In his route, the MC is dumped on him by Kyosuke and he reluctantly takes her home as a maid. Takahisa is a captain in the army and is very strict about what he expects of her. His sister is as well.
Due to their parents dying when they were children, the two live alone in a large traditional Japanese home. Suzuko is in finishing school so she's away at class most days, and prior to the MC's arrival, the two of them handled most of the chores themselves. Takahisa makes it clear that the MC is only going to stay until Suzuko is ready to leave home (i.e. get married). They've had maids before, but none have lasted, supposedly due to Takahisa's demanding requirements. If you've ever heard the phrase "Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable," then you know what Takahisa is like. (Actually, with him, five minutes early is still late.)
He's ridiculously stern and barely talks outside of expressing more sternness, which made getting useful screenshots of his route pretty hard. I try to take a variety of screenshots around important dialogue with different poses and facial expressions, but 90% of the time Takahisa has the exact same look on his face.
The closest thing is when he treats her to dinner at Omurice, and then he blows it off as bribing her into staying quiet about what she saw in his room. And while we learn midway through the story that he's secretly been doing the MC's chores when they haven't been up to his standards, it comes off as a passive aggressive way to say she's not up to snuff, rather than propping her up until she gets the hang of things. She's more than willing to meet those standards, but it's hard when he won't tell her where the goal posts are.
There was a point halfway through the story where I thought things would change. The MC has finally managed to bond with Suzuko, and begins to feel like she really could become a member of the Togo household if she could just win over Takahisa well. As joke, Suzuko says her brother, who is notoriously picky about his tea, likes it brewed with the tea leaves standing up (which is just as dumb and bizarre as it sounds). The MC takes it at face value though, and tries brewing tea in a way the leaves will do just that. When she manages to get it to happen, she is thrilled to serve it to Takahisa, who bursts out laughing.
I get that Takahisa takes his position in the military seriously. He wants to be the stoic soldier who places his devotion to the country above all else. He even trashes marriage proposals because he finds them a conflict of interest. But it wouldn't kill him to crack a smile every now and then, especially at home, in private.
And yes, Takahisa is very eligible. He's not as big a deal as Kyosuke, but he's descended from samurai and he and his sister are described as the main branch of the Togo family. That position presumably comes with some degree of money and influence since they refused to ask the rest of the family for help when they were orphaned out of fear that they could be manipulated into losing that power.
The central drama in this route primarily works because Takahisa is notoriously bad at talking to people, not just the MC.
Early on we hear a rumor that Takahisa left a soldier of his to die so he could get a promotion. It bothers the MC, but after spending time with his soldiers, she can't believe he could have done that, and the game lets the rumor fade away for a little while as Suzuko, her crush, and tea shenanigans take place. This part of the story I liked. I thought it was a good seeding of details that didn't have to go anywhere but ultimately did.
The MC is able to dismiss the rumors as hearsay just long enough that when she accidentally chases a rat into Takahisa's room and realizes she's not supposed to be in there, we've almost forgotten about them. That's when we find the bloody soldier's cap, and of course Takahisa catches her inside. But what follows is not that great.
In fact, Takahisa himself doesn't tell us the story of the cap. It's his lieutenant, who explains he left an injured soldier behind to save the rest of the company, and after they were safe, he went back for the injured one, who ended up being killed right in front of him. (The game doesn't name the conflict, but it was probably the Siberian intervention since most of Japan's World War I participation was naval.)
Not talking about what happened ends up biting Takahisa in the butt when it becomes apparent someone is trying to kill him, and that someone is the younger brother of the dead soldier (also a soldier), who saw the bloody cap when he and the other soldiers came to clean Takahisa's house!
Takahisa never gives a good reason for not giving the cap back to the Yamahisa family. All of this could have been avoided with a proper sit-down with the bereaved back when this first happened. He just kinda leaves it at "it wouldn't bring him back" when he finally talks about it after the climax of the route. But even if it wouldn't, the cap clearly has emotional value since Takahisa himself holds on to it.
