Category Archives: Visual novels

Visual novels

12 Days XI: Death sucks

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「セツミ」/「ごとP」

「セツミ」/「ごとP」

Narcissu is about people who are dying.

I read the first Narcissu last year during the summer. That was about a guy and a girl, both terminally ill and pretty much left to die. Faced with the choice of dying in the hospital or dying at home, they reject both and escape. Escape to where? Well, they figure that out along the way while we sit in the backseat and listen in.

Narcissu Side 2nd came out this year to everyone’s surprise and it offers another perspective on someone whose life is slowly draining away. This time, rather than following the journey of two people who are dying, we see how the waiting to die affects the person who’s about to die and everyone around them. Side 2nd takes place years before Narcissu, in which the protagonist, Himeko, meets Setsumi, the girl from the first Narcissu.

Side 2nd is interesting because it illuminates Setsumi’s character and leads into so many of the little details in Narcissu. It’s impressive how Side 2nd adds to the original Narcissu, even though it was already a pretty complete story. And after finishing Side 2nd, reading Narcissu again, and finishing with the new epilogue, I was amazed by how everything fit together.

Narcissu is fascinating because it shows us the end of a life without the usual drama that accompanies it in other fictional works. It’s not about people who are dying and are fighting to live. It’s not about people who are dying and decide to go out in a blaze of glory. It’s not about people who are dying after a life well lived. Narcissu is about people who have barely lived their lives and are resigned to the fact that it’ll be over shortly.

No shouting, no tears, no hope, just silence.

12 Days X: When the trolls cry

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「ベルンさま」/「ガガミング」

「ベルンさま」/「ガガミング」

No, it’s not quite over yet, but this year, I got to experience the joy of the six month waits that accompany each successive Comiket. Yes, after going through Umineko EP1-4, I was suddenly left with nothing to do but wait for the fine folks at The Witch Hunt do their stuff. It’s definitely different having about half a year in between each Episode. For one thing, it was a lot harder to hold the details of each Episode with months in between playthroughs. But now, there is only one left as the pieces of the game are almost set in place.

Chiru was something I was really looking forward to because it would mean the beginning of being able to make sense of the insane things that went down in the first four Episodes. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be as straightforward as Higurashi’s Answer arcs, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for Ryukishi07 to continue in the tradition of Umineko by throwing in even more characters and new reveals that add to the questions rather than answer them.

Well, that’s not entirely true. While the Core arcs doesn’t show us what “actually” happened (and it’s unlikely that it ever will), it does explain how the mechanics of the games work. Things like the role of the Detective and Knox’s Decalogue give us the framework and a direction from which to approach the stories of each Episode. Throughout Episodes 1-4, we were essentially flailing around, looking for any possible explanation for what was going on, but the Core arcs finally let us narrow down the search space for plausible theories.

Not only that, but we get a lot more Meta-world shenanigans. Somehow, there’s a lot more time spent in the Meta-world, away from the events on Rokkenjima. Like the entire game in general, a lot more of the time is spent on the mechanics of the games instead of the events that are occurring in the games. The various witches and furniture and demons are getting a lot more screentime than the original 18 are, which is fine with me, because they get some amazing scenes.

And that’s not to say that there’s no reveals that aren’t more direct. There are a ton of hints scattered throughout these arcs, but EP7, much like Higurashi’s Minagoroshi-hen, has some pretty huge reveals. No, the mystery isn’t explicitly solved, but it should be close enough that a bit of thinking should get you pretty close, if not right at the answer.

For all the focus on proof and logic in the Question arcs, the Core arcs shift the focus pretty bluntly in EP5, with the introduction of Furudo Erika. Why are things like the Decalogue and other rules of the games revealed now? The Core arcs are much more about the nature of the story and why things happen rather than what or how things happened. Somewhere along the way, we realize that denying the Witch won’t necessarily give us the good end, because it means there’s still someone running around on the island murdering people. So the question now becomes finding out why there’s someone on the island murdering people.

Umineko has been an insane ride and I’m definitely looking forward to finally finishing it and having my head explode one last time next year.

12 Days VII: Gotta save them all

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「剣戟の極地」/「Sky」

「剣戟の極地」/「Sky」

It took about a year for me to finally finish this thing. No, it isn’t about the movie.

Something I never get tired of in visual novels is the ways that writers take advantage of the branching and resetting in the overall plot of the game. What’s fascinating about Fate/stay night is that its narrative progresses across all of its different routes. Even though the story begins and ends in each route, the narrative continues and both Shirou and our understanding of the world and the other characters grow from route to route.

In that light, Heaven’s Feel is the perfect end to the entire thing. In each arc, Shirou’s heroic ideals are the thing that is being challenged. In Fate and Unlimited Blade Works, the worst that could happen was that Shirou would lose his life because of it. But if you’re a hero, that’s not such a bad way to go, I guess. Things are not so easy when the thing you would lose is the life of your love.

It’s that classic moral dilemma: would you kill one person to save a hundred? Fate/stay night poses that question a little more specifically. What if that person was yourself? Shirou goes ‘hells yeah’. What if that person wasn’t yourself? Shirou goes, ‘I’ll save everyone’, but he can’t. What if that person was your beloved? ‘…’ What if the one you love is the direct cause of those peoples’ deaths? ‘……….’

It’s not just the difficult part of Shirou’s ideal that’s attacked. He can’t save everyone, but failing at that is understandable and human. But the sense of justice from being a hero is also under assault. All he has to do is kill whoever’s been taking the lives of innocents, what’s so hard about that? Oh, it’s his lover, well, that kinda sucks. What is a hero to do?

