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Review of Bye

SubjectBye
Bye
ByHelpfulness: 0
Vote: 5
funnerific on 2021-08-04
ReviewI don't normally write the kind of review that conveys the story in full detail, but because this particular title likes to be rather indirect and sometimes confusing in its presentation, and because a certain major backstory event differs between routes, this is what I've decided to go with this time.

There is no common route here, and instead you jump straight into "routes", which mostly take place at the same time. The romance in this game is in a pretty weird place. Because the events between routes are mostly shared (with some key differences), you could assume the same people hook up every time, but it's not always stated outright. Since there are only 2 male characters present, you will, consequently, only see any kind of romance with 2 heroines, and there's very little of it in general.

Souto, the male lead, lives with his adoptive mother Mayumi, alongside Rena who is there under the same circumstances. Although it feels odd to call him a lead because only 40% of the game is from his perspective, while three of the routes are narrated by the heroines instead, sometimes with the guy barely making an appearance at all. Both Souto and Rena have lived through severely traumatizing experiences, and this household is a place of respite for poor souls like them. At the beginning of the story, they are joined by Anne — a new addition to the family, and the heroine of the first route.

The writing is pretty rough: Rena has prosthetics in place of her right arm and left leg so she trips a lot, and she's generally slow, which the MC lightly makes fun of her for. For some reason the topic of using a wheelchair never comes up even once. One route suddenly brings out supernatural elements and doesn't really bother explaining anything. Characters regularly behave in a way that makes no sense or is extremely unreasonable (see Rena route). The comedy often relies on silly repetition such as: 1, 2; it's generally weak IMO and you should be ready to skip it. Mizuho, in particular, is to blame for that, being extremely annoying and unfunny. There's also stuff like writing じゃあない in place of じゃない almost all the time when it makes absolutely no sense. Some grammar is weird and you won't see much of it in other VNs, if it's correct at all. And some typos. Where would we be without them?

It's worth noting that despite the significant length of the game there are extremely few CGs, and of course there's no voice acting either. Then again, it is a doujinge. The BGM is decent; these guys made considerably better BGM for their later games.

Anne: If you're familiar with a certain Key character, you'll recognize this one. Anne, as she appears in her route, is the spirit (with physical properties) of a girl who seems to be in a coma at the local hospital. Her being a spirit, or even being in a coma, is not stated outright, but everything points to this. She ended up there after accidentally setting her house on fire, killing her whole family as a result. Witnessing their charred remains being brought out, she was crushed with guilt and jumped from a bridge. Outside of her route, she doesn't end up in a coma after this, and is adopted normally. Here, she dies in the end and is no longer visible to anyone. Mayumi seems to know she's only a spirit because she helped her hide the news of the fire, and probably the suicide, from Souto and Rena. Anne also briefly disappears from everyone's memories, but soon enough the whole household suddenly remembers her anyway. The writing is pretty shit because when she knows she'll disappear soon, she tells everyone she's going to work somewhere far away and everyone just accepts it without question like it's perfectly normal, without even asking why or where. This route has romance, and there's evidence that even after people can't see her anymore, she continues to be around in some form: by the MC's side, or tied to her now-dead body, or simply roaming. I have to say though, there was no foreshadowing of supernatural elements of any kind, so I found it pretty jarring. And what's up with her just lying dead in a hospital room several days after "disappearing"? Or was she still alive until the moment the MC showed up? And brought her to the roof of the hospital, which is for some reason open and only has a very low railing lol. That's not to say anyone falls from there, just pointing it out.

At this point, I was tempted to drop it. But being harukana's #1 fan, I simply had to persevere in reading this dev's other titles, and so I pressed on.

Rena: This route is written entirely from Rena's PoV, which is pretty cool. It's also dark as fuck, and has far more substance than the rest, as you can probably tell by the size of the text wall below.

