VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 6: Yuzuki Murakumo

As I suspected it might, Thanksgiving weekend was jumbled enough that I forgot to set this to go up during my Sunday. If you missed the previous installments of my 7'scarlet series, you can catch up on the previous routes with this tag here. This week I'm covering Yuzuki, who probably has my favorite route from a character standpoint, if not a plot one.

Yuzuki's route doesn't begin like everyone else's in that you don't start with the common route. After you make your name selection, you're asked where you want to start and have to specifically select Yuzuki's route. After an expanded version of the prologue, it drops you right in on Day 3 of Ichiko's stay, which is the day of the festival.

But let's talk about the prologue first. In the baseline prologue to the common route, we see an unnamed woman feeling through the forest from pursuers in the middle of the night. Her hands are bloody. She ends up in town and runs up to a payphone only to discover she has no money to use it. Off-camera, a man catches up with her. He cruelly mocks her about her situation, comparing her need for coins with that given to the dead for passage to the underworld. He suggests that she would probably want to beg for her life, except that she doesn't have one to begin with.

After a playthrough or two, it's pretty obvious from the voice that the man is Yuzuki Murakumo and she is likely a revenant. We don't see the outcome of their conversation, but it's implied he kills her.

Yuzuki's route opens with the same scene, with the woman running through the forest, but then it expands once we get to the town. Though it ends in the same place, gaps in their previous conversation are filled. The revenant gives Yuzuki her name, Tsuzuri, even though he doesn't want to hear it, and she explains that all she wants to do it give her husband a phone call, then she will voluntarily expire without ever having taken a life. When Yuzuki doesn't budge she takes pity on him, saying that he must have never been loved or loved anyone in return. Then we get a cynical monologue from him before it's again implied that he kills her.

Once in Ichiko's POV, she's cleaning Yuzuki's office as part of her job to cover her room and board. That's when she discovers that the second door in his office is unlocked. As she quickly finds out, it doesn't lead to more of the hotel, but rather to his personal living quarters (which despite being called a detached house is very much attached so far as I can tell). Being an intensely private person, it doesn't take long for Yuzuki to kick her out, but according to Yuki, their accidental meeting must have gone well if he didn't get flat out angry with her.

Due to his ornery personality, the game pretty much has to conspire to find ways to make Ichiko come into contact with Yuzuki, as he is not part of the Supernatural Club. On other routes it often comes up that Yuzuki likely has the answers she's searching for, but that he probably won't tell her. Oddly enough, searching for those answers isn't why she ends up spending time with him.

It's a rather cliche trick, but basically Yuzuki gets sick, and because Yuki is so busy trying to get the concert ready at the middle school, he gives Ichiko the rice porridge Isora made and asks her to deliver it to Yuzuki in his place. This kicks off her staying overnight with him while he's feverish and bedridden. It does the job, and it's fun seeing her order him around and not put up with his crap (because, hey, he's sick and this is for his own good), but a part of me still wishes for something more original.

Having established that familiarity, she feels less anxious about dropping in on him, but that results in her getting kidnapped by someone who assumes she's his girlfriend. It's through this incident that she gets caught up in his and his family's business and the truth of the revenants and the Ensepulchers comes out.

One of the non-club side characters staying at the hotel is Chikage Karasuma, and it's clear from other routes that he's been investigating the town. It turns out that he's the revenant Tsuzuri's bereaved husband, and he kidnaps Ichiko to lure out Yuzuki, to get his revenge for Tsuzuri dying yet another time.

This leads to a replaying of the prologue scene past the previous ending, and we discover that not only did Yuzuki not kill her, but he gave her the change she needed to make the call to Chikage and say her last words to her husband. He also tried to hide her from the other Ensepulchers, so she could peacefully expire once her time was up, but he ultimately failed. She was killed and he was expelled from the group for not doing his job.

Meeting Tsuzuri changed Yuzuki and as a result he no longer sees eye to eye with his traditionalist father. Yuzuki's realized that revenants come back because they have something they need to do before they can let go, and if allowed to do that they no longer have to stay around and they would have no reason to rise again. He would like to send them back voluntarily rather than arbitrarily exterminating every revenant that comes along like his family has been doing for hundreds of years.

Admittedly, given his antisocial personality, there is something hilarious about the idea of Yuzuki giving post-mortem therapy to a revenant that can't let go of the life it left behind.

Once Yuzuki's purpose comes out, he and Ichiko begin a budding relationship, and he helps her look for her brother, like most of the other love interests. But the fun thing about Yuzuki is that because of who he is, he can pretty easily get the town's lone policeman to spill his guts and reveal that Ichiko's brother moved around town exactly like he knew where everything was, even though he was a stranger. Her brother even found the valley where the Violacias grow.

What's interesting about Yuzuki's route (and we see shades of it in Sosuke's) is that because he's a Murakumo, the other characters tend to assume he and his family are in lockstep about what they do. After all, Yuzuki is the only son and heir of the patriarch, and he's got an irritable personality that hates being questioned. Common sense says he's gotta be neck deep in everything.

On their respective routes, Isora warns Ichiko repeatedly against trusting Yuzuki, and Toa remembers Yuzuki from when the Murakumos used a questionable excuse to close his family's hotel. (Amusingly, Isora keeps up his warnings in the first half of Yuzuki's route. He's really got a lot of Murakumo hate.) But Kyouji Murakumo's opinion of Yuzuki is that he's worthless, he's setting himself up to be revenant fodder, and Kyouji bitterly complains about not having done a better job of raising his son. Tellingly, Yuzuki doesn't know everything, even before his falling out with his father, because Kyouji still wasn't satisfied with him as a heir.

