Archive for the Yuri Game Category


Interview with Yuri Visual Novel Studio Élan

February 10th, 2019

Hello and welcome to a very special interview. After the release of Visual Novel Highway Blossoms (which has the honor of being one of two I have actually enjoyed), creator Josh Kaplan launched a brand new venture – Studio Élan, dedicated to creating Yuri Visual Novels.

On the cusp of their first major release, Heart of the Woods, (my review of the first chapter demo looked pretty good), we took some time to talk to Josh and his team about their work.

 

 

Q: You launched Studio Élan right after completing Highway Blossoms, what was your motivation in putting together a VN studio focused on specifically Yuri Visual Novels?

A. There are a couple reasons! The most plain is simply that I think it’s a comparatively underrepresented genre in the west, compared to otome and bishoujo games. Admittedly, the number of yuri games available in English has really skyrocketed in the past couple years. Still, it’s definitely a smaller genre, and there are also very few developers devoted exclusively to it.

Aside from that, though… We’ve been really fortunate with how well-received Highway Blossoms was, and I wanted to use the opportunities its success has provided to be able to carry on its legacy, so to speak. That is, to continue to make games with a similar sort of wholesomeness and attitude. In addition, I wanted to help give a platform to other creators. The vast majority of our team consists of LGBT+ women, which is a pretty far departure from the HB dev team.



Q: There’s a surge of Yuri VNs inside Japan and in the West right now – what do you see as areas that haven’t been explored…and should be?

A: For one, I think it would be nice to see more stories that feature older characters, even if it’s college aged as opposed to high school. In Japan in particular, the majority still tend to fall within the “high school romance” category. Of course there are notable exceptions like Seabed, but still. Also, games that include characters who are trans or nonbinary.

Finally, while this is more of a personal taste kind of thing, it would be great to have more games where the romance isn’t the central part of the story, but more of a subplot, similar to most mainstream media nowadays. In fact, that’s one element that we make sure to incorporate in all of our own games – the fantasy aspect is just as important as the romance.



Q3: In Heart of the Woods, the story is a “ghost story” but is not a scary one, what did you want to explore with this work?

A: We really wanted to go for a fairytale feeling. There’s a certain whimsy and wonder to the stories that you hear growing up, where you don’t necessarily question everything that’s happening but instead let yourself get wrapped up and pulled along. We took a lot of inspiration from Disney movies as well, both in tone and aesthetic. I used Disney as a sort of guideline as to “how dark” the story could get. My barometer was always “could I see this happening in Frozen or Snow White?” Although we do have a couple different endings for the story, it was always crucial to us that the “real” ending is a happy one.



Q4: This is a question for adirosa, your game designer:  What was your inspiration for the look of Heart of the Woods?

adirosa: For HOTW, the direction I was given for it was to keep it simple and modern. I’ve always been very invested in game accessibility and giving players a comfortable reading experience, so I decided to couple these together. Queen at Arms and their option to change font sizes + Autumn’s Journey‘s alternate font options is what inspired me to start this, and I’ve been trying to expand on the accessibility options in the games I work on.

I was also given the direction to make it clear who the POV character was for each scene, so I did heavy colour theming. Persona 3 Portable‘s alternate GUI colour scheme based on the male/female protagonists and idol culture’s character colour theming is what inspired me to take this approach with HOTW, and I’ve taken that approach to marketing materials as well to tie it in. (Fun fact, the HOTW game theme colour is the dark teal of the trees in the logo!)

I’m personally a huge fan of the rococo and art nouveau art movements, and I try to incorporate elements where I can! The inspiration isn’t heavy in the HOTW UI but there are little bits (like the NVL border and the cover image border) that will tie the Élan games together lightly. I’m super extra and I can’t stop putting those elements in.



Q: Music is also very important to helping set the mood for a VN. Sarah, tell us a little bit about the place the music has in Heart of the Woods.

