This review contains spoilers
What do you do with a work like this? I found it genuinely boring for hours, with little emotional highlights here and there—I'm a huge mark for any character trapped in a pattern of self-denial, so La's perspective in particular hit me like a truck—that couldn't save the overwhelming just-okayness of it all.
And then the twist comes, and I feel like that tricked me into thinking the VN's way better than it is.
But at least the twist is better than I thought it was. My first impression was that it was a cheat, abandoning everything we knew about the characters—and it's not NOT a cheat, since multiple chapters of the game are from La's perspective and she conveniently leaves details out—but mostly the revelations recontextualize, rather than alter, the characters and their relationships. There's still a continuity between who they are and who it turns out they were.
(And hey, it's a story about memory erasure, I can forgive a slightly cheap twist about memory erasure.)
Interesting choice to lead La's backstory with Blackiris' half-joking worry that Analye is a pedophile, because it really colors how the Omega storyline ends up coming across. Stating the subtext out loud, but it works somehow.
And then the twist comes, and I feel like that tricked me into thinking the VN's way better than it is.
But at least the twist is better than I thought it was. My first impression was that it was a cheat, abandoning everything we knew about the characters—and it's not NOT a cheat, since multiple chapters of the game are from La's perspective and she conveniently leaves details out—but mostly the revelations recontextualize, rather than alter, the characters and their relationships. There's still a continuity between who they are and who it turns out they were.
(And hey, it's a story about memory erasure, I can forgive a slightly cheap twist about memory erasure.)
Interesting choice to lead La's backstory with Blackiris' half-joking worry that Analye is a pedophile, because it really colors how the Omega storyline ends up coming across. Stating the subtext out loud, but it works somehow.