Stopped reading after two routes, a wonderful way to spend my time while waiting for February releases and also made me review my opinion regarding Giga’s charages.
In the end how much did this story even have to do with kisses though?
Let’s see… reading this story makes me reflect on other stories in terms of escapism and suspense of disbelief and so on.
I personally feel a key to trying to enjoy eroge or, this entire medium in general requires some ability in just ignoring all of those details that don’t make the slightest bit of a sense and accepting things as it is. This is either really terrible or how it should be depending on how you view things but whatever, throwing that aside for now.
Most eroge (or more accurately charage/moeges) take place in a fantastical world where everything ends happily and real life problems don’t exist. Even if they do exist, it’s still somewhat abstracted compared to how real life is like. As someone pointed out, it probably has to do with the entire escapism part of things.
I wasn’t actually that conscious of how much these stories dodged issues like employment, their future career and so on until picking up this story. Seeing the characters run around working to secure a job before graduating and so on felt like quite the refreshing change to what I was used to since it gave the setting more of a sense of being alive.
They’re actively thinking of what they’ll be doing in the future instead of just vaguely putting it aside leaving the reader to think “well, it’s that sort of story, they’ll probably just live happily ever after”.
To be fair, they probably still do live happily ever and it does feel a little improbable to end up with a beautiful cousin, aunt and working with 3 beautiful girls all at once so you can’t really say there’s none of that. I just felt that it was quite a nice touch to show the characters actually doing something with their lives.
Adding on, time also actually progresses in the story with one of the heroines graduating and exiting the story in the middle of another route. The “drama” if you could call it that, tended to revolve around such issues and was honestly nearly non-existent.
Hard to choose between Madoka and Arisa as best characters…
Most of it felt like some natural problems that would occur and the problems didn’t drag on much so I honestly quite liked how they handled the obligatory-drama-that-for-some-reason-every-story-requires.
The story in Arisa’s route also continued quite a bit after they decided to go out with each other, which was quite fun to read since you really get to feel that they’ve become lovers instead of it being something that happens near the end of the story.
Job hunting aside, I also liked the art and (of course) the characters. Things probably wouldn’t have worked out as well if I didn’t.
Overall, how should I say this… it felt like your usual charage with cute girls and nice protagonist but with a slight dose of reality mixed in which increased its enjoyment. The writing was definitely a contributing factor as well. Everything just felt somewhat more natural than usual. Then again when taken in reverse you can say that everything in your usual charage/moege is unnatural so yeah.
I feel some repulsion calling eroge realistic by any means as it makes me feel like I’m straying off to the wrong path though…
The Monologues of a Bored man 