VN Talk: Our Life: Beginnings & Always

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Mac/Linux/Android)
Release: 2020

I wasn't initially interested in Our Life: Beginnings & Always because I heard about it through otome circles and it's an indie game with a single love interest, which to me screams "railroad" and what if I don't like the guy?

But calling Our Life an otome might be pigeonholing it (and notably the developer refrains from using the term). For one thing, you don't have to be a girl. You get to choose your protagonist's pronouns at the start of the game. For another, having a romance is not required and you can go through the game completely platonic. Our Life is really a game following the life of your protagonist and that of their neighbor, Cove Holden, as they grow from children to adults.

Instead of making a number of choices that culminates in a romance, the player remains in control of their protagonist's feelings and in turn Cove's (whose level of interest will mirror the player's), so the game is only as touchy as you like it to be. The base story takes place over ten years, following the protagonist and Cove from eight to eighteen, and focuses on three summers of their lives.

The player can set the tone for their relationship with Cove at the start of each segment of the game, so it's possible to have love at first sight, or to have a more distant relationship that eventually warms up. My own playthrough ended with them being very close friends, and I'd like to think with romance potential, but not quite crossing that line. This wasn't entirely intentional, but I think it played out nicely enough.

There is a surprisingly long tutorial at the start of the game that is worth reading just because the level of control the player has is unusual, and the player can make adjustments to how they feel about Cove between game segments to show the progression of their relationship.

Despite reading that, I didn't realize the player was intended to change things to reflect how they felt about Cove, so I spent the first two arcs of the story as nervously indifferent because I thought that's what the game was setting it to and my in-game choices pointed to that. (In-game choices do matter and the game will remember a fair number of them from your choice in beverage to how you react to Cove on the day you meet. It's just they won't change your attitude after a timeskip.)

After I figured it out though, I like the system. Because the game crosses over so many years, it's not unexpected that the protagonist's feelings towards Cove might change over time and we're simply not there to witness it. Allowing the player to adjust their feelings lets things change over the years we don't get to see. So even though my protagonist wasn't friends with Cove when they were younger, they eventually become close friends in high school, which is believable as people change over time and circumstances might have placed them a lot closer to each other than when their parents were trying to set up playdates with them.

The choices the player comes across during the game are also widely varied. There are some that likely don't mean anything (what you put on your crepe), others that the game will remember (any dietary restrictions), and some that don't appear to affect the story but simply allow the player to express the kind of person they are (whether or not they accept or offer help). Many times there's also the option to say nothing at all if you want to be the awkward person at a loss for words. Our Life is extremely accommodating so you can self-insert to a large degree without feeling out of character.

One thing I'd really like to mention is that Our Life is incredibly LGBTQIA friendly. The players' parents are two women, referred to as Mom and Mommy/Ma (she changes to Ma after Mommy feels a little too kiddy for their daughters) and the player is free to choose their sexuality and gender identity. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the player also has the option to be trans and deal with gender dysphoria as a teenager, and it's left up to them whether they want to share their sexuality and identity with Cove, regardless of what the player eventually settles on.

Cove himself changes based on his experiences throughout the game (influenced by the player's choices), which likely resulted in the header image I chose for this post. I was really surprised to see him come out as demisexual, which I've rarely seen used in real life or fiction, but it felt completely in character.

Though there isn't really a main plot to speak of, being a series of vignettes that happen over the years, the writing feels pretty realistic for characters no matter which age bracket they happen to be in. Cove at eight feels different from Cove at eighteen, and yet there are parts of his core personality that carry through so you can see that he's still the same person, just grown up.

Because of the lack of a central plot this isn't the sort of game I'd normally play, but it was a pleasant enough ride. If you're in need of something wholesome, where people will ultimately stick together during their troubles, Our Life easily scratches that itch. My only real quibble is that the trailer advertises four summers and fifteen years, but the base game is three summers and ten years. The Step 4 that moves the player and Cove to 23-year-olds will be DLC and probably will not release until the middle of the 2021, based on the developer's comments on Steam.

