VN Talk: Norn9: Var Commons - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: PS Vita
Release: 2015

Norn9: Var Commons is unusually ambitious. As an otome game it features three protagonists, nine fully built out love interests with accompanying storylines, a frame story involving a time displaced twelve-year-old, a world that is not what it seems, multiple enemies with differing agendas, and there's a hidden traitor among the team.

That's a lot to juggle, and I wouldn't say it entirely succeeds in what it was trying to do, but it definitely tried. I think the problem is that it's by design an otome and performed that part of its job extremely well, but at the expense of fully explaining its worldbuilding and the frame story that should have tied together the reason all the events in the game happened in the first place.

Having good worldbuilding and being a good otome are not mutually exclusive, but I think Norn9 was juggling so much with nine very different routes that it wasn't possible to give a reasonable amount of attention to anything that wasn't directly part of a romance plot, even with the addition of a non-route affiliated epilogue. So we learn a lot about Natsuhiko, who is the primary attacker on the ship, because he's a love interest. However, most of Shiro Yuiga's personal story comes from an info dump in the epilogue because he's not a love interest, despite the fact his actions have a direct impact on multiple routes and he is in fact the one who enabled the world that currently exists.

When we finally learn Shiro Yuiga's story and what he's after, it seems like he's supposed to be a tragic maniac, but the emotion just isn't there because we aren't given the chance to see his pain and the life he lost. It's just a line of narration for later dialogue to react to. Worse, despite being the closest thing to a universal enemy across multiple routes, his story never feels like it's properly resolved.

On the face of it, Norn9 is about twelve people in the year 1919 on a flying ship called the Norn, who are on a journey to see The World, which is sort of an all-encompassing entity that maintains peace throughout the world. Most of those on board are espers with unique psychic powers who expect that The World will send them out to various countries as goodwill ambassadors after arrival. This premise serves as a romantic complication on multiple routes since there's an underlying expectation that the pair will be separated at the end of their journey.

However, their journey is actually for an entirely different reason, one that ultimately ties into the frame story that sends Sorata Suzuhara from the year 2015 to the year 1919. Though the vast majority of the game is spent with teenagers and young adults sorting through various romantic attractions, it seems like Norn9 also wanted to be a commentary on humanity's propensity for warfare, and this is where the game starts to fall down.

The surprise reveal when the espers finally meet Aion, the AI known as The World, is that the world was devastated by war in the mid 21st century. In 2085, it was so bad that a group of scientists came together with a plan to literally reset the world through Aion. Following the Reset, humanity's knowledge and technology was rolled back and war disappeared.

Since then, every time things begin to get bad, Aion creates a group of espers (no one's born with the ability, they're just gifted one day in childhood) and when they come of age she gathers them on a journey to meet her. Based on their personal experiences from growing up different, the espers then decide whether the world needs another Reset. Aion tells our current espers that being called does not mean a Reset is mandatory. Just over half the time she assembled a group of espers, they voted against it.

This also means that even though the characters think this is the year 1919, it's actually 8075 because there have been three Resets thus far. Sorata, though he thought he's from 2015, is from the Third Cycle and has been in cryosleep for the past two thousand years. So while he's definitely a kid out of time, there was no time travel involved. He took the long way.

Norn9 peppers about half of its routes with signs of war and conflict. Guns are largely unknown to the espers, but become highly visible on any of the routes where the Norn visits a battleground. The fact that they keep coming back despite all the Resets seems to be a comment on warfare being an inevitable part of human nature.

But there is one thing that plays against that, and it's Shiro Yuiga's involvement. He's the scientist who created Aion, and it seems that in every cycle he pops up again somehow in a synthetic body and turns into a weapons merchant to accelerate warfare in an attempt to recreate a disastrous event in the original 2065.

As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't take the time to really explain Shiro Yuiga's motivations or bother with the details of how he's still around. He appears to have uploaded his mind and body hops to different shells as needed, but that doesn't explain why it takes him thousands of years to turn into a wrecking ball large enough to warrant a Reset.

It's not bad that Norn9 wanted to tackle these kinds of themes while also being a sci-fi romance game, but it didn't leave itself the room to do so. And adequately explaining Sorata's place in all this takes too much time for too little payoff.

Suffice to say, I feel like the frame story primarily exists to set up the fact that this 1919 Earth is supposed to be the world Sorata (and thus the player) knows, but for some strange reason it's not. That way the fact it's actually the year 8075 can be a surprise at the end. But for 90% of the story it doesn't matter. The frame story could have been removed, and with some nips/tucks made to Shiro Yuiga's backstory, Norn9 could have been a lot tighter and focused on the personal stories of the espers and their journey, which is what it does best.

It isn't as though the espers have the easiest time of it. Even without worrying about never ending cycles of war, they're dealing with more immediate concerns for most of the game.

Despite the Norn's gargantuan size (it has three levels and a roof, with enough space for a forest and a field to grow crops to feed everyone on their journey), it has only nine rooms for passengers, leading to the suspicion that it was intended for nine people, even though there twelve people on board. Sorata, being time displaced and a non-esper, is an obvious extra, and seeing as he's far from home, the group is largely okay with taking him on, but aside from that, there are possibly two other people on board who shouldn't be here.

This suspicion grows with the attacks on their ship. Someone on the outside is trying to kill them, and early in the game, a large hole is blown open in the ship's hull. Due to the lack of debris inside the ship, the espers come to the conclusion that there is a traitor on board, and the explosion was from the inside out.

