RPG Talk: Final Fantasy XV - Main Story

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

Platform: PS4 (though it's also on XB1 and Windows)
Release: 2016

Final Fantasy XV won my Reader's Pick poll to see what I should play while recovering from surgery, and like a number of other games, it had been sitting in my backlog for a while. Now that I've finally experienced it, I'd have to say that Final Fantasy XV is a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed it, quite a bit actually, but even with the story patch that was supposed to shore up some of the game's weaknesses it doesn't quite come together.

What it does well, it does really well, but what it doesn't is fairly flawed, and I decided that I really needed to break this particular RPG Talk into two entries, one to focus primarily on the main story (which is what these articles are about!) and another to focus on Noctis's personal journey. Today's entry is focusing on the story.

That said, there is no doubt that the appeal of FFXV lies more in its core cast of characters than the plot. The game never lets narrative sensibility get in the way of an entertaining set piece, so there are mandatory adventures that are fun to play through, but when you take a step back they don't make any sense as nothing in particular was accomplished. (I'm looking at you Chapter 6 base infiltration.)

After spending over 70 hours to complete this game, I'm a bit surprised by how little there is of a story. There is certainly worldbuilding enough. There's history to different regions of the world, cultural details. The architecture changes. Even the food you eat and the fish you catch while fishing changes from place to place. There's a clear cosmology and you get the feeling that the world lives and breaths even when the main characters aren't around to experience it.

But a solid cast and a nice world does not make a story. And it's not that the premise is bad. FFXV has the bones of a good plot. Noctis is a prince on the run after the death of his father and the fall of his nation's capital. His family's history is directly tied to a prophecy of the King of Kings, the True King, and the world is afflicted with a scourge that causes daemons to rise at night.

The problem lies in the execution of the story, because there isn't enough meat hanging on those bones, resulting in chapters with transitions that don't make sense, seemingly important characters that do nothing, and what amounts to a two chapter fetch quest, which is a lot when the story itself only runs fourteen! Some of this is patched up in subsequent DLC or other media (movies, books, etc), but it really shouldn't be in the first place.

For instance, after Insomnia, the capital of Lucis falls, the Niflheim Empire steps up its presence in the outlining regions of the country. Supposedly it's to help hunt down the terrorists responsible for what happened in Insomnia, but 1) Lucis is not their country and 2) the player knows Niflheim is the one who blew up the capital in the first place! So who are these terrorists? Turns out the "terrorists" are scapegoated Kingsglaive soldiers, which you'd only know if you watched the Kingsglaive movie or read a wiki.

Despite its problems though, FFXV manages to work, and that's largely because of the heavy lifting done by Noctis and friends.

The opening of the game is about as low stakes as you can get. We meet Noctis, Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto on the road in the middle of the desert where their car has broken down and they need to push it to the nearest gas station. Though it's mundane, it's surprisingly important, because it shows us who these guys are, what their personalities are like, and how they interact with one another.

Noctis is heading for a port town to catch a boat to Altissia for his arranged marriage to the Oracle, Lunafreya, as a means to seal a peace treaty between his country of Lucis and the rest of the world, which has been subsumed by the Niflheim Empire. The other guys are not only his retainers, but his friends, and we see that come through in their interactions. They call him "Noct" rather than "your highness" and the four of them joke around like any group of buddies.

One of the highlights of the game is the party banter, and since the four main characters are both your starting and ending party, you really get to know these guys. They comment about everything, whether it's Cup Noodles (in one of the most awkward RPG product placements I've ever seen), the monsters they're fighting, or a trivial side quest Noctis just picked up. If the player enters an optional dungeon they found on accident, they'll say something about checking it out, making the player feel less bad about deviating from the main story.

The first half of the game is open world, which feels a little odd since Noctis has a wedding to get to, but there's not too much to do in the beginning so eventually even the most side quest avid player is going to end up at Galdin Quay where the first chapter ends and Noctis learns about the fall of Insomnia and hears propaganda announcing that he, his father, and his fiancee Lunafreya are dead. (Why Lunafreya was in Insomnia to begin with when Noctis just left and they're getting married in Altissia is another of those see the answer in other media moments.)

From there the urgency of having to be in a specific place drops by a fair amount. Noctis realizes he has to visit the tombs of his ancestors and gain the power of their royal arms if he wants to take back his country. While in a nice touch he's not required to get all of their weapons before the end of the game, it's "what he's supposed to be doing" in the early portion of the game. That he's also off running random side quests could be excused as being out of money, needing resources, or training, while checking up leads. In fact, some level of side questing will probably be necessary in the third chapter since the main quest dungeon nearly killed my party on my first visit.

Though it feels odd to put off the main thrust of the game to help catch frogs (seriously, there's a quest chain to do just that), all this open world running around doing errands provides the emotional grounding the second half of the game needs. When the four guys are driving around in their car, the Regalia, they talk with each other. Prompto will ask if they can stay in a hotel if they drive past when it's getting dark. Noctis will complain about camping in the wild if they've been doing it multiple nights in a row. Ignis will drink coffee while he drives, because that's what he does.

Knowing these guys and their friendship is the only reason this game works. We learn how they behave with each other when they're allowed to relax, and we also see them under duress. Their dynamic is more than Gladio being the musclehead, Ignis the smart guy, and Prompto the funny one. The constant camping, having Ignis cook for everyone, challenging Gladio to a beach race, or picking out which of Prompto's photos of their trip to save, makes it feel like you were there for all those light-hearted moments, hanging out while they hung out. Most of the screenshots for this post were actually taken by Prompto.

So when the stakes get upped in the second half, they hurt.

Ignis is permanently blinded implementing Noctis's plan to help Lunafreya summon Leviathan, and spends the next few chapters walking with a cane while trying to figure out how he can still be a useful member of the team. Though Lunafreya actually survived the fall of Insomnia, she dies passing the Ring of the Lucii to Noctis, as his father wanted her to do. Shortly thereafter, Prompto is accidentally pushed off a train and then left behind for the greater good of the people the rest of the team is trying to save.

Even the Regalia itself is wrecked and abandoned, as if to emphasize to the player that there is no going back to those happier days when everyone would drive around in the car running silly side quests.

For most of Chapter 13 Noctis finds himself completely isolated from his friends, left utterless weaponless and alone, and the reason the feeling of helplessness works so well is that we know he only got this far because of his friends and those who believed in him.

But when you take the focus off of Noctis and friends, the story starts to fall apart. In Chapter 13 Noctis has to cross through Gralea, the imperial capital, in order to get to the keep where the Crystal is stored. For some reason, Gralea is completely empty save for random daemons. We know the empire has a human population, we've seen human imperial characters before, but there aren't any here.

If the player is assiduous, they can find radio transmissions warning the population to stay indoors due to the daemon infestation, and that parts of the city are under quarantine, but that doesn't explain why even the military sections of the city are devoid of humans. Even Noctis wonders where everyone went, as if the developers wanted to emphasize to the player that this is unnatural and not that they were being lazy.

