Started playing Tsuki ni Yorisou Otome no Sahou. Nice to have this much voice acting. Runa-sama best girl. Unfortunately the other three seem quite uninteresting. I hope this game doesn’t have the kind of structure where you have to play every route in sequence, with scenes missing depending on your choices (can only pick one girl).
I love the (action) music in this game. It has dubstep sounds which I usually hate, but work nicely here.
I suppose the most interesting thing will be how the characters react when they get to know MC’s secret. I’ve seen similar setting before so I can maybe imagine some of it. Actually it’s not even clear to me yet if this will be a dramatic story or not. The prologue was pretty serious, so I expect something similar, but most VN I have read have been even more dramatic. No matter how happy it seems for long periods of time, people always die in these!
Tried to continue the VN from yesterday but it’s a bit too silly for my todays mindset.
Playing more Tsukini. Many of the characters somehow feel similar to those in Sharin no Kuni, or maybe other VNs too. I wonder if there are some VN archetypes that are not as prevalent in original manga and anime.
What I thought of as similar:
- Minato (the redhead) and Sachi (the redhead) from Sharin. Both are quite self-absorbed and go around causing problems for themselves.
- The trans maid and Sharin’s Isono-kun. Both male comic-reliefs, stock VN type, but they come in many kinds.
- Mizuho (the brunette) and Touka (blue). Both are being sheltered extensively.
- Runa and Sharin’s secret heroine. Both cool and smart.
Now that I’m comparing the two games, I found all the heroines in Sharin were interesting from the start, even though I was only interested in one of the romantic routes. In Tsukini so far I only care about Runa, so it seems like the game could got tedious unless there aren’t major developments soon. Obviously the reveal of MC’s true nature will be a big turning point, so I hope I can at least make it that far.
Predicting the reveal a bit, I think it will happen to all heroines during the common route, because it seems hard to do otherwise (many scenes wouldn’t make sense if it was variable who knew about MC’s secret). But some could get to know earlier than others. Based on the story so far, I don’t think there will be anyone saying the “knew it from the start”, but I like that trope. I think Minato will be absolutely destroyed by the reveal, bit like that girl in the manga Ookami wa Uso wo Kasaneru. Mizuho has the same backstory of being afraid of men, so she might be quite shocked as well. Jeanmaire maybe won’t care as much, considering her current maid, but then I don’t quite know what her route is about. I think Runa well be “I thought something was off”. In any case, there is going to be a lot of material in a VN of this length so even if those guesses turned out about correct they would only be scraping the surface of the actual drama.
Looks like the first reveal already happened. Sharin also has a similar setting if you think about it — some of the characters know MC but don’t recognize him. I wonder if I remember correctly that when one of them learns about it, she starts to avoid him (might have been some other work). I predict Minato is going to do the same. Heh, she instead has an interesting idea of treating Yuusei and Asahi as two different people, asking him to “keep their knowledge separate”. Eg whatever embarassing things Minato did in front of Asahi, Yuusei doesn’t know about it. Realistically speaking it’s very silly of course, but not so bad development.
I hate it how rich people are portrayed as assholes, like the many bitch classmates in this game. In general the way bullies and alpha bitches are represented is stupid in a lot of Japanese media.
Almost in all VNs I have played, all the girls fall first for MC. I think it would be nice if this game reversed that for some of the girls. Because MC is in a pretty interesting position with his secret if he wants to confess. Another interesting plot would be that a girl falls for Asahi as a girl, and she finds out the truth at the last possible moment when she tries to get physical with Asahi. Maybe this will happen with Mizuho. What won’t happen, I’m sure, is that in line with the central theme, one of the girls turns out to be a guy.
Besides the cross-dressing thing, the most interesting thing about this VN is probably the master-servant relationships. MC is so subservient that it’s scary, yet endearing how genuinely he reveres Runa-sama. I think absolutely loyal servants are a pretty cool trope when the masters are respectable characters. Rarely the servant is made the focus, so there’s new stuff to explore here I think.
Wanted to continue playing but it’s getting too late.
Playing more Tsukini. I noticed this has quite cool zooming mechanic. You click the mouse anywhere on the screen and then it zooms, say by a factor of 1.5, and the crop will follow the mouse smoothly. So for example to see the middle part of the image zoomed, move mouse to middle, or to see the most top-right portion, move mouse to that corner.
Funny how Runa-sama and imouto-sama’s threaten to move their fight over Asahi into an MMO game they are both big shot guild leaders or something. Offer to trade Asahi for game items or start a full-scale war in the game world.
Played quite a bit today, so I’m somewhat dissapointed nothing much happened. VNs are terribly long, even if I skip boring parts it feels like the progress is a crawl. Long time ago I read that some famous writer called the short story the ultimate form of literacy, placing it above the novel. I thought back then it felt odd, not having read very many short stories, but these days I tend to agree fully. Good art usually has a point to make and it’s rarely as big as to really need a full book to do so. If a book improves over a short story by say 50%, then it shouldn’t be much more than 50% longer, but obviously that’s rarely the case. The vast majority of books are too long. If there’s a lot of material to tell, then a serial format is good because it’s essentially a sequence of short stories.
