A few caveats before we start. I don’t know if playing through visual novels will be a recurring thing for the blog. As always, whenever I get bored, I go to try new things. Since I don’t usually have anything to watch on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I tend to get bored a lot. In the past, this has meant watching older anime series, but that hasn’t always been successful. Since people kept recommending Saya no Uta, however, I figured, “Hey, why not?” What’s the worst that can happen?
Ugh… of course.
“Hurr hurr she has an old soul.”
Nope, don’t give a shit. Also, I don’t know how familiar my readers are with Let’s Play’s, so let me just speak on that for just a bit. I’ve noticed that a lot of “Let’s play (visual novel)” tend to involve the author either snapping a ton of screenshots or transcribing the mountain of text for the readers to sift through. I’m not going to do that. Yes, partly because I’m lazy and I don’t want to do all that work, but also because I suspect most of this blog’s audience doesn’t really want to read every single, painful sentence from the game. Plus, if you really wanted to play the game for yourself, it’s hardly difficult to find nor is it even a very big download. So if my post (and subsequent posts) on this game isn’t enough for you, feel free to have at it yourself.
Alright, let’s get started. Meet our despondent hero:
Well, despondent is putting it lightly. Imagine how you’d feel if your entire world looked like this:
And your friends looked like this:
That’s enough to drive a normal man to suicide, right? But not our hero Fuminori. Not quite yet and we’ll get to that. For now, we get to sit with Fuminori and listen as his friends try to talk to him.
“SK%guj!%~? &YGo^#1sGjisKIREs5#%0sK473?”
Huh? Yes, apparently his friends sound like shit too… kind of. If Fuminori tries really hard, he can actually understand what they’re saying. One wonders if the same wouldn’t hold true for his vision as well. Maybe they wouldn’t look so grotesque if he actually tries to look past the noise of flesh and rotten excrement, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, why does everything look so horrific to our hero anyway? Three months ago, our hero was riding in a car with his parents when they got into a tragic car accident. His parents are obviously dead (of course), but Fuminori was cursed to live with this strange, new world. But surely, the world isn’t really like this. You’re right; it’s not:
This is how his friends really look. So there must be something wrong with Fuminori’s brain, right? Or is it something deeper? Did the accident unlock some ability within him to see The Real, i.e. “the external realm of experience” beyond the detection of our everyday sense perception. The idea merits some thought, but ultimately, it doesn’t add up. What characterizes The Real is that it “may only be experienced as traumatic gaps in the symbolic order.” In other words, The Real cannot be captured by words. It resists symbolization; it is utterly incomprehensible. Since we can also see what Fuminori’s world looks like, it must not be The Real. Perhaps what he sees is The Thing.
Before I start losing people, let me draw an analogy. Think of a human face. For us to make sense of the thousands (or more) of people we see in our lifetimes, we must make sense of the concept of the face. It is thus not merely a layer of skin atop a mass of flesh, blood, cartilage, and bone. Rather, the face constitutes a part of a person’s identity. For all intents and purposes, the face often constitutes the majority of a person’s identity. This is what we mean by the symbolic order. We make symbols out of people’s faces in order to organize and make sense of our world full of other people.
But the truth is that there’s nothing inherently special about any specific composition of a person’s face. This idea is nothing more than a human construct. Sure, certain faces are deemed more attractive than others, but the subjectivity of beauty is hardly something that can actually be located in the-thing-in-itself, i.e. the external world. Rather, we often deem certain faces pretty because they are the most normal of faces, the most average of our symbolization of faces. So if you grant that what we usually identify as a face is nothing more than a part of our symbolic order, then beneath that face is just bloody goo. That’s The Thing. The Thing cannot be fully symbolized, and thus it borders on The Real, which, again, resists all symbolization.
So has Fuminori’s accident impaired his ability to symbolically order the world? Is he now face-to-face with the grotesqueness of The Thing? Is he merely one step away from that which no human mind can comprehend? In other words, if our hero isn’t already mad, madness can’t be very far off. Still, we know that if he tries, he can understand what his friends are saying. He can also carry on conversations with his doctor. Thus, he has not completely lost his ability to symbolically order the world. Language remains a powerful tool in his disposal.
