Update One Hundred and Eighty-Nine: 17 June 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Damn it damn it damn it! I really wanted to end up putting this on my VN Masterlist - I really enjoyed the writing, it ran like a dream, the art was cute, I am an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Barnum-and-Bailey there’s-two-kinds-of-people-comma-hucksters-and sucker for robots-becoming-human stories…

but the ending(s) just soured this experience for me past what I can enthusiastically recommend. They come abruptly and, uh, go from bad to worse. There’s a pretty neat sting at the end of the ‘true’ ending, but as far as I know won’t be expanded on. All of this hinges around, of course, the other aspect I liked least. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but it’s… the male protagonist. (Surprise!)

On VNDB, one of the tags for this game is the ‘hetare protagonist’. I had never encountered the term before, so in curiousity I explored it. Here’s what it is:
“Protagonist of this game is a worthless, spineless individual that is not worthy of being called a man. He is no help to anyone and is most of the time unable to make any decisions in time. He is always being pushed around by every other character in the game, he is that way at the start and he is still like that in the final moments of the game.”

Yep. That’s this guy. Funnily enough, at some points he called to mind a friend of mine - I love to give him grief, but DON”T TELL HIM ABOUT THIS COMPARISON - so I was endeared to the protag in a way I’m normally not endeared to male protagonists in visual novels. The issue is that this motherfucker had zero character arc. The tag is accurate - he’s like this at the start and is like this at the end. There’s a decay, but not even a Greek Tragic, fall-from-grace decay - it’s just ‘his pessimism and cynicism was right’ kind of thing. Utterly, utterly boring! I couldn’t have a VN about the two girl characters instead?

Considering the pessimism of the original, I can’t be too surprised at how this ended, but I can be disappointed. Otherwise it was cute!

Next up: Let’s go to the seaside!

See you soon!