Archive for the Yuri Visual Novel Category


Yuri Visual Novel: Flowers: Le Volume Sur Printemps, Guest Review by Jye N.

January 21st, 2015

FlowersJanuary 2015 has now officially advanced from being “amazing” to being “intimidating.” I am already sure that there is no way to surpass this month in any future month of effort and feel very much like I ought to give it up while I’m on top. But no, I am nothing, if not stubborn about the sisyphean labor of blogging. Good thing I have an ace up my sleeve. But, I digress. ^_^

Today, we welcome back Jye N, who has already given us a very enlightening view of Winter Comiket this year. Today Jye returns with a review of a Yuri Visual novel, one that I have heard so much about and am terribly glad someone else has gone ahead and experienced it so I can enjoy it without effort on my part. And so, please welcome back  Guest Reviewer Jye N!  /applause/

Flowers: Le volume sur printemps is an aesthetically splendid introduction to a cycle of four planned works and a good Yuri story in its own right.  But it should be thought of as very strictly a visual novel and not as a game.

This is not tribalism – of course it’s a game, I bought it in a Sofmap from a rack of games and played it on a VITA! – but a matter of calibrating expectations.  Enjoying Flowers beyond its gorgeous art and soothing music is easier when you’re not at cross-purposes with the software or the intentions of its authors.

I approached Flowers as a standalone game in which it was my job to guide the heroine, Suou, into the arms of whichever of her classmates I judged best; naturally a strategic approach would be necessary, as interaction with other girls could swiftly result in being locked to the wrong path and the wrong girlfriend.  While the game very clearly positioned Suou’s roommates Mayuri and Rika as the core love triangle, from my casual understanding of the visual novel market and games with related mechanics (such as Persona or even Bioware titles) it seemed obvious the other half-dozen beauties would have paths of their own.  Thus any time Suou spent with anyone other than the delightful Mayuri was marred by my impatience to get back to her, and Rika became the enemy.

 This ended poorly!

Flowers: printemps tells one very particular Yuri story in the context of immersing the reader in the impossible beauty of its Catholic girls’ school setting, where it plans to keep you for three further games.  Suou’s classmates are not all absurdly pretty because they are potential girlfriends designed to cater for a variety of tastes, but because the setting is yet another iteration of the mythical maidens’ garden school where ugliness does not exist and the character designer is apt only to produce beauty.  They are no more intended to intrude on the core love triangle than the endless parade of exquisitely rendered people in Collectors are intended as rivals for Takako or Shinobu.  Likewise when Suou spends time with the mischievous twins, the dashing senpai or the pretty young teacher it is in service to the narrative of the timid main character emerging from her shell in her school life.  If we are to see these side characters in love, it will be in their own games – and indeed I’ve since learned that one of Suou’s classmates is a main character in Le volume sur ete.

The impossible private girls’ school is a setting very familiar to Yuri fans, and while this iteration does not fall far from the Maria-sama ga Miteru tree it is skillfully executed.  The opening is representative and worth watching:

This aesthetic extends to the text, which surfaces a major caveat to this review; my Japanese is far from strong and Flowers is a demanding work for the beginner.  In service to its refined air it prefers kanji to hiragana in all circumstances (I did not know there were kanji for arigatou, anata and the like), and given the choice of two kanji it prefers the more obscure.  While easier than a novel thanks to its illustrations and voiced dialogue, as a visual novel it draws from a limited palette of images and thus offers less visual context than a manga.  Suou is prone to extended internal monologues, which are unvoiced and thus more difficult again.  As a Yuri fan and manga reader I never lost the flow of events or the context, but I would often lose details.  I would not suggest a Japanese beginner should be intimidated by Flowers, but you will likely find it an exercise in reading up.  Following along with context and inference would be preferable to attempting a strict translation, as the weight of material would swiftly render the exercise a chore, but keep a dictionary handy.

The novel is a single route moderated by two mechanics; while there is alternate content for going against the tide of that route, the alternate ending is comparatively vestigial and not Yuri.  The first mechanic governs most decisions in the game, and tracks compliance to the main route.  If a decision is correct, a green glow surrounds a lily attached to the dialogue box, which grows closer to blooming.  Otherwise, the glow is yellow and the lily contracts; this is necessary for the alternate ending but unless a very particular choice is made even the most stunted lily will simply deliver you to a bad end of the main path.  A blooming lily is not difficult to maintain and will almost certainly deliver you to the main ending of the novel, unless you’re being a real jerk to Rika because you’re convinced this is the only way to secure happiness with Mayuri.  In retrospect I do not recommend that.

