Archive for the Yuri Game Category


Yuri Game: Hanaemi ni Kuchizuke wo (花笑みにくちづけを)

December 21st, 2016

Hanaemi ni Kuchizuke wo (花笑みにくちづけを) was originally announced back in 2015. The company putting it out, R-Infinity, made a pretty big deal of recruiting character designs and that it was being released as a Yuri dating sim. And it had a sign up, you’ll-get-all-the-news mailing list. I signed up.

I kept an eye on their website for a long time, but when a year had passed with no updates and I had never gotten any mail, I guessed that the game was dead in the water. As it happens, I was incorrect.  ^_^ Because this week, the game launched! It’s not a download, you’re playing on the Internet, on your cell. Yurinavi has instructions (in Japanese) to play on your computer, and with a little bit of effort I was able to make that work.  (I used browser translation, so you can too. Although Yurinavi says you should use Chrome I actually got it to work in Opera.)

The game is a SLG – a Simulated Life Game. The game makes no pretense to being anything life-like or realistic. And, I’m going to be super honest, I’m just sort of paging through the narration and dialogue quickly because it’s all really trope-y and silly and not particularly well written. (A problem I have with a lot of games, I guess.) ^_^ 

For every scenario you become embroiled in, there is a “happy end” or a “bad end” the game tells you. And then sets you down in town on your way to a private girl’s school s a second-year transfer student. The first person you meet is meant to be all princely and cool, but the uniform design is so clownish on her, I wanted nothing to do with her. ^_^

The game then shifts you into dress-up mode, where you pick your character’s looks from a choice of long hair, medium hair or short hair and choice of two uniforms styles. After every scenario, you’re offered a chance to do little mini-scenario “tea parties” for coins that are, amusingly referred to as “ma-ni,” that is, you get 3 money, 4 money, etc. You use the money to buy accessories. I got myself a nice schoolbag, but somehow the fetching blazer I bought later didn’t manifest. :-( You can of course, purchase ma-ni with real money, but I think I’ll see how far I can get without. 

BUT ERICA, you are surely asking, WHAT ABOUT THE ROMANCE? 

Well, as you can see with the main screen of the game home page, there are four characters. You will be asked to chose from them to go into a story. It turns out that I went for the “childhood friend.” After basically paging through the story and making a few random choices, I guess I got to a “happy end,” as we kissed. ^_^ I haven’t gotten to a bad end yet, but give it time. 

So, this game is more of a curiosity for me than the VNs I’ve been reading. It’s conforming to rules I don’t understand (and legit have no interest in figuring out) , but it’s easy enough to play that blundering around as I am, I’ve managed one kiss so far. 

My only genuine objection is that, sigh, we are the idiot new girl in school. Why can’t we play an interesting, cool character!? At least we haven’t tripped yet. ^_^;

Ratings:

Art – 7 Nice enough, but it’s stills on my phone. If I can play Sailor Moon Drops and get movement, how come I get powerpoint slides in my romance? Sheesh!
Characters – 6 Kinda trope-y and predictable No room to be interesting in this format
Story – 5 I was expecting a generic story and I have not been disappointed
Yuri – 7 So far, so good.
Service – 3 Kinda? I mean the character types are bit service-y and there’s some small things, but no baths so far.

Overall – 6 Pretty much in line with expectations

Back to the tea party grinding for me, and we’ll see if I can nab that blazer! (Update: Got the effing blazer.)





Yuri Visual Novel: A Little Lily Princess (English) Guest Review by Brian T

October 19th, 2016

It is my very sincere pleasure to welcome a brand new Okazu Guest Reviewer to our ranks today! Happy Guest Review Wednesday and welcome to @NetbrianT, a long time Yuri-fan and all-around hoopy frood.  This seemed like a perfect way to celebrate the opening our our new Yuri Games& Visual Novel page on the Yuricon store. ^_^

So please give him your attention and take it away, Brian!

Note — this review has spoilers for The Little Princess:

The VN A Little Lily Princess is a Yuri adaptation of the 1905 novel The Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, put out by Hanako Games. Before playing this game, I was not familiar with the original story (I’ve since read the book) — my first exposure was the anime Souko no Strain, a rather broader adaptation involving giant robots and time dilation.

