VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 4: Yiguang

I was probably the most ambivalent going into Yiguang's route because there isn't much to his story aside from being a mage. Though Wu Zixu distrusts both him and Goujian, Yiguang is in less precarious a position. The only black mark against him is that he faked his death five years ago when the rest of the Shi clan sacrificed itself instead of continuing his family's service to the king. Unlike Goujian, he never raised arms against the kingdom.

We meet Yiguang living as a simple village doctor, with the respect of the people around him, and given the flashbacks we have through Fuchai, there's no reason to doubt that he's anything other than the kind-hearted soul he appears to be. The question really is why he never came back after the sacrifice, and it turns out to be a very mundane but relatable reason. He was afraid that Fuchai would have changed over the years and she'd no longer be the childhood friend he remembered.

Considering that was the one element of the unknown going into his route, it was harder to get excited about it. Yiguang is continually himself, with few ups and downs, and we don't end up seeing any new sides of him.

What makes his route markedly different from the others though, is that we get to visit two places that he otherwise visits alone in other routes. So we get to be with him when retrieves the Azure Dragon Sword from the hidden palace of the Shi family and when he goes to Haojing to find the Body of the Ding of Virtue. Both trips make for a nice change of pace from the march to attack Qi, though they don't sync up with the rest of the story very well.

For instance, Yiguang and Fuchai leave the army after the naval battle to go to the hidden palace, with an agreement to meet up with everyone else at Han City afterward, but when they come back, they apparently don't meet up with the army after all and head back to the capital of Gusu where they find out that the army has been sent north to attack Qi by a fake Fuchai (actually the Dragon God, though apparently without needing her blood to maintain the disguise as he did on Chenfeng's route). This sends the two of them right back out of the city to catch up with the army so everyone can head south again.

Though this happens to some degree on most routes, since there's usually a march to Qi, and sometimes a GuSu visit between the naval battle and the march, it feels particularly needless given how quickly they turn around. Yiguang is already tied for the shortest route in the game despite being the poster boy since his route skips having a chapter in Linzi, the capital of Qi.

As a love interest, Yiguang does all right as the unwavering childhood friend, and I suspect the reason Chenfeng ends up mind controlled is to mark a clearer difference between the two. There's little romantic angst on Yiguang's route save that Fuchai is aware she is likely to die before achieving any kind of happy ending with him, and unlike Chenfeng, Yiguang is not shy about letting her know his feelings.

Despite that, I felt a little let down. His Jade Fish talisman saves Fuchai many times over, and it's something he gave her years ago even though (or perhaps because) it's intended only for his soulmate. But I just felt the romance wasn't earned. They've been apart for most of their teenage years, but there's very little sorting out their feelings and getting reacquainted before they suddenly exchange marriage vows before the final battle.

I did like the climax of his route better than the others though, because the Dragon God is actually active around the ritual site where they prepare to kill him, and because Fuchai ends up doing it on her own without the ritual while Goujian is completely freaking out because she's discovered the Dragon God's hidden weakness. (She really hates Goujian for his betrayal on this route, which I'm all for.)

I'm less keen on the death fake-out though, because it's fairly obvious on Yiguang's route which are the good vs the bad choices, so the fact that it looks like Fuchai's dying in the good ending is pretty cheap. Much like in Chenfeng's ending she ends up faking her death, leaving the kingdom to her cousin, and this time leaves on a journey to see the world with Yiguang.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 3: Goujian

Even though Yiguang is the poster boy of My Vow to My Liege, I feel like the game may have been created with Goujian in mind as his route is the longest out of all of them.

I had a difficult time with Goujian's route, not because of the being on opposite sides thing (star-crossed lovers from feuding nations is all right with me), but because both he and Fuchai keep running hot and cold throughout the entire run. In the beginning of Goujian's route, when he's trying to figure out whether Fuchai actually trusts him, it was understandable, but as it wore on, I kept wanting them to make up their minds whether they loved or hated each other, and one or the other or both would keep bouncing between love, hate, and more rarely ambivalence (that wouldn't last).

I suppose, being a romance game, the answer is ultimately yes, even in the bad ending, but it's a long conflicting road with a fair bit of mood whiplash. The changing feelings are more understandable when prompted by something, but sometimes they aren't, so it's frustrating when they won't commit.

Like other routes, Goujian's story diverges following the naval battle with the Kingdom of Qi, during which Ng's supply ships were attacked. Given that the ships were traveling through a hidden route through the river tributaries that few knew about, there had to be a mole on the Ng side of the battle. If the player has gone through any other route first, it's pretty obvious that the mole is Goujian, but Fuchai at this point in time is still fully trusting of him. She and Goujian just swore a hundred years of friendship between their kingdoms and she released him to go back to his people.

Following the battle Goujian is prickly with her because it's obvious there was a mole, and he's the most glaring suspect. She says she trusts him, but he finds that difficult to believe given the circumstances, and when he pushes her to swear that she does not suspect him, she refuses on account of him acting so defensive.