So anyway, his friends want to discuss a ski trip, but Fuminori’s too irritated by their appearance to take them seriously: “I try my best to ignore the rotten stench of excrement that issues from her quivering flesh.” To be honest, it’s a little sad really. Even if one of his friends look like something that had crawled out of the abyss, they just look, sound, smell, and probably taste ugly. They still seem like good friends deep down though. I mean, how many monsters would actually invite you to go skiing, eh? Anyway, Fuminori excuses himself from the group, because he has a doctor’s appointment coming up. Surprise, surprise, his doctor is a young and attractive woman:
For the life of Doctor Ryoko, she can’t find anything physically wrong with Fuminori, but she can’t nevertheless shake the feeling that there’s something abnormal about her patient. Fuminori cynically dismisses any of Ryoko’s attempts to help him. He’ll just lie and say there aren’t “any problems to speak of.” Instead, he’d rather ask about a certain colleague of hers: Professor Ougai. Ougai has mysteriously disappeared, and Fuminori claims he’s merely inquiring on behalf of a relative. Nevertheless, the encounter leaves Ryoko flustered.
Fuminori eventually leaves to go home, and we soon find out why he hasn’t completely given up on life. Trust me, if my world was nothing but blood and excrement, I wouldn’t hesitate to end such a pathetic existence. For our hero, however, he has nevertheless found a purpose to continue living. What gives our man so much conviction in face of all the abject horror surrounding him? What could it be?! According to Fuminori, his world looks as though “someone sprayed the walls with pig guts from ceiling to floor.” So why even bother? Who would want to live like like that? Well…
Oh come on, you gotta be kidding me! Yes, in Fuminori’s grotesque world, there is one singular source of beauty, and of course it just had to be a loli: “As I bend down to take off my shoes, Saya, as always, wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me gently into her tiny bosom.” Sweet, tiny bosoms! If you thought that was fun to read, you would love the sex scenes: “Saya’s slender hips bounce up and down like an insatiable flywheel (huh?), each descent thrusting my hard desire (read: his dilznick) into the embrace of her hot, tight womb.” Yo hentai writers, you don’t actually fuck a girl’s womb. I mean, seriously, do you guys actually know anything about what goes on down there? Secondly, how is it even remotely sexy to be fucking a woman’s womb?
The best part is that he cries after they fuck. That’s endearing. To be honest, Fuminori’s life with Saya isn’t completely devoid of meaningful content. It’s not all disturbing sex with a prepubescent-looking child. It is somewhat interesting, for instance, to see how Fuminori copes with his new existence. He tries his best to paint his home a shade of green because green pig guts are slightly more palatable than just plain ol’ pig guts. And sadly, Saya’s companionship is all Fuminori has anymore. After all, he feels utterly alone around his friends. It’s just too bad that the story can’t portray Saya’s companionship in any other way than her special ability to turn our hero’s “desire” rock hard. Oh, she cooks for him too, I guess. So she’s a child housewife.
So how did these two ever meet? When Fuminori was initially confined to his hospital bed shortly after the accident, he had to suffer alone with his newfound “sensory disorder.” One day, however, a young girl entered his room and she didn’t look like the rest of the monsters that would come and visit him. Saya, it turns out, has been living in the hospital ever since her father, Professor Ougai, had disappeared. How does a child even live in a hospital, you ask? ‘It’s so big that I never run out of hiding places,’ Saya said.” Saya’s not really that innocent either. Apparently, she found it fun to scare mental patients since no one would take them seriously. Seeing as how everyone looks like freaks to him, however, I guess Fuminori can’t be picky. In fact, he implored her to live with him once he got better. In exchange, he would investigate the disappearance of her father. Yeah… not creepy at all. In fact, I would still commit suicide in Fuminori’s position. One cute girl that I can fuck in the “womb” every night is not going to offset the fact that the rest of my life utterly sucks, and will suck for the foreseeable future. But whatever, I’m not a visual novel protagonist.
Back in the real world, Fuminori’s friends continue to try to reach him but to no avail. One of the girls, Yoh, actually has a crush on our now-misanthropic hero, but he cruelly tells her off. The incident angers one of the other friends, Omi, so she decides to pay Fuminori a visit after class. She finds his apartment door unlocked, and so she enters. Immediately, a wretched smell akin to “fish guts” assaults her senses. Omi finds that the floor is covered in some kind of weird, “olive green slime.” So clearly, even though Omi isn’t crazy at all, there’s something fucked up about Fuminori’s home, and something’s fucked up about Saya as well. Even more interestingly, it turns out Fuminori hadn’t been painting his home green after all:
“Colors. So many colors. The purple of entrails, the brown of rotten meat, the crimson of fresh blood, the yellow of fat — these colors, and yet more that cannot be described, join in a maddening array to cover every inch of the walls, floor, windows, and ceiling.”