Yuzuki and Ichiko have incredibly good chemistry with each other. While she's pretty passive on some routes, Yuzuki's grumpiness gets to her, and she gives just about as much as she gets. His route has the most assertive version of Ichiko as she has no problem calling out his dad for not seeing how much thought Yuzuki has put into the revenants. And to hilariously cap off their argument, she's the one who tells Yuzuki that they're leaving now (he listens), and she calls Kyouji "Father" as if she and Yuzuki were married before bowing and walking out.

Unsurprisingly, the route caps off with Tsukuyomi making another attempt on Ichiko's life, but she's saved by the timely arrival of Yuzuki and Sosuke, who plans on becoming a new kind of Ensepulcher under Yuzuki's direction. The two of them tag-teaming Tsukuyomi was pretty fun, because this is the first time any of the love interests actually catch the bad guy on their own. And because Tsukuyomi came back to life out of a lingering desire to kill, they plan to do the traditional extermination with him (since obviously the reason he came back is not one they want to fulfill).

But Tsukuyomi breaks free and stabs Yuzuki. He ends up dying anyway, thanks to the timely arrival of Karasuma, who sees this as repaying his debt to Yuzuki for letting him hear his wife's last words, and from there the Normal vs Good Ending split is determined by whether or not Yuzuki survives. In the Normal Ending he succumbs to his injury, and tragically (to hide the secret of what really happened), his death is written off as an accident rather than that he was trying to protect Ichiko.

In the Good Ending, he recovers and we get the closest thing to a marriage proposal. Yuzuki talks about how as humans live they accumulate more and more holes in their hearts as life and losses take their toll. He thanks Ichiko for filling the hole in his heart and offers to do the same for her. Though all the routes feature Ichiko falling in love within the span of a week and a half (give or take), I think Yuzuki's is the only one where it's clear that it's a "rest of our lives" arrangement. Normally I would be like "pfft" you guys have only known each other for a few days, but Ichiko and Yuzuki played off each other so well in the second half of his route that I couldn't help shipping it.

I wish we got a little more about their future plans in Yuzuki's epilogue though, since obviously his father still runs the town and Yuzuki is still on the outs. Unlike Sosuke, who learns the truth about his father's life and death, and comes to terms with what he wants for his own future, Yuzuki already knows what he wants to do. His character development, expulsion from the Ensepulchers, and falling out of his father's graces is backstory. The only development is really that Yuzuki is finally pushed hard enough that he outright rebels and refuses to obey his father even if it means getting disowned. His wish to help the revenants remains a nascent dream.

Since he's the only love interest who does not arrive from out of town, leaving this whole damn mess behind is not an option for him, and Ichiko says she wants to stay and help, which would have a lot of fallout given what we eventually learn about her. (This route is totally ripe for a fandisk that will probably never happen thanks to the true route, but that's getting ahead of myself.)

After playing all five love interests, we're still not done, because obviously we don't have all the answers yet. After the credits roll for Yuzuki's Good Ending, we given one half of a conversation of a phone call in which one of the Ensepulchers reports that Tsukuyomi was blamed for the death of Ichiko's brother, as instructed, but that he was not the revenant who killed Shinryu Tatehira, Sosuke's father. The Ensepulcher than agrees to keep watch for the other revenant for as long as a scarlet Violocia exists.

This is the first time the scarlet Violocia is mentioned, though we know the regular purple ones are the "corpse flowers" that call the dead back to life. And after this scene, starting a new game unlocks Toa's true route, which I'll cover next week!

VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 5: Sosuke Tatehira

Sosuke was my fourth route in 7'scarlet, and I really enjoyed it because it has an extremely good blend of mystery, awkward romance, and personal stories. Of all the routes, his is probably the best written and the most balanced. It featuring a self-contained story, addressing sub-plots for both Ichiko and Sosuke, and wrapping them all up by the end with few outstanding questions. Outside of the hidden final route, we actually learn more on Sosuke's route than any other, even Yuzuki's.

Like Isora and Toa, Sosuke is actually from Okunezato and left it to go to an out of town high school after he had a falling out with his father. He has a substantial backstory, but what's really nice about it is that it dovetails with Ichiko's investigation regarding her brother, so it never feels out of place unlike Isora and Toa's. The two of them working together to learn about the revenants and the truth about Okunezato feels like a natural outcome, even though they don't quite get the answers they're hoping for.

I will get one annoying thing out of the way first though. Generally the game behaves more or less like there is a set schedule of events that happen unless the player does something to change it. That's why someone always dies on the fourth day regardless of the route and Toa's concert always gets cancelled.

Characters' actions, and what they know, shouldn't change much between routes.

So I found it incredibly disconcerting that Sosuke's place in the story felt off. In Toa's route he clearly knows the true purpose of the vigilance committee as well as how to identify revenants. He also calls them the Ensepulchers, which is the real, private name of their group. Finally, the vigilance committee trusts him, just enough, to let Toa go on his word alone.

However, on his own route, Sosuke is still trying to reconcile the existence of revenants with what science tells him should be real. He doesn't know about the true purpose of the vigilance committee (though it's possible he suspects), and he definitely doesn't know the full story of the revenants, including how to identify them.