This kicks off the game's route selection. To make sure the traitor is not able to act independently, Kakeru suggests everyone pair off and stay with their partners and the player's chosen heroine is allowed to choose who she wants to be with or be the odd person out (in Mikoto's case, since her team only has three people). The heroine's partner will become her love interest for that route.

As a result, the common route is fairly short, both the prologue to the game itself and the part in common for a particular heroine. This is what allows the game to manage nine routes without being drastically longer than its contemporaries in the Otomate stable. Choices made post-partner selection are mostly to increase affection to earn a particular character's happy ending.

Because there are three protagonists, this also removes the blank slate syndrome that happens in some games. Koharu, Mikoto, and Nanami are each distinct from each other, and while Koharu matches the mold of the all-loving otome protagonist who just wants everyone to be friends, Mikoto and Nanami are cut from a different cloth. Mikoto is assertive and demanding (both of herself and others) and Nanami is a self-loathing, soft-spoken girl who doesn't really care what other people think about her.

Arguably, because they are different, there are some romances that only work because of who they are. The push and pull dynamics during Sakuya and Itsuki's routes in particular, would be difficult to replicate without a heroine as outspoken as Mikoto.

All three protagonists are voiced, and unlike my problems with Beniyuri in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, I was very comfortable with their performances and never had any moments where my internal reading clashed with the audio. I think it helped that they are intended to be distinct characters rather than self-inserts, because they are participating in every route of the game even if they are not the player's currently chosen protagonist.

With nine routes to go through it seems like the game could get pretty tedious, but it's aided by a couple features. One that I'm surprised more visual novels don't use is a flat out skip button when you're about to see the same chunk of text you already saw on a different playthrough. While not everything repeatable is skippable, this lets the player ditch most of the prologue, the shared opening section of the dream sequence (which is the same on every route it appears), and Aion's infodump on the Reset (which happens on slightly less than half the routes).

The other thing is that each route is fairly different, essentially becoming its own timeline. For instance, though Ron is always the traitor, he's never revealed the same way. Sometimes he's found out halfway through the story. Sometimes he makes it all the way up to Aion. He's still the same character in actions and behavior. It's that the circumstances have changed. The result is that even though the player knows Ron's the traitor, it's still not possible to predict when he'll make a move or what it will be on any given route. (In fact, he might end up not doing anything at all.)

Normally I'd be annoyed when a game diverges too much on different routes (like for some reason Ron only goes for Kakeru's earring on two routes when he should be doing that all the time), but this one seems to work for me; perhaps because of its multiple heroines. It's not just one person making choices, but three, and the player is only in control of one of them.

Who the other two heroines choose to pair off with will change from route to route. They have their preferences (Mikoto and Koharu pair off with Sakuya and Kakeru more frequently than others), but the element of mixing and matching with the other girls has a tendency to change character dynamics and as well as which characters are more likely to interact on a given route. This helps keep things fresh.

I originally wanted to play through knocking out all three love interests per protagonist so I could see a particular girl's story in an unbroken chunk, but the game is not designed that way. Though you can, the game recommends which four of the nine routes you should do first. And it turns out that the girls themselves (unfortunately) don't have a comprehensive story that forms after going through all three of their routes, so jumping between protagonists doesn't cost you anything.

So I ended up bouncing between all three girls. I played through in the order Kakeru > Sakuya > Heishi > Senri > Akito > Itsuki > Masamune > Ron > Natsuhiko, specifically putting Ron and Natsuhiko last due to being the traitor and the attacker. The rest were broken up so I could alternate between heroines while doing the four recommended routes (for first time playthroughs) first, the two non-recommended routes second, and the three locked routes last.

I enjoyed my playthrough order, but due to the differing amounts of story reveals in the game, I think the following order works if you want to work from least spoilers to most: Heishi > Senri > Kakeru or Sakuya > Itsuki > Akito or Masamune > Ron > Natsuhiko, if you avoid the bad endings, which sometimes spoil more than the happy ones. Natsuhiko's route is not necessarily more spoilery than Ron's, but I think he's a better lead-in to the true ending due to Sorata playing a more prominent role than he usually does, and Sorata's epilogue is the true end.

That said, it can still be rewarding playing a little out of spoiler order. Even on early routes, it's possible to see reactions from more spoilery characters that only mean something after you've played their route, which is a nice touch. For instance, Akito always has a non-verbal reaction to seeing Aion's male adult form, but it's not possible to understand why until seeing his route.

For commentary purposes, I'm going to group each heroine and her love interests into three separate entries when I do my deep dive in future posts. Next week will be Koharu!

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Series End

I was going to start my Norn9: Var Commons blog series this week, but realized that if I did, I wouldn't have a chance to talk about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. while it was still timely. So Norn9 will begin next week.

So, I want to say first that I am not much of a TV person. I do watch a fair bit of anime, but I tend to have difficulty sitting through an hour long show. Watching a Western drama becomes appointment viewing where I have to block out an hour of time. It's very difficult for me to follow more than one series at a time.

And by that, I mean more than one series during its entire run. The only other series that I watched all the way through since I started Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Agent Carter, which was aided by having a very limited number of episodes. There's a trail of partially finished live actions shows in AoS's wake that I eventually dropped because I find it difficult to watch more than one, even over the course of seven years. If two shows dropped new episodes at the same time and I was busy, then the less popular one would lose, never to be caught up.

