personal history with gaming on the whole and Visual Novels in particular
I've played quite a few games in my days. I've never been great at games tho. I had incidental interactions with them from time to time when I was young. One of my fonder childhood memories was being left at a kind of child daycare in a shopping center when I was young. They had a sega genesis that had sonic 2 with the knuckles addon that let you play sonic 2 with knuckles and I loved the shit out of that. Another such experience was playing super mario world in a costco while my parents shopped in the store. I had a few times like this. Later we got a nintendo 64 and while I did enjoy playing it, my parents never seemed to understand that the console itself didn't do much without the games. We had star fox, mario kart, eventually smash bros. But since I have 3 siblings we tended not to get any single player games. I never owned mario 64, ocarina of time, majora's mask, banjo kazooie, DK64, etc. Going back to these games now I hardly see them as worth playing. During college I got the chance to play them and mario 64 is ok but the camera frustrated me more than I felt was worth it. Zelda has this lock on system for combat that feels just bad to me. And don't get me started on the aim controls for the slingshot. Maybe in the time since they came out other games have spoiled these for me. They were quite well done for the time, no question, but I can't help but feel even if I did play them when I was young I would have had similar frustrations.
Something I always wanted to play when I was young was a proper jrpg. I never had a playstation, and that was the only system that had anything like that (as far as i knew, maybe there was one on n64, who knows.) There was a moment where I talked to a friend about final fantasy 7 at school and they wanted to try golden eye or something on n64 and had ff7 and a ps, so i suggested we swap consoles for a weekend or something. I got as far as the bossfight in the mako reactor before my dad came home and yelled at me for doing that and had to take the playstation back to that friend's house and swap back. That would be my only experience with jrpgs until highschool. My brother got an xbox 360 and I learned that the team behind all those final fantasy games had made a game called Lost Odyssey and it was going to be on xbox 360. I saved up my money and got it on release. I played it a lot. 100%ing the whole game. And I enjoyed it quite a bit. The story was so much better than any other game I had played, the combat system was engaging with the ring mechanic adding a bit of action skill to otherwise turn based combat. But something struck me as I played it. The thing I liked the best in the game were the memory fragments. They have almost no bearing on the plot at all, as they all take place at various points during the 1000 years the main protag had been alive, in places and with people we never hear about or go to. But the presentation, the music paired with the words I had to read and the visual imagery was something I had never experienced before. The writing of course was quite good, the stories interesting, sometimes hopeful, other times terribly sad, and always tinged with this melancholic detachment from a perspective that this story was all that was left from those people and places.
I felt like In all this "playing games" I had been doing, what I really wanted was some kind of "audio visual novel".
I later discovered visual novels.
I probably haven't played as many visual novels as I should. When I first discovered them I went through quite a few and often dropped them due to some annoyance or another. I played kannon, and liked that well enough, but upon trying fate/stay night, and higurashi I didn't make it very far before putting them down. I played to completion quite a few shorter ones which were so forgettable I probably wouldn't even remember having played them if I were to play them again. The one I liked best from this period is saya no uta. I doubt I need to say anything about that.
My time then with Visual novels was rather hit or miss and something I had begun to crave was a very long visual novel I could become deeply invested in. So I went to vndb and sorted by length. Apparently this isn't an option on the site anymore, which I find rather strange.
near the top of the list was Spirit of the eternity sword: eien no aselia. It looked pretty, and it was long. So I tracked it down and played it. I had a spring break between semesters at school and nothing else to do, so I was going to get myself immersed in this game. And I did.
The game is good. I like it /a lot/ I have used Aselia as my avatar for a while, it's one of the only games I have talked about multiple times on my youtube channel. So ya. I liked it. Part of that may be because when I played it, the fact that I was able to fully immerse myself in the world, and play through the game multiple times getting different routes. I dunno. One thing I like a lot, is that it's an isekai, but unlike almost literally every isekai the fact that the other world doesn't speak the same language actually factors into the plot at all happens. They even did voice acting with the cast speaking a constructed language for a good several hours of the game. By the time the character "learns the language" you will have heard enough of it, that you will be picking up various constructions and words. That's cool. Never seen it anywhere else.