What can be difficult to see, particularly in the early chapters of his route, is that Goujian has been getting mixed signals from Fuchai for a long time and his anger is nothing recent. We know they met before he realized that she was actually the king of Ng, which is why they use the affectionate nicknames Ahyu and Ahjiu, but we don't get the circumstances until his route when Fuchai enters the Spiritual Realm and lives out a mirror version of his circumstances, where Ng is defeated and Fuchai is the one enslaved.

This lets us see how Goujian came to care about the one person in Ng who was kind to him, while also feeling betrayed upon learning that his "friend" was also the king holding him prisoner and demanding his people pay tribute. While Goujian did not know who Fuchai was at first, it was impossible for Fuchai to not have known Goujian's identity, making the sincerity of her friendship suspect. Unfortunately for Goujian, he'd already started crushing on her by then, which made him extremely conflicted and understandably upset, leading him to forging an alliance with the Dragon God and his followers.

This revelation comes very late in his route though, leaving his behavior bewildering for most of it. He betrays Fuchai at the naval battle, but then he's mushy with her on the road to war with the Kingdom of Qi. A short while later he betrays her again at the conference with the Kingdom of Jin by ripping open her clothes to expose her chest and gender to the other kings, and then he's… sorry about it (or not, depending on choices made).

From Goujian's point of view I understand why he backstabbed Fuchai at the conference. He swore his revenge would not come without Fuchai suffering the ultimate humiliation, and his action, aside from being devastatingly personal, theoretically put the entire Kingdom of Ng on the backfoot. Being her lover at the time probably helped wedge the knife in, and I'm fine with that if Goujian's decided that his commitment is to his revenge, but being apologetic while exposing her didn't work for me. He can't have it both ways.

I'm less surprised that Fuchai's feelings bounce around after his second betrayal, but she seems surprisingly forgiving of it. Even in the bad ending when she's reconciled herself to the fact that they're enemies, it feels more like she's lamenting that their relationship can never be because they're the kings of two nations at war rather than because he placed his desire for revenge over her.

The good ending also felt a little… easy, considering what Goujian has done. Despite what happened at the conference, Ng having an openly female king turns out to be a non-issue and Fuchai gets to marry Goujian. I don't know exactly how that leaves things in his home nation of Yue, but Wu Zixu makes it clear that Goujian is marrying into Fuchai's family, and not the other way around. Goujian is a little put out, but that didn't bother me. If nothing else, I'm glad Fuchai didn't step down and/or run off with him.

But this made the conference chapter very irritating to me. Literally the only reason it exists is for that scene where Goujian humiliates Fuchai, because it doesn't appear on other routes, and has no bearing on the remaining story beats, not even the Goujian specific endings. It doesn't even bother to show the reactions of the other kings before putting Fuchai back on a boat for her capital, further cementing the fact everything about the conference was irrelevant except for Goujian.

I think if not for the conference scene, and if Fuchai had just been a little more suspicious of him, I would have liked Goujian's route better, but I just can't forgive him.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 2: Chenfeng

Chenfeng was my first route in My Vow to My Liege and he was initially a character design pick. Not too ostentatious, not too stern. He looks like a nice guy and one of the kinder characters in the cast. And when I saw how close he was with Fuchai in the opening that sealed the deal. As the king's bodyguard, attendant, and childhood friend, Chenfeng is in on her secret, and since she obviously can't have female servants helping her in and out of her royal clothes, he's the one who does it. There's no blushing, no sexual tension. When he's combing her hair you can see that this is just daily life for the two of them.

Out of the four love interests, Chenfeng is the least "special" with no magic powers or titles (former or present). He was a battlefield orphan who the king took in out of pity (possibly on a whim) and brought into the palace to be his daughter's playmate. While growing up he was constantly aware of his lower status and even though Fuchai called him her friend, he knew that other people might not necessarily see it that way.

Fuchai wasn't completely braindead about his concerns, and tried to raise his standing. Though it's only a background note and does not impact the story, she arranged for no less than Sun Tzu to mentor him. (Sun Tzu was one of the ministers of her father's kingdom in history, so this is not as large a stretch as it seems.) Chenfeng is commented on as being talented enough to be a general, though he refuses to take such a position.

Because, as is obvious to us if not to our protagonist, Chenfeng is in love with Fuchai and would rather spend his life at her side. As her bodyguard and commander of the Royal Guards he goes almost everywhere with her, at least until he's badly injured in the common route. Though the poor guy wants to do nothing but keep carrying out his duties, Fuchai keeps pushing him off to rest. That's not to say he doesn't continue to show up, because he does, and frequently, but it prevents him from being omni-present, which I think is a good thing. (With a side bonus of showing how much he wants to be with her because he keeps getting out of bed.)