Which is my roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It had a rough first season. I wasn't sure about the characters, the stories were very much monster of the week, and I hated Skye, but I wasn't watching anything else at the time so there was no competition.

Then the second season got better. They introduced the Inhumans and ran a single overarching story arc throughout the season. The writing team even managed to completely rehabilitate Skye, moving her from being the rogue hacker character to a conflicted young woman who was learning about her (very complicated) family for the first time.

The fourth season was my favorite. Despite being broken up into three mini-arcs between Ghost Rider, LMDs, and the Framework, each one was extremely well plotted and surprisingly managed to build on each other.

After watching year after year, I grew attached to the characters, so the show was always must watch viewing for me (especially since I don't subscribe to any services that would make it easy to catch reruns). Some seasons weren't as strong as others, but like any good serial, it was fun seeing where the characters would go next.

I don't think Season 7 is one of the better seasons from a writing standpoint, but knowing that it was the final season, you can see the writers had a lot of fun with it, stuffing in references to previous seasons and the greater MCU. If you're gonna do your swan song, might well put on a good show.

And they did.

While I'm not entirely sure I like the Daisy x Daniel Sousa romance (I'm not sure what the age gap is, but it feels like it's on the large side), I do think bringing Sousa into the last season as a recurring guest star was one of the best surprises the show did. I'd liked him on Agent Carter and bringing him forward in time to avoid his otherwise necessary death (which still sort of happened in an attempt to perserve the timeline) allowed him to fill a role as a pragmatic novice who doesn't understand some of these newfangled things. That's not to say he doesn't pull his own weight, he does, but his toolkit is distinctly different from everyone else's.

Aside from Fitz being absent most of the season (due to his actor working on other projects), it felt like everyone got a chance to do something, and even robo-Coulson didn't turn out as static a character as I thought he would.

After I finished watching the finale, I ended up wandering around the internet looking for interesting trivia (and finding a really fun table read video on YouTube) because I was saddened that it was really and truly over.

I don't watch many shows, so the few that I do, I tend to remember well. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will be difficult to replace, and I loved that it had both Ming-Na Wen and Chloe Bennet, giving us two Asian woman with unrelated characters in the cast!

I'm sure people will recommend other shows to me. There's so much to watch out there, but I have no plans to pick up anything else right now. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, but it's difficult to find something that will scratch just the right itch when you're looking for the one TV show you plan on watching for the next seven years.

Just a Quick Update

I realize I've skipped a couple weeks of blog posting, and while I wouldn't ordinarily say anything, I knew that I didn't have it in me to get something substantial for this week either.

To be frank, I haven't been feeling great these past few weeks. It's not so bad that I'm completely debilitated, but it's enough that my productivity isn't where I want it to be either. (And this heat wave is not helping either.)

So here are a few quick hits that might be worth your while until next week:

• How I Outline a Short Story - I talk about the subject as part of a Writers of the Future podcast series
• MANGA Plus - Free manga to read on the publisher's own English language site. Only the latest chapters of currently are available, but they also rotate in classic series that have already completed.
• Why Cats Like Your Gamer Chair - Silly article concept, but answers given seriously
• Joker and Akechi Sing "You're Nothing Without Me" - The voice actors behind the two Persona 5 characters sing this duet (in character!) from the City of Angels musical

Next week I should be ready with the beginning of another VN Talk series, this time on Norn9: Var Commons.

Racism in Valkyria Chronicles

I happened to start Valkyria Chronicles at about the same time the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd began, which tinged my playthrough to the point that I had to break my discussion of how the game handles racism into its post.

While I enjoyed the game, this was the one aspect of worldbuilding that I had the most difficulty with. The game doesn't map the Darcsen ethnic group directly to being Jewish (in fact they're portrayed as the Europan continent's indigenous people), but the comparison is hard to avoid given that we're in a WW2-inspired setting and the Darcsen of captured territories have been funneled into concentration camps as forced labor.

However, the Darcsen aren't discriminated against for religious differences, so much as they supposedly incited a calamity in ancient history, causing many people to die, and as a result they lost their nation and have become a people without a homeland. Nobody really knows exactly what went down back then (being close to two thousand years ago), but in the present day the Darcsens are a persecuted minority in all the places they live and the legend serves as a means to justify it.

The problem is that the game is not terribly good about showing racism and characters overcoming racism aside from broad strokes. Part of this is because we play as Welkin, who is not Darcsen and he's such a nice guy that of course he sticks up for his adopted Darcsen sister Isara, and forces the rest of his squad to work with her and like it. The other part is that I don't think the writers really understood how racism works, resulting in an inconsistent application throughout the story.

We see that Largo and especially Rosie initially aren't too keen on working with a Darcsen squadmate, but Rosie's racism is a bit hit or miss. She's just short of openly hostile at the start of Chapter 3 and still pretty cranky towards Isara at the start of Chapter 8. But at the end of 8 she's oddly considerate and goes to downright pleasant (for being Rosie) during the optional beach chapter that chronologically takes place between 9 and 10. Then she goes back to being hostile in Chapter 10.

This makes it hard to buy into her change at the end of Chapter 10 when she discovers that enemy forces have herded Darcsen prisoners (including children) into a warehouse and then set fire to it. The way she reacts with anger and horror makes it seem as though she'd never seen a Darcsen child before (which I find unbelievable), and this event is the trigger to get her to be less racist as she joins in helping the laborers look for survivors.

