No spoilers, just vague statements about the story.

As three split into a pair of two, until the remaining one left, and the two split into a pair of ones, a season of White Album would come forth over and over again covering all their scattered emotions, before melting away as spring arrived and being shown to the whole world in all its impurity. This will be less of an analysis piece and more of the remaining thoughts and feelings that have stayed put in my mind since the three months when I finally finished the absolute behemoth that is White Album 2, for I still can’t go even a day without listening to a song from it.

Music, I would like to think, is the great connector between all people, more so than any other form of art. The majority of those that listen to it aren’t necessarily qualified to accurately identify what makes say, this chord progression good or why this particular harmony sounds pleasant to our ears, but regardless of that, they are still able to feel it. White Album 2 understands the essence of music, that past theoretical composition and choice of instrumentation, the most important aspect of it all is the feelings that music imbues inside of us, and what it represents in every aspect of our lives. We listen to music because it turns into a part of us, something that when we hear a melody that sounds nice in our mind, we become happy; something that when we hear, perhaps maybe we are reminded of a time long past, a memory now casted in an immortal light.

Love is something I find nearly impossible to fully write about in all of its confusion between sadness and happiness, and the logical inconsistencies that such a thing brings with it. However, there is one thing that I believe is fact, love isn’t merely a romantical feeling. It could be the love of friendship between life-long friends who have witnessed each other change over the years, or a paternal and maternal love parents have for their child, as there is nothing more they see in the child then the one they now are forced to love second most. These are both very ideal situations, but I think they are good enough examples for what I am trying to get across. White Album 2 is not a conflict of two separate loves for the same person, it is a conflict of three mutual loves they share between all of them. That is the reason why I believe this story to be so emotionally effective, where love battles love in a fight for what they deem will give their greatest happiness.

Originally, I was planning on doing more of a review directly addressing White Album 2 itself, but I don’t think that’s something I am capable of, at least right now. So instead, I wanted to let out this small fraction of feelings that I still hold within me from this work for the world to see. Love and humanity is such a challenging thing to genuinely represent, and were I to be ashamed of it(for some odd reason), I would probably struggle to tell others that the story I found the most of this in is from a 2011 Visual Novel. Fortunately, I am not that person. This story is so, so special, and I hope that were someone to read this, one who hasn’t read it or someone who doesn’t even know what a visual novel is and probably just saw the incredibly high rating, that this capsule of feelings were to touch you, perhaps even getting you just the slightest bit interested in it.

In my view, White Album 2 is very inconsistent. Some of the CC routes have questionable writing (such as Haruki's actions in Mari's route) and I don't really care about parts of the execution of one of the last routes' endings as it goes overboard with the point it is trying to make, beating the reader over the head with it. In addition, I have problems with another one of the last routes, but this time because of the themes it tries to communicate. I also think a couple of the routes were boring in terms of execution. And yet I still loved almost all of them.

Despite all of the issues in parts of the story, even at its lowest points, WA2 perseveres with pure emotion. There was no major chunk of the story where I didn't feel something, where I didn't feel like all the characters in the story had their layers and layers of complexity, where every action they took let me see another side of them.

That's the thing about White Album 2 — the characters behave like real human beings in this, more than in the vast majority of media, and it's astonishing. People's views of each other are not necessarily on the mark, in fact, they almost never are. Even if you are close to a person, your view of them is filtered through your own perceptions and biases. It is difficult to understand exactly what a person has been through.

Characters don't act logically in White Album 2, because love, and by extension, the human condition, are not logical. Being in love is emotional. Humans are complicated. The characters are often downright infuriating or pathetic at times, just like we all are from time to time. In many other works this kind of writing would be considered BS, because it is extremely difficult to pull off, but Maruto Fumiaki succeeds at doing this. I've never truly been in love, but WA2 is an example of what I expect it to be like.

The main trio of Haruki, Setsuna and Kazusa are characters that you just keep trying to figure out more and more as the novel goes on, with Setsuna perhaps being the most interesting character in the story, but even the side-heroines in the Closing Chapter and supporting cast such as Takeya have a lot to offer to the overall picture, from how the side heroines represent various aspects of the trio and their dynamic, to how characters such as Takeya view them and influence them.

Side note, but one thing I appreciate about this is that every member of the main cast in this is an adult, while looking and acting like one. It also lacks the more disgusting tropes you often see appear in eroge. Didn't feel icky reading this at all, even though an all-ages version exists only on consoles.

Boiling all my feelings on this down to a short review is truly impossible. What I recommend is to go read it and see for yourself, and experience one of the greatest fictional narratives of your life.