Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With – Part II

More and more time passed, and as time passed, more visual novels playthroughs are progressed. To my surprise, it had already been over a few months before I could actually sit down and write this post. For those who had read my previous post on my visual novels playthrough, you should know by now but the order of visual novels I played are quite random, some as old as classics, some pretty new.. well either way, I don’t think I’m the type of player who would always plays the latest visual novel released. Not many new titles interest me these few months anyway.

Here are some quick impressions on more visual novels I had been messing around with, over a course of few months. Again as before, spoilers alert.

Moon.

A twisted game, in a good way. The game is made by TACTICS, a brand of the joint company, NEXTON, which surprisingly, housed the would-be future members of KEY as we all see nowadays. This is a really old game but it has one of the goriest, bloodiest and darkest atmosphere ever, and it’s level in that regard is close to old school Nitroplus titles. Astonishing, coming from a group of people who would make fairy tale romances like Clannad and Kanon a little bit later eh?

The story centers around a girl named Ikumi, whose mother died recently. Some investigations lead her to an organization called FARGO, which is an organization which tried to develop supernatural abilities through heavy torture, mentally and physically. Ikumi joined FARGO just so that she could learn the truth behind her mother’s death and possibly to execute her revenge…

The map movements pisses me off at times but I do enjoy the BGM when I’m navigating through these maps.. ;D Other than that, the other BGMs didn’t strike me as good. Nonetheless, the whole game had been a good ride and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Not to say.. some of the “tortures” are fun to watch too, ehehehe……. *ahem* ;D

Aoi Shiro

Another game I played with a female protagonist. This game was translated way back in 2009, and that’s coincidentally the year I started playing visual novels. At that time, I was probably too busy playing mainstream titles like Fate/Stay Night and Ever 17 to even heard of Aoi Shiro.

This VN is a shoujo-ai genre and these types of VNs had almost never escaped my grasp ;D The settings for this game is certainly what you can see in omyouji ones, most of the characters themselves don’t have all those chanting prowess though and just go in a full frontal assault. What’s more, the way the oni and some of the characters are structured, seem more like vampires than their counterparts. The story isn’t particularly interesting or isn’t particularly bad either, just so-so.

You played as Syouko, captain of the kendo club at her high school, quite a ferocious little tiger at that. She and her friends went on a camping trip and there, she met some new people there and these people are related to her and the oni more so than she thinks…

There are a lot of endings for this game, and is the type of game where you NEED to finish all the good routes of the game before finally unlocking the true final route, and that route, wasn’t as epic as it makes out to be. It feels just like the other routes and I felt I had wasted my time playing through the routes of each and every characters just to obtain that final route. Overall as a whole though, Aoi Shiro DOES deliver and the characters have really fun personalities as well. The music is quite comfortably soothing too.

I will most probably be playing Akai Ito soon, which was made by the same company, SUCCESS, and has more or less the same settings. I also got quite a lot of other pending yuri VNs I’m looking forward to playing ;p You will probably see more of these in my posts soon enough I guess ;D

Onachuu

Now I dunno what went wrong in my mind at the time, but I ended up playing this game due to my curiosity. In this game, you played as Hajime, a young healthy boy in high school (well aren’t we all are?). He stumbled upon a beautiful, elegant, twin-haired female classmate of his, Naho, masterbating on the school’s rooftop, and she, realizing that her undignified and horny state had been spotted, shouted out, “S-so.. embarrassing. Being seen by a boy like this.. I’d rather die!” Our hero saves the day then, literally as he said “N-no wait. I’m the masterbating expert! I can teach you the secret arts of masterbation!” The girl then was like “Really? I’m in your care then..”