Before long, something assaults Omi and kills her. When Fuminori returns home later that night, he finds his loli hunched over some green goo, lapping it up voraciously:
Fuminori decides to take a bite himself and finds it rather tasty. Juicy, in fact. Succulent too. He asks his child wife where she found the delicious meal. She tells him it’s been a while since she’s caught something so big. Usually, what she finds at the park is much smaller. Hm.
I actually like the part when the visual novel revisits the hospital and tells us a bit of a ghost story. Janitors would find slime in weird places. Organs have been disappearing. Cats have been disappearing. Dogs, on the other hand, simply refuse to go by the hospital. I guess the author must like dogs because he refused to kill them too. Eventually, a baby disappeared… or is it just a rumor?
Sure enough, Omi’s disappearance starts to bother her friends. Koji, Omi’s boyfriend, decides to tail Fuminori one day and follows his friend all the way to Professor Ougai’s home. There, Koji finds shit like the Voynich manuscript. Y’know, if it sounds mysterious, just throw in there whether or not it actually means anything. More importantly though, Koji finds a bathtub filled with tiny animal bones.
Again, hm. Why would someone murder so many animals, he wonders? Oh shit, watch out beyond you man!
But, perhaps for now, the two of them just talk uncomfortably for a bit — uncomfortably because Fuminori pretty much stares daggers at Koji. Having found what he set out to look for, however, our hero eventually leaves to head on home. He feels he may have to do something about Koji though, if his former friend continues to pry into his investigation. Still, he has Ougai’s medical logs that Saya wanted for some reason. An unnecessary sex scene then follows because our loli has an insatiable appetite for womb-fucking, of course. Actually, more than that.
Somehow, we’ve found the one guy in the world who used to not like oral sex… until magical sexy loli manages to change his mind: “I’ve always been prejudiced against fellatio, thinking it to be something that perverted sadistic men force women to do.” Uh huh. This sounds like one of those guys pretending to be gay to pick women up: “I’ve never been attracted to girls before, but maybe… maybe you can change me?” Afterward, our hero begins to lose it more and more: “I need to resolve once and for all to rid myself of the useless trappings of morality.” Maybe he’s becoming one of those sadistic men after all. Well, if Fuminori has trouble symbolically ordering his world, he isn’t likely to take morality seriously.
Meanwhile, we segue a bit to a neighboring family. The patriarch is starting to get a little fed up with just how much Fuminori’s apartment stinks. Still, for now, they don’t do anything. The following day, the old man is busying himself painting when that hideous smell seeps into his home. Before he can even fully investigate the source of the stench, something attacks him from beneath his sofa. He is mind-raped.
Elsewhere, Fuminori’s friends continue to investigate Omi’s disappearance and Fuminori’s new personality. They discuss Ougai with Doctor Ryoko, concluding ultimately that the missing professor must have something to do with it all.
Back to our old man! He eventually regains consciousness, but shit, his world now resembles Fuminori’s world: “The thing that attacked him in the living room — that entered his skull — it’s everywhere!” By now, it’s pretty obvious that Saya is “the thing.” Is she, however, also The Thing that we had previously discussed earlier in the post? If so, why does she retain her symbolic appearance to those like Fuminori and the old man? These are questions I hope to answer if I ever complete this game. Anyway, the old man can hardly find his bearings when he hears, “I’m home.” Enter two grotesque monsters. One calls him ‘honey’ and the other calls him ‘daddy,’ but the old man can no longer recognize such affectionate words. He immediately leaps at them with a stake and murders them both. He eventually escapes his apartment to find…
Here’s where the story gets extra dumb. Yes, now. I’m serious. Like Fuminori, the old man finds that Saya remains the only source of beauty left in a grotesque world. So what does the old man decide to do? He decides to rape her: “‘Because you’re cute!’ Yousuke roars, his breathing wild with passion. ‘You’re too pretty not to hurt; too beautiful not to break!” Fuminori eventually returns home to find his precious loli getting raped out of nowhere. Our hero goes nuts and murders the rapist:
When everyone calms down a bit, Saya reveals what she has discovered. She can force people to see what Fuminori sees. Conversely, she can return Fuminori back to his normal world. And finally, we reach our first dialogue branch in the story. Saya offers to reverse Fuminori’s condition. What will he choose to do? In fact, I’ll leave that up to you guys to decide. Where will this dumb story go? On the night of America’s presidential election, you too can choose! Should Fuminori continue on this reckless course, or should he take back what he lost in the accident?
