VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 3: Shion

This week, I'm continuing with the second love interest I played from Variable Barriacade. Spoilers will be coming further down after the break.

Shion was surprisingly close to being my first pick of the game over Nayuta, if not for the fact I went through that rationalization process on who made the most sense from Hibari's point of view, and that's a funny thing because going into the game, he was the guy I was least interested in. Ichiya was the flirt, Taiga was the foul-mouthed rough around the edges guy, and Nayuta was the happy-go-lucky bundle of energy. Though they aren't flat characters, most of the cast falls into certain archetypes.

Except for Shion. Even the opening movie tags him as "The Daydreamer," which doesn't really fit him at all, since that's implying he's always thinking about what doesn't exist.

My first impression of Shion as a character (outside of the fact that he's supposed to be an extremely beautiful man) was that he was surprisingly insightful. He ordered Nayuta to get him a drink, which Nayuta did, complaining all the way, and while Nayuta was gone, Shion spoke to the other guys about stuff that Nayuta should not hear. When Nayuta came back before the conversation could finish, Shion told him he didn't get the right drink and sent him out again (which Nayuta did, because he's a nice guy).

Shion might be the prettiest pretty boy in the game, but that doesn't mean he lacks a brain, and it was Shion's ability to read people that caught my interest. His flaw (aside from being unemployed like all the rest of the guys) is that he has always been a kept man and never worked a day in his adult life. Instead a string of patrons kept him housed and fed until he eventually ended up in the suitor competition for Hibari's hand.

VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 2: Nayuta

I played Nayuta's route first for Variable Barricade, and since I was predisposed towards liking all the men after clearing their first barricade boards, he wasn't the shoe-in that I thought he'd be. Nayuta interested me when I read my first import review of the game (back when I thought it would never be translated), but the specific reason is a bit of a spoiler so I won't mention it just yet so you can't accidentally glance down at it.

However, if spoilers bother you, now would be a good time to check out, as I will eventually cover all of his route.

Nayuta is often likened to a large dog, but he is definitely not an alpha dog. He's happy to please, all the other guys get him to run errands and do things for them, but he has tons of energy and is genuinely happy to help. Not getting to help, when he can possibly be of assistance, drives him crazy, and what he wants to do more than anything else is please Hibari.

He's also... not the brightest bulb in the room. At one point Shion texts Hibari to say that they have no need of a pet, because they have Nayuta. When Hibari points out that Nayuta is a human being, Shion replies with a protest that Nayuta was eating dog food.

Seriously.

VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2022

Variable Barricade is one of those games I learned about prior to its Japanese release and despaired of it ever being translated into English. It came out on the PS Vita at the end of its life cycle, and it wasn't the sort of romance game that Aksys usually chose for localization. Aksys was (and still is) the primary purveyor of console otome games in the west, and in those early days, the focus was more on romance games with a crossover appeal.

And I get that. I gravitate toward games that are in a fantasy, science fiction, or historical setting, just because I want that extra zing of escapism. Sticking exclusively to romance in a mundane real world setting could have been limiting at a time when otome needed to find as many fans as possible. The more checkboxes a game offered beyond being a romance, the wider a net it could cast, so the early titles tended to be more action-based with a sense of adventure.

But the otome market has matured since then, and Variable Barricade was ported to the Switch, giving it another shot at localization at a time when it's no longer a risk to release a straight-up romantic comedy.

So, you might wonder why I wanted to play this game so much when I just said I seldom play games that aren't fantasy, science fiction, or historical, and the reason has to do with Variable Barricade's premise. Hibari Tojo is a wealthy heiress who gets coerced by her grandfather, the family patriarch, into choosing one of four suitors to be her fiancé, but she isn't down for this type of manipulation and resolves not to fall in love with any of them!

It was Hibari's defiance that sold me on the game. This being a romance game, she obviously falls in love eventually, but she has to be encouraged to do so. She's dumped into a pretty weird situation where she's forced to cohabitate with her suitors (though her butler is there to chaperone and make sure nothing untoward happens) and she has all the rage one might expect a seventeen-year-old girl to have about this.

New Site Layout

Embarrassingly enough, I've had the same blog design, more or less, for about twelve years and it was looking pretty dated. I kept telling myself I was going to fix it, and like many things, it got pushed off. (And all those bouts of illness didn't help.)

Finally, I decided that it was time. I was going to look for a new layout!

And this is the one I chose. I think it looks pretty clean. I like that it's not stark white, but it's still dark text on a light background, and I'm able to make a wider main column for the blog writing itself. I did have to cut a column to do so, but I wasn't updating my published works column regularly since I had to add cover art manually each time, and many times online magazines don't even have cover art, so they didn't get included. The end result was that it ended up looking outdated.

Now I hope to simply have one image of the latest publication, so it'll be less work to keep current, and I figure most online magazines at least have a logo of some kind I can use going forward.

I'm still tinkering with things so some of the widgets might move around, and I'm not sure I like the red link color, but for the most part this template should be here for a while.