Sarah: Heart of the Woods is a magical fairytale, but one where magic isn’t something to be taken lightly. I wanted to reflect that in the music I contributed — you’ve traveled out to an unfamiliar town in the middle of nowhere in the depths of winter for a paranormal investigation, and you don’t know what you’re going to find there. There’s a lot of uncertainty and trepidation, and you’re starting to realize it might be more dangerous than you anticipated when you left home. You don’t know if you’ll make it back safely.

The first piece of music that I wrote for the Heart of the Woods soundtrack was “Into Another World,” which was used for the opening train sequence, though I didn’t initially know where it was going to end up in the story. It was my audition for the project, and I wanted to try figuring out exactly what Heart of the Woods should sound like and really define it in one song. It ended up being a sort of template for the wintry and spacious sound of a bunch of the other music on the soundtrack, enveloping you with icy orchestral strings as twinkling piano and chimes echo off into the distance.

“Why Am I Here” is one with a bit of a personal story behind it. It was written during a period in my life where I was evacuating from a storm while also dealing with a sudden emergency, and for a few days found myself unexpectedly alone and adrift in an unfamiliar city wondering what in the world I was doing with my life. It was written in one sitting and was basically just me pouring out my emotions into music, though I didn’t really recognize it as such at the time. It ended up being adopted as Maddie’s character theme because it really mirrors a lot of what she’s dealing with after Tara has dragged her along to Eysenfeld.

Of course, this isn’t just a bleak and depressing story, it’s still a romance VN and there are pockets of warmth and comfort to be found here too! There’s a bit of that warmth mixed into the soundtrack in places, such as the character themes for Morgan and Abby. Morgan is an odd one but she means well, and I wanted her theme “Restless One” to make you feel like “ah, this girl is someone I can trust!” when you hear it.

Meanwhile, Abby’s theme “Communion” is a song where I tried to do a lot of things at once, with feelings of isolation and angst and love all rolled together in a string quartet arrangement that took forever to get just right. Visual novels can be a lot of hours of reading and so there’s not much avoiding having to hear to the same songs on repeat a few times, so I really like it when a song can be versatile and carry different emotions depending on the context it’s being used in.



Q:  What’s the structure of Studio Élan like, and how do you all work together?

Most of us wear a few different hats. minute went from being “just” the programmer to also being an editor as well as contributing some creature designs and background art. adirosa not only does the GUI for our games, she also created our new studio logo, graphics for promo materials, our trailer, and more. Plus, every member of the team is encouraged to give feedback on the story, release plans, pretty much everything. It was really important to me that really feels like part of the team, rather than just being instructed on what to do.

 


Q: Heart of the Woods seems to me to be a step forward in reader engagement with sound and movement integration. Can you speak to some of the enhancements you’ve made to the VN experience with Studio Élan?

minute: The scripting for Heart of the Woods is very much my love for visual novels coming through. It’s honestly one of my favorite mediums- its accessibility, format, and history means a lot to me as both a creator and avid reader.
That said, it’s also a medium with a lot of room to grow. In the past few years visual novels have been extending into the western audience in a great way- so many new, incredibly skilled creators are pushing the boundaries of genre and target audience with their work. HotW is scripted with these new advancements in mind, but with the classics of VNs very close to my heart. I wanted to make the characters feel alive, with tiny movements or subtle expression changes to offset the limits of a traditionally-styled VN. It’s a process of making sure the game is both fun to play and easy to read, which I hope we’ve achieved so far!

The sound design is a constant back and forth – you’d be surprised how many variants of “tree branch snapping” we can go through to find the right one. But in the end, as a team we are all focused on trying to make every aspect of Heart of the Woods enjoyable. To that end, it’s also why our accessibility options are so extensive! adirosa and I spent a long time trying to make sure every option is equally viable for every reader – so no matter how someone chooses to play, we hope they’ll have a good time.


