VN Talk: Variable Barricade - Part 5: Ichiya

I know what I expected from Ichiya from Variable Barricade's promotional art, and it's not what I got. Given that he's the poster boy and poses with a suave, debonair air, I expected him to be a flirty ladykiller. While I got the flirty part right, a ladykiller he is not. He's always one bad line away from Hibari wanting to be sick.

That isn't to say that Ichiya has no dating experience, he's good looking and women are attracted to him, but all his previous girlfriends both initiated the relationship and ended it. So when it comes to courting Hibari, he actually doesn't know how to attract her. As a result he flirts like crazy, but all his lines are so over the top cheesy that, to paraphrase Tsumugi, it sounds like he was flipping through some shoujo manga to find all his material.

As with all of Hibari's suitors though, there is more to Ichiya than we initially see, and since this title is still fairly new, be aware there will be major spoilers after the break.

The first solo scene with Ichiya that I remember enjoying was when he greets Hibari with some schmaltzy line after she comes home from school and the first thing she does is shut the door in his face because she just doesn't want to hear it anymore. And after that I kept screenshotting some of his worst/best material and Hibari's reactions to them. Alas I can't share them all.

Suffice to say, I found a lot of entertainment in Ichiya when he was the butt of jokes in the common route, or even in other guys' routes, but I wasn't sure how he would work in his own. After having played Nayuta, Shion, and Taiga's routes, I'd gotten to know him when he wasn't flirting his brains out, and he seemed like a nice guy and very supportive of his friends, but unless Hibari was already in love with another guy, he would rarely show that side of himself.

At most during the common route, we got a heartfelt confession that as the oldest of her suitors he realizes he has no idea how to court her (he's nine years older than her, so yeah, twenty-six and seventeen is a big difference) and that makes him feel insecure, though he's trying the best he can. He says this as he's handing over a bag of homemade cookies, so the gesture is sweet, if you can get past a guy almost ten years her senior trying to figure out how to get a seventeen year old to agree to marry him. (Thank goodness the game later tells us the marriage won't actually happen until she's out of college.)

But the fact Ichiya clearly has dated before is refreshing, since a lot of these games won't remark on previous loves, even if the love interest is old enough to have them. When they go someplace scenic on a date, a wary Hibari asks if he's taken his exes to the same place. After all, his key flaw is that he allegedly perpetrated marriage fraud so he's obviously gone very far with at least one person!

This is rather a sore point with Ichiya though, and unlike the other suitors, who are pretty upfront about their issues, Ichiya refuses to talk about his. When he tries changing the subject by the "tried and true" method of shutting her up with a kiss and telling her his past no longer matters, it goes about as well as you'd expect.

She slaps him in the face and their relationship spirals downward, with Ichiya completely shifting from overconfidence, to being alarmingly certain she's one step from kicking him out the door. It turns out that Ichiya is frightfully insecure, and is the type of person who immediately assumes the worst.

Eventually, his fear gets to the point where he stops coming out of his room and the other guys push Hibari in to talk to him. She finds him a blubbering mess, and though Ichiya doesn't spill everything about his past at this point, it's enough that Hibari understands that what Ichiya wants more than anything else is to be loved. He has been operating under the assumption that if he loves someone enough, eventually they'll love him back, which unfortunately isn't true.

In fact, Ichiya is so desperate and broken that he's willing to suppress anything he wants in order to please the person who might eventually love him back. When he and Hibari date prior to his breakdown, the date is all about Hibari and what she wants to do. Ichiya would insist on deferring to her without voicing his own wants, by framing it as the woman's prerogative to decide. In one of Ichiya's POV segments he even admits that he only became a great cook because girls seem to like it. Theoretically this would make him the perfect accommodating boyfriend, but even though his previous girlfriends initially liked it, they got tired of constantly being the recipient of this one-sided giving and eventually broke up with him.

Seriously, Ichiya needs therapy, but he's heartened by the fact Hibari doesn't reject him for being broken (she actually finds him rather cute when he cries, which becomes a hilarious point in his After Story when she tries and fails to get him to tear up). He gets better after his breakdown and his next date with Hibari feels like an actual date between normal people where there's some give and take.

So of course that's when the end of Act 2 relationship problem rears its head.

Interestingly, a lot of Ichiya's route is not about him, because we need to go into the source of his pain, which comes from his family. So the end of his second barricade board introduces Kazuya, who Hibari has met a couple times as "Kazu" in the common route. Kazuya turns out to be the unnamed suitor who is trying very hard to marry Hibari and caused her grandfather to kick off this entire suitor scheme. In addition to that, he's Ichiya's twin brother.

Hibari and "Kazu" text each other via the WHIS app in the common route, but after she chooses any suitor other than Ichiya, Kasuga will delete Kazuya's contact information, preventing them from meeting again since they have no other way of contacting each other. This prevents Kazuya from interfering with anything that happens on the other routes (since Hibari can no longer share what's really going on with her suitor situation).

So when Kasuga does not delete Kazuya's info on Ichiya's route, I assumed it was because he knew who "Kazu" really was and was letting the family drama play out since it would inevitably become a part of Hibari's life. Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case and for some reason he's just careless on this route as he berates himself for not doing so later on.

The reason this is a problem for Hibari is that sharing her woes with Kazuya lets him know that Ichiya being her fiance is actually just a ploy to buy time and she's not actually committed to him yet. Armed with this knowledge, Kazuya is able to strong-arm his way into being a fifth suitor (which her grandfather warns her could happen on other routes), and Kazuya has been better than Ichiya at just about everything since they were children. The only exception has been girls, since Kazuya was focused on academics and the family business, so Ichiya prided himself on the one thing that he could be accomplished with that his twin could not.