Mayumi is Rena's biological mother, but presently nobody knows that fact except for Mayumi herself. When Mayumi was in middle school, she was raped by some rich dude, got pregnant and (rather unwisely) decided to give birth. But since she was too young still, she left the child with that guy who accepted it because it's a girl and he evidently wanted to do stuff with her when she grew up, although it's pretty ridiculous I think if you consider the time it would take. In the meantime Mayumi prostituted herself to pay the guy so he'd look after the child, plus he got to bang Mayumi for free. The guy himself told Rena that her mother died while giving birth. Fast forward ~14 years or so (damn, that's rough) and Mayumi shows up to retake her daughter — possibly because she expected the guy to "use" her. And SOMEHOW this fact alone motivates the guy to get into his car with Rena and commit double suicide by driving into something at high speed. His fate is left unknown to the reader, but Rena survives and has to have her right arm and left leg amputated. But not before she witnesses the state they're in: her arm all twisted and oozing something purple, getting sawn off in front of her eyes as she lies on the operating table under regional anesthesia, and soon her leg, all rotting and swollen so much that there's not enough skin and there's something yellow oozing from it, with a stench to match. It's quite the horrid experience as you can imagine, and is likely the main cause of her mental trauma which is why she is completely unable to get used to her prosthetics even after 3 years, in the present. Mayumi adopts her to look after her, keeping quiet about their biological relation.

However, Rena is too embittered by the events and bears a grudge against the world. She wants to kill her mother (she doesn't yet know it's Mayumi because she never knew how her mother looks) and resents pretty much everyone else, with the sole exception of Ruri, another heroine, who's been treading the line between life and death for the past several years and is obviously more miserable than her. Although this is one of those things the game isn't very clear on, since she doesn't really seem to resent people that much outside of her route. Maybe the gap between her inner thoughts and behavior is just that wide. Anyway, at one point in the past, Rena was into smoking and prostitution (link). The latter — because she was desperate to get people to like her, being pretty unstable mentally (she still is). It led to her getting pregnant, and when she consulted Mayumi, she was told to do as she wants. So she had an abortion, and started to hate herself for it soon after (killed muh own child and stuff, the standard fare).

That was all backstory. In the present, Rena accidentally finds out the truth — that she is Mayumi's real daughter. It creates a lot of drama as Rena continues to be a steaming pot of spite, bearing hatred for absolutely everyone around and treating them as her enemies (Ruri is already dead by this point so there are no exceptions). With time, she cools off a bit, and the two have a talk — Mayumi tells Rena the whole story, but stupid Rena still fully blames Mayumi for "killing" her father and for her lost limbs. This leads Mayumi to commit suicide by jumping in front of a car. Rena learns of this and decides she doesn't want it to happen, and with some crazy luck she manages to find her mother just before, even calling her おかあさん once again (and she heard) but Mayumi for some reason doesn't react to that and jumps in front of a car anyway. Doesn't die tho, and guess what, she has a rare blood type and needs a transfusion and the only one who can save her is Rena, so there's your little plot contrivance to give Rena an opportunity to be helpful to someone for once. In the end Mayumi's fine, they reconcile, and Rena becomes a nurse (the heck, a nurse with prosthetics? Can't imagine it at all). No romance here.

The fucking anti-abortion propaganda in this game, though... I know it's typical for Japanese media, but still!


Ruri: Half of this route is just watching the almost exact same events unfold. The sickly girl Ruri was once abandoned in front of an orphanage because her parents probably couldn't deal with the fact she has an incurable heart disease. She's now almost a member of MC's family but refuses to actually become one, hoping they'd be less sad when she dies — but as you can probably tell, it doesn't work like that. Ruri isn't even her real name, it's just the one Mizuho gave her since nobody knows her original one. She dies here too, just like in other routes, while the MC is busy being a bitch and not having the balls to visit her except a few times, because he's too self-centered to prioritize Ruri's feelings over his own. But once she dies, he gets stuck in a dream world inside his head for a while, where he spends several days with a girl who looks just like Ruri but is, in fact, a mere figment of his imagination. In reality, though, not even a day passes, and things go on as normal. Until one day, guess what, they're getting a new addition to the family. It's not stated who it is, but... see true route for more. No romance in this one either, btw.

