Let's do a vn log. [18+]

Every game I've been playing lately is visual novels. It's all I have energy for. I'm sorry to all the jrpgs I've stalled on. As stated this log will focus on eroge, often featuring offensive content such as rape and gore. I probably won't be giving you a play-by-play of the details here, but I will probably talk about these topics. Take care when looking up or if you decide to play any of these games for yourself.

Heaven Will Be Mine

Let's start off with a non-eroge just in case! I'm a fan of We Know the Devil and I've had Heaven Will be Mine in my library for a while but only just getting around to playing it. It's nice to see a new work from this team featuring even more girls with issues and that same metaphor-rich writing style. The setting is interesting and gives us great phrases such as "Newtonian-Jungian physics" and facilitates unique presentation of the interpersonal drama between the girls.

Unfortunately some technical issues did hamper my enjoyment of the game. No skip text option, no cg galley, and the faction system doesn't actually do a lot in practice. I started the game off by choosing every possible option for Saturn, a pain without a skip button, but I like to explore different options and choices in visual novels. Turns out this was a mistake, as it made playing the other girls' route more repetitive as a lot of the dialogue and even the endings are repeated. I imagine earlier in the game's production, the girls' routes were meant to have more unique dialogue and endings, but time and budget constraints happened. If there was a skip read text option, I wouldn't have minded this as much.

DeadΩAegis

After Magilumiere left me feeling unsatisfied, I knew what vn I had to read next. Dead End Aegis is one of those visual novels that has a (hyperbolic) reputation for being "the most fucked up and disturbing game ever" which made me a bit nervous about trying it, but I had a need for a "magical girls dealing with an abusive workplace" story so I went head and gave it a shot. Like with Subahibi, it ended up being nothing I couldn't handle. I can probably stop worrying about this now.

So, did Dead End Aegis give me what I was looking for? Eh, sometimes! I think the Return to Earth route is far more successful than the Stay at the Cathedral route at handling misogyny as a theme. On Earth, Mitsuomi isn't just manipulative and cruel, he's also pathetic. A loser. Helpless. Minori getting to see Mitsuomi as he really is and realizing she isn't beneath him felt cathartic and rewarding. So in the Cathedral route seeing Mitsuomi as just genuinely a cool and nice dude felt off-putting.

The Earth route has our the other girls being the more important and positive relationships for Minori, while in the Cathedral route one is killed off early and the other has a more antagonistic role. So Mitsuomi ends up being Minori's hero. That's weird considering the common route!

I think the Cathedral route is supposed to be the "main" route considering more of the intrigue and plot threads get wrapped up there, but the Earth route is just better. And even if the Cathedral route did address more of those earlier threads, I still found myself thinking: "Hey Chekov, you sure left a lot of guns around here. Are you going to use them for anything? No? Oh, okay." (I am aware this is not a hard and fast writing rule but there were some really nice guns that would have been really cool to see in action.)

I think the writing has a lot of flaws but there's also a lot of things that personally appeal to me and the high production values made the experience fun anyways. Definitely looking forward to seeing what Metalogiq puts out in the future! Especially since from what I've heard Minagoroshi no Otome has a lot more focus on yuri.

Hashihime of Old Book Town

How did I just find out about Adelta this year?? As I make my way though some of the visual novels the community upholds as "The Greats", this one that doesn't get much attention outside of its niche (BL) was the first to really blow me away. The aesthetics and visuals have a distinct character that fits the psychedelic Taisho theme. The characters are interesting and have interesting relationships with each other. The romance is engaging. The writing is clever and never bored me, even during the weaker routes. And oh god, I didn't know having the sex scenes take up so much less screen time is so refreshing after playing Dead End Aegis and Subahibi. They actually felt like a welcome reward rather than a thing I have to click through until I get to the next scene. (Maybe a bad comparison because the sex scenes in those games largely aren't supposed to be triumphant moments usually.)

That's not to say the game is perfect. The game is very "front-loaded" with the strongest routes being the first two you get, leaving the last endings you get feel lackluster in comparison. As a whole, I don't actually mind Professor and Hanazawa's routes feeling more like "side routes". I even think it feels natural for the characters for Minakami and Kawase's routes to be the more fleshed out ones because they have so much history together with Tamamori (something Professor and Hanazawa lament about!) But I can see how readers expecting all the routes to have equal weight would be disappointed by this, and it just leaves the latter parts of the game weaker than the start.

