夏の終わりのニルヴァーナ – Impressions

Heh, I didn’t hear much good things about this story so I went in not expecting much. I mean, at this point, just about anything but another game would work for me. That said, the art wasn’t particularly great and the summary also sounded questionable so I prepared myself mentally for something bad.

Contrary to my expectations however, it has been pretty pleasant to read so far.

In other news, the lastest installment of Leyline has been getting some pretty positive reviews which is a good sign as that’s what I plan to play next. On the down side however, it’s apparently not over yet. There really is a lot of FDs and sequels this month…

For starters, let’s point out that the setting is retarded. As a comedy the setting is perfect, for a somewhat serious story… Uh… No.

That said, I have a thing for series that mixes good comedy with heavy drama to avoid what would otherwise be a depressing read throughout. I personally feel that the two genres compliment each other fairly well but maybe that’s just me.

The story consists of the protagonist being an immature troublemaking son of Yama and as a trial, he’s put in charge of judging 4 girls who have recently died.

Now, there’s a certain catch to this trial. All four of them do not have any memories of why they died. It’s hard to judge the sins of people who geniunely don’t know what they did and unfortunately he doesn’t have the ability to magically pull out the pasts of the heroines out of the blue (if he did, then there would be no story to speak of) so there’s no choice but to steadily talk to them until they recall everything. Also as an added bonus his childhood friend and what appears to be the true route heroine is also added in the mix as a support.

I’m pretty happy with this setup since the childhood friend is more or less the best character in the story. Though most of the characters here are pretty average so that’s not really saying much.

As the story progresses the heroines slowly recover fragmentary memories of their death which the protagonist gets to see, casting a dark shadow upon what would otherwise be a bright story of laughs. In general none of their deaths seem particularly peaceful. Well that’s a given considering their age and context of the story.

From here on it’s a question of how well they can handle the individual routes. I’m pretty satisfied with the common route at least.