紅蓮華 – Thoughts

And finished, well that was… not particularly good.

Lost interest in trying to summarize things so I’ll omit that and go straight to thoughts.

To elaborate, the characters are pretty decent. Or maybe not even that. Let’s be even more specific, Elsrise was great.

But that was actually just about where the merits of the story ended.

Basically, as much as I loved Elsrise, there weren’t actually any special feelings when doing and finishing her route. Things only went downhill from there as I did other routes. Route-wise they basically included a route for every single (female) character in the story which, just like every other VN which tries to pull things like that, it means that the less important characters get little attention in their respective routes. I guess it’s mainly good if you liked a sub character and wanted a route for her but I’m not sure if you’d be happy with a short route like that even then. Regardless it doesn’t apply to me as the only character I truly liked was Elsrise.

The main part of the VN that I didn’t like was that simply… nothing of particular interest happened. The story was fairly shallow to say the least. In addition because it had to branch into various other character endings, the character in focus was often switched around, as a result at times it even made the main heroines have somewhat awkward routes since they’re partially not even focused on the main heroines until the end.

So to accurately describe my thoughts on it I guess it was just… unsatisfying?

To roughly outline the events of the overall story, we are taught that the other world is a natural occurrence. It’s not like there’s some sort of evil antagonist that created these worlds and are trying to destroy the world with it. This alone somewhat kills the possibility for the story to expand as it’s like dealing with a natural disaster now. From there, the story mostly revolve around recovering Kuon’s power. It’s revealed that due to the process they use to return power to Kuon, at the very end of recovering all her power she’ll essentially enter a sealed state of sorts again. This serves as a plot device to throw Kuon out of the story in the case Ryouji ends up in another person’s route.

The story, as far as I can see, doesn’t really bother addressing the difference in aging between Ryouj and Elsrise/Kuon which causes some awkward imaginations on my part because of how many stories of these lines I’ve read before. Let’s be fair here, in their previous game 彼女は高天（そら）に祈らない they addressed this by pressing a reset button at the end of every other god damned ending. That just pissed me off so I’ll be glad they at least didn’t go into that path. It doesn’t change that endings like this leave much to be imagined though.

She’s a hostage they said, a hostage.

The main “antagonist” if excluding Elsrise who occasionally cooperates when their goals match, would be Yae, a shrine maiden that arrived at the shrine shortly after Kuon’s seal was released. Though what she did varies story to story, basically she’s a being born from the other world much like Kuon and Elsrise and she, or at least her snake, serves as the “antagonist” of sorts for most of the stories. If not her then it’s Elsrise, much to my dismay.

They basically finish up collecting power for Kuon, Ryouji and the heroine falls in love with each other, hscenes proceed, perhaps a battle here and there with an antagonist which is hard to get into because the battles aren’t particularly special, and then the story draws its curtains.

So repeating what I said earlier, yep it just came off as unsatisfying. It’s not like it had some massive plot holes or incomplete endings but it was simply unsatisfying since nothing of particular interest really happened. At least to me, perhaps others will find the content of the story more fun.

Next up I’ll likely play Dolphin Diver’s by AXL. Not exactly holding much expectations since the story doesn’t come off as particularly interesting but AXL tends to produce fairly consistent stories. Average ones, that is. For the better or worse I’ll go in expecting another average story.