The base game itself is free though, so one can hardly argue the price! There are also paid DLC packs to add optional additional scenes to the first and second summers (and eventually the third summer as well) for those who would like to support the game further.

VN Talk: Hatoful Boyfriend

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on PS4/PS Vita/Android/iOS/Mac/Linux)
Release: 2012 (original), 2015 (HD)

I actually marked Hatoful Boyfriend off as completed back in 2015 because I tried it, got a ending that wasn't the bad one, and then due to the completely arbitrary nature of some of choices (including stat raising), I ended up getting the same ending for my second playthrough even though I was aiming for different birds. Annoyed, I shelved it as done without bothering to play the rest of the game.

But, one of my friends is a big Hatoful Boyfriend fan and I knew that there was a lot of the game I was missing, so I decided to go back and give it another shot. This time, armed with a walkthrough, I went through all endings to unlock the Bad Boys Love route and see the craziest part of what most people call a "pigeon dating simulator."

And it's really not that you're falling in love with pigeons.

There are clues throughout the game that the world is our own, but set in the future after most of humanity has been wiped out. The teenage player character, default name Hiyoko, is a hunter gatherer and she even makes a reference to having hunted for her breakfast before the first day of class. She also lives in a cave, making it clear that her life isn't close to the present day human lifestyle we enjoy, and the birds currently participate in. (Oddly enough, and it's commented on, the sentient birds of the game have patterned a lot of their society off of humans, so they have things like high schools and school sporting events like the three-legged race that are so much worse for birds than humans.)

As you go through some of the routes, we learn more about the history of humans and birds, and that some birds aren't comfortable with the remaining humans. Hiyoko being allowed into the prestigious all-pigeon high school is supposed to be an experiment in whether humans and birds can truly get along (and if she doesn't find a love interest, then the bad ending plays, which results in the experiment being called a failure and Hiyoko is killed). She's also an experiment set up to fail as the birds financially responsible for running the school actually want a war between birds and humans so they have cause to wipe out what's left of humanity.

There's really a lot more to Hatoful Boyfriend than romancing birds!

But you have to go through most of the romances to unlock the BBL route, and you have to go through all of them (sometimes twice if they have multiple endings) if you want the epilogue to BBL. With nine birds, that's a lot romancing if you want to see everything, and it's not all that straightforward.

Oftentimes the player is confronted with a choice of where they'd like to spend their time, and there will be birds at those locations, but there's no way to know ahead of time that Ryouta will be in the cafe or Yuuya in the infirmary until the player actually goes there. Some characters require player stats to be at a certain level for their full endings, but it's not possible to know which is best until it's too late to make a difference. It's for those reasons I relied on a walkthrough, and thankfully the routes are short enough that I could do two or three in a sitting.

Though the romances are short and fairly tropey, the game takes the everything including the kitchen sink approach, so even if we have the devoted childhood friend and the pompous rich guy, we also have a student who's a secret agent, a ghost, and a pigeon who lives in a delusion thinking he's the hero of an RPG. Individually you might find one of the eccentric ones in another game, but HatoFul Boyfriend has all of them. The romance options might be birds, pigeons or otherwise, but they're all vastly different from each other.

It also helps that the translation is funny and doesn't take itself too seriously.

The BBL route (I've seen it called Bad Boys Love and Bad Boy's Love, neither of which are used by the game itself) was more interesting to me because it's a single storyline played over the course of a few hours that delves into the backstory of the humans vs birds conflict as well as mysteriously trapping most of our cast inside their school. Nearly all the birds' backstories (except Azami's) come into play in BBL, which is why it's necessary to play most of their routes to unlock it, and this second half of the game would not work if the player wasn't aware of them.

I'm not entirely sure playing all those routes was worth the price of admission, but BBL once I got to it, was very good and very suspenseful. You also play as Ryouta instead of Hiyoko, whose disappearance and subsequent murder kicks off the storyline.

In a nutshell, the world of Hatoful Boyfriend is one that was created when humans tried to genetically engineer a virus to kill off all the birds, because they had become carriers of a new strain of bird flu that in turn was decimating the human population. But the virus failed and instead made the birds, particularly pigeons, large and intelligent while the human population continued to dwindle.