Yamahisa is introduced as one of Takahisa's lieutenants, and he's the younger brother of the aforementioned dead soldier. Obviously he must have joined the company after his brother's death, since he's unaware of the circumstances, and assumes the worst is true when he sees the bloody cap. This causes him to make multiple attempts to inflict physical and emotional harm on Takahisa, providing the drama for the second half of the route.
But the thing is, several men in the company, including the other lieutenant, are well aware of what actually went down when his brother died, and he didn't talk to any of them? I could easily see him being apprehensive about being assigned to the unit his brother died in and asking "Hey, can I trust this commander?" Instead, he appears to have not spoken to anybody, and just sat on his suspicions up until he found the hat.
When replaying Takahisa's route to get the alternate ending, I did notice Takahisa says later that he shouldn't have told Hishikawa, the other lieutenant, not to speak about it, which suggests that it's his fault Yamahisa's in the dark, but then I have to wonder what that was supposed to accomplish. The narration tries to frame the climax as a tragedy of miscommunication, but it feels more like a self-inflicted train wreck instead.
The climax of the route involves Takahisa knowing Yamahisa wants to kill him and thus he sends Suzuko away to become a ward (which is the next step to getting married since this is where she lives in another house and learns how to manage a household), which in turn allows him to get rid of the MC since her job is only supposed to last until Suzuko leaves home. This pushes everyone he cares about out of the impending blast radius, or so he thinks. He's not a complete ass about it, and sets the MC up with a job at Kyosuke's (where it won't be as bad this time because she already has experience working at an upper class household) and even gives her a carriage ride over, which is where the story gets a little fuzzy.
How can that happen in front of Kyosuke's mansion? Are there even convenient alleys for holding a hostage in the part of town he lives in?
Then when the rescue happens, which seems to be within a few hours, it's because Takahisa heard from Kyosuke that the MC never arrived and he returned home to find a letter from Yamahisa explaining he kidnapped her, which is a bizarre chain of events. I can suppose that Yamahisa paid someone to drop off the letter (since he never leaves his hostage), but Takahisa was obviously not home when it arrived. So how did Kyosuke contact Takahisa? And why did he do it so quickly? I can understand "Hey, I was expecting your maid this morning and she never arrived" going out in the afternoon to Takahisa's house, but catching him while he's running around town is a whole different level of urgency in a day before cell phones.
That said, I really wanted to believe in the climax. I liked how Yamahisa figured out that Takahisa cares about the MC given that he's not a demonstrative man. The MC doesn't believe she's worth anything as a hostage because she thinks Takahisa doesn't care about her, and from her POV that's not off the mark. That tension between not wanting to die, but believing he doesn't care enough to come is good. But it should be obvious to the player for reasons beyond the fact he's the love interest that Takahisa is going to come to the rescue. I have no idea when or even why he fell in love with her.
And even after the rescue, he still drops her off at Kyosuke's (only she makes it this time).
Fortune's Fool and Favored Bold are a fair bit different on Takahisa's route, as opposed to Kyosuke's which are very similarly flavored. In Fortune's Fool, Kyosuke gives her the opportunity to visit Takahisa and she decides to do so one last time to properly confess her love for him, with the expectation she'll be rejected, but at least she will not regret having left words unsaid, which I really liked. Of course, once she confesses, it turns out that Takahisa has mutual feelings for her that he was trying to repress, but since she pushed her way back into his life again, he agrees to let her come home.
Much like Kyosuke did in his Fortune's Fool ending, Takahisa also brings up how their relationship will be rough due to the class difference, which is a little odd since it's barely emphasized in this route. Though they're quite obviously from different social classes and both ought to have arranged marriages, it's not painted as drastically as it is in Kyosuke's. He also warns her that he can't fully be around due to his military duties, but she's fine with that (and honestly, there are a lot of military spouses who make that kind of sacrifice).
Favored Bold is a better emotional high even if it's less realistic. I like how Takahisa essentially storms into Kyosuke's manor to take the MC back due to Kyosuke intentionally misleading him about his intentions towards the MC. This works better in that we finally get to see that Takahisa cares about her, and seeing him so unraveled and pissed off was great, but the rest of the ending felt a little too mushy for me. It might have been fine with another character, but I felt like Takahisa's personality changed a little too much in favor of a demonstrative ending.
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