The main character of A Little Lily Princess is Sarah Crewe, a refined British girl sent to a boarding school, but is forced to work as a scullery maid for the school when her father dies and leaves her with nothing. Part of the game is a verbatim retelling of the original, and then it’s expanded on by adding in fleshed out arcs for the original characters. Each character has their own set of scenes, which are chosen via a time management mini-game (the minigame is easy enough that you effectively choose the desired result.) After you view enough of their scenes, you’re locked into that character’s route and ending.

The game works as Yuri in interesting ways. Some of the character routes develop romantically, though the majority time you spend is on the friendship side of the relationship. More uniquely, the Yuri genre as a whole was heavily influenced by fiction of this era, such as Secret Garden or Anne of the Green Gables. In fact, this was my favorite element of the game — it tickled me pink to see how much of the book was practically Yuri already! The original story, which the game brings out wonderfully, functions as a Yuri prototype — between the foundations of the genre in things in “a place meant only for us” or specific enduring tropes like secret tea parties, it fits perfectly.

becky

One of the best points of the game are the character-specific routes, and how well the VN added real depth to the foundations the book gave. Lily Princess does an excellent job reworking the story, and is especially good at matching the prose style of the original. The tone, too, is carried over — visual novels are well-suited for the introspective style that emphasizes an inner monologue. The melancholy of the second half almost works too well, as my tastes are firmly in the camp of the happier and more upbeat. The artwork was adorable, and the soundtrack fits the story perfectly.

The game’s biggest flaw is in the time management mini-game. It works fine during the first half, but once you have locked in a route, there’s no further decision-making, so it’s just busywork. After the first playthrough, it’s even more cumbersome, which hurts in a game that assumes you’ll replay to see different routes. Storytelling-wise, the area I’m most torn about is the ending — the game compresses much of the buildup from the source material, so it ends up overly abrupt.

You select activities for each week, which raise different attributes. Those attributes are spent viewing individual character routes

You select activities for each week, which raise different attributes. Those attributes are spent viewing individual character routes

time-management-desc-02

Overall, I liked the game quite a lot — if you’ve read the book, your enthusiasm for that will almost certainly carry over to the game! The game took me about three to four hours to complete for a single route, and six hours total for all six routes.

Art: 7
Story: 8
Characters: 8
Service: 1
Yuri: 4
Overall: 7

Erica here: Thank you Brian for the excellent review. I’m so pleased you enjoyed the VN. 

And thanks to Hanako Games for providing us a review copy. We’re much obliged!





Yuri Visual Novel: Flowers -Le volume sur printemps- (English)

September 27th, 2016

flowers_dvdIf you like — or would like to like —  Flowers -Le volume sur printemps– the newest Yuri Visual Novel from Japan available in English, you may wish to re-read the fantastic review of the Japanese language version by Jye N. Before play, I re-read it myself just to be prepared.

With that said, I began Flowers-Le volume sur printemps- with no expectations. It is available on Steam, directly on the JAST USA website, or as a physical edition on J-LIST.

Immediately I realized that I had been thrown into a tale that was being marketed completely, utterly wrong. It’s not a Yuri VN. It’s a lesbian VN – with a lesbian main character suffering from crippling social anxiety and PTSD from an abusive family situation, put into a world so strange and incoherent that it’s a bit like a nightmare scenario.

Suoh has, we learn very quickly, no social skills, because of circumstance, a painful past, a bad home life and plot needs. But it becomes immediately apparent that “poor social skills” is not nearly sufficient to describe the excruciating pain and suffering this girl goes through to eek out a “Good morning.”

I was prepared to not like Suoh, but, when a week into the story, she was making minor progress, I decided to keep at it a bit longer. I played her straight, that is to say, I chose paths that fit the character we were given as a written and thought I was doing well when the game came to an end. ??? So, I went back and made a different decision. And then another. All of them ended in one of two ways, either, I screwed up or ruined everything. So I backed up again, and serially replayed every possible combination of the two questions …and there was no way forward. At which I grew bored and stopped. I consider it the story’s job to compel me to continue. As I had yet to feel anything other than pity for Suoh, and mostly to very much disliked everyone else, I did not feel so compelled.

Apparently I needed to have backed up to an earlier decision and changed my methods, but my nature doesn’t allow me to play characters out of character. A girl with crippling social anxiety is not going to suddenly be rude or forward. It makes no sense, and if the game requires me to act out of character for the character to proceed, they did a crappy job of writing, I say. ^_^;

Jye wrote that the art is beautiful. It is – if blandly but prettily realized imaginary westernish Christianish schools and schoolgirls is your thing. It’s a reasonable assumption if you read my blog, you know that, for me, it is not, in fact, my thing. ^_^ Again, if St. Miator appealed to you in a way that Lillian did not, you’ll probably like the art here at Saint Angraecum.