Now there are only a few humans left and birds dominate the planet. There is peace between the two factions, but it's an uneasy one.

When BBL starts, the school enters a lockdown following the discovery of Hiyoko's dismembered body. All the students are herded into the gym with no sign of when they'll be free to leave. Ryouta, being Hiyoko's friend, doesn't want to leave her where she was though, so he goes to pick her up with the irritable Sakuya in tow, kicking off what becomes a murder mystery/thriller.

The tone of the game changes, becoming much darker as it becomes apparent that the students are intended to be a sacrifice for a war and Hiyoko's death is intended to rile up the surviving humans into demanding vengeance. A dome empasses the school, preventing anyone from leaving, and it will only come down after 12 hours, giving the humans outside time to muster and gather weapons for the retribution the birds agreed to provide them should anything happen to Hiyoko. And if that's not enough, there's a crazy robot running through the halls of the school that Ryouta and those with him have to avoid.

Ryouta is fantastic as a protagonist. He's not overly talented, and is normal enough to blend in with the background in the dating portion of the game, but that makes him a relatable everybird in a mystery. When he's in danger, it's bad, and we really don't know how he's going to get out of it. We know he can't fight the strange robot, he can't stand up to the school's shady doctor, but he cares deeply for Hiyoko and wants to make sense of his best friend's murder.

Sakuya, though he's a bit of a pill on most of the romance routes (being the pompous rich guy), is actually a great sidekick. His bluster keeps the edge off of what could otherwise be too horrific or depressing, and his character is further developed as well, allowing us to see his insecurity and that he can become just as discombobulated as anyone else. Sakuya also proves himself to be a great friend and keeps Ryouta grounded whenever things get really bad.

BBL, though it ends well enough for most characters, has a fairly depressing ending (only lightened by the epilogue.) Ryouta learns that a wish he made as a child became a catalyst for the day's events. He had wished for peace between birds and humans, and his unasked for wish giver concluded that coexistence was not possible, so the only way to attain peace is to wipe the humans out. This won't be through a war, but through a new virus which Ryouta was unknowingly infected with.

The idea is that after the 12 hours are up, the walls will come down and expose the gathered humans to the virus through Ryouta, and when they leave, they'll take it home and spread it to other humans. And Ryouta knows that it's effective, because he learns that Hiyoko was the test subject, and she died simply by getting too close to him in the school infirmary. (The dismemberment was post-mortem.) The wish giver chose her because when Ryouta made that wish she said she was willing to die for it.

Though Ryouta and company manage to stop the school doctor, he decides to remain in the hidden underground lab at the end of the route, so he'll never spread the virus to an unsuspecting him. This makes for a downer of an ending, and it's only if the player unlocks the epilogue that we see that eventually Sakuya finds a cure for him so he can leave.

It was pretty bonkers seeing how everyone's backstories were woven into the plot though. Just about every love interest has a role to play, even the ghost, and it's a bit of a shame that the best part of the game is gated by a completely different genre of play.

VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 6: Misyr

Misyr is the poster boy of Café Enchanté so he gets an additional two chapters to his story beyond that of the rest of the cast, and we also get the full picture of what's been happening over the entire game (which clarifies some things about Il's route, like how God was behind Amasaki Island even though it somehow involved skeleton monsters and giant bone arms). While I don't think his story is undeserving of the length needed to tell it, it also makes it incredibly obvious how much routes like Canus and Rindo's really needed an extra chapter to breathe.

We always knew there was something up about Misyr, being that he's the only cafe regular who will not stay the night. No matter what, he always went home before midnight, like he'd turn into a pumpkin if he didn't. Even during arguably critical operations, like in Il's route when the group is preparing to face a group of angels, he'd still go home, and in his own route, he refuses to participate in the guard rotation to watch over Kotone, even though she's in danger.

He makes it clear that he would really like to stay, but he can't, supposedly because he's a demon king and if he doesn't go back at night his kingdom is going to fall apart (though somehow he can stay all day at the cafe and that's fine).