Eventually it's possible to piece two and two together and discover that somehow the population has turned into daemons. The main antagonist, Ardyn, even taunts Noctis asking him if he really knows where daemons come from. But learning the truth doesn't affect the story in any material way. This should have been a major revelation, but it's treated largely like a footnote, and actually brings up the question of why nobody knew this already.

People turn because they were afflicted with the Starscourge disease that Lunafreya healed with her powers as the Oracle. Since Oracles have been healing this disease for centuries and people know they needed treatment for it, how did no one learn prior to this moment that lack of treatment meant turning into daemon?

And even though the Niflheim Empire is collectively the antagonist for most of the game, the majority of imperial characters showcased early on don't (or barely) even show up later, including the emperor, who turns out to be a bit player in the grand scheme of things.

Lunafreya's brother Ravus has a lot of potential as a secondary antagonist, because we meet him as the High Commander of the Niflheim forces, being tasked with hunting down his own sister after she escapes from Insomnia. This could have been great drama, fleshing out both their characters!

But in the second half of the game we find out from a completely missable newspaper article that he's been sentenced to death for his poor performance in Altissia (which we don't see except in broad strokes as part of the general imperial military action) and the next time Noctis sees Ravus he's already dead, killed off-camera under mysterious circumstances that clearly were not a formal execution. We never learn why he took the position of High Commander for a country that annexed his homeland, nor why he disliked Noctis so much.

And though Ardyn is the main antagonist, I never understood what he wanted and why he was doing what he did. He shows up numerous times over the course of the story to "help" Noctis along and generally make a nuisance of himself, but we never learn why all that was necessary. Helping Noctis didn't seem to benefit him, and "it amused me" only goes so far as motivation. Did he want revenge? Was he just insane?

Having the ability to make smarmy remarks doesn't make a good villain. Lacking any reason to understand him, I defeated Ardyn simply because that was what had to be done. He might as well have been a mindless daemon for all he contributed to the plot. I assume his DLC answers a lot of questions about him, but he was so unsatisfying that I can't convince myself to pay $10 to find out.

Speaking of DLC, the episodes for Gladio, Ignis, and Prompto all take place when they aren't with Noctis, which only happens during select portions of the game. Ignis and Prompto's take place organically, with Ignis's being when the entire party splits up in Chapter 9 to evacuate Altissia, and Prompto's when he's accidentally pushed off the train in Chapter 11.

But Gladio's was awful, with him voluntarily leaving at the start of Chapter 7 so he can go take care of something and then returning in Chapter 8 with a new scar and a comment about how Noctis should have seen the other guy. It was so blatantly obvious that the departure was for his DLC adventure and it probably only worked without ruining the main story because this happens during the two chapter fetch quest so it didn't matter that Gladio was out of the picture.

Despite its problems though, I think FFXV is probably my second favorite Final Fantasy of the four I've played, and it's largely because of the bros. I am not a dedicated follower of the series and to be honest, if Final Fantasy Versus XIII's first trailer hadn't existed, promising a dark and somber take on Final Fantasy, there's a fair chance I would have skipped this one, because all the early promotion after being rebranded as Final Fantasy XV focused on a bunch of guys on a roadtrip, which really wasn't what I was looking for in an RPG. But it was still a trip worth taking.

The last chapter, when the four guys reunite and head back to Insomnia where everything started, was surprisingly effective, and it simply wouldn't have worked if we didn't care about the characters.

Next week, I'm going to take a deep dive into Noctis's personal story, which I didn't have room to talk about here.

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 6: Alma

I'm really glad I saved Alma for last, because he comes off as distant and unapproachable in other routes. He's the unflappable leader of the Bad Apples, who never gets upset, never raises his voice, but never gives up. Alma works harder than anyone, and yet its rare to see him get emotional about anything and it's hard to tell what he's thinking. Even the few times he's surprised by something, his reactions are muted compared to the rest of the cast. You want quiet determination? Alma's your guy.

But it isn't as though he doesn't have feelings. On all the other routes it's fairly obvious that he struggles with the loss of Sanzu, and that causes him to pull back on Bad Apple activity out of fear he'll lose someone else.

There's also a unique facet to him that I wish the game had explored more. Alma is the oldest of the Bad Apples, in that he's been at NEVAEH the longest, which means that all the rule-breaking, the discovery of how to keep one's sense of self, was all started by him. In fact, once you start his route, it becomes obvious that Alma is not like the other students, even the other Bad Apples, and that's likely part of why he's an effective leader (though I wish the game explained how he knew the method by which Rinka had died).

It's also obvious upon starting his route that Alma has deep psychological issues that otherwise have no reason to come up. It's first hinted at in his first meeting with Rinka, but it makes his manner of death different from everyone else. Higa died when he was struck by a vehicle (like Rinka), Satoru overworked himself, Shikishima died from disease, and who knows what actually did in White Mask, but Alma is heavily implied to have committed suicide. And instead of escaping his pain in life, he found himself in an afterlife where he's now more afraid of forgetting what it's like to feel pain than the actual act of experiencing pain himself.

Unlike most routes, Alma gives Rinka the rundown on people's inability to die right away, and demonstrates it right in front of her by slitting his own throat. Pain can still be experienced at NEVAEH even if death cannot, but he behaves as if this is no big deal (and Rinka is rightly horrified).

Playing Alma's route answers questions about his behavior on most other routes (including why we don't see him eat his forbidden apple in Shikishima's ending) as we get a good deep dive into what makes him tick. For that reason I feel like he probably works best as either a first playthrough (so everything is on the table) or a last one (to answer questions), but not in the middle.

Though Alma gives off the appearance of constantly being in control of himself and his situation, he's really not. All the times he disappears on his own and in other routes is largely because he needs time to cope, which he tries to manage alone. He cares deeply about his role as the group's leader and sincerely wants to give everyone a chance to be reborn, even if he does not plan to return to life himself.

As Rinka learns from her Soul Touches with him, Alma was in love with a girl from a young age and she ended up spending all her time in the hospital before they even got to high school. Alma wanted to grow up and become a doctor so he could cure her, but he had attitude problems, so even though he was a brilliant student, nobody liked him and he was constantly getting into fights. His own father disowned him. The girl was the one bright spot in his life and he promised to be with her until the end, but he failed to do even that when a brawl kept him from getting the hospital before she died.

Alma takes his promises seriously, and was broken up by his failure to keep that one, and so he made another promise not to forget her, but the problem is that time takes away a lot of things, and a year after she died he realized he was starting to forget things about her. That led to him going to the roof of his school in an attempt to stop himself from losing any more memories of her (by killing himself).

His failures haunt him pretty badly, which is why Sanzu's graduation sinks him into such a great depression. Until that point it didn't appear to be possible to actually lose any of the Bad Apples, because no one could die.

And since Alma's own life ended on such a miserable note, he has no desire to go back. Like Yoh, he doesn't see the point in returning to a life without the one he loves, and he says this is why he had no words to console Yoh when Sanzu died, because he realized they were in much the same situation and Alma has no words to make his own pain disappear.