Technically, the game was relatively simple. The window-size made it impossible for me to access the controls, but once I shifted my configuration to fullscreen, there was no further difficulties. Jye noted that choices were colored red or green to indicate suitability, but all I noticed was green – even when I hit my dead end oubliette. All the choices were green and they were all wrong. And the negative ending didn’t honestly make all that much sense. But oh well…

The voices are pleasant but, as so often with VNs, randomly distributed. Clearly I missed some important memo about having every fifth line voiced…and never particularly important ones, but always every “…” and “ah” and breath. I apologize if I sound peevish here. This makes no sense. At all. I expect the important things to be voiced. Not the unimportant ones.

Which leads me to the translation. It was pretty good. The dialogue is stilted, and the writer had an odd obsession with throwing in “current” movie titles, which will quickly date the game, but in most cases, I felt that the translation was decent. There was even a surprisingly interesting conversation about the sexism and Christian themes in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series. I would have liked the story so much more if it had more of that, and less of the fetishized ballet lessons and stressing about being partnered with one or another character. The only problem with the translation was that there was something in the original that made the language puzzles make sense that were lost in translation – or, to be fair, I just completely missed them. But usually, I’m pretty good about that and the obvious connections did not work, so I don’t know, ultimately what I missed there. The kanji might have been more evocative than the English. (After research, I find that my initial choice was, in fact, correct. I have no idea why the game didn’t let me move forward.)

If you enjoy the stylized narrative of a impossible Christianish school in which girls act like no humans actually act and speak in mysterious ways, in order to pair them up as romantic and sexual partners, then Flowers is definitely for you. Not so much if, spoiled by the ridiculously well-written characters of Kindred Spirits, you were hoping for something similar.

In short, if Kindred Spirits is the Maria-sama ga Miteru of Yuri VNs, with compelling characters and decent dialogue, then Flowers is very much the Strawberry Panic! of Yuri VNs, with unreal, overblown dialogue, characters who function as types, rather than people, designed to be viewed with suspicion and distrust until proven loyal.

I want to come back to Suoh one more time before I wrap up. There is nothing at all that reads more like a character who is a closeted lesbian written by a guy than a hyper-oversensitivity to touch and sight of any portion of another girl. Suoh spends so much of her first week averting her eyes from even so much as glancing at a classmate in the changing room that I imagined her walking through her days, peering carefully through a hand over her eyes. Clearly, her painful past included a confession, although I never got that far.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story:  6 I agree with Jye, it’s not very tight. It’s trying to be too many things at once.
Characters: 7
Service: I’m going to quote Jye here directly: “5 – I bought it as demonstrating the girls’ attraction to each other.  Bump it up if you really like skinny sixteen year-olds?” I’d add sixteen year-olds with oversensitivity to being seen as lesbian.
Yuri:  5, as I couldn’t find the apparently appropriate route.

Overall:  6

None of this is to say it’s a bad VN. It’s targeted to a portion of the Yuri audience that does not include me. If you’re an avid VN reader, and like the challenge of bringing Suoh out of her shell and into the arms of a partner who will love her, you will probably enjoy Flowers-Le volume sur printemps- very much.

Many thanks to JAST USA for the review copy!





Interview with Josh Kaplan, Creator of Highway Blossoms

June 21st, 2016

key-art-with-solid-logoYesterday, I had a chance to read through the new Yuri Visual Novel, Highway Blossoms. And I generally found it to be good. Today, we welcome creator Josh Kaplan to Okazu to discuss the game. Welcome Josh!

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Are the any Japanese VNs that inspired HB? And what artistic influences inspire you, personally?
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For me at least, I generally take more inspiration from regular novels and fiction than anything else, if only because I read more books than I do VN’s. In particular, I love young adult fiction, and I think that HB fits under that umbrella. Recently I’ve been devouring just about everything by Siera Maley, and I also love The Gravity Between Us by Kristen Zimmer. There’s a doujin Yuri VN by Cosmilica, called Love, Guitars and the Nashville Skyline that is currently being localized by our publisher, and it also includes a lesbian pair on a roadtrip through the US. At the time that we started planning Highway Blossoms, though, we’d never heard of it. I’m looking forward to reading it, though, and the developer of that one is very fun to talk to.