–
You guys will have a day to vote.
In the meantime, I want to rant a bit about the visual novel format. It sucks. It’s not that it inherently sucks. I’m sure you could do something very interesting with the format, but not Saya no Uta. Unfortunately, what we’ve got here has neither the strength of books nor the strengths of films. Instead, we get an in-between product that is wholly unsatisfying. Unlike novels, the prose is dry and boring. It’s entirely predicated upon uninteresting narration and straightforward dialogue. Nothing’s being done with the prose itself to capture the imagination partly because we have some visuals to rely upon. But unlike films, the visuals are static and flat. There’s nothing profound being conveyed in the background images at all.
Most of all, the sex scenes are so pointless. It’s like, “Gee, you’ve been forced to read a mountain of text, so here’s a perfunctory romp session to keep your interest going. So even though there’s no real reason whatsoever for the old neighbor to suddenly rape Saya, it’s almost as if the story said, “Enough reading, time to reward you guys with a fap session.” Ah well.
Edit: spoilers, bro.
I’ve forgotten how Saya’s prose is compared to other VNs, but thinking about some of the better ‘pure’ visual novels, I don’t think they really gained much from not being actual novels. Like, ryukishi07 doesn’t put in *any* choices (or sex scenes), so you pretty much get mood music and sprites at the expense of having to click through paced screens of text. Not a great tradeoff.
I guess I think that the real strength of the VN format isn’t the presentation, but rather as more of a choose-your-own-adventure sort of thing, with a couple of major different alternate stories. Like Tsukihime or ever17. But then you could argue that that’s no more than a game without gameplay, and indeed some of the most fun VN-esque games have actual gameplay (Utawarerumono, Rance)
What kind of layout is email then nickname anyway…
I don’t really need gameplay or anything. As long as a “game” immerses me in its world, I’ll be happy. People bitched up and down that Heavy Rain wasn’t much of a game, but I was involved enough in the story that I didn’t care about gameplay. When the writing is this bad though, the illusion falls apart. It’d be awesome if the visual part lived up to its name, but it doesn’t either. In fact, Saya no Uta’s visuals are pretty subpar from what I can tell. It thus feels like a chore to click through all the text when at least in a novel, I can just flip to the next chapter and read on.
Thus is the greatest flaw of most visual novels, mate: the written/visual detail dichotomy.
The authors almost never (and I only say “almost” because Fate/Stay Night kinda does this right…half the time) know how they should describe things.
Should they dive into the colorful and stimulating prose? “But…we have visuals in front of the text. It kind of defeats the point.”
Should we leave the physical descriptions of things alone and leave it up to the images? “…But it’s a novel…”
Seems to me no one can fully decide how to go about things, and so we get crap like this.
Side note: Visual Novel/RPG hybrids work well in my opinion. Despite the massive grindfest and half-lame gameplay, I find Fate/EXTRA to be one of the best VN’s I’ve ever read (of the…three(?) I’ve read).
–Speaking of -crap-: Sex is exactly what you described. Why? Because most VNs are romance-driven, and the reward(s) of most contemporary romance tripe is sex between the two leads. Why add in rape (or “politely” known as “forced sex”)? Why a moe -LOLI-??
Sadly, I think it’s obvious. Hint: “[Blank] sells”
Most VN authors: “We can get away with putting in as much gore and sex as we want, so let’s blow it up, baby!”
Saya no Uta is said to be very good because of the concept of a -romance- involving something as horrifying and unknowable as a Lovecraftian being (Because I find it so interesting I’m currently planning out a story with a similar premise…minus the loli, the gore-vision, the unlikable lead, uneeded sex, etc.). However, the concept is quickly trodden on by the need to make a sale and appeal to the majority. You might find as I did there’ll be a number of small tidbits that you’ll find promising and interesting, but they get smothered beneath the shit.