Valkyria Chronicles goes out of its way to include racism against Darcsen. It's even present as a character trait in recruitable squad members. So having a prominent character in the squad serve as a racist mouthpiece is necessary for what the game wants to accomplish. That said, I can see why the writing would want to eventually rehabilitate Rosie so we're not left with a major character being a racist the entire game through. This probably would have been okay, except that the game isn't really good about showing racism anywhere outside of Rosie's transformation.

Largo's only skeptical about Isara for about a chapter before he treats her like anyone else. Alicia seemed to be confused at first whether Isara was Darcsen at all and didn't change her treatment of her once she knew better (or offer backhanded compliments like "You're much nicer than I expected a Darcsen would be"). And the other engineers in the R&D workshop who aren't part of the squad treat Isara as just another person.

The game only brings up Isara's race (or the race of other Darcsens) when it wants to make it a point, and then forgets when it wants to focus on something else. For instance, Darcsen characters all have black hair, and so does Welkin's superior, Captain Eleanor Varrot. From the slander "dark-hair" we can infer that only Darcsen have dark hair, so is Varrot Darcsen? It turns out she's not, because Darcsen do not have family names, but the player can only learn this by reading supplemental codexes. However, Varrot is never accidentally discriminated against or slandered in a case of mistaken ethnicity, when there is no way to visually tell her apart from a Darcsen character.

And it is easily confirmed that aside from their dark hair, it's impossible to tell a Darcsen from the rest of the Caucasian appearing population. We know this because Princess Cordelia is secretly Darcsen and no one can tell because of the headdress that hides her hair. Both the majority population and the Darcsen one possess the same range of skin tones.

Isara is also clearly allowed to wander where she wants without being worried about her personal safety and she gets to go to all the squad events. Imagine if she couldn't go to the R&R on the beach because she was Darcsen and it would "look bad" to have her on royal property. I get the game probably wouldn't want Welkin constantly sticking up for her and making a substantial portion of the speaking cast racist, but the result is that the racism really feels like it comes from one character on our side and of course the really mean people on the other.

This is likely because the game is the result of Japanese developers who live in a highly homogeneous country where racism isn't something a significant portion of the population will ever experience. And considering that, it's surprising they made the attempt to the extent that it's codified in the game mechanics where some characters literally don't work as well because they're racist against the Darcsens in their squad. It's not game breaking bad due to how character traits don't always flair up, but I still left all the racists cooling their heels back at headquarters.

Probably one of the worst things in how the game handles racism is how Isara dies. As a writer I like the complete suddenness with which it happens. This is a game set during a war with firearms, so my gut reaction to Isara getting sniped by an enemy soldier when the squad thought they were safe was great. It would be realistic for the squad to have a casualty among the main characters, and in broad strokes I don't mind that it was Isara in particular who was killed.

However, what I do mind is how they handled the impact of her death and how it serves as a vehicle for Rosie's redemption. Despite being the team's token racist, I actually like Rosie, because she's complicated and she's also an unapologetically tough woman who we don't see a lot of in JRPGs. Both she and Isara deserve better than what they got.

After Chapter 10, Rosie begins to soften a bit towards Isara, but has trouble showing it because she's stubborn and not good at apologizing. So initially she refuses Isara's gift of a good luck charm and brushes it off as something she doesn't need from a "dark-hair." Meanwhile Isara works really hard on a plan to protect the squad on their next mission so it doesn't turn into a suicide run, and succeeds. After the mission, Rosie thanks Isara and reveals that she actually kept the good luck charm.

The two agree to become friends and when Rosie asks Isara what gift she would like in return, Isara wants to hear Rosie sing. So of course that's when the bullet catches Isara. When Rosie finally does sing for her, it's at Isara's grave.

Presumably because they had a chance to reconcile that means that Rosie's racism is gone, because Rosie now has a precious Darcsen friend who died and she needs to carry on for. But that reduces Isara to being the magical minority friend who makes a white person better for dying. And the thing is Rosie should still be a bit racist. Learning to be better, sure, but if it's really ingrained she should still slip up without meaning too, and in more ways than just dropping a slur.

The fact Rosie is suddenly not racist is really hammered home when her optional chapter is unlocked and she pushes for the squad to go out and stop imperials from rounding up Darcsens for slave labor. Not only does it suddenly boil her blood, but she's very kind to the Darcsen kid she meets up later and explains that she started hating Darcsens because of an attack on her village when she was a kid during the last war, and she blamed the presence of the local Darcsens for the attack happening in the first place. This pins the source of Rosie's racism to a particular event rather than a systemic societal problem and makes it easier for her to realize she was wrong.

After this point, Rosie's racism or former racism is never brought up again. And it's not for lack of other Darcsen characters for her to interact with. Zaka's part of the squad from Chapter 11 onward, but she has no conversations between him about growing or wanting to do more, even though meeting him and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp was the start of her awakening.

And heck, just before the penultimate battle Princess Cordelia appears publicly in front of Welkin's squad as a Darcsen for the very first time and nobody says a thing about her dark hair. I realize they have other things to worry about at the moment (like an enemy tank the size of an aircraft carrier), but the fact that the head of state is secretly part of a persecuted minority surprisingly goes unacknowledged by everyone who wasn't present at the moment she revealed it.