I asked Syon, the other writer and the director for the project, and he said his biggest influence was the anime Trigun, as well as the film and novel Holes.

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Haha, so the whole desert location is sort of baked into Syon’s references then. ^_^

 The idea of the road trip is uniquely American. You’ve said elsewhere  that you’ve been to most of these places. Was it your intention to inspire fans to visit these places? It does seem a bit of  travelogue. ^_^
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I wouldn’t say that it was our intention to get people out and visiting these places, but it’s definitely a happy side effect. Hell, I was getting some wanderlust just as I was writing. We’ve had a number of fans say that they’re inspired to take a roadtrip now, though, and I think that’s awesome. We actually have a couple ideas to reward people who do go out and see these places after they read HB, but we’ve gotta see if they pan out, first.

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You mentioned in the Yuri Nation interview that you’re consuming a fair amount of contemporary lesbian work. What themes did reading/watching that inspire you to cover? I notice, for instance, that Amber starts out the story having had girlfriends already, so that “coming out”, which is so often a major theme in lesbian literature and entertainment is skipped over almost completely.
Is there anything you definitely did NOT want to do in the narrative?
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We specifically wanted to avoid the “b-but we’re both girls” trope that dominates most Yuri media. Not to belittle the difficulty and courage it takes to come out, but simply because there’s a lot of stories that deal with that out there already. Throughout the entire thing, nobody gives a second thought to the fact that the two girls are in a relationship – and that’s how we think it should be. Sadly, we know it’s a little idealistic right now.

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Music is a huge part of this story… do you have a story behind the music you mention in the narrative?
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The music that Amber listens to and talks about were meant to characterize her Grandfather more than anything, and the kind of person that he was. It’s also supposed to set Amber apart a little bit – she’s never heard of any of the bands that Marina likes. But as for those artists having personal significance to us in real life? Nah, not really.

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I thought the sex scene interesting, rather than sexy, per se…what was your thinking behind the way that was handled? 
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Having the sex scenes be a part of character development and not just fanservice was definitely intentional. Especially with the first one – it sets up a lot of important things that happen later. You can also see how Amber misinterprets some of what’s going on or just assumes things about Marina that aren’t quite true. The second sex scene is definitely a happier, lighter one and is supposed to be kind of silly, not just erotic. Both as consumers and developers, we prefer sex scenes that feel like they mean something, rather than just being tossed in there.

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What themes or messages do you hope folks will take away from playing Highway Blossoms?
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Like I mentioned, I think the big theme is simply that “love is love,” no matter who you are or who you fall in love with. Recent events have been a tragic reminder that not everyone is on the same page there yet, but I hope that every day we get a little bit closer to that. There’s also the recurring notion that everyone deserves to be happy, and that you deserve to allow yourself to be happy.

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Any last thing you want to say to fans?

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I’d just like to emphasize that 2016 has been and is a great year for Yuri media in the West. Aside from HB, there have been titles like Starlight Vega, Rising Angels, and A Little Lily Princess, that have all had releases this year. There are also some interesting looking upcoming ones like Alpha’s Adventures. I know that HB isn’t for everyone, but hopefully all Yuri fans will find a new game that they love this year.

I think that’s just about everything. I’ve said it a lot, but thank you! =)

Thank you Josh and best of luck with Highway Blossoms and future projects!





Yuri Visual Novel: Highway Blossoms (English)

June 20th, 2016

key-art-with-solid-logo2016 has been a year of surprises for us here at Okazu. Among the many firsts, was the very first time I managed to get through a Yuri Visual Novel, with the extraordinary Kindred Spirits on the Roof.  Since then, I’ve had a number of opportunities to try out other Yuri VNs, but so far, being compelled to complete a story has eluded me. You know how I am. ^_^

Imagine my pleasure, then, when Highway Blossoms, from Alienworks and Sekai Project became the second Yuri VN I completed! High praise indeed, since I’m such a curmudgeon about the VN format. ^_^ I was provided a beta version of the game by co-creator Josh Kaplan – we’ll be talking to him later in the week.

The story has a unique setup – Amber is escaping dealing with the death of her grandfather who raised her, by traveling to California in his old RV. On the way, she picks up a hitchhiker, Marina, who involves Amber in a treasure hunt and a life-changing set of experiences.