But there is a reincarnation wrinkle. As we know from other endings and from the graduation process itself, reincarnation happens and it's laid out fairly early along Alma's route that Rinka feels she has met him before. In fact a couple of her first few Soul Touches with him are uncommonly affectionate for someone she doesn't know well, patting his hair and touching his face, and she's not entirely sure why she wants to do that with him.

One of the interesting things we learn in Alma's route is that the longer someone is at NEVAEH, the more their memories of their previous life and their memories of school life bleed into each other. Since Alma has been around the longest, he suffers from episodes where he can't tell when or where he actually is, and this spills over on to Rinka, who he conflates with the girl he loved.

It doesn't take much to put two and two together to realize that Rinka is the reincarnation of his previous love, and if that's not enough, Alma all but spells it out in the graduation ceremony scene when he loses his Soul Totem. I kind of would have liked it if Rinka wasn't actually a reincarnation though. For a moment it looked like the story might go that route, and I think it would have been a nice change of pace of it did, but that would have broken the red string of fate motif running through his route. Alma's Soul Totem is a red thread and seems to be a literal manifestation of his tie to the love of his life.

Alma's ending is also different from the others. Unlike Shikishima and Higa who would be clearly too old (or dead) by the time Rinka is born, or White Mask and Satoru who are her contemporaries, Alma exists in a bubble between time periods. I was hoping there would be at least one of these where Rinka or her love interest had to wait a few years for the other to catch up (mostly I was hoping this would be the case with Satoru since he died in middle school), and Alma's mostly fits the bill. The age gap is on the large side, even if we're really generous about when he was born, but it allows him to be an adult when they meet up again.

The game is vague about Alma's birthdate, with the only mention being that he was born fifteen years after Higa, who in turn was born in the 1950s. This means if we want a young Alma and put Higa's birth in 1959, then Alma was born around 1974, give or take for rounding errors. Assuming Rinka dies in 2015 (the Japanese release date), this puts Alma in his 30s by the time Rinka is born and in his early 40s when they reunite, which he totally does not look like in the ending illustration.

If we ignore the suggestion of his birthdate, or run with the assumption that Rinka comes from a year earlier than 2015, Alma's love died when she was of high school age, making her at least fifteen. Allowing time for her to be reborn as Rinka and grow up, Alma is likely a minimum of sixteen years older than her, so he can't be anything less than his early 30s when they reunite.

So even though they see each other again in his ending, their meeting is very chaste. He's now a doctor and ends up being the surgeon in the emergency room when she's rushed in, and there's a nice comparison between the knife he used to fight with in NEVAEH and the scalpel he's now using to save her life. He's well aware that for her, NEVAEH is a recent battle she's still fighting. When she wakes, she sees him (no longer with dyed red hair since he's in a respectable profession now), and they're happy that they remember each other.

It's the epilogue three years later, after Rinka graduates, that is the real coda to their story. Alma, no doubt recognizing and caring about the age difference more than she does, puts off their relationship until after her high school graduation so the epilogue consists of Rinka rushing to the hospital to see him. That's when they finally spill the love confessions they couldn't say in NEVAEH and he asks Rinka to marry him.

Mind, there would still be external problems with their marriage. Even if we've seen their journey together, I'm sure Rinka's parents are going to have opinions if their newly graduated daughter is eager to marry a guy sixteen years older than her. And while we don't know what Alma's adult social network looks like I'm sure he'd get a lot of cradle-robbing comments.

I'm also a little disappointed that we don't seem to get Alma's real name, though this might have been a translation preference. Rinka calls him Dr. Alma Fudoh in the epilogue, but Alma is not a Japanese name. It's probably Aruma (which would be pronounced the same), but I was hoping there was a reason behind his unusual name in NEVAEH. This is compounded by the fact his former love called him "Al" which sounds completely weird when listening to the Japanese audio.

Still, this was a good note to end the game on, and as a whole I enjoyed Bad Apple Wars more than I though I would. If you enjoyed this blog series, please consider leaving a tip in the Ko-fi jar. Ko-fi followers get the first heads up when there's a poll to vote on what game I should cover next.

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 5: Satoru

Man, where to start with this guy. Satoru is actually the first love interest Rika interacts with in Bad Apple Wars, by virtue of the fact they arrive at NEVAEH Academy at the same time and are seated together as new students during the opening ceremony. But at the same time calling it an interaction is overselling it a bit, because it's more like she tries to talk to him and he blows her off so he can study words and phrases out of his reference book.

In other routes Satoru is frequently used as a demonstration to show how bad apples are treated by the Prefects. We see his Soul Totem (his reference book) being taken from him, we see him being "corrected" multiple times, and even the good apples laugh at him for being so obstinate for no discernable reason. All he cares about is studying what he thinks is important, resulting in a disconnect between what's actually happening in class and what he's preparing himself for, and yet he never wavers in his single-minded dedication to his studies. Anyone who gets in his way, be it Rinka, a Prefect, or even a teacher, gets the cold shoulder and/or a lot of attitude so he can continue doing what he does.

When I started playing he was highly irritating, but as I watched him get smacked down route after route, I started to wonder, why does he need to study so badly? Clearly it's some failing from his previous life. The exam, which highlights the test taker's weakest subject, asks him to write an essay on how to make friends, which unsurprisingly is something Satoru is completely incapable of doing. (He's really pissed that's the exam too.) So even though I wasn't that eager to hug the porcupine, by the time I was on my fourth route I was ready to see what made this guy tick.

Satoru takes a fair bit of narrative effort to crack, to the point that there are some things that happen a lot differently on his route because otherwise he'd never get involved. For instance, in all other routes, the key in the Reaper Game is in a classroom where it goes undiscovered by all other students save Rinka. But Satoru has no reason to participate in or to monitor the game--he just wants to study--so he never leaves the gym to go on the scavenger hunt. This necessitates moving the key (on to Satoru's back no less) so Rinka can discover it while in his presence.

His route also has him getting dragged along by one of the tertiary Bad Apples to their clubhouse so he can be better known by the rest of the cast, which doesn't happen in any other storyline.

Things like this keep Satoru front and center in a story where he would otherwise melt into the background through sheer non-participation. And by pushing his trigger buttons (like telling him to "drop out" in regards to the Reaper Game), the story is able to showcase what Satoru is like when he's really passionate about something. Not to mention that it's hilarious watching him go berserk just because White Mask told him to drop out.

It takes a while, but after Rinka Soul Touches with him enough, she learns the reason why he's so focused on studying to the exclusion of everything else. He was being raised by a single mother in the wake of his father's untimely death, and while he is not naturally a good student, he realized that getting good grades was one of the few things that would lift his grieving mother's spirits.

He subsequently went overboard in his determination to make his mother happy and decided to shoot for the best high school even though it was in all likelihood beyond his academic ability. His teachers argued against it, saying that even if he managed to pass the entrance exam, he'd never be able to keep up with his new classmates, but Satoru refused to accept no as an answer. The solution to everything was simply to study harder, no matter what it took.