The second mechanic is the most gamelike part of the work, where Suou must deduce the answer to various mysteries that crop up in the story from some reasonably esoteric clues.  While the game veering into Yuri detective territory is entertaining (I would dearly love to see Shirohane Suou: Private Eye as a post-graduation sequel), it’s extremely difficult at my level of Japanese.  I brute-forced most of these segments with trial and error based on the few clues I could figure out, and I would begrudge no-one for turning to a walkthrough.  On the plus side, it is these segments where the shy Suou becomes a main character worthy of the admiration lavished upon her for reasons beyond her physical beauty: they successfully sell her as extremely intelligent and insightful, even if she’s prevented from being so bold and clever in the rest of the story (the game would have been a good deal shorter if there was a “go talk to Mayuri” button).

The story is quite long, and lavishes a great deal of time on concerns of clubs and classmates beyond the drama of the Suou/Mayuri/Rika triangle, and is further extended by the mystery segments.  The content itself will be of no particular surprise to Yuri fans – tea parties and dance class, libraries and dormitories, a bustling school in which we somehow only ever see eight students and one teacher.  Like most of its ilk we spend very little time on academics, preferring the extracurricular activities where the girls can talk freely in various combinations and vary their outfits somewhat.  School superstitions, a culture festival and cooking for birthday parties feature.  The reader should not expect to be surprised, but instead concern herself over whether those tropes work for her with this imagery to this music.

The imagery is strictly at a PG level, and the aesthetic does not match the stereotypical male-gaze moe or ecchi, but the novel is at pains to frequently visit the girls at ballet class, bed or the bath.  It misses no opportunity to get a blush out of Suou by bringing her into some kind of intimate contact with another girl.  This has the advantage that her hyper-awareness of her classmates’ bodies severely undercuts the “ambiguity” often associated with this brand of Yuri; there is no credible reading that Suou, Mayuri or Rika are straight.   And for what little I know this might reasonably represent the broad scope of opportunities to become completely flustered a young lesbian at a school for impossibly beautiful girls would enjoy.  But I certainly felt uncomfortable playing in an economy seat on a long flight when a still of young women in their underwear stayed on my screen for what seemed like a thousand lines of dialogue.

The characters are appealingly designed, though as you might expect not particularly diverse.  Their personalities had mixed success with me, no doubt influenced by a few strong performances by the voice actors (there were not many characters, but given the length of the work each had a great deal to say).  Suou is not a strong main character, but as mentioned was improved by the detective segments and the arc of the story, and in the end I could buy her as a full partner in a relationship.  Mayuri was excellent, coming across as an entirely reasonable person still at the mercy of her heart; not the designated tomboy but still a bolder character. Yuzuhira is the designated tomboy but is very entertaining, while the wheelchair-bound girl who stars in the second game appears as an acerbic off-sider and gives me great hopes for her in a main character role (amusingly, her name is a spoiler).  The Sasaki twins are less endearing, filling a more childlike role and taking up more scenes than I’d like, and the strength of the love triangle story is undercut by Rika, who comes across as possessive and emotionally unstable.  Towards the end this harmonises with the main route, in particular the way the love triangle is shown to be potentially closed (more Yuri should address their larger number of valid pairings than a strictly heteronormative story), but the damage was done: I didn’t like her.

Ultimately the main route is an iteration ‘Story A’ with elaborate decoration, but it is a good one, if not great.  It is legitimately a Yuri story, the opening alone makes it clear that these girls share a more intense attachment than the “romantic friendship” you might otherwise associate with Marimite descendants.  I found the ending to be almost entirely satisfying, with the caveat that it needs to be taken in the context of three more novels, not the last word on this world or its characters.  And indeed that is the core question for the reader – given you could get a similar or better story in manga and be done in a fraction of the time, do you find the aesthetic of this impossible school and its students pleasurable enough to luxuriate in for up to three times as long as this already lengthy novel?

For myself: I will be buying and playing Le volume sur ete.

Ratings:

Art & Music: 8.5
Story:  6 – it’s not bad, but it’s not tight.
Characters: 7
Service: 5 – I bought it as demonstrating the girls’ attraction to each other.  Bump it up if you really like skinny sixteen year-olds?
Yuri:  8 on main route.  5 otherwise.

Overall:  8

Erica here: Your comment about the kanji reminds me of a shirt a friend once made me with “monku” (complain) written all over the front and “urusai!” (shut up!) on the back, but as they had used the kanji for “urusai” no one understood the joke when I wore it. Some words one just doesn’t see presented formally, especially informal shouting to “shaddup!”. ^_^

Thank you for the delightful review, Jye. We look forward to your review of the sequels!