At points I wondered if the half-baked Darcsen racism could actually be lifted from the game entirely without hurting it (rendering its inclusion pointless), and I can think of one reason not to. According to generally accepted history, the Valkyrur came from the north and fought with the native Darcsen population. Supposedly the Valkyrur stopped the Darcsen menace and eventually disappeared, perhaps by interbreeding with the local population to such a degree that they could no longer be distinguished as a separate group.

However, over the course of the game, we learn that the Valkyrur were not actually benevolent and pretty much beat the snot out of the Darcsens to get a hold of their geographical resources. Being the winning side, they got to rewrite history and blamed all the atrocities they committed on the Darcsens.

That the legendary Valkyrur were actually a race of conquerors was a nice twist and dovetails with the fact that the first Valkyria revealed in the game is a powerful general on the other side.

While the game could have written the Valkyrur to be remembered as conquerors, I did enjoy the added complexity to the worldbuilding. I just wish that if the game writing was going to include racism that the writers had done a better job of it so it actually meant something.

RPG Talk: Valkyria Chronicles

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

Platform: PS3 (also on PS4, Switch, and Windows)
Release: 2008

Valkyria Chronicles won my second Reader's Pick poll for my Ko-Fi supporters, and it's a game I've been meaning to play for years.

Taking place in a pseudo-WWII setting, Valkyria Chronicles follows the story of Lieutenant Welkin Gunther and his squad's exploits during the Second Europan War as they defend their small nation of Gallia against the invading East Europan Imperial Alliance (hereafter called the Empire).

Though the bulk of the war is actually between the Empire and the Federation, the two superpowers on the Europan continent, Gallia is closer to being Switzerland, being politically neutral and opposed to forming alliances with other countries. Similar to Switzerland, Gallia also requires all citizens to receive military training as part of their education, so when Welkin is conscripted, it's not surprising that he's quickly given a command (being university educated) and thrown on the battlefield. He probably needed a refresher, but not the full boot camp.

Unsurprisingly, the Second Europan War is over resources, specifically the MacGuffin known as ragnite. It fuels everything from tanks to medicine. The Empire wants more and invaded the Federation; and later, to get at even more ragnite, it invaded Gallia. This means that Valkyria Chronicles is centered around just one smaller front in a larger war. In fact, the game itself is presented as a book by the narrator Irene Koller called On the Gallian Front. We really don't know much about what's happening in the larger war, whether things are going well or poorly for either side. But we know how Gallia is faring, and for our characters, who are the ones with boots on the ground, that's all they care about.

Welkin is perhaps an unusual protagonist for a war story. He's introduced as an easy going nature lover and a bit of a doodler. Though he's the son of an important general from the First Europan War, he's not interested in following in his father's footsteps. As a recent university graduate, he wants to become a teacher. The only reason he ends up in armed conflict, even after the Empire drives out the people of his hometown, is because he's conscripted.

It takes a lot for Welkin to get upset. In fact, the only scene in the game where he really gets angry is when he confronts Faldio, his best friend and fellow officer, over whether Faldio intentionally shot Alicia, Welkin's sergeant. Even the death of his sister, Isara, doesn't get as much of a reaction out of him (though narratively I think that's because Isara's death was to focus on Rosie's transformation, which I'll get to in a separate post because addressing the game's handling of the Darcsen is going to take up too much space here).

By making someone like Welkin the protagonist, Valkyria Chronicles is able to insert more humanity into a game about modern warfare. Even though yes, our hero and his squad are killing a lot of people as part of their operations, Welkin never loses sight of what needs to come after; the peace and the rebuilding. He's not out to get anybody.

One of the best scenes that captures a glimpse of humanity in the middle of a warzone is when Welkin and Alicia are separated from their squad and take shelter in an abandoned cabin while evading enemies. A mortally wounded imperial soldier stumbles into their cabin, and instead of finishing him off, they choose to comfort the dying man. When he passes away, they bury him.

That's when they're found by General Gregor and his men, who are looking for their missing soldier. On seeing Welkin and Alicia's treatment of their fallen comrade, Gregor is appreciative of the kindness they gave him and leaves them be rather than taking them prisoner.

And the thing is, prior to this Gregor is presented as the most severe personality out of the three enemy generals. After this, the next time we see him, he's presiding over a concentration camp that is close to working the enslaved Darcsen laborers to death. He dies when we free that camp, but the fact he acknowledged a human kindness with a mercy of his own made him a more complex character that he otherwise looks and I was actually disappointed when he died. His capacity for both empathy and racism made him a surprisingly realistic character and I would have liked the game to run with him longer.

In general though, the imperial generals are fairly interesting characters. I wish I could say the same for Maximilian though. He's one of the princes of the empire, but because his mother is of lower birth he's not the heir, which probably explains why he's off invading a small country like Gallia instead of hitting the Federation.

I wanted to like Maximilian, because the guy wants better than he got (due to his low birth), and he's not afraid of doing his own dirty work. Welkin first faces him just before the halfway point in the game and Maximilian is on the front lines in his own tank. (Granted, it's a super tank, but he's definitely not a pampered snot afraid to risk his own neck.)

But the game squashed my only other reason for liking him, and that has to do with Selvaria. Selvaria is the first powered-up Valkyria to appear in the game. She has the power to wipe out multiple enemy squads single-handedly and not even artillery shells can harm her. Her story is unfortunately common for villainous powered women, in which they use all their power to help a man who rescued them and showed them their worth earlier in their lives. But I thought I could tolerate it because Maximilian genuinely seemed to trust her.