One thing I really like about the gulf between Ichiya and Kazuya (and a lesser degree Ichiya's parents) is that even though Kazuya initially comes off as cold, he's actually just not very good at communicating in the way Ichiya needs to hear it. Kazuya and his parents are very much on the same wavelength, with the same focus on results and the family business, which makes them sound like they don't care about anything else.

Ichiya is the sensitive black sheep of the family, steeped in thought and emotions, and his family quite frankly doesn't know how to deal with someone like that. So even though they care, they aren't good at showing it, which is exacerbated by Ichiya's tendency to take everything in the wrong way, even when a remark is intended to be supportive.

And the marriage fraud thing? Ichiya did it to help Kazuya, who was trying to get a potential fiancee off him so he could pursue Hibari. He met the woman while pretending to be Kazuya (since they're identical twins), figuring that he'd get the woman to fall in love with him, reveal the surprise, she'd love him anyway, and everyone would be happy. Except it quite obviously did not go that way and was pretty disastrous for both parties.

Why Hibari's grandfather chose to pick Ichiya as a suitor after that disaster, I don't know. Okay, I do know since he says it in game, but I don't understand how he came to that conclusion. He says it's because Ichiya knows how to love and be loved, and we know Hibari grew up very distant from the people around her. She absolutely gloms on to anyone who can earn her trust, so finding someone with a similar need is not out of the question, but Ichiya arguably doesn't know how to be loved at this point in the story. He thinks his family hates him. (Also, wasn't her grandfather looking for suitors who have something she lacks?)

Regardless, Kazuya's insertion as a fifth suitor shakes things up. Ichiya doesn't feel like he can compete with him, and Kazuya even has a powerpoint presentation for Hibari that shows just how much their families (and their respective businesses) have to gain from their marriage. Both Hibari and her grandfather agree that logically Kazuya is the best match, but Hibari wants to marry for love. She's willing to look past Ichiya's attempted marriage fraud. The problem is, she can't be certain that Ichiya loves her for being her and not because she happened to be the first person who was nice to him when he bared his heart.

Given that Ichiya's history is all about glomming on to people in hopes of being loved in return, this is a valid concern, but one that Ichiya cannot assure her of. The rest of the cast comes down pretty hard on Hibari for this. Too hard, I think. While it's not really an answerable question (just how would Ichiya be able to prove such a thing?), the other guys act like she told him to jump off a cliff. Part of her concern is that if someone else is nice to Ichiya he'll leave her, which I do think is going overboard, but that is equally unprovable as no one else will ever be in the same position she was.

And going back to jumping off cliffs… Eventually all this leads up to an intense finale, which I did not expect given how light-hearted and flat out fun the common route was. Ichiya kidnaps Hibari (with Kasuga's assistance no less) and takes her, yes, to a cliff, which he plans to jump off of in order to prove his love for her, since after wracking his brain he can't think of any way to assure her that he loves her for being her.

I wracked my own brain trying to think if I'd ever seen another love interest do this before, because it feels like it ought to be old school (though I don't know if Japan has the phrase "go jump off a cliff" for telling an unwanted man what to do with himself).

Anyway, Hibari stops him at the last second, and in one of the weirdest confessions, she accepts his love because she now knows that he'd never leave her for another person, because he'd rather die than be without her. And of course Ichiya is happy because he has someone who loves him back.

Kazuya, who is just a bit late to the Ichiya tried to kill himself party, then withdraws his bid to marry Hibari and kinda admits that he did want Ichiya to win after all, and there's definitely no way he's competing with his brother in this particular arena of life. Which, good for him. Better for his mental health.

I wanted to like Ichiya's route more, and I even liked Kazuya's messed up suggestion in the middle of the third barricade board, when he suggests Hibari marry him and keep Ichiya as a side piece, thus giving her the political marriage for her family and allowing her and Ichiya to keep their relationship. It's wrong socially, but it does fit all their requirements if not the spirit of them. (And if Hibari's sense of romance is not high enough, they actually do this in the Another Ending.) But I just didn't like the drama at the end.

If not for the chibi art depicting Ichiya tearing through town while trying to ditch the other guys, the kidnapping would have been borderline terrifying as Ichiya starts ranting about how he doesn't care about being a criminal or what things he has to do as long as Hibari loves him. When I first saw the cliff I had a horrible feeling that it was going to end up an attempted murder-suicide, though thankfully Ichiya only planned to kill himself.

And I think the epilogue just felt a bit empty because the whole finale boiled down to them finally knowing they'd never leave each other, which is an assumption we expect for all happy endings. So while Nayuta, Taiga, and Shion all had little nods to show the hurdles the pair had overcome, Ichiya's epilogue is just… more commitment to loving each other.

One thing that stuck with me though is that Kazuya grows to like Hibari enough in both the Happy Ending and the Another Ending that he's a bit disappointed that she's chosen Ichiya instead of him. As her grandfather said, Kazuya is not a man who would mistreat her, but Takamune also said that he would not give her the attention she's getting from her other suitors. After seeing Kazuya on this route, I'm not certain that's true. Sure, he's often busy, but when it really counts he makes room for the people in his life, and that includes Ichiya.

Considering that there are only four love interests in this game I'm a little surprised that Kazuya wasn't a fifth hidden route, as I would have liked to see a reality where he ends up with Hibari. She does marry him in a couple of bad endings, but we don't know what that would have looked like. Kazuya was fairly methodical in selecting Hibari as the one he wanted to marry for business purposes, so he clearly did not want to marry her for herself when he first raised the matter, but after having gotten to know her, he clearly would be willing to try a romance with her.

Instead we get a true route as the final one, and there's no chosen love interest involved. I'll be covering that one next week.