Yuri Game: don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, Guest Review by Mara)

October 14th, 2011

This is not so much a “Yuri Game” as a “Game with Yuri Elements” but that makes a clunky review header. Anyway, it is my very sincere pleasure to welcome back Guest Reviewer Mara, with another great game review!~ 

don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story is the newest game from creator Christine Love, who has also written Digital: A Love Story. The narrator is John, an arguably pathetic guy who is at least smart enough to be aware of it. John has just started teaching literature at a high school that has its own internal social network called Amie.

As a teacher, John is allowed access to his students’ profiles and messages, both public and private and is flat out told to monitor them at his discretion.  This is not just a plot element but worked into how we, as readers, experience the story. As the central narrative moves forward, all of the characters are messaging and posting in time with the main story, whether they are present in the scene or not.

Every time someone in the class posts, the player is alerted to it and can read the posts in a submenu. This gives the central characters a powerful sense of constant presence. Even if the main story leaves these characters behind; we still see them talking to each other and posting their status. This device was the selling point in the story for me as it really hammers home the fact that the main narration is just John’s incomplete view. By reading the students’ posts we are privy to their opinions on how the story unfolds, and we can see the gradual bubbling of incidents yet to happen.

It is through this mechanism that we learn of the first Yuri subplot in don’t take it personally. Two of John’s students, Kendall and Charlotte, have just broken up – apparently in a major way – and we see some of the residual fallout of this in the messaging that occurs right at the beginning of the game.  The online communication we see also highlights an important difference between Kendall and Charlotte. While Charlotte is pretty much the same in person as she is online (sensible, accepting and polite) Kendall is a loud witty troll online, but very subdued in person when John first meets her. It is only after the breakup story concludes that it becomes clear that Kendall’s perkiness begins to shift back into her offline persona.

One particular story route does deal with Kendall and Charlotte directly and the possibility of them getting back together. The result is something incredibly adorable in that teenage “this moment is the most important ever” sort of way. Although I did occasionally cringe at attempts to give the characters a unique voice; there was a sense of the raw emotional immediacy that seems to plague teenage life that felt truly genuine in how Kendall and Charlotte’s relationship played out.

However, Kendall and Charlotte are not the only Yuri draw in this game; there is another couple who, although they have much less exposure (John only meets one of them), were the couple that made the game for me. They are the mothers of Akira, another of John’s students, Ichigo and Hazuki.

Akira’s early story deals with him coming out to his friends and peers, having realised for himself very recently that he is gay. It is a sequence that is pretty much free of drama as everyone’s reply is ‘I already assumed so, ages ago’. This irritates Akira, as for him finding out he was gay was an important event and a powerful moment of self discovery…only to find that everyone else had already assumed it.

This is compounded for Akira, as his mother Hazuki by comparison, has a coming out story that spans a year with subplots, themes and a cast too big to fit on the stage. Although this and one other mention is all we get to know about Hazuki, we still get a solid flavour as to what her character is. That, and she induces intergenerational coming out envy in her son, which is just awesome.

We do get to meet Ichigo, in full mama-wolf mode during the end of a sequence where Akira is harassed by another character. Ichigo is straight to the point about the problem and refreshingly appropriate and direct. She also appears in the scene wearing a very dashing suit. I do have to say it is nice to see a mother turn up to protect her son and not be shown as a hysterical protective monster. Instead, Ichigo comes off as perfectly sensible especially, after she turns up again in the resolution of the main story to sort everything out and is instrumental in a very well-written big reveal.

don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story is a short visual novel. You can get through all the routes within a few hours. However, with both the offline and online world to read, it feels like a truly packed experience. The rhythm that builds up though each chapter allows the important points of each event to be easily digested, like lightly fried dumplings. The art is pleasant, although inconsistent, as two artists split the tasks, meaning that the art for the event cg and the profile pictures have a different feel than the sprites.

I am very willing to forgive this and indeed a few other flaws in don’t take it personally. Why? Well considering this was made for the most part by one person, who put it out for free, and I never felt for a moment that the effort put on this project dropped. don’t take it personally was easily more interesting and is more engaging than games I have bought for eight thousand yen (looking at you Yukkuri Panic and Koihime Musou.) To see such talent and effort available for free is truly humbling.

In conclusion, I seriously recommend this for two good reasons. It is entertaining and free. You cannot go wrong with that.

So:
Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 9
Yuri – 9
Yaoi- 9
Service – 6

Overall – 9 (Hey, big achievements mean a lot to me)

What are you still doing here? :  : Go and read the visual novels of Christine Love!

Erica here; Mara, thank you so much for bringing this game to our attention! (That’s the “we” of the Yuri Network, not the royal “We.”) ^_^

The game sounds like it’s fun and your review might even get me to try it. 