I didn't initially like the start of his route because Chenfeng starts acting out of character, becoming brusque and possessive. Fuchai is taking greater and greater risks that are likely to get her killed, and Chenfeng, who is already doing his damnedest to keep her safe, feels like she doesn't respect how hard he's working for her. Worse, he knows that with mages and the Dragon God around, he can't fight that kind of power because no matter how good a swordsman he is, he's helpless against the supernatural.

His reasons are sympathetic, but his actions aren't. It might start with him becoming overly vengeful towards Fuchai's enemies, but he ends up imprisoning her in her room of the palace so she can't leave. He even suggests, quite forcefully, that she should give up being king so she can live as Tengyu again.

What saves this (from me punting his route as a surprise yandere ruining what I thought was a sweet love interest) is that it turns out Chenfeng is being corrupted by the Dragon God's magic from when he was injured and sent in to the human sacrificial array earlier in the story. His route gets even more dismal when it becomes clear just how little of his own self-control remains and how his devotion to Fuchai has been twisted.

Probably the best part, which will sound strange because I talked about his devotion being twisted, is that when Fuchai enters the Spiritual Realm to save him, she realizes that what she saw is a part of him. It's just it's not the only part. She comes across two dueling Chenfengs espousing conflicting views over how best to care for Fuchai (both of them make good and bad points), and when they demand she choose between them, the best choice is to acknowledge that both of them are a part of Chenfeng.

If Fuchai does everything right, Chenfeng is able to break free from the Dragon God's magic and will join her in the final battle to retake the capital of Gisu from the Dragon God. If she doesn't, Chenfeng remains controlled. She manages to kill the Dragon God in both the good and bad endings of Chenfeng''s route with rather surprising ease for a final confrontation (not even famous last words from the Dragon God himself), with the difference being that both Chenfeng and Fuchai die in the bad end, having inflicted mortal wounds on each other.

While I expected some sort of tragedy for his bad end, I hadn't expected it would run all the way up to the end of the storyline, or to hit me emotionally, but there was just something poetic about Fuchai turning into water to join the waters of the lake and for Chenfeng (after coming to his senses) to become the wind so he can continue to be beside her. (Bonus: "Wind" is one of the characters in Chenfeng's name.)

I particularly liked his good ending though, which sees Fuchai give up the throne (now that the Dragon God is gone and the Sacred Vow broken) to her cousin while pretending that she fell in battle against the Dragon God. This frees her to live a nondescript life with Chenfeng away from all her previous duties where she can be Tengyu again. And I have to admit I like the fact she ships her cousin with Princess Shaojiang. Maybe that marriage alliance between Ng and Qi can still happen.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Windows
Release: 2020

I picked up My Vow to My Liege for a few reasons. One was that it's set in ancient China, which is unusual for an otome game, but also because it's by a Chinese developer (no chance of being exoticized by outsiders) and I heard that it has a good translation.

This title is less than a year old as of this writing, so be aware there will be spoilers as I get further into my discussion.

My Vow to My Liege is set during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, probably during 492 BC given that Fuchai has been king for three years. Five years prior to the story, Fuchai's father tried breaking the Sacred Vow that bound their family and their kingdom to the deceitful Dragon God, but rather than killing it, they were only able to seal it away, at the cost of the entire Shi clan (the head priest and priestess's family) and all of King Helü's sons, including the real Fuchai.

The game's Fuchai is actually Tengyu, Helü's daughter. Since a woman cannot rule, and the Sacred Seal binding the royal family to the Dragon God can only appear on the bodies of those of the bloodline, Tengyu took on the name of her youngest brother in order to become her father's heir. When he died, she became king, and only those closest to her are aware that she is a woman.

Naturally this introduces complications, as the Spring and Autumn period is a fractured time in Chinese history with multiple smaller kingdoms rather than a single empire. Fuchai wants to keep her kingdom safe while also researching ways to sever her kingdom's connection to the Dragon God, and one of the traditional ways is to form a political alliance through marriage.

It's not surprising that Fuchai wonders about the point of it all when she would never be able to produce a child with a wife, but she still proceeds with the marriage proposal because it's too important not to. As for how getting a blood-related heir would be conceived, her prime minister advises her at one point to pick a random guy, get pregnant, and he will handle disposing of her partner to keep it secret. She's not keen on the idea.

Fuchai is a complicated character. She wears her royal mask well and is capable of thinking like the man she pretends to be both in terms of romantic interest (she admits that if she really was a man, she would love to marry Princess Shaojiang) and as a king with too much to lose. There aren't too many otome heroines who will unhesitantly cut off an enemy's hand during an interrogation. No one prompts her to do it. She does it on her own without any dramatic build-up because she's out of time and needs answers from enemy agents who are willing to kill themselves, but might speak up to avoid being maimed. (She gets the info from the maimed prisoner's partner after making an example out of the first one.)