His route begins to pick apart the truth of who and what Misyr really is by having the real demon king of Asmodia stage an invasion of the human world, causing everyone else to ask Misyr what's going on. Fortunately Asmodeus, though powerful, is a few brain cells short of a lobe, and when he eventually ends up in the hands of the GPM he ends up being more of an obnoxious ally than anything else. (I found him incredibly entertaining though, so if there's ever a fan disc I hope he makes an appearance.)

Because of upgraded prologues that would expand with the completion of each route, I was lured into thinking that Misyr had a split personality, with a different psyche in the same body, which could explain why he needed to leave at night. He wouldn't be himself if he stayed. This misconception was added by some artwork portraying Misyr with two-toned hair, with half of it being silver. I think it's possible two personalities in the same body was explored at some point in the development cycle, when the artwork was initially done, because it doesn't really make any sense otherwise.

Misyr, as it turns out, comes from another realm entirely, the World of End Times, called such because virtually nothing is able to survive there. Originally a human from ancient Earth, he arrived there on a dimensional ark and became the only survivor after a centuries-long warping of his body in order to adapt. In his current, undisguised form he turns everything around him to the same kind of ash that fills this realm, and he's had a lot of company over the tens of thousands of years as various other unfortunate entities ended up there through wormholes.

Eventually he was able to craft a shell around his true form so he could go out through the Gate and enter Enchante as a relatively normal appearing non-human, but the reason he has to go back every night is because there's a time limit to how long he can keep his shell up. (And this also means that the solution to his going home at night issues is simply to show up later in the day so he can stay overnight.) Because of how his shell appeared, Misyr decided to pretend to be a demon king from Asmodia, though he has some regrets about this after learning what kind of person an actual demon king is.

Though Misyr's storyline ends up being fairly epic (again, for a game that started with taking over a cafe), at the heart of it, it's about loneliness. Noah, the entity that is both body and soul of the World of End Times has not, until recently, been able to communicate with the one inhabitant who can survive inside of him. That was okay for thousands of years, since Noah could share in their mutual misery in isolation. But then fifteen years before the game starts, a small wormhole opened to Enchante and Misyr managed to meet child Kotone, who gave him a cup of coffee through the rift because he sounded thirsty.

For Misyr, this sparked his desire to return to the human world and thank the child for the soul soothing gift. For Noah, this was a betrayal, because Misyr experienced a salvation unavailable to him.

Though Noah is not directly responsible for everything that happens across all the routes, he takes advantage of the Salvation Project run by the angels in Caelm to force his influence into other worlds, threatening to turn all of them into ash, in his single-minded quest to unite with Kotone, so she can save him in the way that she saved Misyr. Obviously, things don't work that way, but Noah isn't exactly sane. He doesn't give Kotone any choice in the matter and brushes off Misyr's feelings with a sense of "You had your turn, now it's mine." It's not even out of malice; he gives Misyr back the humanity he lost as what he thought was a parting gift. Noah simply does not understand forcing someone to become a part of him doesn't mean they'll be happy about it.

And unfortunately Kotone is at her most passive on this route since her kidnapping (twice, no less) puts her out of commission for most of the story, giving us alternate narrators between Misyr and the other regulars. It doesn't help that Noah's merging with her is essentially paralyzing and erasing her physical body so she literally cannot protest anything about her treatment.

Misyr becoming human again was not a twist I saw coming, though I like it as a balance to Rindo becoming non-human in his route. And it also raises the stakes in a big way narratively as Misyr has to go into his final confrontation with Noah, a world of death, as nothing but an ordinary human with no magic to speak of.

Since this is a story about loneliness, Misyr eventually gets through to Noah, who asks to be put down so that he stops encroaching on all other worlds, so there are some bittersweet farewells as Noah finally has a friend in Misyr, just in time to die.

