Review of Koshotengai no Hashihime
| Subject | Koshotengai no Hashihime Hashihime of the Old Book Town - Download Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 2 Vote: 8swordfish96 on 2024-10-01 |
| Review | It has a ridiculously stylish aesthetic mixing a somber dark art style that brings to mind a rainy Taisho era Japan interspersed with some strikingly colorful psychedelia CGs signifying Tamamori’s delusions accompanied by a jazzy soundtrack. The VN is structured lie a mandatory ladder with each route being unlocked after clearing the previous one. Unlike most VNs with a mandatory route order, there isn’t really a gradually unfurling mystery as you play through the routes; the first route is required for context for all the others but the other routes feel more like what-ifs. Really, the route that has the closest claim to being the main route is the first one which is unusual. One of the most charming points about the novel is the protagonist Tamamori. He’s one of the most novel protagonists I know, being a charmingly pathetic aspiring writer who gets lost in his delusions, and someone who ignore reality when it’s to hard to face, with a lot of the story involving him facing up to the truth and confronting himself sometimes literally. He’s also fairly obviously an unreliable narrator, leaving the reader to discern how much of his narration and dialogue he actually means. Despite his many flaws I wouldn’t call him frustrating; in fact they make him an incredibly fascinating protagonist to follow. The cast of characters as a whole is pretty good. The LIs are all entertaining messed up weirdos underneath a facade of normality (and even if I hate Hanazawa as a LI, he works great as an antagonist). Unlike how I’d expect, there isn’t that much of a focus on the romance; apart from the single H-scene at the end of each route, it isn’t particularly overt. The side characters also have pretty decent characterisation with my favourite being Naoshi, a kind hearted trans girl in love hidden beneath the facade of a trickster. The VN really embraces the setting, with references to a bunch of Japanese Taisho era literature (along with other little things that really sell the setting) to the point where the translators needed to include notes regarding some of them. It’s a pity that the main reference (Dogra Magra by Kyosaku Yumeno) doesn’t seem to have an English translation. From what I can tell it’s what Cyrano de Bergerac was to Zakuro’s chapter in Subahibi or And then there were None is to Umineko; not essential knowledge but relevant and constantly referenced. The first route is undoubtedly the best being a tense mystery centred around a mysterious death and the time loops Tamamori undergoes to find the reason behind it, hitting you with revelation after revelation along with a heartfelt love story at the heart of it. The romance with Minakami just feels like the intended romantic pairing that the VN was designed around. The other routes aren’t quite as good. Unlike most mystery focused VNs with a route order, there isn’t a central mystery that unfurls as you play thorough each route but instead it feels a lot like the first route (and maybe the a last route) was written to completion first and then they decided that it was necessary to have other routes. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the other routes bad (except for the third one. That was just terrible) but they generally recycle the first route’s twists without much fanfare and don’t really have any central reveals of their own. Both the 2nd and 4th routes are alright; not bad but nothing outstanding either. The 3rd route stands out for how bad it is being a depressingly bleak story focusing on an asshole nationalistic war criminal rapist. Really, there’s no redeeming that. I’m not sure whether the last route is fantastic, explaining and re-contextualizing everything or a complete travesty that retroactively makes the rest of the VN worse. Honestly I’d say the former though I can understand the latter position. At the least it is incredibly fitting to the atmosphere that everything was a delusion and it was interesting. Well I guess it was declared an AU so it’s probably fine. There’s quite a few things about this VN that ended up reminding me of Chaos;Child; the protagonists of both are riddled with flaws, there’s unreliable narration in part due to these flaws, theming around delusions, they’re both surreal mysteries with a heartfelt ending and they both have a great main route and iffy side routes. Overall, it’s a pretty uneven VN, with my satisfaction while reading essentially being a parabola but it’s certainly something I found unique and worth reading. |
| 2 points |