You’ve just touched the tip of the Saya iceberg. Now let’s see how far you make it down…
Also, I voted for Option #2. Hopefully we vote you towards the ending I watched online.
I think the whole thing reminds me a lot of the first Hellraiser, and not very favorably in my mind. Both stories revolve around the appeal of the grotesque and the abject, but Hellraiser doesn’t pretend for a moment that the woman is really fucking Brad Pitt or anything. She literally fucks a corpse, and it tells you how far gone she has become to indulge her moral breakdown. The act of fucking a corpse is literally a fuck you to the symbolic order.
In the early going, Saya no Uta seemingly wants to make a similar point… as the main character’s relationship with Saya deepens, so does his moral order continues to deteriorate. But the story cops out. Instead of bucking tradition, i.e. fucking something truly grotesque and abject like Cthulhu or a corpse, Saya is the perfect pettanko or some shit. The story wants to have its cake and eat it too. Oh yeah, life has no meaning, who cares about morality, who cares about anything but pleasure… but uh, we’ll stop short at the girl. Make sure she conforms to anime’s ideal vision of beauty.
Indeed, mate. It’s a shame the story squanders such an idea on a romance between a grown ass man and a loli. Still, as we’ve seen by Nyaruko…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiyore!_Nyaruko-san
…Anime in general seems to have a hard-on for moe-fetishizing cosmic horrors and deities.
It could’ve been so much better with more thought and better writing (and excluding all the bullshit put in to pander, of course), but instead we get “hard” desires and “hot, tights womb”.
P.S. I forgot to mention the other reason this thing is popular, but I’m sure you know why now. A lot of the fan base (those who are actual fans who’ve read this and haven’t just listened to the OST and read the premise) think Saya is ultra kawaii.
-I have no clue about that train of thought. The idea of adoring a character just for their physical appeal has always confounded me. Like how SO many people trip over themselves for Fate/Stay Night’s villain “Gilgamesh” when he’s a conceited, selfish outspoken woman beater and rapist.
Wait, I don’t recall Gilgamesh being a wifebeater or a rapist. I cannot for the life of me remember where this could have happened.
Besides, characters like Gilgamesh are lauded not because of their backwards treatment of women but instead their confidence and shamelessness. People flock to these kinds of people because, fittingly for kings, they have charisma. Misogynistic charisma, yes, but to an audience of low self esteem nerds this is negligible.
So what you guys are saying is that I should play Fate/whateverthefuck next?
Well yeah, if you consider badly-written sex scenes and grinding through text multiple times to get to the most satisfying ending to be immense fun. Fate/Stay Night is considered to be one of the best VN’s, though.
Why go for the most satisfying ending? Why not go for my ending? It’s funny. People say that choice is what makes these visual novels enjoyable despite the terrible writing, but they also believe in this idea of a “true ending.” What’s the point of choice if you still abdicate authorship to someone else?
Can’t settle for one ending when you know that you haven’t touched at least half of the material available in the game yet.
Some visual novels try to get around the frustration of doing this by making each route you complete be relevant to the narrative of the true ending. Unfortunately this is mostly through some sort of metaphysical macguffin that connects timelines, but the effort nevertheless exists to make the format feel a bit more friendly towards you having to reread things over and over again.
F/SN is awesome. It’s also about twenty times longer than SnU, something to keep in mind if you decide to try it. It also has the same amount of sex scenes, or less than, SnU, despite being so much longer, so the mollusk writing shouldn’t be of consequence. The story branches really early, so text is not repeated for the most part; the “grind” appropriant is referring to is, I assume, the food porn scenes. Many people complain it’s wordy, but as you’ll expect, fans like myself disagree. Take of that what you will.
I suppose the attraction of VNs is the choice system, and getting the feeling that you have some sort of impact on the story. Personally, this sentiment is trivialized by the fact that the game also seems to coerce you to read all the scenes and endings (100% completion, so to speak). So your choice, in the long run, ends up having no impact at all. I think VN’s don’t have a lot of literary significance in their storytelling because the existence of multiple routes/endings makes each and every one of them a trifle. Changing your character’s fate with the click of a mouse reeks of fanfic wish fulfillment. Actually, since most VN’s are in the form of dating sims, it IS wish fulfillment.
