Akaneiro no Kyoukaisen
Entry posted by Clephas
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... are you as surprised as I am that I'm already posting on this? It isn't because I rushed through it or concentrated on it for three days straight. No, in this case, it is because the game is actually only about seven hours long in total... and that is probably an overestimate. While I don't tend to judge VNs by length, I do want to be able to get to know the characters before I see them falling in love.
This game's biggest plus point is that it is story straight from beginning to end, with no side-trips or long drawn-out slice-of-life segments... but in a way, that very same element is also the biggest bit of self-sabotage the writer of this game committed. To be straight with you all, given the excitement in the prologue, I thought I had some surprise chuunige fun with non-human heroines and a conspiracy in the background... and this game does have all the elements that might have created a low-level chuunige of decent quality. A ruthless kitsune heroine who hunts unnatural beings in order to rise to the next plane of existence as a deity, a half-youkai girl who struggles with her own identity and place in society, and a token human heroine who has 'Victim A' written on her forehead. There are inhuman beings with their own agendas, people the protagonist is involved with in daily life who have another face, and disaster seems to be looming over the school he attends...
So why, I ask, did Alcot give this over to their low-price subsidiary? Yes, there were some moments that were somewhat touching... but I wasn't invested in the characters because of a lack of any real character development beyond the introductory level. The protagonist was living with a kitsune, but they'd only touched upon the surface-most level of her personality when the heroine paths came along. The youkai-hunting half-breed girl was doing the classic 'oh, he knows what I am but treats me equally' bit, but it happened so quickly I could almost feel the sonic boom slamming my hopes in the face. Victim A turns out to have a secret issue with a non-human being, but it is resolved easily and with only a very small amount (relatively speaking) of drama.
Do you see what I mean? Instead of a good chuunige, we have the flesh-stripped, gnawed-on skeleton of a chuunige. It is better than Sougeki no Jaeger (which had some of the same problems) or Pygmalion, but again, that isn't saying much. Hatsugamai, the most recent game by this company, proved that even on a low budget, it was possible to create a first-class game. However, this one shows the pitfalls of not putting enough of a budget into a chuunige.
The grand route, while it extends the kitsune heroine's route beyond its somewhat bittersweet ending, is not what I'd call a work of genius, either... Overall, this game turned out to be a disappointment, if only because it had seriously immense potential to turn into something great, given a bit more effort.
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