Review of Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito
| Subject | Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito - Regular Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 1 Vote: 7meirin on 2024-08-12 |
| Review | (Click here to watch this same review in video format on YouTube) Ok, I will admit it. I only read this because there's a character named Meirin. Although, going into this one, I certainly wasn't expecting to come across something so flawed yet extremely interesting. Story and Characters Despite its slightly bizarre premise, Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito is held by a robust, well-defined, symmetrical structure. You can easily dissect this story into two distinctive parts: one introductory part presenting the worlds and the characters, and the second one resolving all the build-up and conflicts of each world, with the main struggle of the central narrative taking place right in the middle. In a way, it forgoes the usual common route followed by the individual character routes. It does, however, still have two main endings for both heroines, as well as one normal, i.e., less satisfying ending; but instead of having completely different plot lines for each girl, what changes between the two main outcomes is nothing more than the middle point of the story and their respective endings. Needless to say, this is a plot-focused story, first and foremost. I believe, though, that this clear structure gives the game a remarkable sense of pacing. It’s always very clear at which point of the narrative you find yourself, even though the story itself is filled with almost surrealist moments that could be far more confusing if it took a more convoluted narrative structure. As far as the story goes, I quite liked how varied the worlds they traveled back-and-forth were, from a medieval fantasy-themed one to another taking place on a tropical island or one on a train traveling through a winter night, just to name a few. The wide variety of locales gave a strong feeling of going on a grand adventure, never knowing what’s coming next. Something interesting is that during that first half, you only get half of the stories of each world, with those plot lines ending in some sort of cliffhanger. This relates to what I meant with the perceptible structure of the story, as the game makes it clear that you will be revisiting those places to address those unfinished businesses. When done poorly, this type of structure could end up with an overwhelming number of unanswered questions and disorienting foreshadowing, but since the moment-to-moment events have their own weight and emergency, the flow of the narrative ends up being smooth and satisfying. One surprising aspect of this visual novel was the amount of comedy it had. This is a game with a relatively large cast, which led to plenty of contrasting and entertaining dynamics. In particular, I liked the banter between the protagonist and the fat yellow bird, Ken-chan. Their back-and-forth followed a Manzai-style comedy that suited quite well to the overall surrealist vibe of the story. But, generally speaking, every relevant character stood on its own, with all of them having likeable, even if at times slightly eccentric, personalities. Incidentally, Meirin was very cute. I mean, how could she not be with a name like that? That being said, to me, the one that absolutely stole the show was none other than Lilith, one of the two main heroines, and also the girl that appears in the box-art, which, in a way, is impressive since she only becomes a major character around the halfway point of the story, having only made small appearances up until that moment. But once she took center stage, she felt like an unstoppable force of will. Her personality is highly energetic and very, very cheeky. One of her primary traits was her rivalry with Hatsumi, the other main girl. I would even say that most of her actions felt like they were fueled by her disdain for her, but it was always in a friendly manner. Well, relatively friendly manner. I personally found it quite amusing how she always took the piss out of Hatsumi’s large forehead every time she got a chance. There’s also another reason why I liked her so much, but I don’t really want to spoil it, since it relates to one particular plot development that I quite liked. On the other hand, I can see some finding her kind of annoying. She’s very high spirited, probably more than any other character, and it feels like that energy only doubles once she properly enters the plot. But I can only speak for myself, and in my completely unbiased opinion, she was the cutest, bestest waifu of the entire game. Lilith-chan banzai! Anyhow, another character that I also quite enjoyed was Seiren. Of all the secondary characters, I think she had the most depth and showed a well-developed character arch, in particular during the second half of the story. Perhaps the character that could’ve gone with a bit more character development was the main villain. The game hints at the reason behind his motives and goals, but it never gets too deep into it. The story itself works well enough regardless of this omission, but at the same time, it wouldn’t have hurt either way to address it in more detail, I think. One interesting detail about this game is that it’s somewhat presented as a crossover title, featuring characters from other games from the same developer, which sort of fits the multiverse thematic of the narrative. Obviously, this raises the question of whether one can truly enjoy this VN without having read those, as well as if the game is filled with references that are too reliant on those stories. In this regard, I can safely say that you really don’t need to worry, as it is a perfectly self-contained story. But most importantly, because, amusingly enough, more than half of the games this game references never actually saw the light