Then, after Alicia awakens as a Valkyria and Selvaria loses, Maximilian suddenly decides he no longer has a use for her and has Selvaria sacrifice herself in a rear guard action. Granted, it was a really effective sacrifice, taking out almost the entire Gallian army, but why he would throw away any further use he could get out of her, especially once his enemies have a Valkyria of their own, doesn't make any strategic sense. While he neutered the Gallian military, in exchange, if things went wrong (and of course they did), he would no longer have Selvaria for backup.

Because Valkyria Chronicles follows Welkin throughout the war, it's perhaps not surprising that the story is less about him than the portion of his life he spends in it. The ending isn't Welkin freeing his hometown (that actually happens just after the halfway point). It's Welkin defeating Maximilian, who he does not have any personal grievance against aside from the fact he's the enemy commander.

The heart, the emotional highs in the build-up to the finale, are the principles on which Welkin decides they will win this war.

He first meets Alicia during a visit to his hometown, just before the invasion, and while they start off on the wrong foot, they quickly come together as a team, which is fortunate because when they're conscripted they're placed in the same squad. Though Alicia is not Welkin's only NCO, she's clearly the one he has the most affinity for.

Considering that she's his direct report, Welkin is generally pretty good about keeping any attraction buttoned down. While it's clear that they become close, given the number of scenes they have featuring just the two of them, none of their early to mid-game scenes are overly romantic, and it's possible to read Welkin as being simply too thick to realize that Alicia might actually like him. (This is a guy who compliments his sergeant's uniform because it reminds him of a rhinoceros beetle.) Neither of them flirt. They mostly just talk.

Though Faldio certainly seems to think Welkin loves Alicia, because he wrote as much in his notes, there's nothing to suggest more than a possible crush for most of the game, which I liked given that they're in the same unit and she's his direct report. It wasn't hard to see the potential, but they kept things professional.

Until they don't, but to be fair, it was a good moment, and if you're going to break decorum that was the time to do it, and this is where the emotional climax comes in.

Alicia, having awakened as a Valkyria, sees that the last ditch attempt to stop the land dreadnought from reaching the capital of Gallia has failed and realizes that there's still one thing left she can do. Like Selvaria did, she could sacrifice her life and essentially nuke the enemy into oblivion.

Alicia didn't appreciate the change in her life or the pressure of having become a Valkyria since it set her apart from the rest of the army and she realized other soldiers had begun worshiping her as their salvation. Blowing herself up would save the day and she wouldn't have to deal with the pain anymore.

Welkin is the one who talks her down and makes her realize that there are still people who look at her as one of their own, and he talks about after the war and wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. He gives her a future to look forward to and assures her that winning the war by using her power isn't the right thing to do. (And it doesn't hurt that he makes a temporary engagement ring for her using the flower she put in his uniform the other day.)

So when he and his squad face Maximilian they do so without Alicia turning into a Valkyria (thus preserving game mechanics) and without escalating things to the point that other powers in the war might consider finding Valkyrur of their own. Shortly thereafter, a ceasefire is called and the war ends between Gallia and the Empire.

Perhaps because the characters are a little older, I also appreciated the epilogue which runs over the fates of all the major characters after the war. Welkin and Alicia do return to their hometown where Welkin becomes a teacher like he wanted and Alicia now owns a bakery. Unusually, the epilogue is also far enough forward that the two of them now have a daughter who's old enough to "help" with the baking herself.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 7: Beniyuri

Beniyuri does not have her own route in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, but since I'm doing character arcs this time rather than game routes, I decided to devote one last week to talking about our protagonist. This also seems a good time to point out that this is the first otome I've played with a voiced protagonist, which surprisingly changes a lot of my impression of the character. Oddly, this likely explains an issue I had with the Code:Realize anime.

Most otome protagonists are unvoiced, so the player can self-insert. The protagonist tends to have a few character traits due to word choice in their unvoiced dialogue and/or habits mentioned in their first person narration; enough to know whether they're optimistic, bad at studying, or proud about their athletic skills. How a particular piece of dialogue or narrative is read can therefore be left largely up to the player.

This is where I'll digress into Code:Realize a bit. I read Cardia's dialogue as being pretty dynamic and lively after the other characters indicated that she was opening up, which made it hard to reconcile the Cardia in my head with the anime Cardia, who was voiced with a subdued personality for most of the series.

So now we have Beniyuri. Because she was voiced, it was very clear from the get-go how her lines should be read, since they were being performed. Unfortunately, that put a barrier between me and Beniyuri because I wanted to read her more favorably toward what I wanted in a protagonist than who she actually was.

It was interesting to see how much of a disconnect there was just through the voice even though the written words were the same.

This might have come down to casting choice, but I think it's also that hearing Beniyuri's distress verbally instead of just reading it made it more annoying to have yet another crying and helpless protagonist. It's not that she's crying and helpless all the time. I genuinely liked the finale where she realizes she has to kill Kagiha to stop Hikage and send everyone home, and I loved the scene where she dives into the Abyss to save Monshiro, but the scenes where she's feeling miserable and betrayed are long and extended and so emotionally charged it's draining just listening to her. (Heck there's an entire chapter of her feeling bad.)

That said, I had hopes for Beniyuri in the beginning. When she first sees Yamato and Karasuba she is the first one to summon a weapon to try and save them, and she does it based off her memory of what Monshiro did when he saved her and Hikage. In retrospect this was probably a narrative misdirection to avoid Hikage being too knowledgeable right at the start, but it was still great that she was the first to figure it out. Until suddenly she can't do it a second time and Yamato has to show her. I mean, sure, you get a nice picture of him helping her out, but it could have been the other way around too.