As a result, he gave up all his hobbies, stopped seeing his friends, and dedicated everything he had to being a more knowledgeable student, even if was detrimental to his own well-being. In fact, the reason he died and ended up at NEVAEH is because he was fueling himself almost entirely on coffee and sacrificing sleep so that he could study more. Once he arrived at NEVAEH he was so focused on his studies that it took him until Chapter 5 to even realize he was dead. (Presumably on the other routes this never dawns on him.)

But once he does, it's a complete heartbreaker for him, because he realizes that all his hard work was essentially meaningless. Since he died, he never got into the high school he wanted, and now his mother has not only lost her husband but her son as well.

And I do want to stop here a moment and say that Satoru is oddly enough (considering that this is a high school afterlife) a third year middle school student. He says he's in eighth grade in the translation, but it's actually closer to ninth grade, since high schools are a three year program in Japan and first year high school students are fifteen. It's not a huge deal as far as being in a relationship goes since he and Rinka are only one year apart, but it's odd that he's not in high school but is in a high school afterlife, and somehow everybody intuitively knows that Satoru is younger than Rinka since she gets ribbed about liking a younger boy. Prior to getting all his Soul Touch flashbacks I thought Satoru died after his entrance exams so he'd at least made it in.

Satoru is the only love interest who consciously makes the choice to become a good apple over the course of his story because the message being drummed into NEVAEH's students is exactly what he learned from his own death. Trying is meaningless. It only ends up getting you hurt when you fail.

As in White Mask's route, Rinka has to step up to save Satoru from himself, making this one of her better storylines. She quits being a Prefect, right in front of White Mask no less, and decides to break the unbreakable rules so she can give Satoru the forbidden apple.

Despite the fact that Satoru became laser focused on his studies while still alive, he actually had a relatively normal life beforehand, having both friends and hobbies that he dropped in pursuit of better academics, and from Soul Touch Rinka knows this and wants to give that life back to him. In her presence, Satoru manages to loosen up a bit, and once of the sweeter things in his route is how the other Bad Apples go out of their way to give Satoru and Rinka some time together. They ship the pair before Rinka and Satoru are ready to acknowledge feelings for each other.

The finale is a bit rushed since the inappropriate relationship and crying at graduation rules are broken almost simultaneously, so we don't even get to see one of the apples like we would on the other routes, but at least we kinda have a clue that both are broken when Rinka causes Satoru to cry at graduation and then kisses him. The two of them also face down the Rotten Apple together with their answer about returning to life, which is a nice touch.

Interestingly enough, the era Satoru comes from is never discussed with Rinka. I suppose he just comes off modern enough that Rinka is relatively certain he's from the same time period as her, so when he comes back to life he is still one year younger than her. He presumably did not get into the elite high school of his dreams, but he also realizes how much he's been hurting the other people in his life and that his mother was devastated when she nearly lost him. So it's a more mature Satoru who ends up going to the same high school as Rinka.

But I wish that at least some of the epilogue had taken place from Rinka's point of view because it's not immediately clear why Rinka and Satoru reunite at her high school's opening ceremony and why she's sitting with the new students, especially since she's a year older than him. However, from Higa and Shikishima's endings we know that she falls back a year in school due to the time it takes for her to recover from the accident. If the player has already gone through at least one of their routes it all makes convenient sense, and it's nice to have them get to be first years together, but if Satoru is the player's first playthrough this scene will feel a little off.

I feel like Satoru was a middle of the road route for me overall. Though it complements White Mask's route nicely, and has some genuinely fun moments, I don't feel like I ever got super invested in Satoru himself. I could feel for his circumstances, but he felt more like a boy who really needed a good hug rather than a potential romantic partner for Rinka. I get that he's fourteen and probably put any thoughts of romantic attraction on the backburner when he cracked down on his studying, and that's fine. I just think he and Rinka worked together better as friends than romantic partners, no matter how much the Bad Apples pushed it.

Next week we'll wrap up Bad Apple Wars with Alma's route!

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 4: Shikishima

Even after playing a couple other routes in Bad Apple Wars, I didn't know what to expect with Shikishima as he's an odd duck who marches to the beat of his own drum. Specifically, rather than calling himself a good apple or bad apple, he calls himself an "odd apple." He breaks rules because they prevent him from doing what he wants and the artist in him doesn't want to lose his individuality to become a good apple. On the other hand he's not invested in chasing after forbidden apples to escape NEVAEH and expresses skepticism that it's even possible to break the unbreakable rules (and least until they get broken).

Being from the Taisho period (1912-1926), Shikishima is chronologically the eldest of all known students, and he is amused by the others' reaction to his age, since from his perspective everyone else is coming from an unknown future. I don't know if his attitude is supposed to be representative of his time, but Shikihima comes across as scholarly and whimsical (though despite his poetic sense of speech, he's actually terrible at studying).

In most routes Shikishima floats in and out of the story, enough to confirm that he's there, and never hanging around when a commitment is needed, as suiting his unaligned nature. He might break rules like a bad apple and sleep in the dorm like a good apple, but he's really just doing his own thing.

So I wondered how Rinka would even get involved with him.

And the answer is that she initially doesn't know how she's going to fit in, so she keeps bumping into Shikishima while trying to find her own space, and her persistence in trying to understand his artwork (which always looks like a slab of black paint) intrigues him enough that he starts hanging around the Bad Apples more, even participating in the Reaper Game and the exam, which he avoids entirely on other routes.

Eventually we learn that the reason behind his art always being black is due to a limit. Outwardly he isn't bothered by it much, because even in life nobody really understood his work, but he came from a wealthy family so he was allowed to be an eccentric who could hole up all day in a studio painting without worrying about material needs. Despite his way with words, Shikishima isn't very good at expressing himself, and feels he does it best with his art, which again, nobody really understands.

When he was dying from illness (implied to be tuberculosis), he thought he was all right with having never reached anyone, because at least he'd spent his life painting as he wanted to, but in actuality he was very lonely and died in despair that no one could ever understand him.

Unlike most of the characters, Shikishima doesn't have a life to go back to. He rightly concludes that returning to life would put him back in a body wracked by disease from which he would shortly die again. But after spending time with Rinka he decides he is going to join the hunt for the forbidden apple so he can finish his last painting and leave it for Rinka to find in the future.

Though I wasn't overly fond of the Shikishima romance, his ending was a real tearjerker about loneliness, loss, and accepting that pain is part of living. The Bad Apples crash the graduation ceremony as in other routes, and while there Shikishima presents a painting to everyone, which is as inscrutable as ever, but he uses it as a metaphor to show what the school has taken from them. He talks about his own problems and asks the graduating good apples to think about what they're losing (and I love that Yoh regains enough of himself to call Shikishima out on the fact being expelled will not reunite him with Sanzu).