Thus, starts Naho’s gruesome lessons of masterbation, all being thought by our healthy little boy. During choices, you can choose just what kinds of masterbatation you want Naho to go for, soft, medium or plain stimulating. She will masterbate with various methods (and items too) depending on the choices you picked. You can even choose to plain out “f” her straightaway if you so desires. Also, at times, Hajime, our sneaky main character would also stumbled upon other people masterbating too, though the weird thing is that he was never spotted here. Is Naho’s detecting skills so good or are the others just plain oblivious? If I’m not mistaken, there are also 3 endings available. The one I played seems to be a bad one but I seriously couldn’t even care… Anyhow, this game is just plain weird since the very first scene and I found myself skipping most of the dialogues. To be blunt, it’s.. kinda a waste of my time but I was able to finish the game in around 3 hours so it’s all fine and dandy I guess..

Sengoku Rance

I haven’t been able to progress much with this game but so far, it had been entertaining, on the gameplay department that is. The story isn’t that appealing and some people who finished the game had the same opinion as mine too. That makes me think, players of this game usually play this for their gameplay. I got to say, it is pretty nice, the prospect of capturing enemy territories and strategically thinking what troops to defend and what troops to attack is pretty good, combining with the fact that most of the sengoku era characters are replaced with more alternatively good and unique looking ones. Having and witnessing THEM in battle is nothing short of entertaining. There are no tutorials at all so the gameplay takes time to get used to though.

The music is top-notch in the game. Fans of rock music would certainly love the wide selection of rock BGMs in the game. There are, of cause, other genres of music in the game as well and likewise, they are second to none. Sound effects like the war cries of the armies add a good impact to the game too, especially when you are charging towards an enemy territory. The only disappointment in the audio department is the lack of voice acting, and this is actually a very major disappointment at that too.

The story, as I had said, is nothing really interesting, and this statement doesn’t seem like it only applies to me too. It’s just the old conquest of Rance, conquering the countries AND women around Japan. Ohh wait did I mention it? It seems like they call their country of theirs “Japan”, not “Edo”. That’s not the only bizarre thing, the characters look nothing like their original counterparts. Oda Nobunaga has a frail and weak body and leyasu is a friggin raccoon dog; Kenshin is a woman as well, and a pretty cool one at that too, I kinda understand now all the hype around Kenshin ;D Having access to her route looks to be a life-long dream to me though ;D

Rance’s wacky, yet straightforward altitude makes a great addition to this game. Really, this game is nothing short of bizarre.. but interesting in it’s own rights.

Anyhow, if you haven’t, you can check out a more complete review of Sengoku Rance here.

Yosuga no Sora

I had been wanting to play this ever since I watched the anime. I was waiting eagerly for the translation but it seems like they got some copyright issues with them, a pretty common problem already I would say. Now that I get to play it, I was in even deeper despair when I found out I need to play other heroine’s routes to unlock Sora’s route. Luckily, it’s not really necessary to finish all the other heroines straight out though I’m not sure if there’s a need to play one specific route just to unlock Sora’s one. The route I played is Motoka and after that, I finally gained access to ma rori imouto.

With my ramblings on “sora, sora, sora and sora”, I assume you can certainly see that I was playing this just for Sora ;D To be blunt, I honestly couldn’t care much about the rest of the characters. When I try to recall now, I can’t even seem to remember what attracts me to Sora so much. Is it because of her altitude? Her character designs? Hmmm.. what I can say is she is indeed mysteriously alluring.

The story talks about the hardships of Haruka and Sora, two twin siblings in a taboo relationship. Haruka, the main character is pretty much a wimp, that all we know, and he panicked real hard when Nao and the Kaichou found out Sora and him were making out, having their “secret little fun”. Haruka gets all emo then, but I had a smile on my face when that happened. The anime had a similar scene here too but the feeling feels way more accomplished in the game, accomplishment as in trolling the rest of the characters that is.. Nao especially ;p

All Entries:
Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With – Part I
Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With – Part II
Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With – Part III
Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With – Part IV

Tags: Aoi Shiro, blonde, Blue, dark, hentai, Moon, Onachuu, sengoku rance, silver, Sword, Torture, twins, Visual Novels I Had Been Messing Around With, Water, Yosuga no sora

This entry was posted by Kai.

• November 15, 2011
• Impressions, Visual Novel
• 10 Comments