Initially, Beniyuri seems to be a generic not-to-competent otome game protagonist until you start getting to her flashbacks. Oddly, she was really spirited as a kid. She got upset, fought with her younger sister, and it's surprising to see the contrast between her as a child and her as a teenager. I'd like to say the change in personality is due to the accident, but it's more likely that the social standards for being a mouthy girl in elementary school are different from being a mouthy girl in high school since she's still pretty subdued in the alternate Happy Ending.

What saves her from being generic is her flaws; specifically her inability to let go. She looks happy on the outside, and tries to be upbeat and friendly with Yamato and Karasuba prior to the start of the game, but she's not, and she's hiding it both from her family and her friends.

In fact, one of the nice things about the expanded prologue that encompasses the Real World ending is that you get to see how Beniyuri is consciously trying to keep her distance from Karasuba. She's not blind to the fact he likes her, but she recognizes that she's not in a position to be in a relationship with him. All things said, she'd just like to keep their relationship at being friends.

And as the audience, we can see the disconnect between what she says about Karasuba and the kind of person he presently is, well before he calls her out on it. When the two of them meet Yamato for the first time again in years, she laughs and talks about how none of them have changed, when it's pretty obvious that Karasuba is no longer the soft-spoken little kid he used to be. That's just how she remembers him, and not reflective of his current personality, so it's easy to see why he ultimately blows up over that.

Beniyuri's hang-up over the course of the game is that she feels guilty over Kagiha's death, and this causes her to withdraw because she never wants to lose a friend again. This feeling of guilt is so strong that when Kagiha is taken hostage, her childhood friends refuse to tell her that the reason they're not rushing out to rescue him is because he's already dead. They know that if she knew, then all that guilt would come back again.

The first time I played through I actually didn't understand why she felt so guilty to the point it breaks her during the showdown with Hikage, because I missed that she was the one who suggested they look at the ruins in the first place. Instead I focused on the fact she's the one who suggests they brave the flooded path to escape the ruins. While it wasn't a good idea, they were in a bad situation with few alternatives, so I didn't like that she was beating herself up over making the best of a bad situation, and the choice to go back for a ribbon wasn't hers at all.

It was only on replaying the flashback that I realized Beniyuri is the first to suggest going to the manor, in which case I can understand her blaming everything that happened there on herself. I think that scene needed a little more pushback from other characters. Instead, everyone except for Kagiha agrees with her, making it so easy to forget that it was Beniyuri's idea at all. As a result, I thought she was being excessively hard on herself.

Unlike a lot of otome protagonists though, Beniyuri does grow, and it's not because a new boyfriend swept into her life and made it all better. The finale against Hikage, when she's the only one who can save all her friends, is still a standout moment. It's not merely the physical act of being the only one free enough to shoot, but the fact that by doing so, she's finally accepting that Kagiha is dead and will never return. She faces the truth that she was trying to suppress the entire time in the manor world.

Before passing on, completely this time, Kagiha lets her know that he doesn't regret giving his life for her and his last request is for her to live on. The Beniyuri we see in the best ending (and the Takuya and Aki endings) is finally at peace with the past and ready to let go.

I don't think Beniyuri will end up on any list I make for favorite otome protagonists, but she wouldn't be at the bottom either, because even if I have trouble relating to her, she's still her own character with her own personality rather than a bland self-insert.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 6: Monshiro

Continuing my examination of character arcs in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, I saved Monshiro for later because of his unique position as a "secret" route. He's not even featured by name in the opening credits. While everyone else (supposedly) arrives at roughly the same time, Monshiro is clearly an inhabitant of the manor world who has been around a while and knows how it works. In fact, he makes his entrance by shooting one of the monsters that's about to attack Beniyuri and Hikage before leaving without talking to them.

Since he wears a fox mask and has long white hair, Monshiro presents as otherworldly and, more importantly, as an outsider to their group. Of course, Monshiro is not actually an outsider at all, since he's Yamato's brother Kazuya.

I've already discussed the twist involving him and Hikage, but what I hadn't talked about was Monshiro's side of the story.

Unlike Kagiha, Monshiro didn't like working for Hikage because of the cruelty of his games and decided to withdraw. Over the years spent in the manor world he gradually began to forget everything about his past in the real world except for one thing: he had a ribbon he wanted to give back. Even though he no longer remembered Beniyuri, and apparently even lost his face because he was so far gone, he refused to pass on without giving the ribbon back.

Considering he risked his life to go back for the ribbon (and fell into a coma because of it) it's not surprising that his soul would have fixated on it while trapped in-between.

Monshiro's side of the story fills in a lot of gaps in the main plot. Nothing critical, but smaller things like how he came to know where Yamato was hiding (it turns out Yamato's sanctuary was Monshiro's up until monster-Yamato crashed it) as well as how he and Kagiha ended up staying as long as they did in the manor world without passing on or being turned into monsters.

He also is a nice contrast to Kagiha's desire to return to life. Monshiro actually believes he's dead, having no evidence to the contrary (which clears up his confusion about whether or not it's okay for him to go back in the main story). He's only waiting in purgatory to return the ribbon and has no clue that his body is still waiting for him or that he's physically in a coma.