When the rotten apple appears with its speech about despair, it's Shikishima who talks it down this time, expressing his willingness to go back to life, even if it means dying again shortly thereafter. And then unlike other routes, when everyone gets their own forbidden apple, Rinka isn't in a rush to leave, so we get an extended farewell to many of the secondary and tertiary characters.

Shikishima's route gave a lot of space for the supporting cast so farewells from characters like Enishi and even Ouji (who doesn't get a portrait and barely shows up on some routes) still have a bit of heft to them. We see almost everyone leave after eating their apple (except notably Alma, who walks away without eating) and then Shikishima and Rinka say their farewells to each other before going their separate ways.

I was glad Shikishima wasn't going the special graduation route that Higa did, and that both he and Rinka accepted that their reunification would take place through the art he promised to leave her. And eventually, once she's recovered from her accident, she hears about an art exhibition by a talented Taisho artist who died young. She goes to see the art and of course she discovers Shikishima's last painting before he died at age 17, which moves her to tears.

If that had been the only component of the ending, I would have been fine, but there's a little more to it. I guess since this is an otome they can't entirely leave it off at a bittersweet ending, so she meets Haruhiko Shikishima, the great grandnephew of Natsuku Shikishima, the original artist. Haruhiko was the one who discovered the painting in his family's storage and decided that it needed to be put on display, but he's clearly an adult (young, but definitely not in school). He doesn't quite look like the older Shikishima and isn't an artist himself, though they share some of the same mannerisms.

Essentially he's the replacement goldfish so Rinka can have a romance at the end. But it comes off as creepy because 1) she takes a part-time job at the gallery in the epilogue, which likely makes him her boss, and 2) she's still a first year high school student when Haruhiko confesses that he loves her. He recognizes that she seems to confuse him with Natsuku a lot, and it makes him a bit jealous, but he doesn't really care and Rinka (despite the fact she knows she's constantly confusing him with his great granduncle) seems okay with it too since she says she loves him back. And they kiss.

Of course, the implication is that he's Natsuku reborn, but it's not presented as strongly as in Higa's ending, where we knew he was going to be reborn and the rebirth tied up one of his regrets in his previous life. Haruhiko's appearance is just fanservice.

So my playthrough of Shikishima's storyline felt like a lot of "well this guy is rather eccentric," followed by "I can't stop crying," and ended with "this is gross."

We have two routes left and I'm hoping Alma doesn't pull a reincarnation romance, though he's supposed to have been born fifteen years after Higa, making him a child of the late 60s, early 70s depending on when Higa was born. I don't know Satoru's time period yet, but I guess I'll find out soon, because he's up next!

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 3: Higa

Oftentimes when I'm playing an otome someone becomes a lot more interesting along the way, even though they aren't who my character is currently pursuing, but that didn't happen with Bad Apple Wars. I was entertained with White Mask even when he was being a self-sacrificial dumbass, and while the other romance options seemed like fine enough people (barring Satoru who I actively found off-putting), I wasn't raring to see their storylines... except maybe Alma's, but not enough that I was going to change my mind about saving him for last.

That left me with Higa and Shikishima if I wanted to do the Bad Apple route, and knowing what I learned after playing through White Mask's route multiple times to get everything, I knew I would have to just suck it up and pick one of them preemptively so I could use a walkthrough and avoid too much replay. I chose Higa.

Unlike with White Mask, Higa's portion of the common Bad Apple route doesn't feel like it overwhelms the shared scenes. There's clearly a lot going on that Higa has nothing to do with and he doesn't feel that prominent even in the scenes specific to him, probably because he has a huge amount of Alma worship. Higa knows he's not much of a thinker, so even if he can't understand the reasoning behind Alma's decisions, he'll back them 100%. What he does best is fight. He just needs Alma to point him where.

One thing I didn't particularly like though is that Higa is supposed to be sold as a scary guy who's actually pretty nice, but even though he talks like an old school delinquent, he doesn't actually do anything scary, nor does he look particularly scary. White Mask is scary because he you can't see his face and he will invade Rinka's personal space when he is less than pleased with her. Higa doesn't do any of that. He just talks blunt and expects Rinka to talk bluntly in return (since he's not brainy enough to want to read between the lines). I could see her calling him rude, or even intimidating, but I can't buy scary.

His big hang up is that he wants to be needed by the people he cares about, and places their needs over his own. In fact his bad ending takes this to an unhealthy extreme where he refuses to question Alma's depression, and is only too happy to accept that Rinka needs him, because it makes him feel like he has a purpose.

The dividing line between Higa's good and bad ending routes felt a little odd though. White Mask's bad ending was ridiculously easy to trigger since touching him anywhere other than a couple specific spots during Soul Touch would trigger a bad reaction, and considering how emotionally broken he was, that was unsurprising. But I don't understand why Higa's bad spots were bad, since they didn't seem to have anything to do with the story.

And the good ending changes the final two sets of memories that Rinka gets from Higa, particularly the latter of the two. Higa's last memory is in his hospital bed after the car accident where he saved a little kid's life. Since he's dying, he's not entirely sure what his older brother is saying to him, but he knows from the tone of voice that his brother is both sad and angry. Higa takes this to mean his brother was disappointed in him, and that despair follows him into the afterlife at NEVEAH.

However, in a moment that makes no sense because Rinka is only supposed to see memories and not what really happened, when she Soul Touches with Higa she gets a unmuddied version of the memory and we learn that Higa's brother really admired him, and his anger and disappointment was directed at himself. Through Soul Touch Rinka is able to relay that unclouded memory to Higa, which in turn lifts his spirits and allows him to literally punch Alma out of his depression so the Bad Apples can get back on track for the finale.

(Alma gets depressed after Sanzu's disappearance in White Mask's route too, so I'm guessing his depression is going to be a thing on everybody's route.)

I do like the confession moment between Rinka and Higa though. Rather than having them act on their feelings in a climactic moment where there's an audience to see them break the inappropriate relationship rule, it's just the two of them in Rinka's room preparing for the graduation ceremony. They acknowledge they have feelings for one another, even though they can't say the word love because of the academy limits, and they kiss. The forbidden apple appears and disappears as usual, and it's all very private, though Higa later reports in to Alma to let him know they broke the rule and that he and Rinka are now dating. And in a very Higa moment, he also makes an announcement to let everybody in the Bad Apples know they're dating.

I have to admit I wasn't sure where Higa's good ending was going to go. Since I'd played White Mask first, and he turned out to have come from the same time period as Rinka (apparently dying within minutes of her), their happy ending was easy to see coming, since the both of them returning to life would result in them being alive and in high school at the same time. Higa, however, was born in the 1950s, and while we don't know precisely which year Rinka is from, I think it's a fair assumption that she was born around 2000, give or take, since the game's Japanese release was in 2015 and Rinka is starting her first year of high school.

This meant that returning to life would place them fifty years apart from each other. And while Higa is not the only love interest with this problem (Alma being born fifteen years after Higa and Shikishima being from the Taisho era), he was certainly the first route I played that had to address it.

Amusingly, Higa is acutely aware that if they get expelled from NEVAEH and he were to go look for her afterwards, he would look really creepy due to the age difference, even though Rinka tells him "it is what it is."