Q: What creative work has inspired you, personally and artistically? Are there any games, VNs, comics, animation that has informed your work on Heart of the Woods?

minute: Fate Stay/Night is my biggest inspiration for choreographing and visual directing!

Sarah: For this particular soundtrack, Yuki Kajura and Ryou Mizutsuki were my biggest influences.

adirosa: I draw a lot of inspiration from the English visual novel community in general. The HoTW UI was inspired by the more sci-fi UIs Auro-Cyanide used to do (such as Break Chance Memento) and Dischan’s UIs in general like Dysfunctional Systems Ep.1 and Juniper’s Knot.

Josh: Aside from what I mentioned above, I get a lot of inspiration from music like Nightwish, as well as the book series The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.



Q9: What does the future hold for Studio Élan?

Hopefully, a lot! Every one of us is in this for the long haul. We already have our next couple VN’s planned out. We’re going to be starting a comic for our Patreon, and we also hired a merchandise designer to help out with, well, merch designs. Eventually, we’d like to try making games other than VN’s, as well as other forms of media in general.

We have a couple long-term, grand dreams as well. First and foremost, it would be wonderful if we could do this for a living, rather than a hobby. Additionally, like many if not most other western VN devs, we’d love to be able to find some success in Japan.

Ultimately, for me at least, I just want to continue making stuff with this particular group of people. We have really great chemistry and, while there have definitely been some stumbling blocks, I think we have the potential to make something truly great. I hope that someday, there will be people out there consider us their favorite developers, and who get excited when we announce a new project. I hope that the stories we tell can have an impact on someone the same way that the books I read and games I played help shape me as a person today.

 

Thank you very much to the folks at Studio Élan for their time and we look forward to the full VN of Heart of the Woods, which is being released this week!  Check out the Studio Élan website for details of the VN. From the Studio Élan Twitter feed:  Heart of the Woods is also going to be a participating Steam Trading Card game as well! So take a look and let us all know what you think in the comments. ^_^





Yuri Visual Novel: Heart of the Woods, Chapter One Demo

January 30th, 2019

“Tara looked at me with more pride than a rainbow flag.” This line made me laugh out loud. ^_^

You know how I always say that Visual Novels are not for me? This is not an arbitrary statement. I don’t have some elitist disdain for VNs (well, in theory, I don’t, but I’ll cop to often finding issues in individual VNs that strike me as…infantile.) But to be clear, the reason I generally don’t like VNs is because they are not good games and they are even worse as novels. Dialogue is often unrealistic and banal and while I actually like the idea of reading a picture book, I still expect the book part to be worth it. Above all other things, I have not yet read a VN where the game mechanics worked and also let me move forward with ease. And, again on my side, I do not wish to choose my own adventure, I want to be told a good story. The decisions are usually either pointless, or so convoluted that I can’t actually get anywhere in the narrative. 

All this said, I was genuinely surprised and pleased at Studio Élan’s Heart of the Woods, Chapter One demo. 

To begin with…the sprites do not look like paper cutouts, flipping awkwardly, blinking convulsively like they have something in their eyes. Yay! Seriously, VN fans, I cannot understand how that does not make you twitchy.

The characters  move a little more naturally and their expressions actually vary, with smooth transitions. That right there, made the whole thing much easier to tolerate. I am a harsh master, though, and will still insist that, if a movement is important enough for it to be described in the text, it should be important enough to visualize. Moving sprites back and forth is fine for proximity, but if you can animate a character touching their face, you illustrate that character touching another character’s arm. I swear, I’m gonna harp on this forever until the entire industry gives in. ^_^ Show and tell. That’s the whole point.

The rest of the illustration, backgrounds and ambience on the game were, IMHO, excellent. There’s a number of small, but significant touches which increase player engagement; motion within scenes, a video recorder toggle, very good sound effects that match well with the visuals.  And the music is top-notch. I was reading the demo while my wife was home and just let the music run, because both of us found it pleasant and not at all repetitive.  Top marks for the music! I’ve got the fully voiced Kindred Spirits next on the list and I cannot express to you how much I am not looking forward to hearing that same 2-minute musical riff over and over again.

