac­ters, and is actu­ally pretty decent.

Next is Sharin no Kuni, gods I need to catch up with Visnovs…

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Screw Grind­ing, Pow­er­level with Friend­ship: Sakura Wars
• Aoi Shiro Yuri Visual Novel Review
• Thank You, Angel Beats!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 20:19 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.