And it's after this that his route does another asspull (after the previous one with the memory that shouldn't exist).

While playing catch with Rinka and a few of the Bad Apples and having a good time, a chime sounds and the world lights up like when Sanzu had her early graduation. Higa realizes this is his time to go, but no one really understands why since they were just playing catch and not breaking any rules. The game attempts to explain the game of catch as a metaphor for passing love on from one to another, but it doesn't quite come together (especially since kissing does not cause a similar reaction), and the upshot is that Higa graduates via special graduation, promising that one day he'll see Rinka again.

Interestingly, this results in the ninth chapter of his route taking place completely without him, as Rinka and the other Bad Apples crash the graduation ceremony to finish up the job of getting the forbidden apple. As in White Mask's route, Rinka gives the Rotten Apple a talking to, in order to get it to transform into forbidden apples for everyone, but the speech doesn't quite work this time around because she talks about how she's tired of limits and specifically mentions the exam, which she aced because for some reason never explained, limits don't apply to her. And then without another thought or even a good-bye to her fellow Bad Apples, she eats the forbidden apple and away she goes. (Even in White Mask's route she at least looked around at her friends a bit before leaving!)

As I suspected when Higa had a special graduation, Rinka returns to life and to her new school only to bump into the reborn version of him, Katsumi Higa, who talks like a more modern teenager instead of an old school delinquent (though still with the same attitude). He doesn't have his memories of NEVEAH, but he and Rinka click pretty fast, and in the epilogue we learn that he is actually his own nephew, having been reborn as the son of his older brother. And thematically it's nice that Katsumi Higa is able to fulfill the promise the older Higa brothers had made to each other about going to the nationals in high school baseball.

I found Higa's route to be rather dull in the beginning, particularly during the common route, and the romance wasn't really working for me. Rinka constantly felt lame and overly apologetic, and Higa came across as more of an older brother figure than a potential boyfriend (though they were goofy great together during the fashion show). His last two Soul Touches, which are supposed to be very intimate scenes, didn't feel like it at all. Though Higa's route eventually pulls the relationship together without feeling forced, it also feels rather late, since we don't get to spend much time with them before they're forced apart by Higa's graduation.

Not having enough time together is not a problem exclusive to Higa's route (White Mask certainly had tons of drama that separated him from Rinka), but it's just the way that it's handled that bothers me since it felt so arbitrary, and gives me some concern about how the age gap going to be handled with Alma and Shikishima since they are similarly much older than Rinka in terms of when they are born.

Next week I'll be covering Shikishima, who I figured would be a good midpoint play, since he's not a Bad Apple (with caps) himself and he's the closest thing to a middle ground between the two sides.

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 2: White Mask

As I mentioned, I started my first Bad Apples Wars playthrough as a Good Apple, which meant that I knew my options were going to be Satoru and the masked Prefect leader, who Rinka refers to as White Mask from the first time she sees him. (In practice all the Prefects wear white masks. What makes their leader different is that he also has white hair.)

I wasn't sure how route locks would work since it was my first playthrough, but I'd already had one scene with Satoru in Chapter 1, so I figured for Chapter 2 I'd see what White Mask was about. He starts off as an extremely rigid enforcer of the rules, but he never raises his voice and follows procedure to a T. Rinka even describes him as mechanical. He appears completely unflappable, and though he does not tolerate rule breakers, he doesn't get overtly frustrated with them either, repeating the same lines for them to desist or face correction countless times.

I figured depending on what I saw of White Mask in Chapter 2, I'd decide on him or Satoru, but it turned out that just meeting him in Chapter 2 locked me in his route. In the game's flowchart, my Chapter 2 was still part of the common Good Apple route, but in practice I was never given a choice to interact with Satoru again (though he still showed up as part of the story). All my scenes were with White Mask, but due to how the story played out, I was fine with that. Everything that happened felt like a natural flow of events rather than my choices being taken away from me.

Rinka is forced to become a Prefect in the Good Apple common route, so it's unsurprising that she would be placed under White Mask's wing and go on regular patrols with him. She's a terrible Prefect though, since she doesn't want to correct anybody (which involves hitting them with a correction tool and brainwashing them for what seems to be 10-15 minutes), and White Mask is surprisingly patient with her, even when he thinks that being new at her job shouldn't be an excuse anymore.

I'll be honest that I didn't really like a lot of his early scenes. The player is introduced to the Soul Touch system not because Rinka accidentally bumps into him, but because he corners her and touches her first. White Mask ends up being the love interest who crowds her space a lot, not because he is trying to be romantically aggressive with her, but because he asserting that he knows better than her and she should accept the status quo of the school. There are multiple times that he grabs her in a restraining or threatening manner, since as a Prefect he is bound to correct Bad Apples, and by questioning things and becoming friends with the rebelling students, she is marking herself as a potential Bad Apple herself.

White Mask is genuinely scary sometimes, and some of the tensest moments on his route are when he seems on the verge of correcting Rinka. Since his tone of voice doesn't change, a lot of the threat is conveyed by a change in music and/or his proximity to Rinka. Close is bad.

But that said, once I got more of his personal story, I found I liked him quite a bit.

As Rinka repeatedly comes into contact with White Mask, either by physically trying to stop him or because he's grabbing on to her, their souls intermingle and she gets various memories from when he was alive, enough to realize that he'd lived a pretty miserable life. Everyone who cared about him had an unfortunate tendency to die, so he tried to stop caring about other people and to get other people to stop caring about him, figuring that way they would live longer. But no matter what happened someone would always slip through, and then they would die.

It was a despairing way to live, and at NEVAEH he's been able to forget everything about who he was and starve the hope that he could ever love or be loved without consequence. But the thing is, even though he forgets so much about his past, there's a fundamental part of himself that never goes away. Rinka realizes that he's eager to punish the Bad Apples as a Prefect not because he hates them, so much as he hates himself for wanting to be like them. Possibly, for this reason, he is the only Prefect that anyone can tell apart from the others, because a part of his individuality remains. When Rinka calls him out on his hypocrisy, White Mask begins to crumble.

He's actually a boy named Watase, and in a nice touch, once the player knows his name, all interface boxes using the name White Mask switch over to his real name. After recovering his memories and realizing the true meaning behind his actions, Watase decides to quit the Prefects, asking the Bad Apples to look after Rinka and telling her good-bye. It's actually a pretty funny scene when he visits the Bad Apples' home base. Not only does he not attack them on sight like they expect, but he takes off his mask, which one of the Bad Apples humorously thought was permanently stuck to his face.

Watase is quite the self-flagellating type, believing himself to be the cause of the deaths of his family, classmates, teachers; and to be fair, he must have gone to a lot of funerals since I assume that we are only getting memories in regards to a portion of the people who have died around him. Other kids gave him the nickname "reaper" (in Japanese: "shinigami") while he was young enough that he sounded like he was in elementary school.

