Review of Ano Harewataru Sora yori Takaku
| Subject | Ano Harewataru Sora yori Takaku Farther Than the Blue Sky |
| By | Helpfulness: 9 Vote: 7alonesome on 2020-09-14 |
| Review | Overall, this was a game that I found quite enjoyable, and I thought was especially interesting because it's such an uneven work. There are parts of it that are really genuinely excellent and capture everything I love about its genre, but also parts that are really not that great and meaningfully diminish its quality as a whole. One of the biggest appeals of this text is the "design story" that it is centered around, and I absolutely adore this theme - one where there's a really tangible "goal" and the narrative centers around a group of like-minded people all coming together and striving towards this improbably lofty ambition. It's a great device that allows for some really kinetic storytelling, and explores a lot of themes that I'm especially fond of. I also have a personal theory that the creators tend to be able to do a much better job telling such stories since they're "writing what they know" and imbuing the narrative with their own lived experiences of working on creative, team-based projects themselves. The central conflict of rocket development almost beggars a comparison to its much more popular, aeronautically-inclined cousin Konosora, and for what it's worth, Byakko does a much better job of executing on its design story conceit and generally does pretty damn great job of hitting all the right beats when it comes to this aspect, with it being the consistently best part of the text. The beats are by no means especially original - an unlikely group of friends comes together, struggles against odds, deals with failure, and fights with each other while ultimately growing closer as they reach towards their common goal, but the execution is very fine indeed. Byakko does a phenomenal job of not only teaching you about the science and mechanics of rockets, but also imbuing you with the same sense of mystique and romanticism for rocketry that all the characters have. Each of the four routes foregrounds a different aspect of building a rocket such as engineering the airframe or creating the propellant, and each feature plenty of design story "good-stuff", from experimentation and failure, creative iteration, coming up with novel solutions, etc. all backed up with very seemingly solid science and robust explanations - including a TIPS menu with a extensive glossary of rocketry terminology. It's certainly quite possible that a lot of this plot might be hopelessly boring if you don't have any interest in rocket science, but I found it all fairly interesting, and I certainly didn't have any background in it beforehand. I think all you really need is a healthy amount of intellectual curiosity and an open mind, and the text should be able to do the rest~ The story also hits very nicely on another really important aspect of these types of story, being those really emotionally rousing and stirring beats. There are certain moments like Arisa's speech during her route, and a few moments in the common and true route that you'll just absolutely know when you see them. It's those moments of shared sorrowful pathos or joyful elation, those moments of euphoric mutual recognition that sweeps aside all other interpersonal relations, that sympathetic connection borne from single-minded devotion and passion, that upwelling of inspirational, aspirational affect that just motivates you and makes you want to create. It hits totally different than the emotional climax of nakige, but it gets you right in the feels all the same. These moments are pretty far and few between in Byakko, but that it has any at all is a good testament to its quality storytelling. Would that it were possible to overlook its flaws, Byakko would genuinely be a truly great work. Unfortunately, I feel like its issues have a real inherency with the rest of the text - unlike a lot of other stories where I feel like you could strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the script and get a tighter, more focused, and overall better work, I don't feel like you could do the same with Byakko, and for better or worse, you're stuck with what it has to offer as a complete package. Most of the issues I have are with its moege elements, but unfortunately, this moege conceit is such a fundamental part of the text as opposed to a merely tacked-on inclusion. It's every bit as much a pure moege as it is a dedicated design story about rocket science, and so I can't even imagine what it would be like if you only retained the really good bits about developing rockets. One of the largest culprits is the protagonist himself, who ends up being a considerable stain on the enjoyability of the text. While plenty of VNs suffer from having ultra-competent ubermensch protagonists, I feel like Byakko leans too far in the other direction and creates an MC who, while certainly not generic, is primarily defined and characterized vis-à-vis his universally recognized stupidity, while not being especially funny or charming in compensation either. Having to parse the story through the interiority of a character that's written to be intentionally idiotic simply isn't pleasurable to read, and he often feels like a lazy device for the writers to exposit dumbed-down rocket science such that even a chimpanzee could understand. This also has the effect of reducing a lot of character interactions with the MC to being very similar; getting smacked for asking dumb questions, getting teased by sexual innuendo, eliciting eye-rolls for being a donkan, etc. It also means that many of the conflicts in the narrative are directly caused by the MC's incompetency as opposed to more interesting sources such as ideological disagreements or interpersonal conflict. In order for him to have some actual redeeming role, there also ends up being some pretty silly plot contrivances, like his causing one of the girls to have a eureka moment while spouting nonsense, or spontaneously defusing tensions and inspiring camaraderie with his good-natured idiocy. This isn't to say that the heroines themselves fare too much better either - they're likewise all extremely one-note and overwhelmingly defined by their singular character schticks of being abusively tsuntsun, the weirdo my-pace girl, the taciturn kuudere, etc. rather than feeling like compex, well-realized characters with any actual agency. This rather unfortunate combination of the painfully stupid MC, uninspired and conventional heroines, repetitive character dynamics, and really ecchi sensibilities of the novel (introducing every single heroine with a panchira? Seriously game, you can do better than that...) all combine to create moege beats that aren't especially bad or even necessarily below average, but by no means good either. One of the bigger casualties ends up being the tonal coherency of the text, as the confluence of its moege storytelling and its design story beats combines to create some really bizarre tonal tension where serious info-dumps and plot developments are juxtaposed with really over-the-top silly comedy and tonally jarring fanservice interludes. The very existence of the heroine routes themselves is also sort of problematic, with how repetitive the plotting in each route becomes. It's conceptually a really nice device to allow you to learn more about different aspects of rocket science, but the execution could certainly have been improved. The structure and pacing of each route is nearly identical, which makes getting through all of them and unlocking the true route somewhat tiresome. All of the routes even resort to the same exact dumb development where MC has a random epiphanic flash of insight while having sex and comes up with a brilliant solution to the intractable engineering problem they're facing. But I suppose there's not many options for natural story development and redeeming moments when you've written yourself into a corner by making MC dumb as bricks... Overall though, despite its flaws, I still do think Byakko is pretty interesting and worthwhile. The true route is by far the best part of the story and hits some really nice highs without ever overstaying its welcome, and you'll definitely walk away from this VN with that characteristic uplifting, "feel-good" mood that most moege aspire towards, not to mention a ridiculous amount of useless random knowledge about rockets. However, I'm not too sure who I'd really recommend this novel to - it's in a sort of weird, liminal place between moege and plotge such that I feel like unless your tastes in fiction are especially omnivorous, there's likely to be significant parts that you'll end up disliking. Originally posted on Reddit WAYR. |
| 9 points |