Despite that, he still knows more than most people. He saw what might have been a newly formed revenant when he was twelve and once he buys into the other parts of the legend, he's quick to adjust to the fact it was his father's job to capture and exterminate revenants. (It was witnessing this without context that caused the falling out in the first place, because he thought his dad was dragging people off in the middle of the night and murdering them.)

The nice thing about Sosuke's route is that it makes the murders incredibly personal. He's come back to his hometown after being away for years, but loses the opportunity to reconcile with his father when his father is discovered as the second body on the fourth day. Finding out the truth behind why his father died is what drives him to unearth the town's secrets, giving both him and Ichiko reason to investigate the mysterious flowers, the revenants, and what the vigilance committee is really up to.

And we get answers!

We learn that most of the townspeople are ignorant of the revenants save as legends, we get confirmation that the revenants are recently deceased townfolk, and that revenants appear once a year after the rainy season. It's the job of the Ensepulchers to hunt down and exterminate the revenants, but unfortunately they look and behave just like real people so there's no easy way to identify them until they try to kill someone. This year is unusual in that the revenants (referred to in plural) seem unusually aggressive and their victims thus far have been members of the vigilance committee.

Even though they can't tell a revenant on sight, the committee seems to have some way of detecting them as Kyouji Murakumo, the head of the Murakumo family, is aware that there is a revenant stalking Ichiko. In fact, he invites both Sasuke and Ichiko to join the Ensepulchers, seeing that they've both lost family to the revenants. Though we don't know exactly what happened to Ichiko's brother, we learn that last year there was evidence that the revenants had killed someone, but all the townspeople were accounted for and the committee found a journal in the forbidden part of the mountains with her brother's handwriting.

We also get his name for the first time, Hanate, which feels a little odd to have finally gotten on my fourth route. I had assumed his name would either have had some significance based on prior knowledge, or he'd just continue to go nameless.

Kyouji Murakumo also refers to something from Hino's route, in that Ichiko attracts those like the revenants (though it comes as a shock to her, since she obviously doesn't remember her previous serial killer encounter) and says that she must have noticed before. Unfortunately she doesn't inquire further about it. It really feels like she should have, but I guess the writers wanted to save it for the final route.

The climax of the route is a lot of fun though. After surviving an attack by the revenant (in the dark, so she couldn't see his face), Ichiko and Sosuke agree to work with the Ensepulchers and they attend the last night of the Supernatural Club get-together, which includes everyone at the hotel except for Yuzuki. Because the revenant is fixated on Ichiko, she's there to act as bait. They know the revenant must be someone in the hotel due to the fact she was attacked inside after it had been locked down in the wake of three murders, so the revenant should be at the gathering.

With a little prompting and an unexpected visit from the town's only policeman, even the people who aren't fully on board with the revenant legend get dragged into the world's most uncomfortable game of Werewolf as they try to deflect suspicion and explain why they can't be the killer.

Identifying the killer is completely supported by the in-game narrative, nothing is hidden from the player, which makes it extra fun that Ichiko gets to be the one to point them out.

As the hotel guest Karasuma says, everyone is suspicious, and everyone has something they're hiding, so it's a little hard to notice the one specific clue that greatly weakens the killer's alibi, but in additional to that clue, there's enough circumstantial evidence from earlier in the story that Tsukuyomi, one of the other non-club hotel guests, knows things that he really shouldn't, specifically about Ichiko. And once his alibi is weakened, his attempt to cover that weakness up just makes his entire excuse collapse by even more stuff brought up earlier in Sosuke's route.

Though we don't see Tsukuyomi don the cat mask seen in the other routes, after he's detained by the vigilance committee they find the mask in his room. However, he does not confess to being the one who killed Sosuke's father. On the other hand he doesn't outright deny it either.

I'm a little disappointed that we don't get a resolution for who killed Sosuke's father on his route, though the vigilance committee itself considers it a closed case. Ichiko fares a bit better in that she gets a probable explanation for happened to her brother, but the proof is not definitive and his body hasn't been found. Worse, the game leaves us with the implication that if Tsukuyomi wasn't the one who killed Sosuke's father, that means there's another revenant running around, and wouldn't that mean she's still not entirely safe?

Still, it's enough for a happy ending, and in his Good Ending Sosuke takes her to the valley of the Violacias, which is a rather odd choice since those are supposed to be the flowers that revive the dead, but I suppose she's still looking for closure regarding her brother and that's the only place she has left.

Considering Sosuke's not the last route, I wasn't surprised that we don't get answers to everything, but I found his personal story to be engaging and when I finished I thought his route might well be my favorite of the game. And intellectually, I think it ought to be and that his route is the best written as its own stand alone piece, but it turns that Yuzuki's route gives it a good run for the money.

Assuming I'm not distracted over the Thanksgiving weekend, Yuzuki's route will go up next week!

VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 4: Toa Kushinada

Continuing my playthrough of all the routes in 7'scarlet, I liked Toa's more than I thought I would, even though Ichiko spends the least amount of time looking for her brother due to being head over heels fascinated with her new love interest. Toa is initially presented as a shy and introverted man with nerdy hobbies. He's a clutz, but a very kind person, and on Hino and Isora's routes he's a pretty one note character, though the game drops some hints that he's probably the "civilian" identity of a huge pop star that goes by a stage name.