of day, and the majority of the ones that actually did were only released once Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito was already out. You can actually find promotional material out there for the ones that never came out, which only makes this whole ordeal even more interesting. Anyway, let's go back to the main topic. One aspect, however, of this game that I feel needs to be pointed out is its writing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad per se, but the issue is that it consists exclusively of dialogue and the occasional onomatopoeic sound. You won’t find any descriptive text whatsoever here, which honestly feels like a major missed opportunity to further flesh out this mysterious world. To me, this is one of the game’s biggest flaws, especially when you consider how captivating the universe they created is. There are also some scenes where you will have to use a bit of your imagination to fill in the blanks, like, for example, during fighting scenes, which fortunately weren’t that many. Admittedly, this isn’t the only time I’ve played a dialogue-only visual novel, but I feel in most of those cases there were other elements that helped compensate for that shortcoming, namely the visual presentation. One final note about the writing is that, while it’s not the hardest thing you will find out there, I found it to be a bit more nuanced than what I was expecting, particularly with characters like Ken-chan, who spoke using a thick Kansai dialect. He wasn’t that difficult to understand, but if you are not used to this type of speech, it might catch you off guard. Presentation Now moving onto the presentation of this game, and here’s where things take a turn for the slightly worse, primarily in the audio department. This game’s biggest point of criticism is that it’s a very quiet game. Music is extremely sparse, so much so that at first, I thought there was some sort of technical problem with my game. You will very occasionally get some scenes with music in them, but for the most part, all you will be listening to will be ambient sounds and voiced lines. The usage of music is mostly limited to scenes where it makes some sense that music would be heard in the background. Well, those and the H-scenes too. I guess it would be somewhat awkward if those were quiet too. I can understand that they wanted to create a strong sense of immersion into this world, but in this case, where the prose consists of dialogue only, I don’t think the effect was achieved as well as what they probably would’ve hoped for. There's, however, a solution for this, although it’s not a very elegant one. The game was sold alongside an ambient soundtrack meant to convey the atmosphere of the story, even if the tracks included on that CD were never part of the actual game. You can easily find this soundtrack online these days, so what I personally suggest is listening to it while playing the game, choosing whichever tracks you feel better suit each scene. As I said, it’s not an elegant solution, but the music on that disc is surprisingly good. I think they did a good job at delivering a musical accompaniment that nicely matched the game’s tone. As far as voice acting goes, it was pretty good. Lilith’s voice actress was, in my opinion, the standout, but everyone else delivered a solid performance too. The only issue was that the ratio between voiced and unvoiced characters wasn’t exactly great. I know that in Galge, it’s not uncommon to leave male characters completely unvoiced, but when the story has so many of them, some of whom were quite important to the plot, it only emphasizes that sense of quietness prompted by the lack of music. On top of that, there were some characters that I found odd that didn’t receive the voiced treatment, especially a couple of kid characters, who you often see being voiced by voice actresses either way. I personally would’ve also liked to see Ken-chan being voiced, considering he’s one of the characters with the largest presence throughout the story. I think some of the comedic gags would’ve worked even better that way. Maybe it’s for this reason that I found the second half of the game to be more engaging, since at that point Lilith steps into the story like a thunderstorm, making things feel less lonely and far more dynamic. On the visual front, I didn’t have that many quarrels. As you can see from the footage, this game doesn’t present the sprites the usual way but instead opts for using them only as portraits. I personally didn’t mind this approach, primarily because the number of sprites was quite high. In fact, there are barely any characters without their own sprite, and all of the main characters have plenty of sprite variations. The backgrounds were also nicely drawn, but there was something that caught my attention during my playthrough. You might’ve noticed that there’s often something akin to an ellipse with a background on top of the main background. It’s never really explained why, but I’ve reached the conclusion that it represents the protagonist’s view since, after transforming into a hat, he now only had one single big, elliptical eye. Maybe it’s nothing more than my head canon, but I feel it’s plausible enough, and if it’s true, it was a nice touch on the developers’ behalf. Conclusion In conclusion, Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito is an interesting title that will definitely not be for everyone. There are so many elements this game pulls off with plenty of confidence, such as its strong pacing, good comedy, and intriguing world-building. But at the same time, it also took some rather questionable decisions, especially with its audio design. With that being said, if you are willing to overlook those sticking points and are hunting for something that’s different—maybe slightly bizarre yet absorbing—this will be one memorable journey you will want to take. |
| 1 point |