VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 3: Higa

Oftentimes when I'm playing an otome someone becomes a lot more interesting along the way, even though they aren't who my character is currently pursuing, but that didn't happen with Bad Apple Wars. I was entertained with White Mask even when he was being a self-sacrificial dumbass, and while the other romance options seemed like fine enough people (barring Satoru who I actively found off-putting), I wasn't raring to see their storylines... except maybe Alma's, but not enough that I was going to change my mind about saving him for last.

That left me with Higa and Shikishima if I wanted to do the Bad Apple route, and knowing what I learned after playing through White Mask's route multiple times to get everything, I knew I would have to just suck it up and pick one of them preemptively so I could use a walkthrough and avoid too much replay. I chose Higa.

Unlike with White Mask, Higa's portion of the common Bad Apple route doesn't feel like it overwhelms the shared scenes. There's clearly a lot going on that Higa has nothing to do with and he doesn't feel that prominent even in the scenes specific to him, probably because he has a huge amount of Alma worship. Higa knows he's not much of a thinker, so even if he can't understand the reasoning behind Alma's decisions, he'll back them 100%. What he does best is fight. He just needs Alma to point him where.

One thing I didn't particularly like though is that Higa is supposed to be sold as a scary guy who's actually pretty nice, but even though he talks like an old school delinquent, he doesn't actually do anything scary, nor does he look particularly scary. White Mask is scary because he you can't see his face and he will invade Rinka's personal space when he is less than pleased with her. Higa doesn't do any of that. He just talks blunt and expects Rinka to talk bluntly in return (since he's not brainy enough to want to read between the lines). I could see her calling him rude, or even intimidating, but I can't buy scary.

His big hang up is that he wants to be needed by the people he cares about, and places their needs over his own. In fact his bad ending takes this to an unhealthy extreme where he refuses to question Alma's depression, and is only too happy to accept that Rinka needs him, because it makes him feel like he has a purpose.

The dividing line between Higa's good and bad ending routes felt a little odd though. White Mask's bad ending was ridiculously easy to trigger since touching him anywhere other than a couple specific spots during Soul Touch would trigger a bad reaction, and considering how emotionally broken he was, that was unsurprising. But I don't understand why Higa's bad spots were bad, since they didn't seem to have anything to do with the story.

And the good ending changes the final two sets of memories that Rinka gets from Higa, particularly the latter of the two. Higa's last memory is in his hospital bed after the car accident where he saved a little kid's life. Since he's dying, he's not entirely sure what his older brother is saying to him, but he knows from the tone of voice that his brother is both sad and angry. Higa takes this to mean his brother was disappointed in him, and that despair follows him into the afterlife at NEVEAH.

However, in a moment that makes no sense because Rinka is only supposed to see memories and not what really happened, when she Soul Touches with Higa she gets a unmuddied version of the memory and we learn that Higa's brother really admired him, and his anger and disappointment was directed at himself. Through Soul Touch Rinka is able to relay that unclouded memory to Higa, which in turn lifts his spirits and allows him to literally punch Alma out of his depression so the Bad Apples can get back on track for the finale.

(Alma gets depressed after Sanzu's disappearance in White Mask's route too, so I'm guessing his depression is going to be a thing on everybody's route.)

I do like the confession moment between Rinka and Higa though. Rather than having them act on their feelings in a climactic moment where there's an audience to see them break the inappropriate relationship rule, it's just the two of them in Rinka's room preparing for the graduation ceremony. They acknowledge they have feelings for one another, even though they can't say the word love because of the academy limits, and they kiss. The forbidden apple appears and disappears as usual, and it's all very private, though Higa later reports in to Alma to let him know they broke the rule and that he and Rinka are now dating. And in a very Higa moment, he also makes an announcement to let everybody in the Bad Apples know they're dating.

I have to admit I wasn't sure where Higa's good ending was going to go. Since I'd played White Mask first, and he turned out to have come from the same time period as Rinka (apparently dying within minutes of her), their happy ending was easy to see coming, since the both of them returning to life would result in them being alive and in high school at the same time. Higa, however, was born in the 1950s, and while we don't know precisely which year Rinka is from, I think it's a fair assumption that she was born around 2000, give or take, since the game's Japanese release was in 2015 and Rinka is starting her first year of high school.

This meant that returning to life would place them fifty years apart from each other. And while Higa is not the only love interest with this problem (Alma being born fifteen years after Higa and Shikishima being from the Taisho era), he was certainly the first route I played that had to address it.

Amusingly, Higa is acutely aware that if they get expelled from NEVAEH and he were to go look for her afterwards, he would look really creepy due to the age difference, even though Rinka tells him "it is what it is."

And it's after this that his route does another asspull (after the previous one with the memory that shouldn't exist).

While playing catch with Rinka and a few of the Bad Apples and having a good time, a chime sounds and the world lights up like when Sanzu had her early graduation. Higa realizes this is his time to go, but no one really understands why since they were just playing catch and not breaking any rules. The game attempts to explain the game of catch as a metaphor for passing love on from one to another, but it doesn't quite come together (especially since kissing does not cause a similar reaction), and the upshot is that Higa graduates via special graduation, promising that one day he'll see Rinka again.

Interestingly, this results in the ninth chapter of his route taking place completely without him, as Rinka and the other Bad Apples crash the graduation ceremony to finish up the job of getting the forbidden apple. As in White Mask's route, Rinka gives the Rotten Apple a talking to, in order to get it to transform into forbidden apples for everyone, but the speech doesn't quite work this time around because she talks about how she's tired of limits and specifically mentions the exam, which she aced because for some reason never explained, limits don't apply to her. And then without another thought or even a good-bye to her fellow Bad Apples, she eats the forbidden apple and away she goes. (Even in White Mask's route she at least looked around at her friends a bit before leaving!)

As I suspected when Higa had a special graduation, Rinka returns to life and to her new school only to bump into the reborn version of him, Katsumi Higa, who talks like a more modern teenager instead of an old school delinquent (though still with the same attitude). He doesn't have his memories of NEVEAH, but he and Rinka click pretty fast, and in the epilogue we learn that he is actually his own nephew, having been reborn as the son of his older brother. And thematically it's nice that Katsumi Higa is able to fulfill the promise the older Higa brothers had made to each other about going to the nationals in high school baseball.

I found Higa's route to be rather dull in the beginning, particularly during the common route, and the romance wasn't really working for me. Rinka constantly felt lame and overly apologetic, and Higa came across as more of an older brother figure than a potential boyfriend (though they were goofy great together during the fashion show). His last two Soul Touches, which are supposed to be very intimate scenes, didn't feel like it at all. Though Higa's route eventually pulls the relationship together without feeling forced, it also feels rather late, since we don't get to spend much time with them before they're forced apart by Higa's graduation.

Not having enough time together is not a problem exclusive to Higa's route (White Mask certainly had tons of drama that separated him from Rinka), but it's just the way that it's handled that bothers me since it felt so arbitrary, and gives me some concern about how the age gap going to be handled with Alma and Shikishima since they are similarly much older than Rinka in terms of when they are born.

Next week I'll be covering Shikishima, who I figured would be a good midpoint play, since he's not a Bad Apple (with caps) himself and he's the closest thing to a middle ground between the two sides.