One of the side events on all routes is a concert being held at the local middle school by A-TO, one of the country's biggest music stars. It's a bit of a mystery why he would want to perform at a school out in the middle of nowhere, but the school is happy to have him. Given that A-TO is a ridiculously simply anagram of Toa, it wasn't hard to figure out the two are the same person, but we don't see A-TO until Toa's own route, because he's that good at hiding his other identity. As Toa, he dresses in a padded kimono that hides his figure, slouches, wears glasses, and his shaggy hair falls over his face. As A-TO he stands up straight, dresses fashionably, drops the glasses, and his hair is brushed back.

The early part of Toa's route is mostly cute stuff as Ichiko repeatedly bumps into him at bad times and eventually realizes that the shabby-looking guy who loves cats is actually a celebrity. We also get his backstory about how he grew up in Okunezato, how he created the Okune Panda mascot, and how his family's business was eventually shut down by the Murakumo family.

But despite that, the middle section of the plot doesn't feel that much different from Isora's. Most of the fourth afternoon/evening is even recycled from Isora's storyline with Hino having extra work, Sosuke missing the evening meeting, and Yuki suggesting that the group break up.

I didn't like the reduced focus on Ichiko's story much. Though I related to Toa a lot (especially how he takes off his glasses before going on stage so he can't see the audience), it bothered me that Ichiko put off the reason she came to the town in the first place because she couldn't get him out of her head. Also, Hino drops off really badly in this one, and this time there's far less of an excuse for Ichiko not to touch base with him. I know he's not the designated love interest on this route, but they're still friends who came to this town together and I feel like the other hotel staff show up more often than he does.

The last third of Toa's route is really intriguing though. It's not that it comes together as part of his story (in fact you could cut a lot of it and it wouldn't change anything), but it advances the overarching story of the town that cuts across all playthroughs. Even though most people say the local legend about the revenants is just a story, the town's vigilance committee certainly believes in it, and suspects Toa of being one.

It could have ended badly, but Sosuke intervenes and convinces them to let Toa go. Then Toa and Ichiko go back to dealing with celebrity issues (almost) as if nothing had happened. But this was a massive tease for Sosuke's role in the story and made me heavily anticipate going through his route. Obviously he's involved--deeply--with what's going on if the notoriously fanatical vigilance committee will listen to him.

And the route wraps up with the now customary attack by a man in a cat mask.

The game does something odd here, with having a cat being clearly attracted to the killer, when Toa is the only character who we know of who constantly has cats flocking to him. And I was shocked it took me so long to realize that on top of that, the killer is wearing a cat mask. I thought they might be one and the same.

But then Toa appears and defends Ichiko just like Hino and Isora did on their routes before him. I can't help wondering why the cat attraction was included and if it was a dropped plot thread, because after finishing the final route, this appears to be nothing more than a red herring with no additional significance. In most games something like this wouldn't matter, but given that 7'scarlet is a mystery, players are likely to expect a meaning behind any unusual event and in this case there isn't one.

After the cat mask killer is dealt with, Toa's route then resolves with the usual happily ever after and he and Ichiko decide that they'll try to make their relationship work, even though his job as a singer has him traveling and performing a lot. Oddly, his Normal and Good endings are almost identical, but if the player gets his Good Ending, there is one additional piece of information revealed.

Toa is also a childhood friend of Ichiko, which is the pattern I mentioned in Isora's blog entry and why I was glad that I had played Hino first. Given that Sosuke is clearly tied to the town as well and that Yuzuki is the local hotel owner, it wasn't a stretch to assume that all of the love interests are Ichiko's childhood friends (though it turns out that's not entirely true). This made Hino feel less and less remarkable the further I went in.

Needless to say, after the vigilance committee scene, I was looking forward to playing Sosuke's route next, and especially jamming over to Yuzuki's, since multiple characters on prior routes suspect he knows everything.

VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 3: Isora Amari

I'm glad I played Isora's route second, because his history is the start of a pattern that I only noticed once I got to Toa's route, and once that happened, Hino started to feel a little less special even though his route is otherwise pretty solid.

Isora is the chef at the Fuurin Cafe attached to the hotel Ichiko and Hino are staying at. He's also a member of the Okunezato Supernatural Club. Initially he appears to be another outsider because he says he came to the hotel to work for the summer (he goes to school in another town), but he later reveals on his route that he was born in Okunezato and had lived here until he was in middle school. Since he is a second year high school student he hasn't been away that long and he's still attuned to how the town works. In fact, he tells Ichiko that he could be a lot of help in finding her brother precisely because the town won't open up to outsiders, but as a local he won't have that problem.

Not that he turns out to be a whole lot of help in that regard. It seems Ichiko's brother kept away from the main thoroughfares and while people vaguely remember a disappearing incident, they don't remember her brother in particular.

Going into Isora's route I was worried about Hino getting arbitrarily ignored by Ichiko just because he's no longer the main love interest, which would be terribly rude considering he was the one who convinced her to come out here in the first place (and they're still friends even without the romance), but the game handles the reduction in his presence well. At first he simply has an extra afternoon of work at the hotel (where he's helping out to pay for his half of the stay), then he gets sick in what she fears is an act of food poisoning intended to kill him, and in the final leg of the plot he's just not able to be present since only Isora knows her location.

As for Isora himself… I didn't like his route much. At first it was because he didn't feel very much like a high school student to me. He felt just as mature as the rest of the cast and has no issue approaching and confidently flirting with a girl at least two years older than him. And though his route ramps up the sensation of danger every bit as much as Hino's does, it doesn't feel entirely fair because it conflates multiple potential dangers with the intention of making the player think they're related (and thus things are getting progressively worse) when in fact they're not.