Then we come to the story. It’s slow to get going, I’ll be honest, but the payoff was exceptional. There’s a fair amount of setup and atmosphere. And implied but not explicated, backstory. The tensions are clear, but the reasons for them are not, yet.

There’s a lot of Chapter One. So much, that I wish there has been a progress meter as I went along. In some of the slower bits, I would have liked to know how much further along I had in that scene, and in the chapter. This will become especially important to the larger game, since I don’t know how many Chapters there will be – or how long they will be. Chapter One was pretty long, in my opinion.

Above all other things, I really liked that there were no decisions to make. I appear to be a minority of one in this. On the Studio Élan forums, people were bemoaning that there were no choices. The Studio stated clearly that there would be choices in the full version but, they would not change the romance paths.  So, like Kindred Spirits, I think we can look for choices that don’t change the larger narrative. I’m kind of sad that there are any choices, I know I’m alone in this, but I find them utterly exhausting and tedious. Tell me a story. 

I’m not going to talk about the characters, I’ll wait for the full game to do that. I think there will be a lot to talk about, then.

In the meantime,  I recommend the Heart of the Woods Chapter One demo and ask you to look forward to the full version which will be released in the middle of February!

Ratings: 

TBD when the full version comes out, but let’s call it a tentative 8 for now.

I am genuinely looking forward to the full version. That’s should count as a victory for the folks at Studio Élan.





LGBTQ Visual Novel: Heaven Will be Mine, Guest Review by Louise P

January 16th, 2019

It’s our first Guest Review Wednesday of 2019! Please welcome back Guest Reviewer Louise P for a look at a new Yuri Visual Novel for us. Take it away, Louise!

Heaven Will be Mine is a visual novel that starts right at what would be the climax for any other super robot story. The three factions have all their players, two super prototypes are finally operational and everyone is headed to the moon for the big final confrontation. There the future of humanity in space will be decided; or rather the future of humans who already live in space will be decided. Do they ‘return’ to Earth, live in space or cease to be human at all? These conflicts will be solved both with giant robots (called Ship Selves) and sexting in equal measure.

Heaven Will be Mine ditches a great deal of unnecessary visual novel tropes. There are no ‘heroine’ characters instead we have three protagonists, all equally important. There’s Pluto: the idealistic leader of Cradles Graces who finally has a ship self that matches her own overwhelming power. Luna-Terra: the jaded veteran of Memorial Foundation who has now broken so many hearts in space that it is finally catching up with her and finally Saturn, a pilot who totally gets this is a game about relationships and space robot battles and jumps into merging fighting and flirting so naturally it’s a surprise to hear that it is her first time in the pilot seat.

The story follows all three in their journey from the outer solar system to the showdown at the moon from the perspectives of Pluto, Luna-Terra or Saturn. While we begin right in the thick of things and there’s a lot of back story hanging over the characters and we are given enough credit to piece it together ourselves, as we see events from the perspectives of each leading character and their supporting cast. Emails often fill us in on the back-story, while the pilots live-chatting with their comrades provide some of the biggest laughs in the story.

But center stage is taken up by the confrontations between Luna-Terra, Saturn and Pluto. I do mean confrontations, because each character is an ace pilot for one of the three factions warring for the future of space; they’re supposed to be enemies. Like many other giant robot stories, this is fantastic ground for romantic tension and unlike many other giant robot stories, Heaven Will be Mine is doing this deliberately and it all pays off in the end.

What Heaven Will be Mine manages to create is a genuine sense of chemistry with the three main characters. Luna-Terra and Saturn slowly open up and learn to be vulnerable with each other. Pluto and Saturn learn about each other beyond their status as psychic celebrities and see each other as people. Luna-Terra and Pluto start with a tonne of baggage from the beginning but gradually work and fight through it. It’s a real delight to read as each scene is a blend of two of these unique voices that give a face to some very real queer experiences.

