Review of Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo YU-NO
| Subject | Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo YU-NO |
| By | Helpfulness: 6 Vote: 5tertyyy on 2020-10-19 |
| Review | YU-NO was an extremely influential visual novel being the one that popularized the multiple route murder mystery. Unfortunately due to its age many aspects of the novel feel very dated even compared to some of its contemporaries. The romantic drama in each route feels incredibly contrived and relies on extremely cliche problems and nonsensical miscommunication between characters. Most of the heroines don't get a lot of depth and feel pretty forgettable. There are two exceptions to this, Mio and Kanna, but the relationships in their routes feel sidelined by the greater mystery which doesn't end up making up for this. The multiple routes don't actually play off of each other very well and simply focus on a single aspect of the story and leave most of the real answers to the true route. This might have been fine except for the fact that the true route is very clearly rushed and feels like an outline for a route. This is a shame because if the true route was given more time to develop it would have been really interesting and could have raised the quality of the whole story. Takuya also should be mentioned as he represents many of the problems with the whole story. He suffers from a severe lack of agency as the player is doing most of the exploring and solving to progress the plot, but for some reason he doesn't seem to acknowledge that he is actively trying to find his father. Takuya just seems to walk to random areas and stumble into plot relevant events even though it makes no sense for him to be there. He constantly get jerked around by the story without it ever justifying why. Additionally, all of Takuya's character growth is left for the true route which, as mentioned above, is extremely rushed. This dampens his development as none of his changes feel earned. Overall this was a very disappointing novel and I can't bring myself to forgive its flaws because of its age. |
| 6 points |