Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening: The Importance of Fluff

In both my recent review of Emi's route and my upcoming review of my fourth-favorite route, I mention at length how important the seemingly filler scenes are to Katawa Shoujo's success. I firmly believe that the reason the hard-hitting scenes in Katawa Shoujo are so effective is what I like to refer to as manipulation of enjoyment. This is a technique based around contrast. Contrast is a powerful tool in any writer's arsenal. On the sunlit field, between the blooming flowers and delightful little streams that whistled their little song whilst darting merrily on by, lay the rotting, limbless corpses of a hundred men, dragged out of their homes and murdered.

The above may not be very effective because of the short build-up, but it'll at least catch some people off-guard. It's all about the contrast. KS uses the same idea in a much more subtle and elegant fashion. It fills out large part of its routes with pointless filler. Because this is pointless, it feels nonthreatening, and the writers are skillful enough to each give it their own flavor of enjoyability. Emi's and Shizune's route give you amusing banter, Rin allows you to enjoy yourself listening to her delightfully weird dialogue, and Hanako and Lilly's routes fill you with inner peace.

Something that almost all of the fluff does brilliantly is have short sub-plots embedded within it. These don't often last more than a single scene, but they keep it feeling relevant. In Emi's route you go on a picnic that gets interrupted. Shizune's route sees you competing over a box you're delivering to Kenji, and Lilly's route has you having a nice dinner. There's no way this stuff is relevant to the overall plot, but it gives you an objective for that scene, which makes it feel like it's important in the moment. Not only is this brilliantly representative of how real life feels on a day-to-day basis, but it also keeps the fluff from becoming annoying.

However, you still know deep inside that the fluff isn't important. This is what allows it to be so relaxing. As human beings, we don't like important things that will have a lasting impact. We want our current moment to be good, but we don't want to then have to pay for it somehow. Katawa Shoujo provides an environment exactly like that, and that feeling of enjoyment without a price is what makes the tougher scenes all that much more effective.

In reality, what the emotional scenes represent is a removal from the fluff. Part of the reason that they can be so impactful is because this wonderful, relaxed fun is being taken away from you. Suddenly, you're transported out of this pleasant dreamlike haze into a world where you have to deal with relationship issues. What you want back is exactly what Hisao wants back: The stages when the relationship works properly and allows you both to be in this pleasant state.

This is not to say fluff is the only thing that allows the routes to work. The characters are sympathetic enough that you simply don't want them getting hurt, and it's extremely upsetting when they do. The writing of the emotional scenes tends to be extremely strong, too, and they can often stand by themselves. Before playing the game by myself I stumbled upon the rooftop scene where Misha explains whats up with her in Shizune's route, and I found that very moving even without the context. However, the manipulation of enjoyment is a very effective addition to these scenes, and helps make fantastic sections better. Whilst the writing in the game is very strong, I believe the very clever way enjoyment is manipulated pushes it above the sum of its parts.

Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening: Emi's Route - Short and Bubbly

So, this is my first time doing this kind of review. I'm nervous, and don't know how it will turn out.

I'm also currently massively annoyed because I just accidentally deleted the first 3450 or so words of this post, Blogger autosaved, and now it's gone forever and ever. Fuck you, Blogger. I'll try to recreate my points as best I can, but I'm just angry and upset that 3 and a half hours of work just vanished into the fucking ether. Now I have to write the damn review of Act 2 and 3 all over again.

Emi's route starts in Life Expectancy when you accept to race with her on the track. I mentioned several times in the review of Life Expectancy just how jarring this seems to me. Upon further thought, I ended up considering the possibility that this was a purposeful thematic choice, to reflect upon the player mechanically what Hisao must feel emotionally. However, upon even more reflection I realized that this was bollocks. In the late parts of the route, Hisao feels that him hanging out with Emi is almost a miracle, and marvels at how lucky he is. Considering that the choice that led him here is extremely inconspicuous and practically railroads you into this path, this doesn't really come across very well mechanically.

So, Hisao and Emi race, and Hisao collapses because of his heart condition. The Nurse (Whose title I feel I must capitalize) tells him and Emi off, and Emi begins hanging out with Hisao as a sort of apology. She eventually ropes him into becoming her running partner in the mornings. This hanging out is extremely pleasant to read about, and shows off TheHivemind's (this being the writer behind the route) uncanny ability for writing banter: it really does feel like this is how Emi and Hisao would interact. They eventually go to the festival together, in a particularly enjoyable version of the event. Hisao and Emi have a little battle of wills and rules-lawyering over whether Hisao gets to eat fried food, as his training regimen forbids it. It's funny, entertaining and endearing. This kind of stuff represents some of the best writing in the route, and is its greatest strength.

After the festival, Act 2 proper starts. Every girl has 3 separate acts from 2 to 4 that are exclusive to that route. Emi's Act 2 is named Form. Between Act 1 and Act 2, each path has a little animated cutscene that tries to capture the spirit of the route in some way or another, over which a unique track of music plays. I refer to both of these as that girl's scene, and will sometimes refer to it by the name of the song. As such, I consider both the video and the track playing in Emi's transition to be called "2*400 Metre relay", and call both of these "Emi's scene". Each girl also has a main musical theme, which I will call either by its name or "(that girl)'s theme".

I'll try to review these as best I can, and include links to them but I'm neither a music guy nor a film guy, so I can't provide much useful judgement beyond my uneducated feelings. So, Emi's theme is Standing Tall and her scene is 2*400 Metre Relay. First off, I love both these names. Standing Tall is a reference to the thematics behind the route, to Emi's shortness, and, obviously, to her standing with no legs, a great metaphor for this route's main emotional problem. 2*400 Metre Relay is obviously a reference to working together with Hisao to overcome said problems, and I think is just a really nice mental image.

I do have a problem with Standing Tall, the track, though; both musically and as Emi's theme. It's one of the few tracks in the game I'm not fond off. It's a boring, repetitious loop of a few notes that aren't that interesting to begin with. It's mellow, and relaxed. These are two words that do not fit Emi at all. It's an absolutely awful choice for her theme, and slows down scenes that would do better at conveying Emi's energy if backed by something like Hokabi or Parity.

Luckily 2*400 Metre Relay fairs considerably better. The music is phenomenal in encapsulating Emi's spirit. It carries the same energy and cheer that Emi does, and the ending reminds you of the genuinely great relationship developed throughout the route. The video is also great. It's a fantastic visual metaphor for the events that have transpired thus far in the story: Hisao stumbles, and Emi picks him up. The apple section at the end baffled me in my first draft, but I realize now it's a good representation for what Hisao is expecting out of the relationship from now on. The fact that Emi sits on Hisao's shoulders is also a good thing to note, being a nice metaphor for what Hisao wants Emi to do through the later part of the route.

Now, I'll just list the secondary characters important in the route. I'll talk about how effective or not they are through the review.

-Meiko Ibarazaki
-The Nurse
-Rin Tezuka
-Akio Mutou
-Yuuko Shirakawa

And so, to the review of Emi's route proper. I'd be excited if I hadn't done this before. Don't look at me like that, Blogger, you know it's your fault. I'm still upset at you.

Act 2, Form is mostly there to start the romantic relationship. It's when the two participants fall in love, and they're officially together by the end of the act.

Form starts off with Hisao heading to his first morning run as Emi's official running partner. At the track, they banter for a little bit, and Hisao starts inwardly expressing physical attraction toward Emi. This happens much more quickly in this route than any other. There's nothing wrong with it per say, but it just comes across rather strangely if you're used to the slower development of other routes. It certainly makes sense: Emi's route is by far the most sexually charged one.