That isn't to say that Fuchai is all about being a ruthless king. She has moments of vulnerability, and she wants to live as a woman instead of being trapped by her filial and national obligations, but she's also capable with a sword and will go to hell and back for those she calls "friend."

This makes it unfortunate that part of her backstory deals with attempted rape (and attempted suicide following the attempted rape) because it really doesn't do anything to advance her character. She's already compelling without it and barring one romance route, her experience in the past has no impact on her present. It's just there like it's part of the atmosphere.

Since Fuchai is (sort of) a historical character, one of the more interesting things about the game are the other historical characters around her. This is an otome, so that means there are love interests. The game gives us four, three of whom are historical; Wu Zixu, her prime minister, Goujian, an enemy king currently held by her kingdom as a slave, and Shi Yiguang, historically one of Fuchai's concubines but in this case a male mage and childhood friend. Chenfeng, Fuchai's attendant/bodyguard/childhood playmate, rounds out the group as the fourth option.

Because of this history, savvy players are likely to have expectations on how things will go and who to trust, which can run counter to what Fuchai believes. Given that Goujian is historically famous for nursing his revenge (there's even a proverb about his dedication to doing do) it's quite likely that a Chinese player wouldn't be surprised that Goujian betrays Fuchai on most routes, even if Fuchai herself is. Goujian does a pretty good job of pretending to be cooperative, even saving Fuchai's life at one point, all in the name of obtaining the freedom he needs to do the real damage.

For an otome, My Vow to My Liege leans heavily into dense military action sequences, which is an unusual choice for the genre. Due to Fuchai's duties and the eventual escape of the Dragon God from his imprisonment, she and her love interest have to deal with finding sacred artifacts and threats from other nations. There are land battles, sea battles, operations in another kingdom, filling the middle to late parts of the game with a lot of warfare. And for those liking proactive heroines, Fuchai is in the thick of it, from participating in planning stages (where as king she is the final word) to charging in with her escort herself.

Fuchai also doesn't spend much time wondering about what love is or baffled about the feelings she's having. She acknowledges the affection she has for the men in her life fairly easily, but she does not know what her future will be or if she'll even have one, which is probably the most mood-dampening aspect of her romances. When the Dragon God's plans begin in earnest, the Sacred Seal on Fuchai's chest keeps acting up and it's clear that it's slowly killing her. One of the reasons she tells Wu Zixu that she cannot agree to his secret pregnancy plans is that she doesn't know if she's going to be around long enough with a rogue Dragon God running around.

Fortunately, on most routes the romance and the Dragon God plot move hand in hand, so confronting her feelings about her love is woven in a naturalistic fashion. Between events like Chenfeng being brainwashed by the Dragon God and Wu Zixu being framed by the Dragon God's followers, it makes it understandable why Fuchai would devote time to her affections even though she's simultaneously trying to take down a god.

And no matter what happens, Fuchai will always take down the Dragon God, even in her bad endings. I really appreciated the game's fidelity in sticking to her main quest since some otome will drop the heroine's story in favor of focusing on the love interest's goals in certain routes. Before anything else, it's Fuchai's mission, which only makes sense when she's the liege of the title.

I'd also like to talk about Shaojiang, who plays a major role in the story. She's introduced as Fuchai's fiancée for the arranged marriage, but she's a determinator herself and a powerful mage. When she gets kidnapped by the Dragon God's followers and trapped in the Human Sacrificial Array, she ends up fighting them from inside of it.

After her initial surprise at learning Fuchai's gender, she doesn't freak out or complain about wanting to break the marriage because her husband-to-be is actually a woman. It's just another fact and she doesn't treat Fuchai any differently for it. One ending even suggests she's still sweet on Fuchai and that's the reason she's refusing another marriage proposal. Though, she is a bit of a shipper herself and happily arranges for Fuchai to get some alone time with her chosen man, providing that Shaojiang approves of the match.

As with many otome, there is a common route, a fairly substantial one, that establishes the setting and the characters before branching, and the routes are long enough that I'll be breaking the game up into a series of posts like I do for most of the longer otome I play. So next week will start with Chenfeng!

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

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

Platform: PS Vita (also on Steam)
Release: 2018

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk is the second game in the Psychedelica duology, and it's a much different animal than its predecessor, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. It changes the setting from a Gothic mansion to what appears to be a fantasy European town and introduces us to a new heroine, Jed, who is a much livelier protagonist than Beniyuri. All the horror and suspense elements are gone, in favor of following Jed's day to day life in a town ruled by two feuding families.

I spent a good portion of the story wondering how the two games were connected, because the opening movie pulls scenes from Black Butterfly, but the connection is more for thematic reasons. Yes, it becomes clear they are a part of the same multiverse, possibly the same world if you assume that Jed's town is in the Europe of our world at a different point in time, but the only thing that really connects the two games (other than reincarnation shenanigans) is the fact they both take place in psychedelica; the intermediary world between life and death.

