Update One Hundred and Seventeen: 24 January 2018
AIRIS
50 hours, 12 of 12 achievements
8/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
You know? I was really surprised at how good this ended up being! I think this hovers right around Doki Doki Literature Club! on the ‘how good is this free game?’ scale.
AIRIS was originally created for National Visual Novel Writing Month (or NaNoRenO)(1), which shocked me because it was A. decently long, with three completely-separate routes with four endings each and 2. very well written, barring a handful of errors. AIRIS succeeds where other fantasy VNs like Blue Rose fail because of those two points. It’s well-written enough where the romance is integrated into the story, which is an interesting, unique take on a familiar plot conceit, and it’s long enough where the proper amount of time is spent on making the plot strong and interesting, and making the romance fun and believable.
The entire game just has a sort of polish that is shocking to find in a free game, and doubly shocking to find it was done on such a short timeframe, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was polished up some for the Steam release. It feels polished, with nice, custom user-interface (not the same Ren’Py stock I see sooo much) and the writing has a deftness to it I enjoy.
This is a visual novel that returns great value for my investment (at 0 US American dollars), and I am more than happy to place this on my Visual Novel Reference List.
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
(1) holy shit it was a mistake to look into these - all these VNs look really appealing and so interesting and I think they’re all free or cheap and I can’t get sucked into this rabbit hole I have so many VNs I paid good US American dollars I haven’t played yet(2). I have to stick to VNs on steam for my own sanity.
(2) Do you remember the Twilight Zone? Do you remember the episode about that guy who’s a big jerk, and he works in a bank, and he just wants everyone to leave him alone, and then he gets locked in the bank vault, and then there’s a nuclear explosion so everyone dies but him, and then he finds that the library is untouched and he’s thrilled because now there’s ‘time enough at last’ for him to just sit and read forever(3)? I’m adding these treasure troves of VNs to my ‘Time Enough At Last’ Dream Vault, along with every novel, webcomic, and manga I want to read but am afraid I’ll never have time for.
(3) The twist is, right before he opens the first book, he trips and breaks his glasses, so he can’t read anything anymore. Books books everywhere, and not a page to read. My nightmare as a child.
Next up: My name is what? My name is who? My name is chicka chicka -
See you soon!
I used to love The Twilight Zone, although I mostly watched the 1985 TV series version (that is, only a few of the old B/W ones).
Since the VN was f2p I gave it a quick look. Too anime/otome for my tastes, I’m afraid. :p And why do all of the women have to be size 2’s (e.g. this and this)? My six-year-old daughter is already starting to tell her Mom that she’s doesn’t like her face (hers, not her Mom’s). Does this kind of thing happen to every single female on the planet? /sad
I mean, I’m sure young boys have body image problems too…maybe they just don’t talk about it as much…but it does seem to be a bigger problem for girls.
Oh boy, Trent…. welcome to life as a woman. Body image problems are CRAZY COMMON, and part of that is fed heavily into it’s very hard to see depictions of women who aren’t size 2s (like you pointed out) who aren’t jokes or grandmas. That’s part of the reason why a lot of people (me included) fight so hard and want so much for a variety of protagonists and characters in different media. It seriously makes a difference, and even children young like your daughter learns things about who gets to be in stories, and who don’t.
Oh god this ended up being MAD LONG. I hope it’s okay.
I didn’t grow up with body image problems, because I was ““lucky”” enough to be tall and skinny since I was, I don’t know, three. (I DO have body image problems around my skin, though. As a woman you are MAD encouraged to hate how you look, no matter what you look like.) I asked my girlfriend, who has not ever been a size 2 and is a happy, lovely, kickass woman at a size 18, and she said:
“Self-affirmation is good. So like, when she is feeling down about how her face looks, she take some time to pick out at least five things she DOES like, things that are good, and say them to herself instead of “My face looks bad I don’t like it”. Try to circumvent that feeling bad and replace it with good stuff.And while the good things don’t have to be about how she looks because in an ideal world it wouldn’t matter what you look like… it’s important to love your body as it is.”
I’d also add that you and her mom can model that kind of positivity - that health isn’t tied to what you look like, that your body is important for what you can do with it rather than what it looks like, and that healthy eating habits are largely ‘let’s eat good food when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full’. You can look into the ‘health at every size’ movement and body positivity movements for more, there are TONS of resources.
Thank you for sitting through this LONG ASS post but so many women my age, in their 20s, struggle with loving themselves. And they eventually do, but it’s a long hard learning process where so much of that is unlearning mean shit you were brought up with. You can do your best to raise your daughter with these healthier, more self-loving kind of messages, so she doesn’t have to unlearn anything to love herself.
LOL, no need to apologize…I love a good WoT– and thank you for sharing. <3
Maybe I’ll follow-up with you up on Steam chat down the road.
Please feel free to follow up! We’re both rooting for you and especially for her. I’m so glad you have your eye on it already.