They banter a little, run, and Emi takes Hisao to The Nurse, where they'll subsequently go after every run for a health check-up: Hisao for his heart and Emi for her legs. These checkups are where you get to see The Nurse and Emi interact. These interactions are pretty entertaining stuff, and I find them to be some of the more endearing moments in the route. They also serve an important role: You become a little more attached to Emi, but also learn that The Nurse is a pretty cool and trustworthy guy, which becomes important later in the plot.

A little bit of plotless filler (more on this concept later) happens, during which Emi extracts a promise from Hisao to attend her track meet. The next day, Hisao heads for another morning run with Emi. However, this time he has more trouble, and exclaims mid-run that he can't do it. Emi becomes angry, and yells at him to continue. She later explains that she hates seeing people giving up. This seems like a set up for something, or at least a subtle hint at an aspect of her personality that becomes important later. It never comes up again in any important form, and is a pretty bizarre, pointless, yet very effective moment of character development.

Through both of the runs, Hisao observes Emi's face when running. Each time, he looks closely at one particular feature. These sections are actually surprisingly full of extremely subtle foreshadowing and really clever use of metaphor. I didn't catch it until this 4th read-through, and is a very impressive little thing that first-time readers won't notice.

The next important event is Hisao going to Emi's track meet. This serves as an introduction to Meiko Ibarazaki, Emi's mother. It's a rather bizarre-feeling scene: The description Hisao gives of Meiko makes it seem like he's attracted to her, and seems like set-up for an out-of-place romantic triangle around Hisao, especially since Meiko might be interpreted to be flirting with Hisao, but this, once again, never comes up. He also chats with Rin, and gains some insight into how she sees Emi: She's "at her Emiest" when she runs. This scene also begins a sub-plot involving Emi being injured: She stumbles on her prosthetic in one of the races, worrying both Rin and Hisao, but waves it off when they ask.

Great part of the rest of Form is the aforementioned filler. I think I might prefer calling it fluff, rather than filler. The reason for this is that I believe that this "filler" material is absolutely crucial to the success of KS. It's pleasant filler. You have a good time reading it. Everything that happens feels relevant, even if there's no possible way that it could be. This is the time you're spending with who is supposed to be the object of your affections. The reason the emotionally resonant sections later on are so emotionally resonant is because this stuff is taken away. The fluff is what you want back. It's the stuff that makes the relationship worth it to both Hisao and the player. It's only filler in the sense that it's not directly relevant to the overarching plot.

Which is why it's disappointing that this is almost all the fluff there is in the route. It's all concentrated in a block here, and after this, most content is plot-relevant. This lets you forget what you're fighting for, metaphorically speaking. By the end the story has spent so much time absorbed in the pain that the relationship causes that you forget why the relationship is worth it, and that makes a huge impact on the route, I feel. There's also just barely enough here. Other routes lead off with larger amounts of fluff, which allows you to become fond of the character. You do become fond of Emi, but not nearly as much as you should, especially considering Hisao expresses more affection for her than his partners in almost every other route.

Anyway, the fluff here is actually of high quality. Hisao forgets to take his medicine, Emi and The Nurse tell him off for it. Emi, Rin and Hisao have lunch together on the roof and have fun goofing around. The three go for a picnic that gets interrupted by a storm. It's fun and relaxing to read, and moves at a pace that's both slow enough to be pleasantly unhurried, and quick enough to maintain the energy that Emi transmits. The interactions with Rin here are actually extremely funny, and it's a shame we don't really get more of them in the route.

Once the semi-filler is done, Emi becomes ill, and Hisao comes to visit in a scene named Dropping By. They banter their way into a pillowfight, and the UST (unresolved sexual tension) reaches a peak. Emi falls asleep, with Hisao still in the bed (no shenanigans have happened yet, though). Hisao realizes his feelings for Emi, but the tender moment is interrupted by Emi starting to cry in her sleep. She mentions something about her father, and Hisao wakes her up from her nightmare.

Dropping By is kind of divided into a good and bad part. The way the conversation leads into the pillow fight and the banter between the two is actually some of the best stuff in the route: Supremely believable, lively and funny. Once Emi falls asleep, though, it becomes cliche-ridden. Hisao's quiet realization of love is carried by the positive writing from before, but is moving, if slightly cheesy. Emi's crying in her sleep seems straight out of a seen-it-a-million-times-before romantic movie, and comes across quite badly. It doesn't hit nearly as hard emotionally as it should, and just seems forced.

The next day, Hisao worries about the last night, but the issue just kind of fizzles out of his mind, something that he does frustratingly often throughout the route. In the scene The (Real) Beginning he eventually has lunch with Emi alone on the rooftop, due to Rin having caught Emi's cold and having a bad case of funny-reference-to-her-routeitis. Emi confesses, they kiss, and the Act ends.

It doesn't feel nearly as sudden as I make it sound. It does come out of the blue, but in a way that feels very much like such an experience with Emi would. It's slightly funny, to be honest, yet still very touching. The (Real) Beginning is to me one of the highlights of the route. It feels pretty much perfect in executing exactly what it needs to.

And, with The (Real) Beginning ends Form. Form is, in my opinion, a fantastic part of the route. It feels very well paced, very polished, and just seems to flow perfectly naturally. It's funny, it's moving where it needs to be, and it has very few scenes I'd remove or change.

A quick mention is that during Form, Iwanako's letter arrives. This is a constant through all routes: Hisao receives a letter from Iwanako, the girl that asked him out immediately before his heart attack in the prologue. The text of the letter itself is always the same, but it's a really interesting plot device, in that it's more about how Hisao's reaction changes between routes than anything else. It typically doesn't affect the overarching story, but is there to show how Hisao's relationships shape him as a person. During Form, Hisao just throws the letter away, telling us how he's moved on and doesn't need this, though it will make a comeback later.

Act 3, titled Perspective, begins a few minutes after the end of Form, something relatively rare for KS. Hisao daydreams in class about the events of The (Real) Beginning, but is brought out of his reverie by Mutou. Later, Mutou keeps him behind to have a conversation about his future - an event that's actually common through most of the routes. However, here it goes a bit further, with Mutou inviting Hisao to found a science club with him, which mostly involves Mutou giving Hisao books to read and then discuss.

This is a strange subplot. It's the only route in which Mutou plays a role larger than "the quirky teacher", but the subplot he's involved in doesn't really go anywhere. It's used as an excuse for Mutou to give Hisao advice later on, but an excuse isn't really necessary. The timing for the start of this subplot is also poor. If you play without taking a break at the act turn over, then this is a pretty irrelevant scene that pales in comparison to the huge event that just finished off Form. If you're starting your session at the start of Perspective, you're allowed to forget just how well The (Real) Beginning worked in favor of random Mutou nonsense. The subplot in general is disappointing because Mutou is a loveable character, and the only route that tries to develop him just kind of forgets about him halfway through. I can't help but wish we'd gotten to know him as well as someone like Yuuko.