Another thing I liked is that while it is a visual novel, for sure, about 20% of the game is a kind of strategy tactics game. It's like if fire emblem or super robot wars were visual novels with strategy gameplay rather than strategy games with visual novel gameplay. The missions can get a bit long and the actual combat mechanics are a bit simple, but it is fun and it makes for a more impactful story. Who lives and who dies is up to your battle tactics, and if you lose a minor heroine then they are gone, no side stories talking to them again, goodbye perfect ending.
anyway this isn't intended to be a review of Eien no aselia. It's on steam now, for like $15. Totally worth it.
anyway. After playing it I was lamenting the state of the VN landscape and talking about how much I enjoyed ena with someone and they mentioned Kamidori Alchemy meister. I'll be honest, I'm glad I played Eien no aselia first, because had I played kamidori first, I might not have been able to enjoy it as much. Kamidori's story is ok. I prefered the Eien no aselia story with its multiple universes and deep lore, by contrast Kamidori's story is more grounded with themes of environmentalism and sustainability and unfettered capitalism as a potential force for devastation. They are both good at what they are doing, I just prefer stories with more crazy nonsense and time travel parallel universes etc. But god damn the rest of it is on a whole other level. It's got this much more in depth dungeon crawling, a simple combat system, material gathering, base building, store simulator thing going on. You have to manage way more things on various different levels, and that's on top of the vn just being interesting. It was good. very good.
The only real complaints I have about it were that it could be quite grindy. But even then it has a system called the deadbeat tower you can use to gain levels and money fast if you are ok with the game permanently labeling you a deadbeat. well after kamidori VNs have been permanently ruined for me. I can't be satisfied by just having a nice story, there has to be more to it, a level of agency beyond a few text box choices. And it's pretty hard to find stuff like that.
I was going through some old videos and saw a video on kamidori I watched a long time ago, and on that video I had left a comment essentially saying how it had ruined VNs for me. Someone suggested I play amayui castle meister.
Guess what I just installed.
I've been playing it for a few days now. At this point I'd have to say it's "pretty good" if you've already played alchemy meister it's pretty much more of the same with regards to general game play loop. Main difference with regard to mechanic is there is no shop management, so no need to craft items to sell, no need to manage workers, or do shop beautification. To be honest it's a welcome enough change. You can still craft certain items and sell them to a shop you have access to most of the game if you need extra money. Additionally there is a focus on base building. You have a fort that you can customize with various installable structures. It's similar to the shop idea, but with more focus on the combat buff side of things, since there are no shop focused items. To get access to these structures you need to build them, just as in alchemy meister. It's a bit limiting, since there are build limits in a single normal difficulty playthrough. So certain kinds of buffs won't reach the full potential they are capable of. For example if you build a certain structure 4 times and arrange them in a square it will give an additional buff, but you can only build 3. This makes new game+ a bit better of course, but that leads into the next difference from alchemy meister. the routes. Alchemy meister has 3 heroine routes and a 4th bad end. Castle meister only has 1 heroine route with 2 minor variations and a bad end. Only one of the variations has any additional CGs. So replay is a bit more lacking than it was in alchemy meister. Of course I haven't even finished a single play through yet, so It's not like there isn't enough game, and there are several add ons which can only be accessed in new game plus so I do intend to play through multiple times.
The story is a bit basic, nothing groundbreaking. I don't know if it's going to get into more deep lore at some point, or have much more themes than it already has, but for now it seems like it cares about just "being a member of community" and the power of connections between people. Which is fine and all. But compared to Alchemy meister it doesn't lean into its theming as strongly. There were many subplots and missions related to environmental messaging and it explored the causes and different views about it from several different angles in the different paths. But castle meister only has the one heroine. There is some exploration in the ideas of family you find vs family you are born to and the ways family and community can fail a person, the responsibility of the individual to family and vise versa, but so far it's a bit weak and boils down to "isn't it good to help people who are in trouble" which i guess? like if it's easy to do so and you don't then ya you are just an asshole. But at the same time, i dunno, it's a weak premise to base a story around since essentially all rpg protagonists go out of their way often to the player's expense of time to help random people, so it's not really something that feels like it should be the focus of a story in such a way. Altho maybe the fact it's focusing so much on it is the spin that makes it unique, rather than just a basic trope, or the subtext it's the actual text.
still feels weak.