Playing this game is likely a vastly different experience depending on whether one has played Black Butterfly. Though Ashen Hawk is largely a stand alone experience, with only the Heroine Ending's epilogue likely to raise eyebrows for newcomers, Psychedelica vets will likely be looking for the meaning of the title, already knowing what psychedelica is, and being familiar with the previous cast.

Given that, I thought the game was pretty ballsy for rolling out a character called Ashen Hawk as the very first face a player meets outside of Jed herself, as it pretty much screams that it's his psychedelica. And it sort of is? I'll get to that later.

Seeing reincarnated versions of Black Butterfly's Kagiha and Hikage was also a nice surprise. The game is coy about their identities, since there's no reason to directly spell out who they were previously, but they have the same VAs and similar (but not exact) character designs. I loved how when I first met Lawrence I just knew he was Kagiha even though the voice was a little older (Lawrence isn't a teenager) and the hair style was different. Hikage took me longer to figure out since Elric's a kid with an uncorrupted personality so his vocal performance is substantially different.

Ashen Hawk's jump in genres made it a much different story to get into; as in, I wasn't sure what it was. The prologue makes it clear that Jed would be considered a witch for having a right eye that turns red when her emotions are heightened, but the early chapters also show that her day to day life is fairly safe. She crossdresses as a man (and has been living as male all her life) to reduce her chances of being suspected of witchery. She doesn't really lament it. It's just her life. (And if you understand the Japanese audio, she uses the very masculine pronoun ore to refer to herself, just to make sure there's no gender ambiguity in her speech.)

The biggest issue at the outset of the game is the ongoing rivalry between the Wolf and Hawk clans. Logistically I don't know how it works. (Initially I thought the Hawks collected taxes and the Wolves provided security, but the Hawks also have soldiers?) The town essentially has two masters who have been feuding for generations, with some citizens being sympathetic to one side or the other, or trying to stay out of the conflict altogether. Being the adopted son of the Lady of the Wolves, Jed is viewed as being on the Wolves' side, though she wants peace between them both.

I thought the arc of the main story would be getting the two families to stop fighting just as the annual masquerade begins, so I was a little surprised that happens by the third chapter. And it turns out this wouldn't be the first time that what I thought would be the end of the story wasn't actually the end of the story. This wasn't a problem with chapter 3, since I knew it wasn't the end, but with later chapters this felt more like a pacing issue because they could have legitimately ended the game at those points and it would have been fine.

Pacing is probably the biggest issue I had with Ashen Hawk. While the genre jump from modern Japan to low fantasy pseudo-Europe doesn't mean that the pacing needed to be different, the tonal jump from suspense to slice of life removed a lot of my drive to see what happens next. It doesn't help that the game packs the vast majority of its side episodes in Chapter 2. While they are mostly optional, and you can jump back and visit missed episodes at any time via the story flowchart, my first impulse was to play them all at once because they're there and I don't want to play them out of order with the main plot.

This results in somewhere from a third to half the game's run time taking place in the very low stakes Chapter 2. While a part of me understands why the designers shoved all the fluffy encounters so early on (because the story really takes off after the masquerade and Jed is less free to move around), it can make the game seem slower than it has to be. Jed spends much of Chapter 2 looking for the Kaleido-Via and the additional side episodes (many of which revolve around her ongoing search) make it a constant reminder that she's making no progress. Story-wise, spending one chapter out of ten on search isn't a big deal, but from a game time perspective, due the sheer number of side episodes, it felt like she was doing it for ages.

Adding insult to injury, after all that searching, she's just handed the Kaleido-Via early in Chapter 3 rather than discovering it for herself.

Fortunately the ball gets rolling after the masquerade when it becomes clear that peace is not happening in this town as easily as Jed hoped and the Wolves are driven underground. This middle part of the story does a pretty good job of painting Olgar, the Hawk Lord, as a monster driven mad by the cursed ring he wears, but I like that he ends up being a more complicated character, especially once it's revealed that he's Jed's birth father. I thought the rally to overthrow Olgar was going to be the climax of the story, but again, it kept moving past that point to give us his backstory and circle back to Jed being a witch.

The game's one good twist is that it turns out the entire town is actually psychedelica. There were hints about it before; with the town being shrouded in fog, that they get no travelers and no one ever leaves, and the fact that a lot of characters are suspiciously missing memories of things they really ought to know. Everyone in town is actually dead, but has forgotten that they are, so they continue "living" as though their town is a real place. So the question is, whose psychedelica is it?

Olgar activated a partially complete Kaleido-Via (which apparently works a lot like the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly) after his wife was murdered as a witch sixteen years ago, which marked the town's transformation in psychedelica. But oddly the dialogue says the psychedelica belongs to both him and Ashen Hawk, who turns out to have been a long time friend to Olgar's, at least until Olgar killed him in a fight after his wife's murder. I think this is because Ashen Hawk had one of the Kaleido-Via's four gems on his person when he died, and the other three were nowhere near it at all, but the game's not particularly clear.