In between the last three semi-filler scenes in the route, Hisao keeps running with Emi and finally tells The Nurse about her leg wound. The Nurse asks Hisao to convince Emi to come in for a check-up, as it turns she's been avoiding him. This feels like it's a long time coming. The "Emi stumbles a bit, Hisao and Rin worry" thing has been going on since the track meet at regular intervals, and has gotten old. It feels like it really should have been introduced slightly later: Only a stumble or two less would've made it feel less repetitious. That said, this culmination does feel real. The Nurse is visibly worried, but tries to keep his cool demeanor, and Hisao's inner dialogue feels like the exact same thing I'd be thinking in this situation. I especially love the scene when Hisao convinces Emi to visit The Nurse: It's funny, feels like real banter, and is actually surprisingly moving in its own way.

This results in a scene where Hisao is called to his room by a frantic Emi. Upon arriving, he finds her in a wheelchair. This is a scene that makes me feel like a horrible human being. The idea of an Emi with no legs should be very saddening, and everything about the scene seems to be written in such a way that it should work well, but I just don't feel as horrified or saddened as seems appropriate. I don't know if this is me being an emotionless monster or some failure of the writing I can't pinpoint, but the scene simply doesn't work on me quite as well as I feel it really should.

Through a bunch of small steps, Emi ends up sitting on top of Hisao, which results in the first H-scene of the act. It's not particularly good or bad. It ends up just being there. It does feel believable, but the art is just not very sexy, and it doesn't have any real meaning in the long run. Unlike other routes, the H-scenes in Emi's route are just kind of there to be there, rather than genuine moments of character evolution.

The next day, Emi and Hisao go on their morning run, but, being in a wheelchair, Emi can't really run, can she? So she ends up luring Hisao into the supplies shed, where shenanigans ensue. This is, of course, another H-scene. I find this one a lot better than the previous one, despite having just as little a overarching meaning. What this one does is something no other H-scene in the game does: It's genuinely funny. It's simply hilarious. It feels real, too, as this is the kind of stuff that teenagers experimenting with this stuff they don't fully understand go through. It's actually one of my favorite, if not my favorite H-scenes, since it doesn't feel as uncomfortable to read simply because of its focus on comedy rather than sexuality.

Smells like lemon to me.

Unfortunately, this is the last scene in the route not relating directly to the overarching plot. It's plot central from now on, and I described the problems with this at the end of my discussion of Form. If by the end of Form most further content was plot-relevant, every single scene from now on is important to the main plot. Bye-bye, sweet fluff, we barely knew ye.

The next scene has Emi tell Hisao that she needs to not talk to him for a while, during the exam period, so that she can concentrate on studying. This sets up an absence scene: Something KS is quite fond of doing. The girl will be away or not talking to Hisao for some reason, so you can remember how bleak life looks for him alone, returning to the tone of Act 1 for a brief while. It's an effective technique, and some of the most joyful moments come after absence scenes for this very reason.

This absence scene is called Detached, and is fairly well pulled-off. Though it feels a bit short and Hisao spends too much time thinking about Emi for the emotional void to really set in, that is not quite the point of this scene. Detached is much more focused on Hisao's exploration of his feelings about Emi. However, by this point we've heard his thoughts on this a few times, and he doesn't really provide anything new.

You see, throughout the route Hisao feels rejected by Emi, or at least not quite accepted. He always worries about how she doesn't seem to want his help. It comes up various times, and what's slightly disturbing initially becomes annoying by this point, especially since Hisao doesn't seem to have too much of a reason to feel this way until later in the route, by which point we're tired of hearing about it.

Around this point in the plot, Hisao seeks advice from various sources. He subtly extracts help from The Nurse, and Mutou gives him applicable advice through an unrelated conversation. He ends up half-accidentally asking Yuuko, and at one point even Misha and Shizune end up giving a bit of a tip. What's great here is how much this advice varies. The Nurse speaks from a position of knowing Emi, but obviously has her interests over Hisao's at mind, even if he does genuinely try to help. Yuuko is giving the best advice she can, but doesn't know Emi quite as well as she might need to. Mutou imparts a philosophy, which is a bit too non-specific to really help. All of these people give advice that doesn't quite mesh together, and leave Hisao more confused than he was before.

It just feels magnificently real: A situation everyone's been in in one form or another. This is something TheHivemind also does brilliantly. Whilst all the other routes feel a bit idealized, Emi's route feels by far the most grounded in reality.

In the end, he decides to confront Emi in her room and offer his help. This, and the aforementioned Mutou conversation, happen in a scene titled Phantom Pain, which I absolutely adore. Emi winds up angry at Hisao, and refuses his help, after very obviously trying to shake him off non-aggressively. What makes this scene is Emi's long speech of rejection, which combines with the music near-perfectly. I don't know if it was painstakingly engineered this way, or a complete coincidence, but the track playing, Moment of Decision seems to fit perfectly with my reading speed to carry me exactly through the emotional roller coaster. No matter how many times I read this scene, I seem to hit the crescendo precisely as Emi says the most hurtful things at you, and it never fails to give me the shivers. It really is a devastating scene, and creates an appropriate feeling of powerlessness and frustration.

It's notable that the first decision point that impacts your ending happens in this scene, during the conversation of Mutou. I'll discuss the decision point structure at the end of the review, after the synopsis, but just know this much: I review all routes picking the fastest way to the good ending. If there's a way to see an extra scene on your way to the good ending (as is the case in his route) by picking wrong, but then using a safety net, I avoid it. Everything I mention assumes you're picking the fastest choices toward the good ending.

The next morning, Emi pretends everything is normal, and even thanks Hisao, because their "little talk" helped her sleep better. Hisao is understandably confused and, mostly, upset. Nonetheless, they end up falling into acting normally around each other again, though Hisao keeps wondering how much of this is a front Emi is putting up. Still, this doesn't stop Emi from inviting Hisao to dinner at her house, catching him off guard.

He accepts, and the story skips to said trip. Meiko is re-introduced, and everything seems to be fine, until Meiko tells Hisao a little too much about Emi's father. This causes Emi to leave, upset. If Hisao chooses to stay with Meiko, she ends up revealing the truth about Emi: Emi sees herself as strong, and refuses to lean on anyone. It's more of a pride thing than an "afraid of loosing people" thing. But how did Emi loose her father? I guess Hisao doesn't get to know yet, because Emi barges into the room, furious, and kicks Hisao out of the house. When he decides to leave without much confrontation, she seems regretful, but he decides it's better to give her some time to cool down.

This scene suffers from Hisao not knowing information that is obvious and blinding to the reader. Emi's father is said to "not be around anymore". Emi lost her legs in a car accident, where she also lost something else important. Emi is said to have been extremely close to her father. To the reader, it's blindingly obvious where Emi's father is, and what else she lost during the accident. Logically, it makes sense that Hisao wouldn't make this connection: He perceives his world as real, and in the real world things don't always work out in such nicely-cut, symbolic, plot-convenient ways. Emotionally, it's incredibly frustrating. You just wish Hisao would fucking get it already, and we could talk about things in a non-roundabout way anymore. The whole scene suffers because Meiko is forced to talk around a twist that the player will have figured out a good two or three hours ago.

Hisao returns home, looks around for the letter from Iwanako, and realizes that the reason he ended up pushing her away was because of how absorbed in his pain he was at the time. He also sees that this is similar to how Emi is acting now, and realizes he should treat her as he was treated to bring him out of his apathy during Life Expectancy. This is actually one of my favorite Iwanako letters in the game: you can see how Hisao becomes more like Emi, thinking only about the now, and then Hisao gains understanding of Emi through his own past behavior.