On the second day of Ichiko and Hino's trip, a body turns up. This happens before route lock so the player gets this scene on every playthrough. The town's lone policeman doesn't know if it was an accident (someone fell down the mountain) or murder, so while it puts a damper on things, no one freaks out over it.

The fourth day of the trip is after the route split and so far on both Hino and Isora's routes, that's when the second body turns up after having fallen down the mountain. That's when people start getting concerned, though there is once again no proof whether it was an accident or a murder. So Yuki suggests that the Supernatural Club cease their activities until they really know what's going on. Hino convinces him to back down, at least until the police report comes in, but Isora completely flips out and even nudges Yuki (as another local) to agree with him that the town is dangerous.

It's a chilling scene, especially when Isora makes a declaration that he will protect Ichiko forever, no matter what it takes. Normally that kind of declaration is made a warm and thrilling moment for the player with romantic music that shows how much the male lead has come to feel for the protagonist, but instead we get the spooky music that plays when someone is relating a creepy story. Isora's declaration is not meant to comfort the player, and I couldn't help wondering: What does he know?

The game continues to build up suspicion against Isora. He serves some tarts to Hino, who ends up sick in the hospital the next day, and the cat Hino fed an extra tart to ends up dead. Isora is upset that people would suspect him, but he was acting strangely, and he knew Ichiko hates strawberries so she never would have eaten the tarts if Hino had offered one to her.

Then Yuki gets kidnapped. He goes to the general store to pick up supplies for the hotel, but never arrives. Naturally everyone's alarmed and Ichiko takes a chance to go looking for him, which results in her getting stabbed in the leg by a mysterious assailant in the old part of town.

When she wakes up, she finds herself in an unknown location with no windows or clocks, so she can't tell the time, but there is a bathroom and a bed. Isora is with her, having bandaged her wound, and tells her she will have to stay here until things die down outside. At first it doesn't seem too bad, but Isora is not forthcoming with what exactly is going on, and it becomes apparent that even though he says he's told everyone else that she's safe, no one ever comes to visit, something that Ichiko knows Hino would do given the chance.

Isora's creepy comments continue to pile up. It's clear that he's really getting off on looking after her and comments that if her hands had been injured instead of her leg he would be happy feeding her. To be fair, he quickly backpedals from it, realizing that he's being creepy, but it still came out. Ichiko comes to the realization that it's entirely possible that Isora attacked her specifically to put her in this situation where she's locked away from her friends and is forced to rely on him. (Yes, he locks the door from the outside when he goes, so she can't leave without him.)

If questioned about whether he really told everyone about what he's doing with her, he admits that he didn't, because he can't let anyone know about her location. He doesn't know who he can't trust at the hotel, but he quickly goes overboard and makes it clear that he won't let her leave, as he frames it for her own safety.

I was getting flashbacks to Toma from Amnesia, though thankfully Isora is not as yandere as him. But it's pretty clear that he was designed to appeal to that kind of audience. If you like messed up guys who will do anything to protect their beloved, even if it means disregarding their wishes, Isora is a tamer introduction to that character type.

And to be fair, when the cat-masked villain finally does show up, Isora beats the ever loving crap out of him. It's nice when yandere works for you rather than against you.

In the Normal Ending she thanks Isora and goes on with her life, but in the Good Ending she tells Isora that she still likes him, and wants to be with him even when he admits that he might end up locking her up again if he feels it's warranted.

Oh well.

The weird thing is that a lot of this could of been avoided if Isora had been upfront with Ichiko about why he was holding her captive in an unknown location (like he thinks the killer is at the hotel). He could have given her a clock and a calendar so she could keep track of time. He could have passed notes between her and Hino so they could each be reassured that the other was safe. He also could have like… not lied to her about why he found her so quickly after she was attacked.

But that would have taken away from the yandere and made him a more reasonable person.

Also, having played Hino's route, I knew Isora was not behind the accidents and probably not behind Yuki's kidnapping either, so he was probably a "good" guy aside from his terrible sense of protecting Ichiko.

The worst thing for me was actually Yuki's kidnapping, which ended up not tieing into anything. The only reason it "needs" to happen is to force Ichiko out of the hotel so she can later get attacked by the man in the cat mask, but the two events are completely unrelated.

The Murakumo family "kidnapped" Yuki in order to talk to him. Yuzuki Murakumo is the hotel owner, and Yuki is his employee. Yes, it's weird that the owner's family would want to talk to one of Yuzuki's employees, but Yuki was never in any danger. It's just nobody knew about the arrangement because it was something done at the last minute and they sent a car to pick him up.

Though we get the reason for this "kidnapping" in another route, it's made abundantly clear in general that the Murakumo family controls this town from the shadows, but they have no direct involvement in Isora's story aside from this incident. Even Yuzuki, as the hotel owner, barely shows after route lock.

At this point I feel like Isora's route is rather skippable, as there aren't any deep plot revelations, but it's still mandatory since everyone needs to be played through for the true ending. It makes me wonder if he was written or conceived last, out of a need to have a fifth love interest to promote, since he has the least involvement with anything.

Now that both intro routes are out of the way, Toa Kushinana is up next week.

VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 2: Hino Kagutsuchi

Hino and Isora are the first two romance options and Hino has a bit of an edge since he's Ichiko's childhood friend and the one who kicks off the story when he suggests they both go to Okunezato. He notices she's been depressed ever since her brother disappeared a year ago and figured she might feel better if she had to chance to investigate the place where he was last seen.