Right off the bat, being freed from the confinement of a school setting was refreshing. The backdrop of an RV road trip was both uniquely American and a little nostalgic. Most Americans my age remember a great deal of their childhood spent on highways going somewhere or other. ^_^

The dialogue is some of the least awkward I’ve read in a VN, although I am already exceedingly tired of the cynical/naive  pair that seems to be common in VNs. I know that writing original characters is hard, but I have to say, I think folks who work in visual novels make it seem a little bit harder than it actually is. ^_^; Luckily for us, both Amber and Marina develop quite a bit during the course of the story.

I’d like to give the writing some props here, as that is, by far and away, the thing that keeps me interested. The achievements have no meaning to me and I find the whole unlocking-an-image-as-a-reward really exhausting and unmotivating. On the positive side, Amber is presented to us as a woman who has had girlfriends in the past, and is apparently well past discomfort with that, generally. Her feelings around Marina are, specifically still a bit of an issue, but it’s not that she’s attracted to Marina that’s the problem, it’s the relationship she’s created with Marina in her head that is the issue. Later in the story, we catch a throwaway side character flirting with Amber and it doesn’t faze her at all. Apparently fandom has embraced that pairing, as they do so often with the unlikely.

The treasure hunt, which seemed silly on the face of it, became a terrific lead-in to a tour of American western landmarks. I quite liked the travelogue bits and think the story could have stood up to a few more cheesy bits of Americana. ^_^

Acting as foils to Amber and Marina, are a trio of characters that I can honestly say added almost nothing to the story except a trio of characters. I wish so desperately they were written like really decent humans, rather than stereotypes. Again, I appear to be alone in this, but the screaming was so very unneeded to move the story or character development along. Every scene the “trio” showed up, I unconsciously rewrote in my head to make shorter and more meaty. They could have functioned as society, as foils, or even enemies, but ended up more often just being tropes.  The few times they actually added something to the story I was relieved. And they did, ultimately add to the story…they just could have added so much more.

The romance developed rather naturally, along with the story. A few of the scenes were genuinely touching and sexy. There is a voluntary patch that can be added in to supply adult scenes. They didn’t add anything specific to the story, but weren’t terribly written, which was a relief. There was one oddly realistic moment in the sex scenes, that was kind of dumped in our lap, but never dealt with, that I honestly had no idea what to do with as I read. It’s left hanging, unresolved and while real, felt out of place.

But these are small nitpicks in what is otherwise a very satisfying narrative. Individually, weak elements might be weak, but as part of the whole, it hung together rather well and I was actually moved to finish the darn thing.

In Louis’ review of Starlight Vega he discusses the place of sprites in the VN mechanism. I have to say, I found the transitions here much more natural….but I am still befuddled at the refusal to take a half second and simply draw the characters more naturally in keeping with the text. “X puts arm around Y”, could really just be a still of X with their arm around Y and I will forever not understand why it isn’t. I still find the 2-Dness of the characters awkward and in some places, laughable, specifically when they are being flipped back and forth to show them “looking around.” Coulda just turned their head, but nope. I’ll never fathom this, apparently.

There is no gameplay as such. You receive achievements as you complete scenes. There were a few goofs in the beta version, the journal entries were misnumbered and I was unclear on the meaning of some of the achievements, but Steam assures me I gained them all. Phew. The achievements have rather cutsey names and so am not sure what some of them actually refer to in the story.

The soundtrack is worth mentioning and while I personally often turned it off, because I read faster without the distraction, the fact that it was original music that suited the tone and location of the story was fun and impressive. The soundtrack is available for purchase as a separate download and I can definitely see folks wanting that on its own.

The art is generally good and has moments of excellence, with one exception. There is literally one scene that was clearly put together by a different team and was glaringly not as good, but all the main art pieces were lovely and a few worth adding to my Yuri screensaver. It was in the art that you could clearly still see the Japanese VN influence.

So…was Highway Blossoms good? I’d say yes.

Ratings:

Art – 8, with one scene as an exception
Story – 8 Generally satisfying
Characters – 9 They grow on you, which is a sign of good storytelling
Yuri – 10 Yep
Service –  5 There are the optional sex scenes, but they are surprisingly not skanky or service-y

Overall – A solid 8

If you are looking for an entertaining, and pretty chunky Yuri Visual Novel, I’d recommend Highway Blossoms for a nice bit of storytelling, freed from almost all of the most stifling tropes of Japanese media. And, at the moment it’s 15% off on the Steam store, which makes it a steal at $8.49 for decent bit  of content and a few hours worth of fun.

Check out the trailer if you haven’t already and let me know what you think in the comments!