This is how Perspective ends. Perspective is a strange act: It feels like it's moving a bit too fast, yet it has plenty of subplots that go nowhere. It feels like it's a bit too light in content, yet it goes over the same content a few too many times. It's not like the story is spread thin, but it also doesn't feel as elegant as pretty much any other route. That said, it's got more spikes of brilliance per than most acts in the game: that H-scene in the shed is absolutely hilarious, Phantom Pain is simply phenomenal, and Detached does a great job at doing what it sets out to do. 

This sets off Act 4, Motion. This is by far the shortest act in any route in the game, being only 5 scenes long. These scenes are of above-average length, but it still goes by surprisingly fast. I actually kind of like this: pretty much all of Motion is a climax in some way or another, and it's extremely well paced.

Hisao and Emi fall back into pretending nothing's wrong again, and Hisao keeps worrying about their relationship and what to do. This takes up the first scene, and is actually surprisingly effective. Even though this has happened more than once before, and felt stale, it now actually works really well, after how unexpected being thrown out of Emi's house was. Finally, Rin realizes what's going on and unceremoniously leaves them both alone, telling Hisao to sort it out in a scene under the name of Saving Throw.

This is another of those emotional high points like Phantom Pain, though it perhaps doesn't have quite as much gut-punch potential. Hisao explains to Emi that he'll be there to help her not because he thinks she needs help, but because he wants to. "I don't want to be a knight helping the damsel in distress, but sometimes even knights helped each other out, you know", he says, in one of my favorite lines in the game. It's a potent speech, and seeing Emi finally realize that there's no harm in this is extremely moving. It's actually kind of nice to have Hisao take the initiative in one of these scenes, too, since in every other route he always seems to be in a reactive role (ironically, considering the above quote). It's nice to see how the advice from Meiko, The Nurse, Yuuko and Mutou all come together into something, but with Hisao still filling in a large part of the puzzle by himself.

The confrontation in Saving Throw results in Emi inviting Hisao to her house again, though this time she promises to tell him everything. This happens in the next scene, Whispers of the Past. This is also a brilliant scene, though it is a lot less hard-hitting than either Phantom Pain or Saving Throw. It doesn't mean to be, though. It's a slow, emotional build up, and rather than a gut-punch it leaves you more profoundly sad. You won't spill tears, but you will end up feeling sad for a long time. It's the difference between pin-prick and a bruise: The pin-prick hurts a lot for a moment, but a bruise hurts a decent amount for a long time.

Whispers of the Past consists of the bus trip to Emi's house, where Emi is visibly nervous and, once again, promises to tell Hisao everything, with Hisao telling her to take it slow, and of their arrival at Emi's father's grave, where Emi tells her story starting from the small details, namely insignificant assumptions people make about her, and ending with how she ended up coping with her father's death and how she feels about Hisao, falling into tears by the end of it. It's a powerful monologue, and is one of the most bittersweet moments in the game. It also once again establishes TheHivemind's incredible ability to make dialogue believable: Emi's speech feels truly true.

The only issue with the scene is that this feels like it was supposed to be the revelation that Emi's father died in her crash. This was incredibly obvious, as I previously mentioned, and thus some emotional impact is lost. It does have a fantastic moment wherein it tells you "We're going to see my father" and switches to a graveyard. You can't call it subtle, but the fact no one actually says he's dead is surprisingly touching.

Despite this flaw, Whispers of the Past is really phenomenal. It's the emotional culmination of the route, and it shows.

The last two scenes are Emi and Hisao's post-reconcilliation H-scene and the following morning. The H-scene is once again unremarkable, but the last scene, Clean Teeth is actually really good. The dialogue returns to the dynamic established early in the route, which brings a much needed bit of cheer after the gloom of the past few scenes, and provides a happy, quiet ending to the story. It feels very Emi-like: It doesn't look back or forward, but just revels in the comfort of a good present, yet it feels healthier than before. It's quietly happy, and ends on the dialogue
"So, Hisao."
 "Hmm?"
"What do you want to do today?"

Which, somehow, feels just perfect.

As I said before, Motion is a strange act. It moves quick, is well paced, and has some fantastic emotional high-points, yet it's just too short to say too much about. I'd argue it's a stronger act than Form, though much of this is based on the character-building done in Form.


All in all, as I have said before, Emi's route is my least favorite in the game. This doesn't by any means mean it's bad, no, the exact opposite. Emi's route is a fantastic piece of writing. It might feel less polished than the other routes, but it's still really affecting. Heck, it's a romance story that I didn't hate, and as such should probably win every award in existence. The fact that I like it enough to read through 4 times is a real miracle. The fact that I like it the least can probably be attributed that Emi is the one of the characters whose personality I like the least, through no fault of the writer's. Even if KS consisted only of Emi's route, I'd recommend it heartily.

The route is particularly strong in the dialogue department. As I mentioned several times before, TheHivemind's writes banter between Emi and Hisao really, really well. This often makes up for the fact that, as far as storytelling goes, the route isn't that great. There's not enough story, it's not a very interesting one, and there's strange plot threads all over the place that go nowhere. However, this is easy to forget when you read Hisao and Emi's dialogue and it feels like it could be a transcript of real conversation. Real conversation that's way more enjoyable and less creepy to read than any real conversation would actually be.

An issue with the route is its thematics. It just doesn't seem to really have a message: The theme is about helping people who don't need it, but this isn't really what the story is about. It just seems very thinly spread thematically, and goes for a story that just avoids being cliche by a hair. In comparison to the other routes, which have some really strong themes it feels a bit empty.


This is one of the routes that I actually like the side characters in the most, right up there with Lilly's. I complained about how Meiko and Mutou get underused, but The Nurse and Rin are actually put to some real good use. The Nurse is just a joy to be around: Despite being one of the most cartoonish characters in the game, he actually feels very much real. His relationship with Emi is subtly moving, and feels like a nice mixture of a father-daughter and brother-sister relationship. The subtle hints dropped throughout the route that he might be dating Meiko are a nice touch. He feels very human: He tries just a bit too hard to be cool, but still manages it OK. He has trouble caring about Hisao quite as much as he should, and refuses to admit this to himself, but has undying loyalty to Emi. This doesn't mean he doesn't worry about Hisao, but their relationship feels a lot less close than his relationship with Emi.

Rin is actually really subtly well used. After my first couple runs, I thought she was criminally underused, but this time I realized how big her role actually is. She puts large parts of the relationship in motion, and is shown to actually really care for Emi, in her insane, weird ways. It's surprisingly moving when you realize just how much she does, and how subtly she does it.

Yuuko is used very strangely. Her personality seems to morph away from what it is in Life Expectancy and the other routes. She has a small comedic sub-plot that, once again, goes nowhere, but mainly is there to provide advice for Hisao. She's just as non-confidently wise as always, but she now seems to be paranoid and over-imaginative rather than how she's usually comically shy and nervous. It's effective and funny, but feels weird when you're used to her personality in other routes.

The last thing to talk about is the choice structure within the route. The way it works is you get two decision points that you have to pick correctly - one at Mutou's room in Phantom Pain, where you have to choose to agree to talk to him so he can give you advice, and one at your first trip to Emi's house, where you must choose to not follow Emi and instead talk with Meiko. The Mutou choice doesn't seem like it would ultimately be that important in the long run, but it's justified if you make the right choice. The choice at Emi's house is a bit more dickish, in that it's clear this is a big choice, but it's hard to figure out which way is the right way. To its credit, Mutou's advice from before helps, and this is also what Hisao says after you choose said way, so if you choose right you're thinking as Hisao would think, which is more than most decision points in the game. If you fail either of these, you're sent to a "safety net" scene where you're confronted by Misha and a binary choice sends you very obviously to the good or the bad ending.