But while we may see these characters move from fighting with each other to falling for each other, that is not what we as the reader get to influence. Instead we decide what faction gains an advantage from the protagonist’s confrontations. What this really means is that we don’t decide who falls in love with whom but who makes the best case for what society that love has to live within.

Because, what everyone is fighting for in Heaven Will be Mine is whether or not they return to an Earth that sees them as something alien. Every character already knows what is at stake, but eventually it becomes clear that aside from the cool robots and space colonies, space is a place where it is easier to be a queer person. It is a place unencumbered by the history and preconceptions on what it is to be human, which allowed the people in space to have the bodies they have, the relationships they have and, most importantly, the power to shape their own destiny and make political decisions.

In space a queer trans woman can be accepted not just as a the woman she is, but as a leader of an entire movement. This looks alien to the majority on Earth, and so terrifying that Pluto and everyone like her are thought to be worth purging, either through exile or extermination. No one will care if the alien dies.

We look for lesbian characters with society and agency here and Heaven Will be Mine not only has those but makes the formation of a LGBTQ friendly society and what shape that will take, the climax of the story. Even though there doesn’t exist a route where everyone gets everything they want, everyone does agree to work to make it the best it can be.

 As Pluto says: “We don’t need a true ending. Whatever it is, we’ll make it the true ending.”

 

Ratings:

Art – 10
Story – 9
Characters – 10
Yuri – 10
Service – 3 (but also kinda 10)

Overall – 10

 

I am not saying that Heaven Will be Mine is perfect, it is exactly what I needed to read at exactly the point I needed to read it. Thinking about this story and its characters makes me a happier person and that’s why the score is so high. It is available on itch.io, Steam and iTunes.

Erica here: Wow, this sounds appealing, if this kind of thing ever appealed to me. ^_^ Thanks for the review! 





Yuri Visual Novel: A Beautiful Ride to Carlisle

December 23rd, 2018

In honor of the massive amounts of Yuri Visual Novels on yesterday’s YNN report, and because everyone likes to feel good about the world, I can think of no better thing to review today than Little Viktoria’s A Beautiful Ride to Carlisle which is described on the site as a “kinetic visual novel.”

To begin with, the story is a straightforward girl-meets-girl plot. Dana is taking a train to spend her vacation volunteering on an organic farm. On the train she meets another woman, Sharon, and the ride becomes something much more than a 5 hour lacuna in her life.

This is not a novel, per se, but there is a nice, long short story’s worth of content. I quite liked that this was written as a piece of writing, with supplementary illustrations that have some motion, rather than presuming the art as a full stand-in for description and narrative. In fact, this is the first VN so far that I have encountered that 1) acted like a story, i.e., didn’t pretend to have game elements and 2) was written in 3rd person. I really liked both those things. It let me release any expectation that the art had any other purpose than illustration. That gave the kinetic aspect a boost up for me.

The art is pretty and the character designs simple and appealing. I would read a manga with this kind of art with no complaint. It’s not the kind of hyper-realistic background art I have come to expect from VNs (and so much other non-film media.) Instead, we are given the feel of being on a train and the narrative fills in most of the rest, and yes, of course that appeals to me. I read books for the narrative, not for the illustrations. I mean, creative teams spend so much time on the art and it’s…a school hallway. Those lockers don’t need to be that detailed.

Which brings me to the characters. I would have both Dana and Sharon over for lunch any day. ^_^ We spend only a short time with them, but they are lovely.

Ratings: 

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 6
Service – 0 (okay, maybe .5)

Overall – 8

As a nice little “Story A” confection, A Beautiful Ride to Carlise lived up to its name. 

Many thanks to Viktoria for the review copy. I’ll definitely be interested to see what she’s working on next.





Yuri Visual Novel: Heart of the Woods Demo

June 29th, 2018

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!