Nor does learning about this event clear up why the game is called Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk. Olgar is the only one of the two who had a wish to see someone who had died.

In fact, the master of this psychedelica is likely not either of them, though it requires unlocking additional content beyond the main story to find an obscure character; an actual hawk, called Ashen Hawk. Presumably the human Ashen Hawk took his name from the bird he'd known in his childhood. The original Ashen Hawk died and went on to be reborn.

This brings us to the person who gives the Kaleido-Via to Jed in Chapter 3 (and intervenes just often enough to keep it safe from the Hawks). Hugh is a shapeshifter sort of character to which rules do not apply, dipping in and out of the story as the mood strikes him. He is clearly magical in nature, with multiple identities (including being the person who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly), and Lawrence suspects him of being the master of this world. Hugh, it turns out, is Ashen Hawk, the bird.

He's also the only character who says this psychedelica was created by Olgar and Ashen Hawk, so if he was lying or exaggerating, no one would know. It stands to reason that if it's his psychedelica, which is supported by his inhuman ability to appear, disappear, and go wherever he wants, that he is the Ashen Hawk of the title, and not the human we meet at the start of the game.

But if that's the case, we don't know how the psychedelica was created, and don't know how it ends save what he tells us will happen. Unlike in Black Butterfly, the people of the town do not have bodies to return to since they've been dead for sixteen years, and the one ending where there's a move to end the psychedelica, kills our viewpoint characters before we see what happens.

Hugh is probably the most irritating part of the story because everything is fairly low fantasy aside from the Kaleido-Via and Hugh himself. But the Kaleido-Via is just an object, while Hugh saunters in and out of scenes whenever he feels like it, giving characters information they would otherwise have no way of obtaining due to his privileged position of knowing the truth about the world. The story would not play out the way it did without him, but because he's such a stage setter, it's difficult to see him as something other than a crutch for the narrative to move things along. He literally will pop out in front of characters just to explain things to them and then leave.

The last major talking point I want to cover is Jed herself. Despite my dislike for Hugh spoon-feeding the plot along, I like Jed as a protagonist, and she's very much allowed to protag once she has the necessary information. Though she's comfortable living as a man, she's curious enough to try living as woman, and goes through some pretty entertaining self doubts about being a woman crossdressing as a man crossdressing as a woman when she disguises herself as a woman in order to try gathering information from the Hawks who would otherwise not talk to the adopted son of a Wolf.

Jed isn't shabby in a fight, and also finds ways to broker peace between the Hawks and the Wolves whenever possible. I like that she wants to be in charge of her own destiny and, before things turn otherwise, that she was planning on leaving the town for a fresh start where she could find a place where she wouldn't have to hide who she is.

In the Heroine Ending, she's the one who comes up with the plan to free the town from psychedelica. Even if it's using Hugh's information, it's what she does with it that makes it such a powerful moment. She knows she has to die to free the Kaleido-Via gem trapped in her red eye, and she does in a way that gives the town what they want (the death of the witch) while protecting the lives and reputations of those she cares about. It probably wouldn't have been as powerful if she was simply executed, but she goes down in a swordfight, killed by the man who loves her and was in on the plan. (Side note: I really loved Lugus for that, for respecting what she wanted and how this was the only way to accomplish it.)

As with Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Ashen Hawk is technically an otome, but I found it even less of one than its predecessor. The chance to choose, or the illusion of choosing, various love interests along the main story is either non-existent or barely there, at least until character focused endings unlock after beating the main story. It's clear that Lavan is in love with Jed, but Lugus is fairly well positioned as the primary love interest and the story would feel like a complete experience even if none of the other characters had been options. The fact he's the one who's reborn with Jed in modern Japan in the Heroine Ending gives him a surprisingly canon feel for an otome.

The character-specific routes are all fairly short and unlike Black Butterfly, the love interests don't have their own character arcs where they end up in a different place than they were in the beginning, so I realized I didn't have much to say about them that I didn't already say here (aside from the fact I was really bothered that Lavan was crushing on his adopted sister for years). Normally I'd write a series of posts for an Otomate otome game, but because of how linearly Ashen Hawk played out and the lack of character arcs, I won't this time.

VN Talk: Raging Loop

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2019

I debated whether it was a good idea playing Raging Loop back to back with Gnosia given that they're both visual novels built around the Werewolf party game, but beyond that initial conceit, they're quite different experiences. Unlike Gnosia, where you play each game yourself, Raging Loop weaves a single game tightly into the narrative so most of the choices are made by the protagonist with the player only making decisions at key points.