Unlike Kagiha, Monshiro is very much in favor of following the proper order of things and would have departed already if not for the ribbon. He even confronts Kagiha late in the game over Kagiha's willingness to do whatever it takes, no matter how unsavory, in order to return to life; an attitude he finds irreconcilable with the Kagiha he once knew.

In fact, it's their confrontation that blows the cover off the mastermind, when the rest of the group finds Monshiro pointing his gun at Kagiha.

Monshiro gets his memory back at the same time Karasuba and Beniyuri do, when they look at the childhood photo of summer camp, but he chooses not to reveal himself even though he's aware that Hikage is masquerading as him, which is puzzling at first, until you realize that he's been largely alone for ten years. Revealing the truth would have broken the group's friendship dynamic, so even though Monshiro knew the game would eventually end, he didn't want to ruin it before its conclusion, since that would leave him alone again.

(Though as I'm writing this, I'm not sure that quite meshes, since he gives the ribbon back to Beniyuri the first night they actually talk, which means that he should be prepared to pass on. Or at least prepared to pass on after seeing his friends safely off.)

Monshiro behaves rather strangely, being overly cuddly with Beniyuri, though it's played off as not understanding personal boundaries more than intentional harassment (like Karasuba), and that not a bad take on it considering that he was likely six when he landed in a coma and has been starved for human contact for years. At one point he ends up sleeping in the same bed as Beniyuri and it's played completely chaste. Monshiro says he's cold and doesn't want to be alone.

Unlike the other living characters, Monshiro doesn't really have a character arc where he changes because of his time in the manor world. This partially because he didn't have to deal with years of regret following the accident where he nearly drowned, but also because he's the one character who tends to make good choices both in life and in-between.

While that's commendable in a cast where nearly everyone's keeping skeletons in the closet whether they know it or not, it also makes his personal story a little flat. It's well-executed, I felt for him at the appropriate times, but I think that's why his endings felt the weakest. Because he's never been wrong, he doesn't have a chance to grow.

His route is also unusual in that it doesn't follow the main storyline even though he's a living character. The branch to both his endings splits if Beniyuri chooses not to run to Kagiha's rescue at first opportunity. This allows Monshiro to attempt confronting Hikage alone, which works out poorly for him.

It's only lightly touched on elsewhere, but everyone is wearing accessories of some kind that absorb the black butterflies that emerge on killing a monster. What the game doesn't really bother with until this route is that the accessories have a limited capacity and when filled, the person succumbs and is pulled into the Abyss, which is basically the ultimate destination of those who've been turned into monsters. It's pretty much the bad place for a soul to go if they do not properly pass on.

Though Hikage pushes Monshiro to the brink, it's Kagiha who tips him over the edge, and it's not entirely clear whether Kagiha does it maliciously or not. Regardless of why Kagiha does it, a massive hole to the Abyss opens up in the floor of the manor's foyer, which does not go unnoticed by Beniyuri who decides she's going inside to save Monshiro no matter the cost. In what must be one of the most heartbreaking scenes for Kagiha, she gives him her hairclip with the final shard (the one everyone needs to go home) and tells him to use it to go back with the others before diving in. (She doesn't know Kagiha's dead at this point.)

Finding Monshiro is a surreal experience punctuated with flashbacks of his time in-between, and once she locates him in nothingness, Beniyuri has to nudge him into remembering her before they try to leave.

All of this is managed through her mother's ribbon, the one she used to bandage his leg as a child and the one he kept all his years in the manor world to return to her. It feels like a dropped plot thread, but at some point the ribbon had become a talisman to ward off harm. We see this in the main story when Beniyuri becomes corrupted after Kagiha takes the ribbon from her, but there's never any explanation for how the ribbon became able to do that.

Now, somehow, the ribbon is able to serve first as a divining rod to locate Monshiro, and then a wayfinder to point the way out. At the end, it's literally pulling them to safety and the breaking point for the Monshiro vs Kazuya endings is whether or not Beniyuri tries to bring Monshiro up with her even if it means the ribbon could break.

His route is pretty touching, but his endings are substantially less happy either way. In the Monshiro ending he sinks back down and Beniyuri is the only character who wakes up, meaning that Yamato and Karasuba never made it out even though she left her hairpin for them.

The Kazuya ending is a little better since Monshiro wakes up from his coma, but Yamato and Karasuba are still unconscious, and no matter how hopeful Beniyuri frames it, they're probably not coming back. It would have been nice if he had a happier Kazuya ending, given that he's one of the living characters, but I think that narratively it would have been rough since all the good Monshiro scenes are on his own route, since by necessity his identity has to be hidden most of the game.

He's a pretty charming character though, and doesn't come with any of the badass attitude you'd expect from his gunslinging introduction. Instead Monshiro is soft-spoken (in fact he usually sounds like he's having trouble staying awake) and not terribly good at interacting with people, though he often tries with entertaining results.

In the alternate Happy Ending where the original accident never happened, we get to see he's going to the same school as his brother and he's still quirky about getting too close to Beniyuri, though that ending points out how ridiculous it is (much like it does Kagiha's childhood marriage promise). In fact, the Happy Ending plays it off as Monshiro doing the innocent bit as an excuse to get physically close to her, only for Yamato and Karasuba to call him out on it.

It's nice getting a chance to see what he would have been like as a teenager without having been stuck in the manor world (especially since he's pretty worn down in the Best Ending) as he comes off as a relatively normal person, even with the lack of personal space shenanigans.