G-senjou no Maou

Started playing G-senjou no Maou now. I played this long time ago (sometime before 2017) and quit because the Japanese was too challenging. Now, I found the language not to be too difficult. I can understand most everything, although I have a habit of skimming through material that looks like it requires more translation work than understanding it would improve the experience.

I think it’s more important to maintain a good momentum, because it takes dozens of hours to finish all routes of a game like this. I want to to spend 6+ hours a day in the game if I can, otherwise I run the risk of losing motivation to continue. I need to remember my ultimate goal is not to understand 100% of this particular VN, but to improve my Japanese and grow my list of (sufficiently well-)read works.

It’s already quite weird that I remember having difficulties understanding some of the material last time, but now that I can understand nearly everything I don’t feel like I’m making any new discoveries about the story. That is, I can’t perceive in any way my previous challenges. Probably back then I didn’t misunderstand anything major, but I just missed out on details. And now I can’t be sure if on the first time I didn’t understand some particular detail or if I merely forgot it by now. It feels like the latter, but I think in many cases it should actually be the former.

Anyway, it’s a good story, I don’t mind reading it again. It seems like the MC has some kind of split personality or demon possession, which I don’t really like. When you have just a single supernatural element like that, the author cannot establish “rules” of how it works, which then enables it to work arbitrarily. It just leaves this feeling that they can do any asspull they want. Also it doesn’t feel like a mystery story when you can’t be sure if the problem can be solved with reasoning or if the answer is actually magical.

The straightforwardness of Japanese still manages to surprise me sometimes. Learned this word recently: 縞馬 = zebra

Playing G-senjou. Putting in two 5 hour sessions a day at these games doesn’t leave much energy for anything else.

Still playing G-senjou. The 4th chapter featuring Mizuha is making me laugh out loud so many times. Playing the Mizuha route now, not sure how long before I finish it. I thought it was pretty weird how it got away from the Maou plot, and I expect it to come back to it somehow, in all the routes. Either that there is a common route where that happens, or that each route has a different ending relating to it.

Finished the Mizuha route. As I feared, it completely abandoned the Maou plot. I didn’t really like any of the “after story” part, although the early part of the route/chapter was good.

Good works often leave me with this conflicted feeling that they do something so well and then just completely waste it, or go in a direction I don’t think worthwhile. First I’m feeling so bad about how I won’t be able to write something as good, is there even a point to write, and then other writers just drop the ball completely and I wonder if I might just write well after all, given my “ability to focus on the ball”. Perhaps what I’m repeatedly impressed by is actually the kind of basic work that can be learned, like keeping tension and writing funny jokes. And the stuff I feel like almost every work messes up happens because the authors are so focused on the basic stuff that, bluntly put, fail to create something actually original.

My guess now is that in this game, the so heavily featured Maou plot is only resolved in the Haru route. And I’m not even sure if I’m so interested in it. There seem to be so many mistakes in it, Maou doing idiotic things, that I’ve been waiting will be resolved later, but I’m kind of losing my hope. It’s starting to feel like a non-smart author is trying to write a smart character and failing at it.

Setting-wise, this is probably the closest work to Death Note, but in the end nothing like it. The best parts so far have been those where Gonzou appears and gives that overwhelming pressure, but in the end, nothing came of his eery demand for Kyousuke to rape Kanon. Then there was pressure where he suspected Kyousuke of being Maou, but it just seemed to fade away. Probably it will be handled in the Haru route, but still I feel like the great tension was completely lost, to poorly fit to the eroge medium. In the second (Tsubaki) and third (Kanon) chapter there was so much action around Maou, but nothing in the fourth (Mizuha) chapter. Ugh. I was planning to play next in the order Kanon->Tsubaki->Haru, but I might instead go straight to Haru because I feel like the game betrayed me.

Playing G-senjou. Finished Kanon’s route. Didn’t like it so much, for the same reasons I listed yesterday. As the last thing, I plan to play the Haru route, which probably will take several hours more, might not finish today which is also my last day of vacation.

Getting to late parts of the Haru route. Well, got to the big reveal so I’m not sure there is much more to it anyway. I thought it was a bit cheap, Maou being a different person. It’s like the only reason I didn’t see it coming miles away was that the game routinely seemed to insist that Maou was a side of Kyousuke. For example those headaches happening always right before Maou appearing, rendering Kyousuke useless for roughly the same period of time. It makes no sense. If the “forgetfulness” of Kyousuke had been that Maou was impersonating him without his knowledge, that would have been interesting (similar thing happens in the film Prestige).

All in all, the story now reminds me a lot of the company’s previous successful game, Sharin no Kuni, which I liked more (but not enough to bother playing the “fandisc”). Both have an evil male “mentor” character, and a reveal so huge it borders being a gimmick. Each heroine occupies one chapter that you complete regardless of whether you choose that route. Seems like a good design for a story-driven VN, I have nothing against it.

Looking at some more titles on vndb.org, and I guess there are after all quite many VNs that I would find at least as interesting as the two akabeisoft2 titles, if I tried playing them. The issue is mainly that lots of them are scifi or fantasy, which I’m still a little bit hesitant to tackle them language-wise. Also because among anime and manga I tend to dislike those genres. But I must say that having played a dozen or so titles so far, the VN medium still doesn’t feel like my own. I don’t think it ever will. It’s just very good for language learning at my current level because of the partial voice coverage with text. The length of the works also becomes an advantage once I manage to trick myself into trying to complete the game, although for many titles it discourages me from ever starting them. All considered, it looks like a rough road of learning ahead — I’m not sure if I’ll ever graduate to reading LNs, let alone “proper” Japanese novels (not that I want to, just pointing out they must be the most challenging medium).

I remember finishing the game but apparently did not write about it.