Review of Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi.
| Subject | Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 7buruma on 2023-03-18 |
| Review | Sometimes, I feel bad when I conquer another heroine. Am I betraying the one I conquered before? Sometimes, I wonder about how much resolve the protagonist of a VN is able muster to protect the girl he loves. Often, he is willing to die in order to save her. Often, he does die, and that across different routes for different heroines. He proclaims "I would never look at another woman than you" and "I will love you eternally", but says that to every heroine of that Novel. It makes me wonder about what true love is. If the few different choices here and there I make for the hero can have such a great effect upon him that it decides who he is willing to die for, is love a cheap thing to achieve? Is the hero someone without his own character, my self-insert? Or is the butterfly effect so terrifying that a few things done differently can alter the mindscape of a person in such a drastic way? Or is it just that Visual Novels drastically exaggerate the way decisions can alter our lives in order to give the reader agency in the story and real life is but a staircase, where after each step there is no choice of where to go but the next step? Those are questions I sometimes ask myself. Totono tries to be a story about some of these questions. Because of this, I am already able to appreciate the various themes of the story. I found Totono to be quite a decent experience, but nowhere near perfect. Good(abbreviated): I like meta-narratives, the male friend of the hero is funny, Aoi is cute. Bad: One thing I disliked was the way it tried to frame me as immoral for making Miyuki come together with the protagonist, only to throw Miyuki to the side in Aois route. For me, however, the method the developers have chosen to try and make me reflect upon my actions is completely misguided. That is because you have to complete Miyukis route to play Aois. I never wanted to date Miyuki. She seems bland to me, as the game never makes me like her. Making her fawn over cats is not enough personality. To me it even seems like quite the achievement to make me so disinterested in her, since I usually like childhood friends in Novels a lot. I tried to make choices I thought would lead me to Aoi, but while avoiding the bad ends you end up dating Miyuki anyway. So after enduring having to complete Miyukis route, I am finally able to enjoy Aois route. The story then progresses into what makes other people compare Totono to Doki Doki Literature Club. There, I get confronted: "How could you, dating Miyuki, proclaiming eternal love to her, make her not be able to love anyone but me, etc. only to then cheat on her with Aoi! Is this a game to you? Do you enjoy playing with peoples feelings like that?" Fuck you, game. You MADE me do it. So I don't see how I should feel bad about what "I did", because I am not the one who made the game that way. So the message only applies to other games than Totono, since here I did not choose to play different routes, but was forced into another one than the one I intended. I do, however, appreciate the effort, since such narratives tend to be complicated to do correctly. I played the censored Steam version so I may have missed whatever great stuff is supposed to be in the sex scenes, so forgive me for not knowing about some things you may know about, like further characterization or something. |
| 0 points |