Raging Loop integrates the mechanics of the Werewolf game into a fictional religion practiced by a small village in rural Japan. The people of Yasumizu believe that when the evening mist comes, a number of their fellow villagers are replaced by wolves, and the wolves will kill villagers at a rate of one a night until all the wolves are hung. Aiding the villagers are various guardian spirits who will bless one of the human villagers with guardian specific abilities such as protecting one villager a night from the wolves, or being able to look into a specific villager once per night to see if they are human or wolf. It's very much the Werewolf game.

Though, in a nice twist, making choices that are sensible in Werewolf might not be in Raging Loop because there is no "team win" condition. The story can't continue if the protagonist dies, which can make for some selfish plays.

Our "hero" in this adventure is unsurprisingly an outsider, Haruaki Fusaishi, who gets lost in the mountains at night while trying to get over his break-up, when a convenience store clerk directs him to the village of Yasumizu. From there, he gets tangled up in the local tradition when the mists come, and to his surprise he finds himself looping back in time to his motorcycle ride through the mountains every time he dies. (Fortunately the player can just jump to the last decision point even though from a story perspective Haruaki has to go aaaaaaaaaalll the way back.)

Haruaki doesn't know exactly what's going on, but figures that getting involved in the game is the best way to figure out what's happening to him and stop the loop.

He's a rather unusual protagonist in that he's not a particularly nice or heroic character. Haruaki is capable of doing the right thing, but generally only does so if he cares about the person he's doing the act for (which eventually becomes most of the people in Yasumizu) and he does some pretty awful things throughout the story while trying to figure out his situation, because more than anything else, he wants to get out of the loop while keeping himself alive. You can see this best when he takes on the wolf role.

There are three primary timelines in the story; one where he does not directly participate in the game, one where he participates as a human, and one where he is a wolf. The wolf is the third timeline he experiences and since winning the game as a human didn't end the loop, he tries winning as a wolf, which means murder. He has no idea whether winning as a wolf will stop the loop or just give him more information, so killing people could mean a permanent death for them. Even allowing for experimentation, and giving him the benefit of a doubt (that he assumes they'll resurrect with another loop) when he kills people it's not just a quick shot/stab and they're dead. He goes about desecrating the corpse until it barely looks human, which is far more than he needs to do in order to keep up his act as a wolf.

Haruaki is something of a chameleon, shifting his morals depending on his role and involvement in the game, and to some degree who his current love interest is, as he gets a different gal on each timeline (though he eventually ends up with Chiemi on the true route). Nobody really knows him given that he's a stranger to the village and even though he introduces himself early on as a graduate student, his knowledge of forensics suggest something more. One villager even asks if he's a detective, but he's actually a mystery author; the other kind of occupation which would wallow deep into murder methods.

Haruaki's sense of narrative comes in handy in deconstructing the local legend that started the tradition and questioning why the game works the way it does. For instance, why are the vengeful wolves who have risen from the dead restricted to killing only one person a night? According to legend they're on the outs with the mountain god, so why would they play by his rules?

He comes to realize, in the face of actual supernatural events (including his own looping), that the game itself is a manmade construction; hence the arbitrary rules. The legend is a real local legend and the tradition of hanging fellow villagers as wolves was a real tradition, but the full on murder game version is a "recent" development (less than a hundred years old).

I like what the game did with the origin of both the tradition and the murder game by tying it into how religion can evolve for political/cultural purposes of control (like how pagan traditions became part of mainstream Christianity in the form of Christmas trees and Easter bunnies). In this case, the greater village of Kamifujiyoshi sends its undesireables to live in Yasumizu, but because it fears the potential for trouble should Yasumizu's inhabitants bite back, it has historically controlled them through the legend and the tradition of hanging wolves, which causes the people of Yasumizu to suspect and kill their own, thus preventing them from ever focusing on their true oppressor.

What's less clear is why Kamifujiyoshi later escalated the tradition to a level where it appears to be supernatural. It is a ridiculous amount of work to put on the game, and while it's mostly possible with current technology, it's also wildly impractical for dubious benefit. Yasumizu only consists of eleven residents at the time the present day game begins, which includes elderly and high schoolers. That's hardly a number to be feared when the larger village likely numbers in the hundreds.

The game also doesn't go into what would happen if the wolves won. While the odds are against the wolves winning in a game with equally savvy players, they could still win and that would leave a maximum of three remaining villagers (since the wolf villagers will kill any remaining humans upon winning). Is that to any benefit to Kamifujiyoshi?

Once we realize the game is a human construct, it calls into question some of the happenings throughout the game. For instance, we know the wolves are actually villagers given the role of "wolf" rather than being replaced by wolves. They're drugged and told an alternate version of the legend that claims all the other villagers are already dead and the wolves are doing them a favor by killing them and sending them back where they belong.

While it's understandable the wolves would remember the telling as a dream, I don't find it believable the degree to which the wolves fall into the role of butchering friends and family. The only wolves who wonder what the hell is wrong with their fellow wolves are outsiders like Haruaki and the reporter, Hisako. Everyone else brings out the guns and the knives and murders like it's the easiest thing in the world.