In a nice twist, we even learn that he had briefly met Rinka before either of them died. He'd seen her on the other side of the crosswalk on her first day of school and thought her soul was pretty, but he tried not to look at her when they passed each other in the street because he was afraid that if he looked at her, she would die. Of course, that's when her shoe came off in the prologue and she stopped in the middle of the street to pick it up. Watase turned around to see why she stumbled, and then she was hit by the truck, sending her into the afterlife, and pretty much shredding what remained of Watase's sanity.

I really wish the game had continued on with his memories though, because we don't know what Watase actually died from, and his last memory ends a few minutes after Rinka's own death, moments after he wished that someone would come and kill him to end his misery.

Watase's self-flagellation continues in his afterlife, as he feels he should be punished, not only for what he'd done in life, but for his actions as a Prefect. Though he's come to care for Rinka, he doesn't see himself as someone worth having, so he wants to send her off to the Bad Apples where she can be happy and find a way to return to life. In his mind, someone like him has no need to return since he would only be miserable and inflicting misery on others, and in fact he hands himself over to the creepy teacher, Mr. Gas Mask, to be experimented on and eventually have his soul obliterated.

Though I'd normally be annoyed by love interests who do this, Watase's bad behavior isn't well tolerated by the rest of the cast, with others calling him an "edgelord" or a "dumbass" for trying to get himself annihilated. Knowing that other characters think he's being incredibly stupid makes his stupidity easier to bear, and a lot more entertaining since they aren't shy about saying it. Rinka doesn't take his actions lying down either, calling him selfish to his face, and being willing to confront Mr. Gas Mask herself to get Watase back.

In fact the Watase rescue scene is probably one of the best in the game. After finally realizing that they can fight the system and that Rinka is willing to break all the rules for him (because she's joined the Bad Apples and that's what Bad Apples do), Watase and Rinka double-team Mr. Gas Mask to take him out. I know I shouldn't be celebrating every time an otome heroine gets to be an action girl, but it still feels like it happens too rarely. Rinka does start the game with a fair bit of ennui, but once she makes up her mind, that girl moves.

I have to admit that I'm surprised though that at no point in the story did Watase or Rinka bring up the fact that since they're dead he doesn't have to worry about killing her just by being around her. Later in the story when Rinka turns and becomes a Bad Apple to try giving Watase a second chance at life, it's understandable that he would be concerned about people dying around him again, but if they just never graduated, then he and Rinka could have stayed together without the premature death problem.

Though Watase's rescue is in the second to last chapter, it's really the climax of the romance, with Chapter 9 primarily serving as a way to wrap up the main story about the school, the unbreakable rules, and the forbidden apple. Rinka correctly answers the question about whether it's worth returning to life when it's also full of despair, and everyone in the school gets forbidden apples. Watase doesn't want to eat his right away, because he has some things to think about and he doesn't want to return to life until he sorts them out, but promises that he will, and asks Rinka to go ahead. Surprisingly, she does, considering that the guy has been pretty good about pushing her away most of the second half of his route (though I guess Watase has never outright lied to her).

Due to the apples returning them to the moments they died, Watase and Rinka revive within minutes of each other (so even if Watase sat on his butt for an additional six months in the afterlife, temporally it didn't matter). This is why I wish we knew what Watase had died from, because he immediately wakes up under the cherry tree he was crying under and then runs back to the accident site where Rinka was hit. Whatever killed him was so innocuous it wasn't worth mentioning and apparently no one around him noticed, which is weird since Rinka ends up in the hospital with a two month recovery time due to getting hit by a truck.

They reunite though and the translation does a bumpy job with names here, because it turns out that Watase is his surname, which makes sense given Japanese cultural context. His teacher called him Watase, and he was introduced to his classmates as Watase, because surnames are used in formal situations. Rinka knows this, even if it might whoosh by the American player, so when they reunite she asks for his "real name" in the English translation, but what she's asking for is his given name.

Then in another translation stumble, the translation gives it as "Shou," but when you listen to the audio, he says his name is "Iku." Since kanji have multiple readings, chances are whoever was translating his ending did not realize it was being voiced (it's not part of a dialogue box) otherwise his name probably would have been double checked against the audio, and this makes it maddening to read because Rinka keeps repeating the wrong name to herself in unspoken dialogue so she can remember it, while I was mentally repeating the correct name from the audio so I wouldn't forget it.

Something like this should have been a really easy catch if anyone with half an ear for Japanese had been listening to the audio while playing his ending towards the end of the QA cycle. It's not as egregious as some of the mistakes made in other Aksys translations, but since it's Watase's name and it's the ending scene it annoyed me more than it might have otherwise.

As for their happily ever after, I liked it, even though I had to work for it. (You need to do everything flawlessly to get the epilogue, even if you otherwise earn the good ending.) Watase visits Rinka during her recovery everyday after school and he's an embarrassing worrywart. They plan their first date for when she gets out of the hospital, and there's no more talk about people dying around him. We're never told whether Watase's curse is really the universe out to get him or it's just all in his head, but at least for now he's giving living a chance.

Despite being a pain in the neck, he was a lot of fun.

I wasn't sure who I would play after that, but I wanted to give the Good Apple side a rest since some of the scenes in the common route are likely to replay even if I'm not hanging out with Watase the next time around. That meant my second playthrough would be from the Bad Apple side, and given that Watase and Alma are portrayed as being opposed to each other in a lot of the artwork, I decided I would save Alma for last. Higa ended up being my second playthrough and I'll get to him next week.

VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: PS Vita
Release: 2017

Bad Apple Wars is one of several one-off otome titles Aksys translated in the wake of more popular franchises (or soon to be franchises) such as Hakuoki and Code:Realize. Since it never got a fandisc, I knew going in that it was probably one of Otomate's less popular offerings, but for those looking for something different, it's a ride worth checking out, particularly because it spends a lot of time reflecting on what makes a life worth living.

At the start of the game, Rinka is drowning in ennui as she heads for her first day of high school, wondering if this is all there is to her existence; going to school day in, day out just like she did in middle school. Unfortunately for her, she's hit by a truck on her way to school and dies, taking her to a high school afterlife called NEVAEH Academy (don't think too much about the name).

After a group of rebellious students crash the awkward opening ceremony for new students, it quickly becomes apparent that there are two types of students here; the good apples, who do everything the teachers say in order to graduate and be reborn, and the bad apples, who break the rules. The Bad Apples, capitalized, are a specific group of students who "live" to disrupt everything and seem to be seeking their own way out of their afterlife purgatory.

The first choice the player makes, even before the protagonist's name, is whether to be a good apple or a bad apple, and the game makes it pretty clear that the good apple side is creepy, even though it outwardly offers the only way to leave.

If you want to get to know the cast before you make a choice, you're pretty much out of luck, but at least the game lets you know which love interests are available to you on each side.

I just wish the two sides had been more visually/conceptually balanced so they would look equally appealing, since the Good Apple route features another new student (who is an obsessed bookworm that barely talks to Rinka), and the intimidating masked leader of the school's Prefects. The Bad Apple route features a (literally) more colorful trio of personalities and while Rinka doesn't yet know why they're rebelling or what they're fighting for, they at least look like they would be fun to hang out with.

