Update One Hundred and Nineteen: 29 January 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Hmm. I didn’t love that.

The strongest point of CLANNAD was, I believe, the ability to weave standard slice-of-life everyday with really heartouching moments. Tomoyo After, a sequel-y spinoff-y game set after the ending of Tomoyo’s route (hence, the name), had little of that ability. There were some genuinely funny and cute moments in this, don’t get me wrong, but it felt like a familiar song played on an out of tune instrument - not great.

The weaknesses were twofold, I believe - 1. not ending the story when it should have ended and 2. making Tomoyo unbelievably boring. In CLANNAD, there’s something like 16 routes and 8 different girls you can date, so their characterization was pretty strong so you could tell them apart. (I’m going to talk about some general CLANNAD spoilers here for Tomoyo’s route.) Tomoyo’s thing was that she was a hyper-competent student council president with a secret - that she used to be not just a delinquent, but literally a gang leader. She took zero shit and was very ambitious, and was no nonsense without being frigid. She had a strong ethical code, and was magnetic and incredibly popular, not to mention was ridiculously capable in street fighting. Her potential was so crazy high that Okazaki (the player character) breaks up with her because he feels he’ll just hold her back. She was one of my favorite parts of that game.

In this game? She’s a housewife. Her role and what she does with it in this game is near identical to the role Nagisa plays in HER After Story, the ‘canon’ sequel story in the main game, minus being sickly. Her character is largely TOLD to us by narration, but compared to her character before? There’s little resemblance, and that’s just sad. I can sit through dated lewd humor, but watching Tomoyo be a pasty stand-in made this game a chore rather than an interesting story.

Which brings me to this game’s other weakness: the story ends… and then jumps tracks and keeps going. The main conceit of the story - Okazaki, Tomoyo and her brother and his girlfriend all take care of this one little girl for a summer - is concluded, and then another story abruptly begins, and this story is a mad dumb one. Bad fanfiction dumb. Morning telenovela that doesn’t last one season dumb. It’s cheap and transparent and came out of nowhere, and it’s LONG. It felt at least a quarter length of the game that had preceeded it, and I wish that time had been used to enrich the main story.

For those reasons it’s a no for me, dogg. Oh, on top of that, a little over half the achievements have to do with this SRPG-add on that I attempted and gave up on because it was pretty much just a straight RNG timesink and I love myself too much to force myself to play that to the finish, let alone grind to completion. I’m good.

Next up:

See you soon!

Small update: Just to have record of it - I took a quick twenty minutes and took a look at Under Leaves again. There was an update recently that added eight new levels and, therefore, eight new achievements. I played through them and now that game is complete once again!