Are they just that fanatical about their religion that they can accept killing is the right thing to do? They don't show a hint of distress during the daytime deliberations that would suggest they've been traumatized by what they've done. Even Chiemi, who is looping just like Haruaki, and has seen both the wolf and non-wolf sides of the story, still goes on a murder spree when she's a wolf.

So now that we know the game is not supernatural, why is Haruaki looping?

The answer is that someone is using the game to get everyone in Yasumizu killed in order to fuel a ritual that will ruin Japan, and this part of the story doesn't quite hold together as well. Basically Ritsuko, sort of a village holy woman, follows a god that appears to have been displaced by the better known national pantheon of Japan, and her ancestors subsequently rammed their deity into the local religion so it would have a place to exist, however awkward.

As the last of her line, Ritsuko carries the accumulated grudges of her ancestors and wants to avenge her god's displacement. She planted the seeds needed for its resurgence in the various villagers and to reclaim that power and resurrect her god they all need to die, so she planned the loop to happen during the game, with the hope of eventually getting all the villagers killed in a single run (which happens thanks to Haruaki when he's in the wolf timeline).

Each time she dies, the loop begins again, giving her another chance to achieve the result she desires, but someone else is trying to stop her and ends up using Haruaki as the instrument to do so. Realizing that the loop is tied to Ritsuko rather than Haruaki was a nifty reveal, as well as explaining why he sometimes seems to loop in some endings without an obvious death.

But I just had trouble following this part of the plot and understanding how her god (and whether it actually is a god) fit in the larger backstory about how the present day religion came to be. Ritsuko's god is not the only supernatural entity to play a role in the story either, so it's not like the game writer is incapable of mixing the supernatural with the mundane. Haru's almost forgotten badger god (the original god of the mountain before humans displaced it with the current religion) fits perfectly into the space it's given, which is likewise substantial.

It doesn't help that the defeat of Ritsuko's god in the true end is entirely a deus ex machina that goes unexplained unless you read the optional epilogue stories. That doesn't change that our protagonist completely lucked out of a situation he could not have handled himself, but at least it's possible to know what happened.

Though Raging Loop's big picture flounders at the end, it does small details well. There's a lot of kanji play in this game, involving reordering the kanji that make up names, taking apart kanji into its components and rearranging them, or using alternate readings of kanji, and all of it is translated into an easy to follow format that doesn't require Japanese fluency.

And for a game with a lot of gruesome murders, there are a number of silly moments to break the tension (some of which can only be seen on New Game+ unfortunately). The fact the convenience store at the start of the game has any number of tools that Haruaki needs (even, at one point, a bulletproof vest) is a running gag. And it's hard not to laugh when Haruaki is being tormented by a sheep, especially when it's his fault for pissing off said sheep.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to talk about.

Mitsuki, whose psychic avatar is the sheep, is the one preserving Haruaki's memories each loop. She's not a villager, and in fact is Haruaki's ex. But even though I love Mitsuki as a character (she's tough, genderqueer, and smart enough to dump Haruaki), the game doesn't do that great a job with her, and it's largely because the game intentionally hides knowledge that the player should have as Haruaki.

She's the first person he meets in the game where she's disguised as the convenience store clerk. In New Game+ we get extra mental dialogue from both of them that shows he recognizes her, but he's still pissed about the breakup so he pretends she's a stranger, and she reciprocates. The NG+ version of the scene is hilarious, and shows just how well they know each other after years of dating, but the original one removes all mention of the fact Haruaki knows her even though we get all his other internal thoughts about her attitude.

I can understand not wanting to derail the horror/mystery setup by having snarky comments about his ex in one of the very first scenes, but by selectively choosing what Haruaki shares with the player it makes her sudden cooperation in the finale strange. (Which is another way Raging Loop drops the ball towards the end.) We never see the conversation when Haruaki asks Mitsuki to help him save the villagers, not even in NG+, so when she showed up the first time out of her shop clothes and Haruaki started talking like he knew her, it took me a moment to figure out that she was the much talked about ex. If I hadn't played Raging Loop regularly until I finished I might not have made that connection at all.

Though Mitsuki's role is small, it's a critical one, and I think there could have been a middle ground between the ignoring each other circus and leaving the player in the dark.

May/June Publications

Due my ongoing health issues, I've fallen behind on a lot of things, but I got a little nudge in the mail last week when my contributor copy of the Cooties Shot Required anthology arrived!

While it's up on Amazon as a pre-order for August, a reader let me know he read my story before I even got my copy (!), so it seems some people have already gotten their pre-orders; perhaps though the Whether Change Kickstarter or directly pre-ordering through Broken Eye Books.

My anthology story is "Those Who Want Power" which is a dark mix of tournament anime and high school anxiety.

Also, running late on this one, but my short story "The Roast Meat Squadron" is currently up in the May issue of Galaxy's Edge and should be free to read until the July issue comes out.