I also didn’t realize this for a long time, but obviously the reason for LNs success is exactly their format. The shortness and series format doesn’t make them worse than “real” books, it makes them “better”. I think the popularity of “real” books in the west might be might be partly due to the long tradition of writing such books and reverence for classical and famous contemporary authors. No one takes serial works seriously, so no one tries to write them seriously. I think it only worked out in Japan because of the otaku culture — people were willing to take everything seriously so all the niches prospered.
Finally this seems to be going somewhere with the Runa route.
In a typical VN you solve the issues of the heroine whose route you complete, but consider how in that universe the issues of all the other heroines go unsolved. I suppose you could argue that maybe in that universe only the one heroine has issues, but I doubt most players imagine it that way. Another way to think is that the other girls solve their problems later on, maybe with the support of the MC and the winner of the MC-bowl. Actually I have a third solution:
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if the “issues” go unsolved. Because in reality life isn’t about broken things being fixed, it’s just… things changing. I want to see a universe where MC doesn’t get deeply involved with a heroine, who then goes on to do something else that is arguably not (much) worse than what would have happened with MC. It should be different of course, otherwise the MC will look useless. Now, because there are several heroines, most of the time they do the alternative not-MC-route. This is quite in contrast to VNs where BAD ends are usually abrupt and short, contrasted by choiceless GOOD ends and sprawling After Stories. Well I guess the non-MC-routes are mostly interesting in games that are not only about relationships like many VNs. Maybe fighting VNs like Fate/Stay Night and Rance actually do something like this, I don’t know.
Besides solving heroines’ problems, it’s nice if MC has a problem too and it gets solved different way on every route.
Playing more Tsukini. As the plot progresses, MC’s dialogue gets more annoying while Runa’s voice becomes arousing with the dere.
I wonder if MC actually gets to do something heroic. He’s been hiding and evading problems quite a bit so far, so it’s going to look quite nice when he finally steps up.
Got to the climax where Ion, the big bro school headmaster exposes MC’s sex in front of everyone. There were some nice bits: I liked how Ion figured out MC’s secret on his own and forced him to come forth at critical moment. And I liked how he told Runa “What would you think if I were to say this person has been my spy all along?”, which was quite genius given that the students’ designs had been stolen earlier. And when Runa steps up to say she is certain of MC’s integrity, Ion says to MC something like “I’m amazed how well you pulled of your scam to the point of gaining perfect loyalty.”
However, then everything takes a nosedive. Ion says clearly that he just wants MC to suffer for having no talent, which somehow “dirties” Ion and others. Ion just wants Runa’s talent and goes with the corny idea that Runa should come to him and MC should move somewhere abroad to be never heard of again. Apparently he was seriously stealing the designs because they were good and he wanted to profit. Ion’s grandiosity is idiotic. It’s all so fucking stupid, no independently successful person would act remotely that way. Obviously he would antagonize people by stealing their ideas and then lose chance at the real profit of creating future business contacts. Those few pictures should be worthless (ideas are not worth anything). And what I hate most is that this game keeps talking about “talent” completely seriously, like many Japanese works do. I don’t know, maybe it makes sense with a broad definition of talent, but I always take it the way of inborn-talent. I don’t understand how any artists who has gone through the work of becoming successful would dare to speak about talent like that in their works.
Okay, so I’m dissapointed like I was with the conclusion of Sharin no Kuni. The way this should have been gone, I think: Ion’s true objective is to cultivate “talent” of his students so that everyone profits in the future. Stealing of the designs was just a trick to get everybody agitated and Ion later credits the original designers for their work, and allows them to use the clothes they produced in the winter show. Ion does not expose MC’s sex by himself, but forces MC to make a difficult decision. I think these would be developments that “make sense”, but like that there’s of course hardly any drama, it would need to be changed somehow and maybe that’s difficult so that the decisions the writers made are understandable.
One way this could still “make sense” is that the heroines quit the school and go into business, challenge Ion and turns out that’s what he wanted. Schools are not really important, smart people can do without them. But yeah, it’s not going to go that way.
Recently I’m imagining of throwing things in anger. Would be nice to throw this keyboard to the wall after being again dissapointed like this by a VN. At work I always want to smash that 1000e iPhone because my job is so stupid and Apple always manages to find new ways to piss me off. Or I imagine worryingly detailed about how it would feel like to jump of that 3rd story bridge inside the building. Sometimes I wonder if thinking too vividly about something like that I might do the action in reality. Reminds me of the manga Domino Kick, where MC’s “what if” scenarios immediately turn into reality.