Ever 17 and Clannad are two that I can name from the top of my head that are devoid of sexually explicit content. Both, however, require that all the routes possible are completed before the good stuff appears as a sort of true route, essentially the core of the story. That, obviously, is going to be a time sink, and even then probably not worth it.
I’m well aware of this, but surely you must also agree that the idea of choice goes out the window when it takes nearly half an hour of reading just to get to a single decision-making point. Something like Persona does a better job of giving gamers the illusion of choice… and it has a better story to boot!
That is quite true. Which is why I also posited the idea of VNs as romantic wish fulfillment when that same half-hour’s worth of text is being used to have conversations with people, usually 2D teenage-looking girls. Most if not all VNs have the protagonist falling in love with someone, and with the format of VNs, no matter how unique the protagonist is character-wise it still ends up looking as if that cute bishoujo/bishounen is talking to you directly. For certain demographics, that’s all they care about.
It’s why I always laugh at the “Is video game art?” debate. Yeah, sure, video game can be art, but most of the time, you’re just playing as yet another kickass, wise-cracking alpha male who gets all the babes with derivative gameplay. Same deal with visual novels. Can you tell a great story with this format? Sure, but not when you keep shoving convenient loli rape down my throat.
If we´re going to mention video games to begin with, I´d rather mention Devil Survivor or Megami Tensei rather than the Persona spinoff series (not that I don´t like Persona, I just think the mainline games+ Devil Survivor have better plots and more actually relevant choice). Or, if we take a non-Atlus example, how about Chrono Trigger?
Also, I´d also call every single of these games “art”. I have to admit that most games are what you described, but the very best of gaming can come close to actual literature, which is why I´m as much a gamer as ever.
To be frank, I disagree with basically everything you said, and am surprised to see the quality of the medium being dismissed. The choice system is in no way trivialized by the 100 % completion, as reading routes you don´t even like solely to get 100 % is rather… dumb. The main point in visual novels with choice is that even if a certain narrative or character appeals less to you, you can simply choose to focus on another one that is more to your liking. And it is nothing like wish fullfillment, unless you are strictly speaking about dating sims, in which case the concept of wish fullfilment isn´t even bad if the routes are done well.
I don´t think I need to explain why the format works perfectly with blank protagonists, and even for ones with an established personality, it makes sense for multiple Options to exist. Many choices are taken on a whim by people, and the VN Format uses that to its advantage by also showing us the amount of impact a seemingly irrelevant choice can have (butterfly effect). And there are certain visual novels with only bad, or multiple bad endings (Fate/SN), in which case the concept of wish fullfilment doesn´t even remotely make sense.
Visual novels may contain even more shit than other mediums, but its best works are on a level comparable to actual literature. Umineko as an example (and please don´t mention the terrible adaptation it received) manages to mix tropes from the mystery genre with fantasy, and not in the sense of ridiculing the genre, but much more deconstructing it. Combined with meta-worlds, incredible voice-acting, the ability to go through it at your own pace (which is the primary reason why visual novels can include more details than anime, while retaining visuals), the fantastic music, complex characters and a well-thought-out narrative, not many anime have managed to come close to it. I could mention others like more gameplay-y ones like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, but even if we just look at visual novels without much in the way of gameplay, we still get masterpieces like Subarashiki Hibi or Muv luv Alternative.
Or Steins Gate, of which the VN version is far better than the anime, to the point of being among my favorite science fiction stories.
About Clannad, the side routes were better than the trou route in my opinion, as Nagisa was simply way too obnoxious to be able to care. I didn´t even finish her route, I just did the ones I could get interested in. Not that Í particularly like Clannad to begin with, so meh.
I don’t read walls of text, such eroge is [b]boring[/b]. I am surprised you can spend your time on this. Good eroges should involve adventuring, battling, subduing the females whether they are humans / elves / spirits / succubus, and make them your woman. Hell yeah! Good ones : Sengoku Rance, Kamidori Alchemy Meister, Himegari Dungeon Meister.
Boredom is a helluva drug.
I’m curious how you’ll handle the choices. You’ve put up a vote, but the thing is that SnU has only three possible endings and two choices, both bringing the story to an abrupt closure. If you get the “immediate end without further explanation”, what will you do? And if not, why not just cover it anyway, it’s just five or ten minutes’ worth of content?