As for where this leaves Kotone, this is the only route where she becomes non-human herself. Having mostly merged with Noah by the time of his passing, she takes over the realm he used to embody and rebuilds it as the kind of place she would like it to to be. Misyr becomes the co-owner of Enchante (a step-up from the other guys who just get hired on as help in their endings) and Kotone sends part of herself through the Gate to tend to the cafe everyday. She's still mostly intangible, sometimes invisible, as a result of what Noah did to her, but Misyr is pretty good at finding her no matter where in the shop she might be.

All the other characters get brief epilogues that address parts of their storyline to suggest things will get better as well. God is disabled in Il's epilogue and the fallen angels aren't being hunted anymore. Bestia is no longer a world where the strong torment the weak and even if Dromi wanted to do his Vanir plan, Ignis knows about it now. Canus is going to take out Yggdrasil now that it's expended all its energy during the Noah encroachment. And Mikado's faith in finding a cure for Shizuku has been renewed now that he's seen it's possible for a non-human to become human again. (It's a little odd that that's Rindo's epilogue. Even though he's present and it's his sister, the moment is more for Mikado than him.)

Overall I liked Misyr's story. It's the strongest of all of the storylines and wrapped up everything with a bittersweet bow at the end, but that's also by design, which irritates me a bit. Yes, he has the best storyline, but it doesn't feel entirely earned given the shortcomings of the other routes.

I also was disappointed by Kotone being sidelined so much, to the point that I didn't feel she actually had a budding romance with Misyr that would have led to the ending we got. When you get down to it, Misyr's relationship with Noah is far more critical to the resolution of the story than his relationship with Kotone. Yes, he likes Kotone and says she saved him, but the climax of the story is not the romance. It's the face off between Misyr and Noah, and Kotone can't even participate because she's been rendered into a mute observer.

So even though from a plot perspective I feel like Misyr's route is solid and easily the best of all the routes in the game, I have mixed feelings about it. It's probably one of the weakest from a romance perspective, despite the extra chapters, and I can't shake the feeling that the fact it had room to indulge is because it took the love and attention that could have gone to other routes.

As a side note: If you are reading this the day this posts, I'll be heading into surgery. In fact, in just after a half hour after this goes live. While I don't know yet how much everything will cost me, if my blogging has entertained you, please consider dropping a top in my Ko-fi jar.

I have another two weeks of posts queued to go live during my recovery since I'm not sure when I'll feel up for blogging again.

VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 5: Il

If I was ambivalent about starting Ignis's route, I expected even less from Il's. I figured Ignis would be entertaining because of his brash personality, even if the fiery tsundere is not normally my type of romance, but Il's characterization is akin to a well-meaning, but socially inept, child. He's unable to take care of himself and spends all his time playing otome games. Most of the regulars baby him (barring Ignis) and at one point it's even brought up that he's not allowed to go outside by himself because he tends to get himself into trouble, which the others later have to extract him from.

That doesn't make him a bad character, but it made it hard to see him as a romance option. At one point in his route, Kotone even wonders if he's seeing her as more of a parental figure than a romantic one, which is completely fair.

His story though, completely knocked my socks off. Il might not be my type preference in romantic lead, but his route is probably the best written out of all of them. Not only does it answer questions about why Il behaves the way he does, but it really pushes his character development in unexpected directions.

When I originally started the game I thought it was strange that a male-presenting angel is obsessed with otome games and chalked it up to the writers knowing their audience. Kotone, Il, and the player could bond over otome games in a way they might not if Il had been playing galge aimed at men. But after playing his route, I learned why Il's first game happened to be an otome and, more importantly, how much it changed his life to have played it. It sounds like hyperbole when he first mentions it, but once the original circumstances are out, it's one of the saddest moments in his story.

We know Il is powerful, because all the patrons of Enchante are, even beyond that of other interdimensional travelers, but until his route we don't know just how powerful, because Il himself lacks initiative to do more than asked. In fact, in the common route, his character chapter revolves around Il finally learning why it's worth making other people smile instead of always being the recipient of another's cheer. He has a flashback with Kotone's grandfather who brings him up on this shortcoming, and initially Il doesn't see the point, until he realizes that Kotone is feeling miserable and he'd like to do something about that.