If there had been a third option on the Good Apple side it would have made the two appear more even, especially if the third was a student whose position in the school was somewhere in between the new student and the Prefect, so there could have been something like a middle ground. It could have been interesting if Shikishima, who is a lower case bad apple who lives in the good apple dorm, was a Good Apple route option and perhaps a character like Naraka or Yoh (both non-romanceable) could have replaced him on the Bad Apple side. That would have given us an even three characters for each side.

Not knowing any of the love interests well enough to make a decision, I decided to RP the situation and decided that Rinka would try to fit in and learn more about the school before making any choices she'd regret, so she became a good apple for my first playthrough.

I think you can safely do the routes in any order, but I particularly liked bookending my playthrough with White Mask and Alma, so I'd recommend doing one of those first and the other last, with everyone else in the middle. That said, you'll learn more about how the Bad Apples operate, how Soul Totems work, and the different unbreakable rules through the Bad Apple common route. The unbreakable rules in particular are important since the Bad Apples believe that by breaking them they will acquire the Forbidden Apple, which will allow them to return to life.

The Bad Apple route also plays much more like a standard otome, where you get to know the general cast and everyone has a chance to shine. The difference is that route lock happens with the first choice in Chapter 2 (no matter if you're a good or bad apple), so even though you are getting to know everyone, Rinka's love interest is set ridiculously early and it's possible the player might not like their choice much by the time the story spins off to his specific ending.

On the other hand, I liked Rinka as a person and her character arc much better in the Good Apple route. She spends a fair to ridiculous amount of time berating herself and thinking about how empty she is on the Bad Apple route on account of the fact she never found anything to be passionate about in life.

While she does go with the flow initially on the Good Apple route, she doesn't have other people fighting the good fight around her. Rinka is forced to come to terms with what's important to her on her own, so when she finally does take a stand, it feels like a natural outgrowth of discovering the kind of person she really wants to be.

Rinka's odd way around the school's "limits" are also handled better on the Good Apple route. While the school has a certain number of written rules that students are not supposed to break, there are also limits which prevent certain actions from being performed. For instance, not being able to die is a limit, because everyone instantly heals from injuries. Not being able to leave the school is also a limit. But by fulfilling certain conditions, it is possible to surpass a limit.

Rinka breaks two limits in the Bad Apple route, and it's never explained why. While one of those limits (finding the key in the Reaper Game) is also broken in the Good Apple version, she's not hunting for the key as part of the Perfects, so the fact she finds it comes across more as lucky happenstance than the fact she is somehow special. The Vexam is more annoying on the Bad Apple route because she magically solves the exam everyone always struggles with without a problem, and though she feels guilty about it, it doesn't make the result more satisfying for her or the player. I much prefer the Good Apple route where the Bad Apples just flat out outsmart the test and the Prefects.

There's also one element of the shared story that I liked a lot better on the Good Apple route, and that's the handling of the Sanzu and Yoh subplot. Unlike most students at NEVAEH, they've known each other since middle school and arrived together, which also means that they died together. In life they were part of an indie band that decided to break up after their final concert, but their bus got into an accident on the way there, which resulted in Sanzu and Yoh arriving at NEVAEH. Worse, Yoh remembers in the moments before he died, Sanzu dove in front of him to try to protect him, and blames himself for her even being here.

The Bad Apple route never establishes why the band was breaking up, only that Sanzu found out about it early by overhearing the rest of the band talking about it. Though she and Yoh make up, it's not clear what happened in the first place.

On the Good Apple route, Yoh explains that Sanzu was given an offer for a recording contract due to her talent, but she turned it down to stay with the rest of the band. Sanzu found meaning in life through singing, but Yoh didn't see performing in his future, so he convinced the band that the best thing was for Sanzu to take the opportunity she was given and they were going to break up to free her. When she learns this, Sanzu calls him out for not considering her feelings on the matter, and he apologizes for not being able to tell her, but he also makes it clear that he never had any intention of abandoning her. Even if he never played beside her on stage again, he would always be with her in the audience.

As a result, Sanzu and Yoh getting back together for their final performance feels a lot better in the Good Apple route, because we know all the necessary parts of their story. White Mask's Good Apple route is also the highest stakes version of their final concert, with a battle breaking out on the roof between the Prefects and the Bad Apples just to give the duo a chance to perform, and the two band members are so in sync with each other that they're able to play as if there wasn't a fight raging around them. It's a beautiful scene that none of the other routes manage, even though they all feature the concert in some capacity.

For a while, I honestly thought no matter what happened, both Sanzu and Yoh were going experience it together (since I played White Mask's route first), so seeing them ripped apart by Sanzu's surprise graduation was a punch in the gut, and the game is uneven about handling Yoh in the aftermath. Since graduation is not getting expelled, that means Sanzu goes off to be reborn, leaving Yoh behind, knowing that he will never see her again. In his despair Yoh gives up on being a Bad Apple because there's no point to being expelled anymore if Sanzu won't be there with him.

Half the endings leave it unclear what happens to Yoh, whether he chooses to return to life without Sanzu, or go through with graduation (or if he's even at graduation at all), and that's too bad. Sanzu's graduation leaves a huge impact on all the Bad Apples, and none suffer for it as much as Yoh, but since he's a non-romanceable side character he's not always given the space to fully work through his grief.

While I'm on the subject of side characters, I'd also like to call attention to Naraka, who is a gender non-conforming boy. He identifies as male, but loves frills, lace, and cute things, so he always appears in a Gothic Lolita dress. Only one character ever dogs on him for it, but only once per playthrough (to bring up Naraka's gender in the first place) and it's done by Higa, the team grouch who complains about everybody. It probably could have been handled better, but it's pretty clear that while Higa doesn't understand it, he doesn't think less of Naraka for dressing that way, and on his own route it's clear that Higa knows when he's not being fair to Naraka and is trying to be better about it. (And Higa being from the 1950s, it's understandable that he's trying to adjust from an older, more traditional value set.)

Naraka arrived at NEVAEH presenting as a normal boy, but after he fell in with the Bad Apples he found he could be his true self and hang out with people where he wouldn't have to explain that this is the way he wants to be. This only really comes out in Higa's route, but I was really happy to have a character like Naraka in game and many times he serves as the player's best friend/cheerleader.

I've complained from time to time about route locks in more recent otome from Otomate like Code:Realize and Collar x Malice, where there's a love interest who can't be pursued until everyone else's routes are complete, and then his story becomes the true route that wraps up everyone else's.

Bad Apple Wars doesn't have that, and I'm incredibly relieved. In fact, there aren't any locked routes at all. Whoever's storyline you want to play through your first time around is open to you. It seems that if anyone would have been restricted it would've been White Mask, since his real name is unknown on most routes and he's a Prefect, but even he is available immediately, and as it turns out, he's the one I went with! White Mask's route is next week.