And, the hidden route. You can count me among the people who didn't like it. I do think the relationship is creepy but I don't want to belabor that point too hard when I spoke positively about Dead End Aegis of all things earlier. But even if I didn't think it was creepy, the fifth love interest is just far less interesting than the other four, so the decision to also give him this additional narrative weight over the others baffles me to be quite honest. It doesn't ruin the game for me, but I don't know why it's here. And if it has to be here, it would have felt less out of place if it was written in a way that doesn't suggest it's more important than the other routes.

Ooe (Demo)

Well obviously I couldn't let my Adelta experience end there but UuultraC hasn't had a sale yet. So let's play the Ooe demo just to get a feel for the characters and premise, surely this won't consume my every waking thought.

It's consuming my every waking thought. Sorry Minakami for cheating on you with Ariake so soon.

Regardless! I don't want to commit the time it would take to play it in Japanese at the moment. I have some reading speed goals for Japanese I want to hit before tackling it.

As this post has been sitting in my draft for weeks, MangaGamer has announced the official Ooe English translation! I very cautiously called it and even told my friend if she goes to the panel at Anime Expo she may end up witnessing fujoshi history.

My Japanese has gotten noticeably stronger since I first played the demo, and playing it in Japanese was really fun, so I might end up playing the whole game in Japanese anyways.

I should also probably actually read And Then There were None at some point. I don't think that'd take me more than a day or two.

Saya no Uta

Eh, not for me. The character writing is basically nonexistent so I can't say I really cared when bad things happened to them or they did bad things. And I hate to be the guy who goes "I think this eroge would've been better if it had more normal horror instead of weird sex" but taking the premise of Saya no Uta into account, there only being one gore cg and it not even being from Fuminori's point of view is disappointing. Strong descriptive prose could have made up for the lack of cg's but there isn't any of that either.

Chaos;Head

Huge Science Adventure series fan. Would love to play Chaos;Head someday.

Finally got to play Chaos;Head! Specifically, Chaos;Head Noah with the overhaul patch. And I think it's probably my favorite entry in the series? It's so fucking chuuni. Takumi is A Lot and I get that not everyone can handle him, but he is what makes this game what it is and I respect that. I also wasn't expecting to like the characters routes so much because I was expecting a "basically the same events but Takumi gets closer to this specific girl and she learns he isn't that bad" but they were all pretty varied and, to be blunt, some of these girls' mental illnesses actually play pretty nice with Takumi's own mental illnesses.

Ayase and Yua's routes were my favorites. Exactly what I meant when I said when I said these characters' mental illnesses work well together. Girl with DID kidnapped me because she thinks I have DID and my evil alter killed her sister. Reluctantly following the weird chuuni girl around a disaster zone doing weird chuuni roleplay because I'm too scared to be by myself right now.

Ayase's route was also basically Saya no Uta if I liked it. And speaking of Saya no Uta, when I said strong prose writing could've made it stand out to me more. Chaos;Head has it! The impalement scene had me reading out of the corner of my eye and grimacing even though it was just white text on a black background.

Kozue and Sena's were my least favorites, which is a shame because I loved them in the common route. Sena's route felt kinda like something that was cut from the common route and I don't think it really gave Sena a chance to shine. Kozue's idk, I feel like there was room to make something else happen. Make of that what you will.

I'll also need to give Chaos;Child another chance at some point because I played it before ;Head and didn't really like it, but just a few hours in to ;Head, some of things that felt completely out of nowhere in ;Child I started to see how they might land better with the context of ;Head.

Tangent 1: Oh god I love this game but the conspiracy theory shit is so bad. It's bad in all the Science;Adventure games as far as I can remember but it might be the worst here. Guys I get "what if conspiracy theory was real?" can be a fun idea but we can't use those ones. Okay?

Tangent 2: Hashihime had to have been directly inspired by Chaos;Head right? I was already semi-jokingly thinking things like "Tamamori is basically a sci;adv protagonist" and "this is yaoi chaos;head" before I properly had a chance to play Chaos;Head, but now that I have played it in full, it was a direct inspiration for Hashihime right?? Like it had to be. I'm not saying this is a bad thing or making an accusation of plagiarism or anything. If anything, I think that these two games are some of my favorites I've played this year says a lot about my tastes.

Okay let's just get this out of the drafts already! Now that the big steam summer sale is here I bought UuultraC and that's probably what I'll play next. By probably I mean definitely.