I like the first two choices, in that they make a lot of sense in-universe. I'm not quite sure about the Misha safety net, however, as it just seems to take out the impact from failing the other two. On the one hand, it's nice to not have hours of your time wasted if you chose wrong and wanted the good end. On the other, it's so obviously a safety net it kind of ruins your immersion, and there's next to no way you'd choose wrong on this one.

There's also a couple meaningless choices in there, as there are in pretty much any route. This is good: They add a bit of interactivity to help you connect to Hisao, and they're good at seeming relevant without being relevant in any way. Overall, I like the way reaching the two endings works in this route.


Ultimately, Emi's route is just like the character - short and bubbly. It moves fast, and doesn't get boring. Some better storytelling would make for a better route, but what we have is very good anyway, very largely thanks to the ludicrously high quality dialogue. My favorite scene would have to be Phantom Pain, closely followed by Whispers of the Past, both being very emotionally powerful scenes.



Next route, I travel all the way to Infinity.

Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening. Synopsis and Character Roster

KS is a visual novel (learn about those in an upcoming post!) where you play the role of Hisao Nakai, a high-school kid. The twist is, you have heart arrythmia, and, after collapsing, are sent to a special school for the disabled.

Where you proceed to have romantic adventures.

This sounds twisted and horrible, and that is the precise reason that I chose to play this originally, expecting to quickly put it down in disgust. I wanted to play something I would be uncomfortable playing. KS turned out to be really tastefully done, and, is not, as the premise would lead you to believe, disability-fetish porn.

You'll just have to believe me on that.

So you, as Hisao, end up in Yamaku Academy, a school for the disabled. There, you proceed to adapt, in about 3-4 hours of story labelled as act 1, to your new environment. You meet a variety of characters, among them five very speshul girls, who you may end up going through a romantic plot through in acts 2-4. Every girl has a unique last three acts, dedicated to your developing romance.

The girls are as follows:

Shizune, the student council president.

Extremely fierce and competitive, this deaf-mute girl is constantly in verbal battle with you, going through a variety of battles of wits, both in act 1 and throughout her route. You are (initially) only able to communicate with her thanks to Misha, a bubbly pink-haired girl who serves as her interpreter, as well as being Shizune's best and only friend. This often creates confusion. Misha is not a romance option, which is something many do not realize, and attempt to romance her. This route deals with problems in communication, and is all about giving as much as you take out of a relationship. I recommend this route as the first you play, unless you choose Lilly's.

Rin, the artist and cloudcuckoolander.

Perhaps the strangest and most unique of the girls, Rin is a passionate painter without arms. However, what defines her most is her extremely strange personality, going on weird tangents and generally not making any sense. She's kind of paired with Emi, though not nearly as much as Lily with Hanako or Shizune with Misha. Her route is all about understanding and acceptance in a relationship, and is actually the one that develops Hisao's character the most, which might make it a good idea to do it first, though I would not recommend it, for reasons I'll explain later. Rin's route is also by far the longest, largely due to the dedication to Hisao's character development.

 Emi, the star athlete.

Emi is a cheerful and extremely energetic girl, if slightly childish. She's also the best member of the track team, and is an amputee of both legs. If you recognize the parallel with Rin, you get no points. Rin actually shows up more in Emi's route than viceversa, but she's still a minor presence when compared with Misha in Shizune's route or Lilly and Hanako in each others routes. Emi's route is mostly about running, both literally and metaphorically, and focuses on learning to trust your partner and letting them help you. It's by far the shortest route, Act 4 being practically non-existent. It's also got the lightest tone out of all the routes, and is more sexually charged, but, given Emi's character, it works. I'd call this the worst route, but it is still fantastic.

Hanako, the extremely shy girl.

Hanako doesn't have a defining occupation like the other girls. She is instead extremely shy, to the point of it being a serious issue, and is almost always reading at the library. Her shyness is due to the huge burn scars covering over half her face. Lilly is the only person she has let close. Lilly is very present in her route, and both routes actually hit many of the same plot points,  though with significant changes in where emotion is directed and enough small changes to make them feel somewhat unique. The route deals with overcoming your fears, and being supportive of your partner, though it takes a different bend than you'd imagine. It's by far the most constantly emotionally charged route, and has some of the most affecting endings in the game.

 Lilly, the motherly, easy-going class rep.

In case you hadn't realized, Lilly is Hanako's best friend. She takes care of Hanako, and is the one person who she's let close. She's also the class rep for class 3-3, a class for the seeing-impaired. As one would expect at this point, Lilly is blind. She's by far the calmest of the girls (unless you count whatever Rin does as being calm), and this translates to her route's feel, being slow and chill. This route is primarily centered around drinking tea, but in its spare time deals with the issues and benefits of attachment. Even more than Lilly is in Hanako's, Hanako is an absolutely huge presence in this route, comparable in on-screen time to Misha's presence in Shizune's route, though maybe not quite as plot-central.This is my own favorite route, as well as the first I played, and I recommend either leaving it for last or going for it first.

An important thing to note is how the disabilities come into the descriptions, in that they're rather secondary.  I tried writing the descriptions as close as possible to a stream-of-consciousness. It's indicative that none of the girl's disabilities showed up first. Sometimes, it's hard to untie the disabilty from the route by its very nature (in Shizune's route Hisao constantly has to overcome the communication barrier, and in Lilly's her blindness is constantly implied in the description of her actions outside familiar areas), but disability is never the focus of a route. KS isn't a story about disabled people, it's a story about people who are disabled. It's a subtle distinction, but it's got an enormous impact.

Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening: Act 1

An important part of what makes Katawa Shoujo so successful is its first act, called "Life Expectancy". This is, by far, the part of the game that you can influence the most, and is considered by some fans to be the best KS has to offer. I'm inclined to disagree, but it's hard to deny just how good Life Expectancy really is.

The first section is extremely linear. Hisao's standing in the forest, waiting for the sender of a mysterious love note he's received. This turns out to be Iwanako, the girl he's had a crush on for a long time, who asks him out on a date. Hisao's heart starts beating fast, he's unable to utter any words when he should be able to just say yes.

This is because he's having a heart attack.

He lands in hospital, where we get a long soliloquy describing the bleakness of his life there. This might be one of the most affecting sections of the entire VN. The extremely cliche description of what it feels like to be a teenager in love is brilliantly twisted into something much darker and more unpleasant. Once Hisao is in hospital, one can feel the bitterness oozing from every word he speaks, angry and unable to do anything about his condition.

Hisao is diagnosed with arrhythmia, and the game fast-forwards an unspecified amount of time, to Hisao being somewhat recovered. His doctor recommends that Hisao attend Yamaku Academy, a school for the disabled where he can learn whilst having the proper medical attention always a short walk away. Hisao is not happy, but he grudgingly accepts, and the prologue ends, putting us into Act 1 proper.