Admittedly, having Hino made the two route restriction at the start more palatable because he is unlikely to offend. He already knows Ichiko, he's supportive of her, and is an all around nice guy. If there's any reason to dislike him, it might be because he's a little too vanilla and all the qualities that make him a good default pick aren't remarkable enough to make him stand out on his own.

I picked him first because I figured he was a safe bet, and Isora ticked me off by trying to get too friendly too fast.

Hino's route is also the best introduction to the game as nearly every member of the cast makes an appearance and sticks around long enough to make an impression. His story lays out a lot of the mysteries around Ichiko and her inability to remember her past, which, though apparent on other routes, don't get nearly as much attention as they do here.

Much of the early portion of the game, prior to route lock, is hanging out with Hino as the two of them check into the hotel and get the lay of the land. Though the other love interests also make brief appearances shortly after they arrive in Okunezato, Hino is the only character who is not a stranger, and the route lock happens when Ichiko decides who to go to the local festival with.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hino's route is mostly about Ichiko, because his life revolves around her. Even though he has an incredibly hard time admitting his feelings, it's pretty clear to everyone else (except Ichiko herself) that he's has a thing for her. He wants to look after her, for her to be able to rely on him, and takes it really poorly when he fails to live up to the ideal protector he wants to be.

That's not to say that he's going around getting into fights to defend her honor, but he really wants to look out for her after having failed to do so in their childhood. As kids he convinced her to come in a "haunted house" with him only for the two of them to get caught by a serial killer. He could have pulled the trigger on a gun to save her, but Hino found himself unable to do it, and it was Ichiko's brother who showed up and grabbed the gun to shoot the guy.

The serial killer backstory feels over the top, but at this stage of my playthrough I wasn't sure if there was or was not any supernatural element to the story and I felt like there might be more to it (and there is). After the haunted house episode, Ichiko's brother warned Hino that she would attract others like that serial killer, and if Hino wanted to remain by her he would need to be able to protect her. Since then, Hino has been living in her brother's shadow, feeling like he needs to work hard to make himself worthy.

And the guy works. He goes running every morning and he's fit because he wants to be of use to her at that one moment when she needs it the most.

Also of interest is that Ichiko doesn't remember much of the serial killer event, just fuzzy details, so the game reveals it by having Hino tell it to her, and she does not take it entirely at face value, even though it's Hino giving her the story. Nothing comes of it on this route, but from the flashback memories we get at the end of the route, it's clear that both Hino and Ichiko have been to Okunezato before and Hino never reveals this. Though, to be fair, if something has been eating away at Ichiko's memory, it may well have eaten a bit of his too. (And as it turns out, this is true for both of them, and I'll get into that when I talk about the final route of the game.)

Even if Hino is keeping things from her, out of consideration or some other reason, he is still completely supportive of her. When she has a weird dream about another shrine when Okunezato supposedly only has one, he doesn't make light of her. He goes all over town with her to find it. There's only one point when he suggests she drops her quest to find her brother, and that's when it becomes increasingly clear that there is something dangerous happening in town.

If there's anything that particularly bothered me about Hino's route it's the ending. Hino's big hang-up is his failure to protect Ichiko when they were kids. Specifically, that he was unable to pull the trigger on a gun. The memory is so traumatic for him that he can't even handle carnival guns to shoot for a prize.

So of course his moment of redemption comes after Ichiko receives a creepy letter telling her to come alone in the middle of the night to a forbidden area in the mountains around town, otherwise her brother is going to die. Hino follows her there where she's confronted with a large man in a cat mask, and when Hino tries to save the day, the mysterious figure presents him with nearly the same scenario as years before. He tosses out a gun that lands by Ichiko and tells them to shoot him if they don't want him to kill her.

Hino asks Ichiko to throw him the gun and he'll shoot while the villain basically taunts Hino's sense of masculinity if he lets Ichiko shoot for him. Me being me, I'd rather Ichiko make the shot herself, and she does in the Normal Ending, but for the Good Ending she tosses the gun to Hino and he shoots. But the gun isn't loaded and a third party ends up taking out the bad guy by falling off a cliff with him. (Sadly, in the Normal Ending Hino is the one who grabs the guy and bodily pulls him over the cliff.)

While I understand that narratively Hino needed to face his demons, I would rather the gun had been tossed to him directly, rather than have the pointless back and forth between Ichiko and Hino about whether or not to give him the gun. Then it would also mirror the situation from the past instead of just being a facsimile.

We don't find out who the cat-masked man is, but to be honest, given the game's semi-linear route progression and that the story is about solving a mystery, I wasn't as bothered not knowing who he was. We get a lot of clues and questions raised, and I figured I'd learn more on the next route.

As for the ending, it's happy enough. Though Ichiko never learns exactly what happened to her brother, she comes to terms with his loss and moves on together with Hino.

I suspect that from a game design perspective that Hino's route was laid out first as there are a number of Easter eggs to be found that will only make sense after completing the hidden, final route, and most of them are exclusive to his route. After finishing the final route I knew I would want to replay Hino's and I wasn't disappointed by a second run, but I'll cover those perspectives when I get to the final part of this series.

Isora's up next week!

VN Talk: 7'scarlet - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: PS Vita
Release: 2018

7'scarlet is an otome in which the female protagonist enters a possible romance with multiple characters, but is a little different from the standard in that playing through all the routes is a somewhat linear process. All but two of the routes are blocked off at the beginning, and the rest gradually unlock as more routes are completed. This allows the story can be told a particular way and reserves the characters who know the most about what is truly happening for later playthroughs.

