Hey y'all. Welcome back to my impressions of KoiChoco. I now barreled through all of the rest of the Chisato route over two days time. Let's Jam!!!
Here are the rules for my play so you know what to expect from this portion:
- If I didn't talk about it much in Isara's route, I will only reference it here when needed - around 1 hour of this session was almost exactly the same between both routes (up to the point I ended at)
- I will be spoiling a particular element of Chisato's route that I knew from the Anime that ties directly into Isara's route and was intended to be the first major reveal of the original Doujin release from 2010
- I will not be referencing the Anime adaptation that much unless something was drastically changed (like what happened with the introduction to the Ketoku between both being tonally different)
- I may also have fewer posts here with longer sessions per post due to how much both routes will share
- I won’t be focusing as much on the individual subplots unless relevant for a point; I hope to mostly focus on visual design choices or particular moments that I felt strongly about
- These rules may apply to other routes
General Thoughts
The vast majority of the Anime adapted this route with tiny pieces of other routes sprinkled in (haven't gotten to those parts yet), so very little of its plotting and twists surprised me on their own. The implementation and the moments that weren't adapted were where the best parts laid. This is hopefully not going to be a massively long post.
Isara basically became a non-character on this route with only a few moments where she had direct agency and wasn't bouncing off of other people. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet because I haven't seen how she was portrayed in the other routes. Her best moment was just a simple line where she nicely said she "loved" Yuuki but was glad he and Chisato became a thing. Without playing the other route first, most players probably wouldn't have caught it because of where the line was delivered in its scene, despite how straightforward and unambiguous it was.
Michiru had more of a direct purpose in the story than she did in the Isara route, which definitely surprised me, although, when I get to her route, I have a thought that might tie directly into this route with how a particular scene was storyboarded. Oboro surprisingly barely had any gay jokes involving him in this latter part of the route, meaning that one could interpret the massive inclusion of them in the Isara one as the developers possibly equating choosing her over Chisato as a bad thing if you view it in a specific light.
The latter half of this entire route could be problematic for some players. It's a series of escalations of insane events and plot twists that could be too much, especially since they set up mysteries that get answered in other routes. It was a little much for me in the adaptation but was a bit excessive in its original format once it began.
The ASP Reporter Needs Love
In both routes, this character came across as somewhat antagonistic until after the polls for the preliminaries. This bottom picture was such a wonderful line. Yuuki had asked which gender was the real one, and they made this statement without any irony. Even though Yuuki kept being confused about this since every time they met, they were dressed differently, but I never felt it was actively a joke in the same way as Oboro being gay was or some of the other ones that were shown throughout. This could change in the other routes but I hope to find out exactly what's going on there and to possibly get a bit of backstory to them.
I Never Thought I Needed This In My Life
The context for this scene barely matters here. Both Non-chan and Yuuki were running late for some crazy scheme involving one of her inventions and the monkey duo came in as a gag that turned into something pretty epic with how bombastic the music was. This scene was reused multiple times with different characters riding on the back seat and scene transitions, cutaways of character's faces and little changes to the clouds and expressions gave quite a bit of motion to this static image.
These two do not belong in this visual novel. They are too pure and innocent for the amount of shit that they get put through. I love their mad levels of stupidity and cheesy one liners like this.
Don't Make Non-chan Angry
I won't give the full context here for this scene but know that she was actually showing murderous intent. Someone she was on a first name basis with (big sign of respect in Japanese culture) betrayed her in a heinous way; this was not played for laughs but instead was pretty terrifying. I wish I had goggles like those, by the way. She's worn them for most of this route.
Non-chan is best girl. If the PSP port has a full translation, I'd possibly route her for the laughs (since she was what replaced the sex scenes in that release). Lewding her is apparently a taboo in the game's fandom. What is wrong with people? Must protect her!!!
Again, I Never Thought I Needed This In My Life
It's not made directly apparent, but these two could possibly have started dating after an earlier scene where they didn't seem to get along that well. In this session, they started at least hanging out and were frequently together in various scenes but also kind of vanished from the story a good bit outside of where they were needed. This scene had me laughing with how both voice actresses performed their lines and how Isara kind of wiggled into the scene while saying her lines in monotone (which was definitely a nice little way to show she was being accepted by and fitting into Shokken).
Sex is an Amusing Farce, I Tell You
One of my theories about why Isara's sex scenes were the way they were was confirmed here. The sex happens when it makes sense in the story while also being awkward as all hell. The Chisato ones had jokes thrown in and there was a full conversation that was a bit more intimate and personal than the Isara ones (due to the history of both characters involved), but neither felt like they were really for the enjoyment of the audience in the way that lesser works that only wanted to focus on such had been. I hope the rest are the same way because they've been fairly inoffensive so far and weren't actively ruining my experience the way some have in other Eroge I've played.
Now, Let's Get Spicy (Trigger Warning)
The context for this scene along with how the sex happens could rub quite a few players the wrong way. Again, this was the first Doujin from its developer back in 2010; I can give a bit of a pass. Writing a story with this type of context for one of its major plot elements in the canon route probably will be massively criticized in today's political climate. It may have had some detractors back then too.
For the past decade or so that Yuuki and Chisato have been neighbors and very close to each other, he's actively been a replacement for her younger brother (Daiki-kun) who died in a car accident before they met. Yuuki almost died a few days prior, so Chisato moved into his home with him and had been sleeping in his bed so that she could make sure he was always protected. The game never made it a joke that she was mentally unstable from that trauma but is mostly a fully functional member of society with quirks that primarily only applied to and were seen by him.
It wasn't made super clear the full requirements for both of them to become a couple in either the Anime or Visual Novel in this scene; it was further explained in the epilogue while they were both at Daiki’s grave several weeks later but that was never brought up in the adaptation. Taken in a fairly literal sense, one could read her desires as wanting to have sex with her dead brother through Yuuki. On the contrary, Yuuki's lines could be read as him asking her to choose her mental illness or him. How he went about forcing her to step forward and start moving on from it could definitely be upsetting for certain audiences; he pushed her away, told her no to their chocolate ritual, and asked her to either eat it (chocolate was a big trigger for her and her coping mechanism was his consumption of it) or leave him forever. He locked himself in his room and left her in shock to cry alone in his living room.
What made it worse was the context of how the sex occurred: she was not in a great state of mind and he wanted to show her his "love" so that they could lock their relationship in. His thoughts and actions were those of someone who cared deeply about her, and she was consenting, but it still could be viewed in a predatory, uncomfortable light. I don't think the writers intended to convey "Fix ones trauma through sex and ultimatums" but the text was there in the scene (definitely not sharing due to full frontal nudity involved). There's other things that could possibly be problematic for the same affected audiences, but these were the main ones that came up first and were most talked about by those that had played it all the way through in the few online sources I’ve come across.
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts here, and I'll be continuing to post in the future as I go. What were your thoughts? Are you also playing this? Leave your comments below, vote and reblog. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful night.