I have a lot of visual novels that I’m going to be playing, and for once I want to have some kind of archive of my thoughts on them. For whatever reason, most of my history with VNs has slipped my mind. I feel like I can only confirm that I’ve played certain games with the assistance of screenshots that are still buried in my documents, but even then, I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ve played some more than are listed there.
I want to say my experience with the medium began with reading an old Let’s Play of Tsukihime, but to be honest, I can’t be sure. It’s definitely among one of the earliest interactions I had with it, but because it’s so far back and not my own playthrough, it’s not as clear as games I’ve played myself. The first VN I played myself was Muv-Luv, which I’ll write about next time, inspired by a random thread pitching/reviewing it on the Escapist forums, which I visited on occasion.
Aside from that, Katawa Shoujo was another game which wasn’t great, but was available in English, being an OEVN (Original English Visual Novel), and was fairly widely praised, despite being kinda sketchy, for being a product of chan-goers focusing on the subject of girls with various disabilities. It made me realize that the medium could be pretty interesting if you could accept the assorted tropes and gameplay standards.
After that, inspired by the anime adaptation of Clannad, I read a decent portion of its source material’s rather rough available fan translation, getting onto the main heroine’s route before my install got corrupted and I lost interest in trying to play it. I did, however, move on to Little Busters and Rewrite later on, two games from the same studio, and really enjoyed them.
At some point, fate/stay night also made its way into my sights, as did The Fruit of Grisaia, and Osadai (Osananajimi wa Daitouryou: My Girlfriend is the President), all of which I blasted through in due time. I fell out of the hobby as time when on, not really reading a whole lot of VNs while I was working on JRPGs, game crit writing, and eventually DGC. I also got into Final Fantasy XIV in this time, so I had some different priorities, but mostly it felt like the games I wanted to play weren’t translated yet so I just kind of lapsed in paying attention to everything.
Snap forward to 2019, and seemingly out of nowhere, an absurd number of games have gotten translations, but more importantly, two major changes had happened to their distribution; Steam became comfortable hosting 18+ content, and a lot more VNs got English translations, be they through Sekai Project or competitors picking up on the momentum the game industry had developed with regards to localization quality. Between these two factors, Steam reminded me once again that I had a fondness for reading VNs, and some free time to play them, so I’m going to do that!
This is going to be a cursory summary/review of the three games I went for first with this revival of interest; they weren’t the first games I picked up, nor the first games I was really interested in playing, but they were the first ones I sat down and read through recently.
I started with Aokana: Four Rhythm Across the Blue, which was a really solid game about a fictional sport based on anti-gravity tag called Flying Circus. I’m not usually one for sports stories, but it’s mixed competently with the drama related to all 4 heroines’ routes and kept me from feeling like it was too focused on sports. The triumphant “true” end of the main heroine’s route was extremely satisfying, especially seeing how all of the routes played out. The characters are charming, the drama feels natural, the resolutions are reasonable, and the competitions are compelling and surprisingly comprehensible despite being text descriptions of navigating 3D space in pseudo-dogfights. It’s a really good game, and I’ll definitely feel comfortable recommending it to people who are interested in romcom VNs.
I then followed it up with Konosora, or If My Heart Had Wings, another game I’d previously played and enjoyed. It’s about a kid discovering an interest in gliders, and flying in one, with a girl who has lost the use of her legs due to an accident. In all of the five routes, the protagonist and his club fly above the clouds in order to chase a notorious cloud formation known as the Morning Glory, with a focus on the inner turmoil of the heroine of each route, as is fairly normal for VNs like this. I still really like this game, as it’s really wholesome and relaxing, but I can’t recommend anyone buys the English version from MoeNovel on Steam. It’s an atrocious localization and completely butchers the English language in one of the two first routes you’re allowed to read, on top of doing a lot to stifle basic relationship stuff like the existence of boobs. If you’re going to read it, grab the JP version and the re-translation patch, because oof, it’s rough otherwise.
Lastly, I played Princess Evangile, which I’d normally say was largely underwhelming but I wasn’t expecting much. I was just seeking a bit of a palate cleanser of predictable fluff between two games I’d already played. The premise is that a boy is abandoned by his scumbag father and is recruited by an advocate for reform at a prestigious all-girls school. He ends up being the fulcrum upon which she intends to change the path of the school away from financial disaster and cultural collapse. It’s a bland enough premise, but the characters are charming enough, and the dialogue is amusing if not terribly subtle. Every named character ends up smitten with the protagonist, but only about half of them have routes available in the main game, the other 5 of 9 being relegated to fandisc stories that sidestep the actual drama surrounding the main premise of the game. The main game’s routes all take different angles on the same theme: conservatism is not healthy.
At one point, Rise, the main heroine of the game, describes the culture surrounding Vincennes Private Girls’ Academy as a gravity well; those caught in its influence will find it difficult to escape, as will their descendants. It takes an extraordinary effort or outside intervention to escape the pull of this cultural black hole that will lead those inside it to staunchly refuse to change, even if changing is the only way to avoid grief, trauma, and disaster. Rise seeks to be the one to make this extraordinary effort, and seeks Masaya, the protagonist, to be the outside intervention they need to make this push work. Her motivation is revealed to be that her mother’s inability to accept change to Vincennes’ existence led her to have a breakdown that left her unable to process that she was a mother; the daughters of the headmistress who are two of the other heroines are also dealing with parental issues with said headmistress also based on the inability to accept change. It’s not a terribly complex or subtle message, but it still resonated with me, lefty that I am, so I have a hard time saying it’s a *bad* game. Bland, sure, but it was essentially what I was promised, so I can’t be too mad.
All that said, I’m moving onto MuvLuv next, because I want to revisit it with the 2016 official English release, to see how much of the trilogy has stuck with me and whether I still think it’s good. Look forward to more posts on VNs! Or don’t. I’m not your boss.
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