His route begins as an extension of that. Viewing the world through the lens of his games, Il comes to realize that the others in the cafe are like the romantic leads in an otome. They're helpful. When Kotone needs something she can rely on them to chip in. However, Il can't count himself among them because he's always the one being taken care of instead of taking care of others.

He makes this connection on his own and realizes he wants to do better. Though he's occasionally inconsiderate, it's never on purpose so much as he just doesn't understand what the proper social response is supposed to be. For instance, what prompts this introspection is that he uses his magic to help Kotone take a nap in the park, but ends up knocking out every other person and animal in the park as well without realizing that could be a bad thing. It's only afterward that he realizes a person could fall down and hit their head, and then he feels guilty because Kotone ends up apologizing to the rest of the group since it had been her idea to take Il out that day.

Il trying to make himself useful is charming, even if he is so bad at it, and we're even more inclined to root for him once Mikado's nameless assistant takes a larger role in the story and belittles Il's capacity to learn things he had not been designed for.

Angels in this setting are a fusion of science and the divine, so they operate under principles of logic and a rigid hierarchy (fans of Shin Megami Tensei will feel right at home with how clinical their world is). Needing to understand things such as sadness or social sensitivities are unnecessary for them, which is why Il is so inept. He's willing to learn, but it is very much not in his nature.

What his nature actually is, is the big secret.

Mikado's assistant is actually Solitus, another angel from the Heavenly World of Caelm, who has come to the human world to retrieve Il. Even though Il protests that he's fallen and can't go back, Solitus says that Il has not completely fallen, which turns out to be true, as the emotional trauma of reuniting with his former comrade causes Il to give up on emotions entirely rather than relive the pain of how he came to his current state in the first place.

Solitus is driven away, but the cafe crew quickly realizes the only way they can "fix" the now unresponsive Il is to take him back to his homeworld.

I'll skip most of the world building, save that it once again involves humans visiting another world in the ancient past, which has been a common thread in other routes, but the crux of Il's issues is that in Caelm he was created to be the Apostle of Judgment, which meant that it was his job to kill all the fallen angels who deviated from their purposes. Angels are not allowed to have emotions or personal wishes, and gaining them causes them to fall and their wings to turn black. (It should be noted that Il's wings are normally a mix of light and darker feathers, but mostly light, which is confusing until Solitus is finally introduced and we see them side by side.)

At some point in the past, Il's communication with God (the supercomputer that rules Caelm) was cut off by a romantically involved pair of fallen angels who tried to befriend him. Though he didn't understand much about their emotional state or their feelings for each other, he felt that they were not actually dangerous to the safety of Caelm, so he didn't want to kill them when communication resumed. But of course he did, because that's the way he was built.

This broke him and he fled through the Gate leading to Cafe Enchante where he was eventually found, and the reason he's so obsessed with otome is because he was trying to understand the feeling of love between the pair of fallen angels and why they were willing to die for it. Misyr, not sure how to explain love to Il, ended up buying Il's first otome game in an attempt to give him an educational tool, and Il took it to heart, even naming himself after the young man whose route was the first one he played.

This explains not only Il's love of otome games, but also his strange habit of not quite understanding how to react to things. He had taken on the personality of Il Fado de Rie from the game, and was extrapolating how the character would react (hypothetically) to a given situation and give the appropriate response. In some cases, he didn't have a strong enough point of reference, so he would simply blank out until someone else gave him something to work with.

And once his secret is out, he's horrified that Kotone now realizes that the person that she knew, the person that he was, was completely a fictional construct and there's nothing to speak of that belongs to Il himself.

Of course, that's not true, as Il grows over the course of his route, even prior to Solitus's appearance, but considering how hard he'd worked to get as far as he had, it was devastating to have it ripped away without a chance to explain.

After getting Il fixed (or broken again, from Solitus's point of view), Il finally takes the initiative on his own and becomes the big damn hero for a surprisingly high stakes finale where if he fails, the human world is likely to be turned into spirit parts for the heavenly one. There's less teamwork in his finale than the others (though the regulars get to show their stuff earlier in his route), but it feels appropriate to keep the focus on Il given his history, and in particular his friendship with Solitus.