I've complained about route locks in Code:Realize and Collar x Malice, but that's mostly because the routes do nothing to warrant them being locked aside from building a grand finale that can wrap up everybody's storyline in a single route. I didn't mind the locks in Hakuoki and Sweet Fuse because the locked routes took the protagonist off the beaten path and featured the perspective of characters who are villains and/or knew too much so it made sense to close them off to first-timers.

7'scarlet is closer to the latter, but done in incremental steps as we start with two routes, then a third unlocks, then a fourth, fifth, and so on.

Since I am writing this within a year of the game's English release, I figure there are people who may still be adverse to spoilers, so be aware that I will be spoiling all routes, including the overall storyline. If you're worried about spoilers, you should stop reading now.

7'scarlet follows Ichiko Hanamaki, a college student on summer break, as she heads for the small town of Okunezato to look into the disappearance of her older brother.

She goes along with her childhood friend, Hino, who is part of the Okunezato Supernatural Club, a group of online enthusiasts who are curious about the town's various mysteries (of which mysterious disappearances is one). The club is holding their first offline meeting in person in the town of their curiosity, but after Ichiko and Hino arrive, it quickly becomes apparent that there are more mysteries than the disappearance of her brother.

Though this is an otome game, the story is only partially about Ichiko, her search for her brother, or finding romance. It's also a story about a town, its turbulent history, and breaking free of the past it's been shackled with. The town may as well be a character, which is an unusual tact for a game.

The early mysteries are fairly mundane: the club admin who arranged their stay doesn't show up (though kindly enough he did prepay the bill for their get-together dinner), for some reason the hotel owner fired all but three employees a month ago (which leaves the staff incredibly short-handed even though this is a small hotel), and somebody seems to be watching Ichiko.

7'scarlet dances in between being a summer mystery to be solved among friends and a much darker thriller with a supernatural tease. You don't quite know (at first) whether the town's local legends are true or not, and the local portion of the cast is dismissive of their ancestral stories.

It makes for an interesting balance, because as you're playing, you aren't quite sure if there is anything supernatural at all, or this is just the work of a serial killer sheltered by a town that dislikes outsiders butting into their secrets. Sure there's a legend about people coming back to life as revenants who must kill others to obtain the life force that keeps their otherwise hollow bodies going, but we're not really going to see the undead in this game. Are we?

With each route, more of the truth is uncovered about Ichiko's history with the town of Okunezato, the legend of the revenants, and how she has forgotten what happened in there in years past. Though it's not amnesia, she has a problem with her long term memory, where even memories of elementary school are distant and vague to her. She knows that she and Hino have been friends for years, but she doesn't actually know that much about him.

The mysteries are what make 7'scarlet fun and more than just another otome. I wanted to figure out who the killer was before the game revealed it, and I enjoyed trying to solve mysteries before the characters themselves made the connections (and sometimes I did).

In fact the game makes good use of the fact the cast consists of modern day characters who make pop culture observations about their situation; like being in a rural town with a bunch of supernatural loving strangers is just asking for the weather to go bad and trap them in the hotel. When they find the town mascot wandering around in costume at night, Hino remarks on how creepy it would be if it turns around and there's blood all over its face. That doesn't happen (the blood part), but he thinks about it, which is perfectly in character and a fun addition to the script.

But 7'scarlet doesn't quite come together because Ichiko's goal of discovering the fate of her brother and doesn't mesh with whatever romance she finds. Her brother's been gone for a year and is considered dead, so it's understandable that she no longer feels a sense of urgency and can entertain the thought of falling in love, but every ending other than her brother's route results in her not finding him. Usually, if she gets anything at all, it's just one of his possessions along with the assumption that he was killed. It's not possible to have a well thought out romance and have Ichiko accomplish her goal of reuniting with her brother.

The two are mutually exclusive, and given the way they wrote her brother, Hanate, I'm not sure that he ever would have consented to going home with her. After playing Hanate's route, it's pretty clear that no matter which path the player takes, Hanate is both in town and aware that Ichiko has come looking for him. The fact he doesn't show himself on any route other than his own can only be construed as he doesn't want to. There is no golden route here where everyone leaves happy. In fact, Hanate's route ensures that that Toa's true ending will never happen.

In a way, I don't mind that too much, as I prefer games where one route is not so clearly the canon route. 7'scarlet actually does a really good job with this. If you look at the box art all the of the guys (save Hanate, who is held back as a surprise) are given equal prominence and in the opening videos everyone's presented in playthrough order with only a slight edge to Hino who gets to appear by himself in one of the shots when the other love interests are paired off. And that makes sense since he starts the game with Ichiko, and he's the one who convinces her to come to Okunezato.

Also worth noting, because Hino is a prominent character, the story doesn't write the player into a corner regarding Ichiko's feelings for him. She's simply blind to his crushing on her, making it feel a bit odd on some routes that she would not spend a certain amount of time with him, since they're still friends. His presence, or occasional lack thereof, is handled really well in Isora's route without making it seem like she ditched him. (I mean, who goes on vacation with a friend and then ditches said friend?) But other times it comes across as incredibly awkward, like how he's barely in Toa's and even leaves town without her.

I thought all the routes save the hidden one at the end were fairly solid, and I particularly enjoyed Hino, Sosuke, and Yuzuki's, though my appreciation for Hino's was greatly amplified by the final route.