I don’t remember where I read it, but each route is supposed to represent a different stage in life. In childhood, we cling on to our ideals at the expense of everything else. In adolescence, we try to reconcile our ideals with everything else. And in adulthood, we recognize what’s really important and we throw away our childish things.

It’s in UBW that a lot of people say that Shirou becomes GAR and mans up. But really, it’s in Heaven’s Feel that Shirou mans up for reals. Fate/stay night is about Shirou growing up and it appropriately ends with him throwing away his childish ideals for the one he loves.

So, as I pray…

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I was looking forward to this route because I’d get to find out just what the hell this Unlimited Blade Works thing was all about. Like I mentioned before, I’ve been constantly reading all of this stuff about how UBW and HF are where it’s at, so I was very, very eager to finally experience creating over a thousand blades and whatnot firsthand. And Fate wasn’t even as terrible as I’d been bracing for, so I was waiting to be blown away.

That excitement was dampened by the realization that I’d have to go through a bunch of school life stuff again. This was my least favourite part of Fate and remains my least favourite part of UBW and HF. The biggest problem I had with this was that there was about as much of it in UBW as Fate did. I’d hoped that with all of the setup that Fate had, we could get through this stuff quicker. Just like Fate, UBW gets good when we get past all of this stuff.

UBW was a very interesting experience for me because it made me realize that my assumptions of what Fate/stay night was about were off. Before playing it, I’d heard that the other routes weren’t about Saber. This was baffling to me, because I’d always thought that Fate/stay night was about Saber. Everything that I knew about F/sn indicated to me that Saber was a central character, if not the central character. After all, she’s essentially Shirou’s ticket into the Holy Grail War and the only way that he can do anything.

Now, I’ve only played a handful of visual novels, so Fate/stay night was yet another interesting take on how interesting the structure of the story for a visual novel can be. Unlike Ever17 or Umineko, where the characters’ motivations and personalities remain pretty constant, Fate/stay night takes more of an alternate universe approach, where enemies in one route become allies in another and background characters from one route are thrust into the limelight in another.

What’s really fascinating is that these alternate universes aren’t equivalent in their importance in the story. In Ever17, each route is different, but it doesn’t really matter which order you go traverse through them since they all serve the same purpose. In Fate/stay night, UBW expands on what we’ve learned from Fate, both in the mechanics of the world and the development of the characters.

UBW is the route that makes it clear that Fate/stay night is about Shirou. You could make the case that Fate was as much about Saber as it was about Shirou. I don’t think you can say the same about Rin and UBW. Yeah, she’s the main heroine of the arc, but unlike Saber, we don’t really get as much illumination or focus on Rin. Instead, it’s Archer that takes Saber’s place in smacking some sense into Shirou.

That’s not to say that Rin doesn’t do anything to help Shirou along. She does, but in a way which is much less noticeable than Archer’s head-on antagonizing Shirou for his ideals. Essentially, the role that Saber played in Fate is split between Rin and Archer. And of course, Archer’s role in Shirou’s development is much greater, given that he’s speaking, as is revealed in the game, from experience.

I can see why everyone loves this arc so much, especially compared with Fate. While Fate is fine as an introductory story with the promise of other routes to follow, I feel like UBW is just as interesting when it’s considered on its own. I hinted at it before, but for me, it was Archer who made the route, not Rin. To be honest, I don’t really like Rin all that much, at least not compared to Saber or Sakura. But I guess I’ll have to head off to HF and decide whether or not it’s better than UBW before I can say that conclusively.

Fate

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I guess I should do what the cool kids are doing and break it down by route. I guess it’d be easier that way too, especially now that my plans to go through HF have been pushed back.

So obviously, with so many people talking about Fs/n and so many opinions about it, it was hard to get into this thing and give it a fair shake. We’ve got the whole Fate/stay in the kitchen thing, CG dragons and mana transfer, and the impression that Fate is the worst route and is terrible and is an abortion. I mean, I’d intentionally avoided the anime because I’d heard Bad Things, and so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to suffer through Fate before getting to the really good stuff.

To my surprise, Fate was actually fairly interesting. I’m actually sort of baffled by the GRAAAAGH WORST ROUTE stuff I’d heard. I mean, I guess it’s vacuously true in that it is the least good of the three routes, but I’m not sure why it inspires the sort of impassioned fury and disgust that I’ve seen. Maybe the anime really was that bad?

I’d heard beforehand that Saber was actually King Arthur and I’d expected this to be a random, thoughtless twist on something that we were familiar with. And it turns out that this twist is the thing that we spend pretty much the entire route exploring. The complications that would arise if it turned out our hero was secretly a girl, if you thought about it hard enough, are actually really interesting. And I’m really glad that the implications that arise from this premise are a pretty big part of Saber’s character.

Here, we have a heroic figure who, through her amazing powers, saved her country at the cost of her own life, both metaphorically and literally. And then we have Shirou, who wants nothing more than to have and do everything that Saber had and did. And when he finally has her power at his disposal what does he do with it? Well, nothing, because she’s a girl.

It turns out the two of them are exactly like each other. Both of them desire to save everyone at any cost, even their own lives. Shirou tells Saber to stop doing that because she’s a girl. Saber tells Shirou to stop doing that because he’s a scrub who can’t do anything. Both of them refuse because it’s the only thing they could do. Saber felt indebted to her country after she pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou felt indebted to everyone after he alone was saved by Kiritsugu. It took the two of them watching each other act in a blaze of self-destructive glory to realize that they were actually the person they were watching.

So, Fate/stay night started off pretty well for me. Well, by the end of the first route at least. Much like Umineko, I found the introductory stuff really tedious to get through. But again, much to my pleasant surprise, when things got rolling, the payoff in the interesting parts was worth it. But I have to wonder just how bad the anime is to cause such loathing for this arc. I can’t really imagine Fs/n without it.