Solitus only appears as himself on Il's route, but he's an interesting character in that he's highly emotional, obsessed even, when it comes to having Il at his side. The two of them have worked together since their creation, so when Il disappeared, Solitus could only think of getting his partner back. So I was puzzled that his wings are white almost the entire route through, since narratively it's completely obvious he ought to be a fallen angel. It's only in the end that Il points out that Solitus's emotions have tinged him black, but it's not enough to make his wings completely black like the other fallen angels'. I guess it takes time for wings to change completely black, but narratively it ended up bugging me for most of the route and nobody comments on it until the very end, by which point it feels more like they just didn't want to make another set of sprite artwork for him.

As with Ignis's route, I didn't expect to be as moved by the ending here, which is particularly bittersweet. Though there's a promise that Il will recover and move forward again in the good ending, his victory was definitely not without sacrifice. It makes me a little surprised that the story started with a young woman deciding to run a cafe, because given those beginnings that's not where I would have figured this would end up.

VN Talk: Café Enchanté - Part 4: Ignis

Ignis is a fun character, but generally not the sort that's my first choice to romance, which is why he was my third playthrough. He's the tough talking jock with a heart of gold that he pretends not to have. Ignis is also the closest in age to Kotone, making him a fairly recent patron of the cafe, compared to the others who arrived while she was still a child.

It probably sounds better in Japanese, but Ignis is a demon beast, to make it clear that he's not simply some mindless animal, but a beast that has a human-like form and powers. Specifically, he's from a clan called the Firewolves. (Or Vinitar depending on the translation, since his route was clearly worked on by different people who did not coordinate with each other, making the in-game terminology for the various beast tribes a hot mess.) He comes from the world of Bestia, which is a frozen wasteland where beasts vie for dominance over each other, and survival of the fittest is taken to the extreme, with stronger beasts frequently slaying the weak for little reason aside from sport.

Ignis is the strongest there is, and he wants to change his world by remaining the strongest while not killing, so he often looks out for weaker beasts and even when he gets into supremacy fights with tougher beasts, he only beats them up enough to incapacitate them. Never to kill. So it's unsurprising that his route chooses to look at what makes Ignis unique among his kind and how Bestia came to be so warped to begin with.

Though there are definitely more than a few hokey deus ex machinas by the end, I found Ignis's story to be well paced and better written than the previous two I'd played. I felt like Canus and Rindo's routes really needed another chapter for the romance to play out, but Ignis's never felt forced, never felt rushed, so even when friends upon friends pop up at the end, I just shrugged and ran with it, because thematically the fact they did was so on point it was forgivable.

For one thing, his route doesn't beat around the bush that he and Kotone could be a couple. Dromi brings it up almost immediately after route split when he sees the two of them together in town and asks if Kotone is Ignis's mate. Ignis being Ignis though, immediately denies that he could ever possibly be interested in her, saying that she's just the cafe owner, and Kotone, not really thinking about romance, amusingly tells Ignis that once he gets himself a girl he should totally bring her to the cafe to meet everyone.

But despite the romcom gaffes, the early chapters of his route make it clear that the way to Ignis's heart is through his stomach, and Kotone, being the cafe owner, is filling that bottomless pit better than anyone. Ignis is a ridiculous pig, and though his enormous appetite is something of a joke, it's also growing, and, it turns out, is part of the story.

Ignis's route builds off of the Minotaur incident in the common route when the group tries to go to the aquarium. His friend Dromi has been investigating in Bestia and discovered that the Minotaurs are jumping through wormholes to the human world, causing them to appear in the town around Enchante. Wormholes are a one way trip, unlike the gate at Enchante, so it's rather baffling that the Minotaurs are taking the plunge, and it's even more baffling that all the wormholes are taking them to the same place, specifically in a ring around Enchante once the GPM manages to put all their data together.