Mizuho: Girl with rapidly deteriorating eyesight goes blind and learns to live with it. You knew it was going to happen eventually, well, here it happens so early that Ruri is still alive. Ruri's dying wish is to give Mizuho her eyes, so after she dies they try transplanting parts of her right eye, which is somehow the only one eligible, and it appears to be successful, but she can only see for a moment before going fully blind again. Years later, Mizuho undergoes surgery again, but asks to keep her right eye untouched. It's successful, and in the end she can see with her left. But only cry with her right, because the left one doesn't have tear glands connected. If you think about it, though, doesn't this mean in the previous routes Mizuho and Ruri don't end up having such a personal connection after Ruri's death? Since, you know, Mizuho's eyes still work at the time. Also, Mizuho hooks up with the other male character in the story. This route is narrated from Mizuho's PoV.

True: Who thought this was a good idea? This route really undermines the whole game, in my opinion. Which was already mediocre. This part is narrated by Anne. Our cast decides to do something about Ruri's impending death this time. Ruri needs a heart transplant, and for reasons I'm not quite certain of, this requires going to America for surgery and paying 80 million yen. Anne & Co run a fundraiser, which is obviously unsuccessful at first, but then it somehow goes municipal, and they're able to raise the required funding even in this small countryside town in less than a month. One trip to the states later, Ruri has a new heart and things are looking up. Instead of agreeing to join the family, though, Ruri plans to go overseas for volunteer work. You know, this poor girl who's spent most of her life in a hospital, who's physically underdeveloped, and is probably going to live a relatively short, medication-filled life that makes her even weaker, wants to spend the rest of it for others' sake. Regardless, this quickly becomes irrelevant, because guess what? That 80 mil yen went down the drain when US healthcare fucked up and she caught some random infection during surgery, so now she has sepsis. And at some point, perhaps directly related to this, she also got rapidly developing cancer. So in the end she dies again, less than a month later than usual, and after being able to visit MC's household for a few hours. By this point you've seen her death 4 times over, including once in Ruri's own route with lots and lots of scenes dedicated to this moment, and it's happening yet again. Sure, it gives our characters, and potentially the reader, extra food for thought on the topic of life and death, but with plot structure like this, it's just boring at this point.

But things don't end here, oh no. If they did, it would just be a fairly boring utsuge with one spicy, if flawed, route (Rena). You see, Ruri has a necklace that's supposedly colored lapis lazuli (ruri in Japanese, hence the name Mizuho gave her). It's actually more like purple on CGs, but anyway. For some reason, everyone is convinced that the necklace is part of a pair, and someone out there has an identical one. And what better time for its owner to show up than here, after the credits? About a year after Ruri dies, the cast somehow manages to locate the bearer of the other necklace. It's Ruri's twin sister, Yui, who is somehow the same person Souto saw in his dream in Ruri route, even though he had never even heard of her by that point. She also appears at roughly the same time in Ruri route. For whatever the fuck reason, Ruri's identical twin doesn't have any problems with her heart or anything else, and simply lives in an orphanage in a different town. So they invite her to join the family, with literally no reason other than "you're related to Ruri", and she accepts. That's right, an ordinary person is invited into this household for people with traumatic pasts. So much for the theme of the game, that being people overcoming their traumas and achieving happiness together by supporting each other. Yui does not belong there. If anything, she feels like a cop-out, as otherwise the reader would be stuck with "damn, Ruri really is dead and there's absolutely nothing left of her", so instead you have some kind of replacement.

It also appears that the events of Rena's route don't occur in this timeline, and probably in the other non-Rena ones, as Anne doesn't know about the two's biological relation even a long time in the future.


On a side note, this game can be quite self-aware...
0 points
#1 by literallolicon
2021-08-07 at 19:49
< report >Cool review man! I also have problem with the repetition of Ruri's death lol.
The first time had me cry my eyes out, but after that, it's just fast-forwarding through all of it.