Yeah, it doesn’t really use the VN format well. FSN had 30+ of those minor endings and 3 major paths, Saya has one major path and 2 minors. Most VNs also opt for backgrounds with character sprites placed on top of them, changing as the conversation progresses, while SnU goes for static images – probably due to its length. I found it a fresh approach to visuals and a definite improvement in terms of character art, if a step back when it comes to background art and image count in general.
Glad to see you taking this title on. Less glad that you’re not ecstatic about it (heheh), but guess I can’t have my cake and eat it too.
This is more of a practice run for if I ever do other visual novels. One of my friends is pushing hard for me to play the pigeon one.
Yeah, that’s not exactly something I’m yearning for either. I just want the visuals to be interesting. There’s nothing too imaginative in Saya no Uta though.
It has a few nice ideas, and I don’t even disdain sex, but the sex is so obviously shoehorned into the story as a way to appeal to a very specific crowd that the story loses all sense of its integrity.
“One of my friends is pushing hard for me to play the pigeon one.”
Hahaha~! You have a great friend there! No sarcasm.
Complaining about sex scenes in an eroge is like complaining about sex scenes in a porn movie. Players buy this kind of game to fap, while being intellectually stimulated at the same time. If the sex scenes really disturb you, just skip them (most VNs actually have an option to skip erotic content). SnU has a very interesting story despite its eroge nature.
On the subject of choices, when I play a VN for the first time I just take whatever choice I like, but I always save the game state before the choice so that I can go back and take the other route later (I am a completionist). I think that having multiple routes is one of the appeals of the VN format. Consider the various routes as alternate universes. The writer often tells you which one is the True Route anyway.
I could say the same about you always coming here to disagree with me.
Besides, your argument is simplistic. Pornos are 95% porn, 5% everything else. Saya no Uta might be considered an eroge, but its fans aren’t exactly praising the sex scenes first and foremost, huh? So if the narrative is so great, why can’t we criticize anything that might detract from the narrative?
Eroge/porn movie seems like a really off comparison to me. Like E Minor alluded to, the ratio of porn to non-porn in a porno movie is quite different than the ratio of porn to non-porn in an eroge.
I think a better comparison to be made is the Harlequin Romance novel. And people might complain about a sex scene in a Harlequin Romance novel in they think it detracts from the broader narrative.
With Saya no Uta I feel that it does have a great story to tell, but because it was also obliged to have sexy children stuff, you get the two sides awkwardly spooning so the weight of the story gets diminished severely.
I somewhat agree on the problem with the VN, Scamp, but I think it’s more than that. I’ve read chunks of it since I first heart about it, and I have to say that, from what I’ve seen, the major problem is the writer didn’t really know what to do with the ideas they had. The author had a handful of interesting bits and themes but didn’t know how to string them together into a proper narrative. They ended up just filling in the gaps with gross chunks of nonsense. Wish they had more sense in how they wrote, too, since even if it’s a tenuous romance there should never be any “womb fucking”. I mean, which is the writer more concerned with: writing an interesting story or writing a generic hentai?
I will admit though that it had a lot of promise, and if someone patched it so you could skip the pandering nonsense (or just edited that stuff out), you would get much more of the flavor the premise has to offer (though the problem of Saya being a child would still be there… Hm).
-That main song for the VN is fantastic, too. It shows how the story should’ve gone, in my opinion. Things start out normal and innocent, then become twisted and dark as more is revealed! Too bad the story just slaps you in the face with the twisted from the get-go, thus ruining the tension and suspense it could’ve had if the author had done things with more nuance and cleverness.
“Fuminori eventually leaves to go home, and we soon find out why he hasn’t completely given up on life. Trust me, if my world was nothing but blood and excrement, I wouldn’t hesitate to end such a pathetic existence.”
If I was him, I’d freaken tell the doctor that something is wrong with me. I don’t get why he’s lying about that. If there’s even a slight chance they can fix me, I’d take it. Suicide only if nothing can be done.
From what I can gather, he sees himself as a failure for some reason — a laughing stock somehow that he ended up with this mental disorder.
There’s no shame in admitting that you’re just plain not old enough to properly appreciate this stuff you know. Or moe for that matter. You seem to watch a lot of shounen anime and this may come as a surprise, but most of those moeblob slice of life animes are aimed at older males. As in, you’re not the target demographic for those shows, which is probably why you don’t appreciate them, because they were never meant for your age group in the first place.