Taken on its own it's still good, but there's a lot of additional context and a layer of tragedy to Hino's once you know the whole story. Usually I have a clear favorite route, and only feel like replaying one of them after I finish the game, but to be honest, I'd be happy replaying the majority here.

As with my previous VN Talk entries, I'll go through the routes one week at a time, in the order that I played them. Hino's route will be going up next week!

The End of Persona 5: The Animation

I was going to start a different thread this week, especially since my last post was also about Persona 5: The Animation, but I finished the series this weekend and I have thoughts. Also, my next post would have been the first in a new VN Talk series, and if you've read any of those, they're multi-part affairs as I run down every route of a visual novel. The next game in that queue ended up having eight parts due to the large number of routes and I realized that, well, that's two months' worth of posts. Persona 5 isn't going to wait that long.

I also want to get this off my chest because even though I'm going to review Persona 5 for Diabolical Plots, this is all the stuff I'm not going to be able to talk about because of spoilers for both the anime and the game. You've been warned!

(As if the post title didn't give it away.)

So I'm going to talk about Akechi. It's been a year and he's still my favorite character in the game (the little backstabber).

The anime went out of its way to introduce more scenes with him, and at first I was wondering why this was necessary. There's a lot of ground for the anime to cover, and especially as the series goes on, it becomes apparent that there are a lot of filler scenes that the series shouldn't be able to spare. (Even with the eventual ending that they went with, I still think there were a lot of extraneous scenes.)

But the scenes with Akechi aren't necessarily among them.

The cameos, sure, when he's only present for a moment or two, but when he starts helping Ren with Yusuke's side story, that's when getting him involved early begins to pay off. Ren and Akechi become an interesting duo where phantom thief and detective are working together to help someone. It's actually something that I wish had been in the game, as their game incarnations are never in the position where they're helping each other out on equal footing.

It's something that's a lot of fun in other series; two people who would otherwise never work together have to do so for the greater good.

Though we do get that when Akechi joins the team in the game, he also blackmails the Phantom Thieves into working with him, which ruins any chance of them feeling like true teammates who simply have different philosophies.

And the anime has to build Akechi this way because of how and where in the story they chose to end the series. As you likely know if you've read this far, Akechi is the traitor who turns Ren over to the police and the series ends with him apparently putting a bullet in Ren's head. Akechi isn't even the big bad on the human side, with Shido calling the shots, but Shido's presence in the story has been reduced, which makes Akechi the face of villainy as far as Persona 5: The Animation is concerned, and that's why his story had to be ramped up for as much impact as possible. If you're going to end the series with the villain walking off into the sunset that betrayal has gotta hurt.

For the most part, I think the anime does a better job of hiding that Akechi is a traitor than the game did. It's not just the fact he's more of a helpful friend, but the TV format helps a lot. One the things that I noticed in game is that after Ren is captured, his friends spend time worrying about him, but Akechi is absent in all those scenes, which struck me as odd. It looks like he disappears as soon as the casino heist is done, which is like having him wave around a flag to the rest of the Phantom Thieves saying "Hey, traitor over here!"

The anime fixes this by having Akechi clearly with the thieves as they leave, and even ties in his going to Ren's interrogation as an attempt to break him out, because he's literally the only member of their team who can get access.

Also, the weekly half hour format leaves less time for the player to be stewing over potential plot twists. Persona 5 is a 100+ hour game, and Akechi is probably with the team full time for around 10 of those. In the anime, the entire joining the team and betrayal happens in less than two hours (and in the meantime he helps with Sojiro's subplot, further cementing him as a friendly).

Akechi's betrayal also feels like less of a narrative cheat when it does happen because the show does not clearly have a narrator. We follow Ren's POV in the game, so there aren't many scenes that happen without him. Theoretically everything Ren knows that is relevant to the story is something the player knows as well, but it turns out that's not true, especially when it comes to the upcoming twist.

We know from the game that Akechi's killing of him isn't going to stick. A lot of people are posting about how the anime is going with the bad ending of the game, but it's actually not. The bad ending requires Ren to sell out his companions, which he doesn't.

The path to the other two endings involves Akechi killing a cognitive version of Ren, which is exactly what happens here, and works better in the anime without the constraints of Ren's POV.

Since Ren and the other Phantom Thieves are actually aware that Akechi is joining them under false pretenses, this entire arrest and shooting is a setup. We can see the anime supports this because Sae shows Ren's phone to Akechi, which discretely activates the Metaverse Nav to send Akechi into the cognitive world where he will kill a fake Ren without realizing he made a mistake.

This works in the anime to surprise the viewer, because we're not following a particular storyteller but it doesn't work in the game because Ren knows what's happening, but we as the player do not. And it's not like this is backstory that he wouldn't be thinking about. It's critical to saving his life.

I'm not sure if anime-only viewers were fooled by Akechi the whole way through, but I think there's a better chance than with the game players. I wish that Akechi's betrayal had been a thing I was kicking myself over not noticing rather than something I was fairly certain was going to happen.

The anime goes to the trouble of adding Akechi to the end credits after his Phantom Thief costume is revealed, but doesn't update the opening credits to match, which I think is a rare misfire in what otherwise would have been a flawless cover. Granted, it would only have been for a single episode, but still, they did an entirely new sequence for the final episode so it's not like they didn't have the budget.

A special to wrap up the series has been announced, since it's clearly not over, and if they can make it a good two hours long I think that will be enough to wrap everything for real. But now that they've built Akechi up like this, I can't help wondering if Shido is going to be that compelling given that it's been his son who's had our attention this entire time.