In 2016, the Yuri Visual Novel Highway Blossoms impressed me with some quirky story-telling and decent character development. Creator Josh Kaplan followed that VN up with the announcement that he and a team of creators were opening Studio Élan, a Yuri Visual Novel studio. It’s just under a year later and Studio Élan has released the demo to their first Yuri Visual Novel, Heart of the Woods, available on Steam and itch.io.
I will begin this review with my usual disclaimer about me and Visual Novels – I am not the audience for these. No matter how many I “read” (the quotes here express exactly how I feel about them) I will continuously be vexed by the mechanism of reading one line at a time while an-all-but-static powerpoint slide image sits there doing almost nothing. And, I believe that my criticism of this mechanism is not just get off my lawn-ist rhetoric, but that it speaks to the very essence of the weakness of VNs. But I will get there.
The story of Heart of the Woods is described on the website this way, “Traveling to a remote village in the woods, Maddie and Tara have low expectations. The two run a popular online show focusing on the supernatural, but thus far it’s been nothing but smoke and mirrors. When they receive an invitation to the antiquated village of Eysenfeld, they’re expecting more of the same. But it soon becomes apparent that the locals are hiding a secret. Maddie sees unnatural beasts in the forest that she’s sure are products of her imagination. Lights in the woods flicker and sparkle but disappear if she gets too close.
In time she learns that the lights come from a girl named Abigail. Well, the ghost of a girl. She was sacrificed hundreds of years ago by the villagers to appease the god of the forest. Maddie devotes her time in Eysenfeld to getting to know Abigail, and eventually promises to break the curse that binds her to the woods.”
This seems accurate and appealing, if you like ghost stories, curses, etc. And, given the setup of Tara and Maddie running a supernatural online show, it feels right for the characters to become involved with this. Very much unlike the confusing setup of Starlight Vega.
First, let me address the demo itself. AS A DEMO, I think the Heart of the Woods demo was brilliant. It gives me a nice window to the story, the characters, the setting, the art and writing. I feel confident that I understand what the full VN will be like. I also enjoyed the meta-commentary of chibi-Tara and chibi-Maddie, pointing out where we timeskip through the story, for technical or demonstrational reasons. These were my favorite part of the demo, in fact. I’m never above a little meta-commentary. ^_^
The art is lovely. The caveat for this (and for all VNs) is that “lovely art” is what, a handful of pictures? (This drives me crazy, when people who tell me that the art for Flowers is beautiful, I’m like, “Well, sure but it’s like 6 pictures. So what?” Yay, they did a couple of really pretty landscapes. Is that worth money to you? Then rock on. ) Rant aside, the art here is thoughtfully created and thoughtfully presented. There even is a little movement to imply motion. And there are a few scenes where sprites are not just facing us in a line. That was refreshing, although the range of motion of sprites still leaves me befuddled. I will not, cannot and do not understand why I am told “She grabbed my arm” and the sprites stand there. Why?!? Draw them grabbed. You can do it, you’re artists.
Now we get to the meat of why I rarely really like VNs and the source of my contention that reading them like picture books is a flawed mechanism. Reading one line at a time means writers are writing for people who read one line at a time. Like a picture book, this removes the space and function of writing for readers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but I am a reader of words. The pictures, IMHO, are meant illustrate a scene, not to be the focus. The upshot is characters are rendered down to – again, in my extremely biased opinion – simple, unsubtle concepts, words and scenes.
All this has been stated for the purpose of being extremely clear why I, personally, do not much like VNs. It is not a judgment of you liking them, nor a condemnation of this specific VN. And, if you do like VNs I am fairly certain you will very much like Heart of the Woods, which is a solid ghost story wrapped around a romance with an outcome that I cannot even vaguely predict, based on the demo. All of which seems very promising.
Ratings:
Art – 9
Story – 7 in demo, but TBD
Character – 6 I had a bit of trouble liking Tara or Maddie upon meeting them
Service – N/A in the Demo. There is an adult patch that you can download. I think this is an excellent solution to adding adult content in an otherwise romantic story
Yuri – 9
Music – 7 Original, and there’s a soundtrack. I can’t stand repeated bgm riffs, but it wasn’t bad
Overall – 7 with potential for more if you like VNs
I’m probably not going to read the full VN when it comes out later this year, but if you do and would like to tell us all about it, please let me know! I’d love a guest review. And I certainly hope you will try this demo out and decide for yourself!
My feelings about VNs are similar to yours – they seem like a very misfit animal. I can’t think of many stories that wouldnt have been served better by either being fully animated or fully fleshed out in writing. They just don’t seem like they can be satisfactory on any level. But I, like you, am definitely not the audience for them so I guess that makes sense.
About the only niche I can think of for them are those who like a lot of backstory to their manga porn.
Not all VNs force you to read one line at a time. In some, the text covers the entire screen. One example would be the visual novel Seabed (also the only yuri VN I’ve read where the characters are adults instead of schoolgirl-aged). Since this one obviously doesn’t have fullscreen text I can see why you didn’t mention that, but I just wanted to point that out.
I know you’ve been emphasizing for a long time that VNs are not your cup of tea. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain where does VNs stand compared to manga and anime. So I’ve asked my friend, an animator and manga style artist for 10+ years, and has recently been doing VNs for the last few years. “Extra art in VN and extra panels in manga are two different things. The niche of VN is to be of higher illustrative quality than anime or manga. Unless the VN was a literal “anime” style. Since manga is aimed for many many pages, you lower the illustrative quality and switch to b/w. If we switch mangas to color and try to match the same output, the artists may need even more assistants and extra hours. Anime is an obvious group effort. VN production is a small team of 1-2 artists, and should be seen as manga artists doing illustrative storybooks, that must be produced under a certain cost-margin if working towards the market. What I like best about VNs is with the same assets, I can tell a much longer story in a VN.”
I’ve also been thinking what “type” of VN might fit what you want. NVL format shows the text in large bulk instead of the usual 1 line text ADV format. Also for motion, the sprites should be done in Live2D to make them come to life more with a 3D vibe. These are definitely a different form of storytelling format, and the Live2D still has an uncanny feel for now.
In general though, VN players remind me of customers that rather buy multiple prints from artist alley for $10 each, instead of buying an indie manga or artbook for $15-30+, that contains way more “artwork” (the true bang for the buck).
I agree with your comments on VNs. They can’t compete with books for narrative detail, and the need to keep clicking next, or to pace yourself to the speed of the autoreader breaks up the flow. They don’t have the action an anime has, because the characters are essentially static, as if they were painted on fans, like they used to do in the old days. The limited number of body positions for the characters, and the limited number of background graphics, means they don’t do as good a job at static art as do comic books. Nevertheless, I do keep reading them, from time to time, because some of them have interesting stories.