Since Dromi's not the reliable sort, Ingis decides to do some investigation on his own and Kotone accidentally joins him when someone kidnaps her and leaves her for dead in frozen Bestia. After being rescued by a weaker demon beast who picks up Ignis's scent on her, Kotone learns more about what Ignis's life is like, being both powerful and unwelcome in most of his world. But despite his world's value on might, he looks after a tribe of weaker demon beasts so they're comfortable living close to his Firewolf tribe, even though historically the Firewolves have been both feared and ostracized and now live pretty much on the edge of habitable land (such as there is here).

Even among his own tribe, Ignis is not particularly welcome as the result of going berserk during a previous attack on his people that caused him to fight friend and foe alike. Feeling guilty about it, Ignis is fine with the status quo, even though he still protects his tribe and has a somewhat cordial relationship with his uncle.

The key thing that upends everything is the discovery of an ancient history regarding the wolf Vanir, ancestor of the Firewolves, who woke up and devoured just about everything he set eyes on. This kicked off Bestia's obsession with being the strongest, because every other beast needed to be strong just to have a chance of surviving a confrontation with Vanir.

What made Vanir unique among demon beasts, aside from his power, was the fact he could eat. It turns out that nearly all creatures of Bestia are born with the amount of energy they will spend throughout their lives, so eating is not natural for them. Most don't have digestive tracts. And there's a part of me that wished this interesting bit of world building had been carried out a little farther, because generally when something like this happens in our world, the energy comes from the mother who does eat. But if the mothers don't eat in Bestia, and they are similarly constrained in that all the energy they have is limited to what they were born with, either successive generations would get weaker or the energy babies are born with comes from somewhere else. It's not really important to the story, but the biologist in me wants to know!

In any case, there is one known exception to the nobody in Bestia eats that happens to be a Firewolf; Ignis, who we also know has been developing a tremendous appetite.

So of course it turns out that Ignis is teetering on becoming Vanir reborn, and it happens that his friend Dromi is actually not a very good friend and has been planning to push him over the edge for years. It doesn't really make sense to me why Dromi would do that because his wish would not only decimate the stronger beasts that pick on him, but likely get him killed as well. Still, he seems okay with it. And Dromi morphing from comic relief to insane villain was definitely a transition I did not see coming. He's completely ruthless once the secret's out, getting all of Ignis's tribe killed by Minotaurs just to trigger him into fighting so much he can't help but lose control.

Worse, when Kotone sees him in his battle lust, he does not break out of it and he actually tears a chunk out of her arm and devours it. Though he eventually snaps out of it, Kotone is not unexpectedly terrified of what happened and Ignis doesn't protest when Misyr and the others lock him up inside a barrier so he shouldn't be able to harm anyone.

Except Dromi intervenes, kidnapping Kotone and trying to feed her to Ignis who admittedly found her pretty tasty in his bloodlust. Dromi fails in that respect, but does get Ignis to transform fully into a giant fiery wolf that is completely out of control and willing to devour anything in his path, which sets up the finale in his route.

Though the finale is pretty much "giant flaming wolf beaten by the power of friendship," it works because of the legwork beforehand. Ignis's cafe friends come to the rescue, of course, but also many of the weaker beasts in Bestia that Ignis had been protecting over the years. Now that he's the one in need, they're willing to risk their lives to help. Even the extremely silly "final blow" delivered by Kororo's herd of sea beasts, is not out of line considering that he rescued Kororo when he was crying and alone.

Everyone working together allows Vanir to be beaten enough for Ignis to comes to his senses and for Kotone (now over her fear) to approach and forgive him, letting him turn back into his old self.

The only thing I was a little disappointed with his ending is that Ignis stops eating! He only started when he discovered the cafe, since eating was a foreign concept in Bestia, and it seems like he only got hungry because of all the fighting he was doing. With Bestia largely united and becoming peaceful with his defeat, Ignis doesn't need to fight anymore and without fighting, he doesn't hunger. While that's a good thing, I really liked the earlier scenes with Kotone constantly cooking and packing meals for him, and I'm a little sad at the thought it's no longer going to be a thing.

In the end, I ended up liking Ignis's route much more than I thought I would going in.