Act 1 itself is a long thing, introducing us to the characters one by one at a very relaxed pace. Or, at the least, initially. Most characters get an appropriately long amount of time: Shizune and Misha are introduced almost immediately and spend a huge deal of time with Hisao. Lilly and Hanako follow shortly after and also get a decent amount of screentime, Lilly in particular. This is understandable, seeing that Hanako's main personality trait is her shyness. Rin and Emi are when things become a bit iffy. Rin is introduced last of all the characters, and, whilst you do get to spend a decent amount of time with her, it doesn't seem to be quite enough, especially considering the very unusual feel of Rin's character. This problem is amplified with Emi. Emi is introduced very shortly before Rin, but gets a short, insignificant scene before dashing off. You get one more scene with her, where you also have a short conversation with her. The next scene with Emi is the decision point that decides whether you end up going down her route or not.

It's really shocking just how little time Emi gets to develop. You just about get the idea that she's bubbly, energetic, and likes to run, and you're then asked whether you want to spend 4 or 5 hours of your life playing her route. This was, by far, my biggest complaint with Act 1 this time around, and I can't help but wonder how much my ranking of Emi's route as the worst is influenced by it.

Complaints about Emi aside, Act 1 is actually fantastically paced. You spend a long time with each character, but never too long in a row. You'll spend a couple scenes with Shizune, go hang out with Lilly, and then be baffled by Rin before Shizune shows up to yell at her and drag you off again. The way the tone and feel of the story can drastically change between scenes, whilst still feeling completely natural is a testament to the quality of writing in display. Scenes with Shizune feel fast-paced, competitive yet still playful. The time spent with Lilly is relaxing to the extreme, and time feels like it's slowed to a pleasant crawl. The little you do get to interact with Hanako keeps you on edge, desperately wishing Hisao doesn't say something dumb and scare her. Rin scenes, on the other hand, feel like you're wondering through a haze, with no idea of what's going on, and the precious few Emi scenes do manage to capture her energetic but easy-go-lucky spirit. The way the tones contrast allows you to really get a feel for what the full route feels like.

Even Hisao, in my opinion the worst character in the game, is fairly interesting at this point. He's absorbed by self-pity, but it's hard not to feel like he's got at least some right to, yet he contrasts interestingly with the other characters who are all dealing perfectly well with their disabilities.

So, I hope I've managed to convey that Act 1 does a magnificent job of introducing the characters. The other job that Life Expectancy has to accomplish is to let you choose between them. This is pulled off quite strangely. After playing through KS quite a few times, I've learned that there's a bit of layering going on with how you get locked into your route. Initially, your choices only really count towards Shizune or Lilly/Hanako's routes (The reason for the / will be explained in a moment). Looking online, you can basically get "points" for either route, and, if you get enough of one type of point, you end up on that route. If you don't get enough, you're presented with a choice that determines your ability to end up on Emi's route. If you take it, a seemingly innocuous choice a bit later on locks you in or out of Emi's route. If all other routes have failed, and a few very simple conditions have been met, you're presented with an opportunity to get on Rin's route.

It's a system that works very bizarrely. It makes sense within the narrative, but kind of negates the effort put into introducing the characters. If you end up close to Shizune's route, you'll still meet Emi and Rin, but will have to make all your progress toward Shizune null to go down their routes, if you even can by that point. The way it practically doesn't matter what you do, you can still end up on Rin's route just feels strange, and the choice pattern on Emi's route is, as I extensively bitched about before, way too fast.

What's even stranger is how Lilly and Hanako's routes work. To end up on them, you have to pursue both Lilly and Hanako through pretty much all of Act 1, and only at the end does an incredibly obvious choice end up allow you to choose between the two. Considering how different the two are, it just seems very strange. I understand it was difficult to make Hisao get close to Hanako any way but through Lilly, but to get to that point you also have to not mess up around Hanako, and at one point call her cute. Surely, just making Hanako have her own path through Act 1 would have felt more organic at that point.

There is also a failure state in the game, a route that ends in Act 1 if you fail to get on any girl's path. There are a couple failure states on "locked in" paths within Act 1, but to get to it you'll usually have to reject the obvious Rin choice near the end of the act. It's quite annoying to get if you're playing the game without a guide, since it can often mean a good 2-3 hours of lost progress, but I can see the need for it. The alternative was just forcing an "official" path on the player who failed to reach any path, and that opens up a whole new can of worms.

On the upside, that failure route is fucking hilarious.

Anyway, once you've chosen (or stumbled into) your route, you end up hanging out with the people within their friendship group more and more. The act ends with both of you going to the school festival, something built up throughout the entire act. There, you end up doing things that your partner drags you into. The festival might be my favorite plot device in the game. The way you change what you do and how it feels depending on who you're with is absolutely ingenious: You do essentially the same things, but with a slight twist. It's incredible character building, and becomes more and more impressive with each playthrough. It also manages to be some of the funniest writing in the game in pretty much every non-Lilly/Hanako route (though you do end up with different festivals in those two routes)

All in all, Act 1, for all its flaws, is still a joy to read. It's brilliantly written, and, Emi aside, introduces every character extremely well. The choices could be better, but the tone Life Expectancy manages to consistently hold, even through the dramatic shifts in feel brought about by the presence of certain characters makes it all worth it.

The Wolf Among Us Review - TellTale Strikes Again

Pre-Review Notes:
Wow, this has been sitting on my blog, unpublished, for ages. I wrote this quite a while back, and only realized it hadn't been published when I went to write something else. A little change to the review format from now on is that most of them will be almost image-free. I'll try to provide an image of the cover, and that'll be about it. This saddens me (I had fun writing the profoundly unfunny captions), but a series of circumstances makes it the smarter thing to do. Occasional reviews may still have images, when I find myself under circumstances that allow it, but these will be rare and far between (As though my reviews aren't that way already). Here goes the review, in the same state I thought I published it about two weeks ago.

So, after my beloved Walking Dead's first season, the folks at TellTale went on to make a game titled The Wolf Among Us, based off of the Fables comic books by Bill Willingham. The entire thing came out, I finally got both the time and the money to play it (which was high priority, considering this is the next game made by the folks what was, until a few months ago, my favorite game), and am now writing about it. I came into Wolf Among Us with extremely high expectations, seeing how much I loved Walking Dead, and was afraid my hopes would be dashed much the same way they were when I played Persona 3. Luckily, they were not.

Now, full disclosure before I begin the review proper: I have not read any of the Fables comics. I didn't even know of their existence prior to the game being announced, and the only thing I really knew before coming into the game was their very basic premise: characters from fairy tales and fables living in New York, usually magically disguised into human form. According to some forum-posters on the sites I frequent, the game, specifically the last episode, is problematic to the canon of the comics, which annoyed a fair amount of the comic's fans. I am taking none of this into account, and am reviewing Wolf Among Us as its own piece of media. If you're a Fables fan, I can't guarantee that this is not a complete mishandling of the license.

Also, Wolf Among Us is a TellTale game. This means that, for the first time, I'm going to invoke the caveat I wrote in for myself in my review system, all the way back in my very first review. TellTale games put story and presentation way above the gameplay, and the story and presentation of a TellTale game is more important than the gameplay towards ones enjoyment. As such, I'll value the presentation score as 75% of the final score. That said, let us begin.