Just a quick note: There will be no YNN Report this week. I’m at New York Comic Con (Table 1158, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!) and won’t have access to a keyboard and I’ll be damned if I try to write the YNN on a phone….





Visual Novel: Aoi Shiro Guest Review by Mara

January 13th, 2010

It must be Wednesday, because we have a Guest Review! Today I welcome back Mara, who will once again be reviewing the Anime/Manga/Choose Your Adventure/PowerPoint hybrid known as a Visual Novel. Enjoy!

It is a sign of success when a visual novel makes the port from PC to console. This is because the game in question must have significant appeal when you remove the erotic content (none of the console makers allow it). But when a game makes the leap the other way, from console to PC, the reasons are less consistent. In the case of Aoi Shiro it was a couple of extra scenes and some more event CG in an already CG-heavy game.

Aoi Shiro is a game by Success who previously brought us the Yuri visual novel Akai Ito – both games are set in the same supernatural universe. The main character this time is the serious kendo team captain Osanai Syouko who is played with surprising flexibility by Noriko Hidaka.

The plot of Aoi Shiro follows Syouko as she heads to a summer training camp with her kendo team. Their location, a Buddhist shrine on the southern coast, invokes sad childhood memories for Syouko. The exact nature of these memories takes awhile to become clear as Syouko seems to be cursed with a memory that makes any act of deep recollection EPIC in a clumsy attempt to give these events additional gravitas.

Regardless of this, Aoi Shiro has a pretty decent plot for a visual novel that really hangs more on the ‘visual’ aspect than the ‘novel’ aspect. When the characters are voiced and have animated sprites that blink and are lip synched to the lines, it becomes clear where the money went.

Regardless, Aoi Shiro has plenty of fun scenes where we get to know most of the characters pretty well and come to like their eccentricities. The many eating sequences stand out as they set the rhythm for each day of the story and there are some truly inspired conversations, such as the finer points of Zen vegetarianism.

Sadly, three major heroines can not share in these scenes and so feel underdeveloped. For example, when we are solidly on Nami’s route and she gets her voice back and begins to develop a personality, Syouko’s sudden gushing crush on her is rather jarring. Indeed the characters rarely discuss their feelings for each other and the short time span of the story (only 4-5 days) means that the endings for each route feel ultimately unfulfilling and do not resolve any of the romantic possibilities.

Although the stories may be low on Yuri the heroines themselves are not, as each fills a specific Yuri archetype, and does so very well. The stand out star heroine, however, is easily Kohaku, the deliberately androgynous, efficient, prideful and damn cool oni that kills off mooks by flicking stones as though she was playing marbles.

Kohaku is played by Kei Mizusawa, who plays her with a nice aggressive tone, and has easily the most ‘Yuri route’. It is in this route that Syouko expresses most strongly reciprocated romantic feelings. A route where we can leave our Yuri goggles on a very low setting and still be satisfied.

While many routes feel very watered down or evasive towards the end Kohaku’s at least feels like a “And that’s how we met” story that couples might tell you at their wedding…if they fought oni for a living.

But, having only one route that has a solid Yuri feel to it is a tad disappointing for a game of this pedigree. Even then there is the ‘grand route’ that we must thus assume is cannon, as all the mysteries and problems are solved. In this route, however, Syouko is not pared up with anyone although it does progress down Nami’s route for a while it is clearly everyone’s story and, so, there is not any time for any romance as the plot about summoning a demonic storm god takes priority. But it is a bit depressing that after all those routes where Syouko ‘got the girl/sister/rival’; the route that is considered the ‘true ending’ has no really romantic scenes at all.

While it is depressing that a game that clearly markets itself and is considered a Yuri game has very little Yuri content Aoi Shiro is still a very good visual novel. The artwork is undeniably beautiful to look at and the story has wonderful characters that each make the best of their short time in the limelight. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Ratings:

Art – 10 (It’s like an inverse Umineko)
Story – 6 (Rushed at the conclusion)
Characters – 9 (Everyone will latch onto one or two heroines)
Yuri – 3 (But Kohaku gets a 7)
Service – 4 (There’s an onsen at the shrine, you don’t say?)
Loser fan girl – 4 (The antagonist and the worlds most awesome Buddhist monk)

Overall – 9

It is the game equivalent of fireworks. A few beautiful explosions that leave your jaw hanging open, you just wish that there was one more or that they lasted just a bit longer

Erica again: First of all, thank you Mara! This really interested me, as I have read all of the Aoi Shiro manga, and I’d say that it’s pretty equivalent. Too many characters left undeveloped, too many opportunities for relationships squandered and too little Yuri, after a lot of Yuri-ish set-up. So, once again, thank you for the review and another glimpse into a piece of the Yuri puzzle that I don’t cover.