Presentation:

The Wolf Among Us takes the same "living comic book" look that The Walking Dead did, but makes it look considerably better. It's simply sharper all around. Characters look more alive and are more expressive. Locales ooze more atmosphere and are just simply better-looking all round. Perhaps this is helped by the aesthetic, which, compared to The Walking Dead's relatively realistic one, is somewhat more exaggeratedly stylized. The game takes on a strongly defined, very sharp look, without the constant grass and smaller details which tended to cloud Walking Dead up. This is not to say the game isn't visually detailed, though. Taking place in New York, the game has lovingly crafted graffiti, signs, and even those paper notes with the flappy cut-up telephone numbers at the bottom you find strapped to lamp-posts. These all say something, sometimes subtly related to one of the characters. They're a really nice little detail, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes subtle world-building and I'm upset they often flash by so fast you don't get to look through all of them. It also uses a much more high-contrast color palette, sometimes even going for bright neon colors. The intro sequence at the start of each episode makes particularly strong use of this. In short, the game takes Walking Dead's already absolutely gorgeous style, makes it crisper, adds more personality, resulting in a mind-blowingly good looking game that'll run on pretty much anything. This is a great example of how much more important aesthetic design is than pure graphical horsepower.

The music helps add to the moody, almost noire, atmosphere. Where Walking Dead's soundtrack was for the most part forgettable, with only Clementine's theme really standing out, Wolf Among Us has a magnificent synth soundtrack which manages to bob and weave to fit the mood of next to every occasion perfectly. It manages to be unobtrusive enough that you won't be distracted from the story, whilst still keeping the atmosphere going in the quieter moments and making the fast ones that tiny bit more exciting. The only criticism I can really levy at it is that tracks are re-used a little too much for such a short game. I'm not particularly bothered by this in instances where it makes sense (the music at a bar, or the opening credits theme), but it made me a bit disappointed to hear the same "shit just got serious" track in the last episode that I heard next to the very start of the first.

Now, the real meat of the game is the story. It's what you're playing the game for. You play the role of Bigby Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, who has taken up the role of Sheriff of Fabletown, in New York City, your main purpose being to prevent the easily riled-up and violent Fables from killing each other. However, a brutal murder forces you out of this role and into a more investigative position. In the process of tracking down the killer, you become involved in a much bigger conspiracy.

In short, it's a detective story. And, if you've read my Persona 4 review, you'll know I'm fond of  like am a sucker for really fucking adore a good detective story. Especially if I get to be the detective.

Wolf Among Us does "detective story" really well. The plot twists and waves and turns, constantly spitting out surprises, and never feeling stale. The amount of thinking you have to do is disappointingly limited, however, with only a couple real tests of deductive reasoning, spoiled somewhat by the fact that you've got a one in four chance of picking the right answer even with your eyes literally closed, and the correct answers become really evident when you see them, but this is understandable seeing as how it's one of those detective stories that doesn't really give you all the cards to play with until you need them.

What's really clever is how it slowly transitions from detective story to social commentary and critique. The causes of the crimes you're investigating are very deeply seeded into Fabletown's social structure, and this is, as most fiction, a parallel of the real world. Wolf Among Us gets you to think about it by virtue of its great detective plot, and then uses your momentum to throw you into thinking about very serious real-world stuff. It's clever, and it only really becomes heavy handed in the last fifteen or so minutes before you're thrown into the epilogue. Otherwise, it's a much needed game that talks about more than its own universe.

The Walking Dead was great because of its very emotionally touching story, thanks greatly to a fantastic cast of characters (though, let's face it, Lee and especially Clementine can be attributed great part of the responsibility for this). Wolf Among Us doesn't attempt to be as touching, but it's still got its fair of emotional impact nonetheless. Unlike Walking Dead, it makes the tough moments very short, and this leads to a more sudden, more concentrated gut-punch. It's also less afraid to use shocking imagery: Despite how visceral and real Walking Dead felt, Wolf Among Us shoves the camera into a position from which it's uncomfortably comfortable to view all the violence, and limits the violence to, for the most part, very visceral things that one could easily see in real life: an axe in the back of someone's head very early on probably being the best example.

Speaking of violence, this is probably where Wolf Among Us suffers most. At least once an episode, Bigby will get into a fight with someone. The way this happens is usually somewhat contrived, and once the fight is over it typically doesn't move the plot in any respect: Bigby just punches something and is punched back until one of the contestants falls over, and the story then moves forward without much consequence. There are a couple situations where it's handled elegantly, but these are in the minority. A fight that happens in Episode 4 in particular felt very cathartic and was actually one of the events where I felt most connected to Bigby: We were both sick and tired of this guy's goddamn bullshit.

Which brings us to another issue I had. Unlike during that satisfying fight, most of the time I couldn't really connect to Bigby, not because he was a bad character or badly written, but simply because I didn't really know who Bigby was. I'd imagine he's an important character in the Fables universe, and quite well defined, but I just didn't know what kind of person Bigby is. Does he grumble about it, but obey orders? Is he a lone wolf (har har har because he's the Big Bad Wolf) who don't take no orders from nobody? Is he an actual asshole, or just a jerk with a heart of gold who will, when it comes down to it, do the more compassionate thing? How violent is he? I couldn't answer any of these questions, and thus had trouble properly roleplaying what I know is an established character. Even Walking Dead's Lee, an original character, had an obvious personality defined quite fast, and you could just slightly nudge him towards one type of personality or another. With Bigby, I honestly couldn't tell and this lead me to make decisions that didn't quite mesh with one another: I chose what I thought was better for each circumstance, and didn't really follow any rules, which made Bigby seem largely inconsistent, smooth talking someone and then threatening to beat the shit out of the next person.

Now, you could argue this is my own fault, but Walking Dead managed to make Lee's actions always seem consistent with each other, whilst Bigby can have apparent huge swings in personality from scene to scene. Bigby wasn't a huge impediment to my enjoyment, and what little of his personality does come across made him seem like he might be an interesting character in the comic books, but it's disappointing to see TellTale do with Wolf Among Us's main character less than with Walking Dead's, when they had more to work with.

The rest of the cast of characters is fantastic. There's some amazing voice talent, and the characters are lent even more personality by the great facial animation tech. The roster is varied, you meet all types of crazy people, all cleverly adapted fairy tale characters. Snow White in particular I was impressed with: everything about that character was fantastically done across the board. Great voice acting, great animation and great writing for a character going through a great character arc.

The episodic model is still the same as in Walking Dead. It still has the same flaws and benefits. If you play more than an episode in a row, the "next time on" and "previously on" sections at the ends and beginnings of episodes will frustrate you. I personally played an episode a day, stopping after the "next time on", and it actually made the sections take on the intended effect, that being the same as in a TV show, and I think it greatly improved my experience. I personally recommend taking a similar approach to get the most out of it, but an option to turn the artifacts of the episodic model off , or at least skip them, would be nice in future TellTale games, at least once the whole thing comes out.

Presentation Verdict:

 9/10

On a technical level, Wolf Among Us is better than Walking Dead, and tries its hand at a genre I'm considerably more fond of. Wolf Among Us does some very clever things with its story, but also makes a couple missteps that made my experience not quite as smooth as with The Walking Dead. Despite ultimately coming worse off, I feel it shows more ambition than Walking Dead, and I can see TellTale surpassing its first massively successful effort by giving something more similar to Wolf Among Us another bash and perfecting the execution.


Gameplay:

Well, this should be quick.

Most of the gameplay of The Wolf Among Us is intimately related to its story. The thing you'll be doing the most is choosing conversation options, usually from three spoken options and staying silent. You've got a strict timer to decide what you say, however, and if you don't choose anything you end up staying silent. However, the layout of the conversation options is slightly different. Rather than a list where you scroll up and down and press enter to choose, the options are now in four squares divided into two rows of two squares each. This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this allows for faster reading of the options, you no longer have to quickly scroll through the list to be able to properly read some of them. On the other, this removes the possibility of choosing options using the number keys, and forces you to use the left and right buttons to choose as well as up and down. This results in it taking a longer time to select what you want, and makes it a bit more fiddly. Several times I ended up staying silent or choosing something different from what I wanted because of this. That said, despite this the timer is still a brilliant addition, forcing you to make split-second decisions that you'll start to regret as soon as you start to hear the answer, and I still think is the best approximation to real-life conversation I've seen.

Now, something that I can't take into account in my final score, simply because I can't confirm it, but I've heard the decisions you make, much like The Walking Dead are less significant than they seem, and the story only diverges until certain points, at which point it converges and then diverges again. This didn't bother me with Walking Dead because the choices there gave emotional context. It didn't matter that characters ended up surviving or dying whether you tried to save them or not, the fact that you tried to save them makes a huge emotional difference to you. In a detective plot, however, that's another story. If you are a good detective, you should be able to dismantle the case more bloodlessly than if you're not. Nonetheless, I cannot confirm this, due to only having played through the game once and only planning to play through the game again when I've forgotten enough plot detail that this kind of thing won't bother me. If it holds as true as Walking Dead, I recommend taking a similar approach: I really regret having re-played Walking Dead within less than a year of my first playthrough.

The adventure aspect of the game, outside conversation, consists of walking around environments and interacting with items to interact with them. Interacting brings up a small menu where you can choose what to do with an item. You can usually either inspect an item, resulting in Bigby commenting on it, or touch it or pick it up. Very rarely you'll be able to use an item on another item. The puzzles have been toned way down, to the point where I don't think there was anything more complicated than use item A on item B (handily told to you through the interact menu). As much as I wasn't a fan of the puzzles in episode 1 of Walking Dead, I did miss the much more simplistic but still somewhat thought provoking puzzles of later episodes, and considering this was a detective story I felt they would fit in better here. That said, interaction is simple, and you can get better results if you pay attention to Bigby's comments when inspecting and then reflect that during conversations, which is a nice satisfying way of bringing about the whole detective angle.

The final aspect to the game is the action, and it's also the most boring. Just as I mentioned in presentation, fights are rarely emotionally resonant, and the fighting mechanics don't do much to improve it. It's a series of QTEs. Press a button. Click on a part of the screen. Mash a button until you win. Press another button. It doesn't do any of the clever things Walking Dead did to relate it to the puzzle gameplay, either, which makes the fighting even less inspiring. The fact that you are a being who is harder to kill the more famous you are, and you just happen to be quite possibly the most famous fictional character of all time doesn't do much to add to the tension, either. This doesn't feel like in Walking Dead, where a single zombie was terrifying. Bigby always has the advantage, and that reveals the QTEs for the bland, uninspiring thing that they are.

Gameplay Verdict:
5.5/10

Sadly, as much as I want to, I can't give anything much higher than this. The mechanics are functional: They don't add or subtract anything. They're purely there to allow you to experience the story, and they do that well, but it's not them that you'll be remembering. The only thing that puts the game above the average 5 mark is the timer in the conversation system.



Final Verdict:
(9*7.5 + 5.5*2.5)/10 = (67.5+13.75)/10 = 81.25*10 = 8.125

A brilliantly presented game that sadly falls down on its really, really forgettable gameplay. This kind of game is why I put the caveat in my review system that allows me to manipulate percentages. The gameplay really is uninspired, but it really is not the part of the game that is important to your enjoyment. Even if the gameplay mechanics were absolutely fantastically polished and innovative in every way, my enjoyment of Wolf Among Us would barely change. The fact that they're not was so unimportant to my enjoyment whilst playing the game that I didn't even realize they were mediocre until I sat down to write this review.

Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening: Mechanics

Katawa Shoujo is a Visual Novel (henceforth abreviated as VN). But what does that mean? The VN is an extremely popular genre in Japan, but is generally regarded with distrust here in the west. VNs are, as one would expect from the name, largely text and images. The amount of interactivity varies. It goes all the way from the fully 3D world to wander around in in Hotel Dusk: Room 215 to the investigating around a series of preset 2D screens and trials sections of Ace Attorney and the puzzle sections in the middle of otherwise barely interactive 999.

They all have one thing in common: the part you're really there for is the dialogue sections. KS is almost all the way non-interactive. 99% of KS is reading, and you very rarely get a choice: something like once every half-hour. Most of your time is spent sitting there, clicking or pressing spacebar, reading text, listening to music, and looking at pictures.

The choices you do get are rather significant, though. The game is divided in 4 acts. The first act is essentially a 2-hour prologue common to all routes. Depending on your choices, you'll end up with a different girl, at which point you're locked in for 3 acts, which vary in total length from Emi's 3-4 hours to Rin's whopping 7-8. The choices you make in this period affect what ending you get, usually out of good, bad, and very bad, though there are a couple routes with only 2 endings. The frequency of these choices varies drastically with route: one presents you with a lot of basically pointless choices until act 4, another presents you with a single choice through the entire thing.

This acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the whole packet is a lot tighter than a more open experience, with none of the weird dissonance that comes from players romancing several partners and going through a one-true-love arc for each, or other such player-based shenanigans. On the other, the less interactive nature of this approach may be discouraging to users, and may create a barrier between them and the main character.

KS also uses the sparse interaction it does have greatly. Since most of the time you're just clicking through text, it does weird little things to throw you off. For instance, if Hisao gets interrupted, the game might force-jump you midway through his speech. When Kenji, your weird dorm-mate, goes on and on about conspiracy theories, the text may make a dramatic pause at each full stop. It's simple, but effective, and used sparingly enough to be cool each time you see it.

Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening

I'm a huge fan of Katawa Shoujo. If not for the fact that I don't feel like it can be called a game it'd definitely be my favourite game of all time - above already gloriously good games like Persona 4 or The Walking Dead.

But I don't think it's a game, and thus, I feel it's unfair to put it up against those. Katawa's success comes largely from its blending of game and not-game. Only by playing on the conventions of game narrative does it reach the heights that it does.

This would require tonnes of words to explain - more than I feel comfortable putting in one post (said the guy with several thousand words on Persona 4). Which is why I'm nervously launching... Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening, a series of posts where I ramble on, heaping praise on something that, by all rights, I should be ashamed of admitting I ever read, yet alone loved this damn much.

This first post will serve as a bit of an intro, explaining the format and reasoning behind it.

The series will be updated irregularly, just as this blog has come to be. First, there'll be a series of posts explaining Katawa Shoujo: what it is, how it works, etc... These will be as spoiler-free as possible.

Then, the review section comes in, where I'll review the routes one by one, starting from my least favourite and ending with my favourite. These will be score-less reviews, as I don't feel able to review this weird a product. The reason for this order is that I'll be reviewing the whole route, including act 1, which is largely shared between routes. This way, I avoid the repetition grating on me and becoming too negative on the worse routes (which are all still absolutely phenomenal). Since KS is pretty much all plot, these will be full of spoilers.

The review section may be interspersed with random thoughts about aspects of the game: the music and graphics and their effect on the experience is a big one I want to talk about, and I'm sure more random things will pop up. These will depend on what I talk about as far as their spoiler status is involved , as sometimes l'll want to go in-depth about certain plot-points, as either examples or discussion of their effect.

Finally, there'll be a comparison and final thoughts sections, where I do what it says on the tin.

Also, no, I'm not doing that thing I teased at the end of the Persona 3 review. Turns out I don't have much to say about Metal Gear Solid.