There seems to be a perpetual struggle in the world of video game enthusiasts to define exactly what is and is not a game.

At the head of this nontroversy is Fullbright Studios' Gone Home, a first-person interactive story where you walk around a house sans its inhabitants, piecing together a number of different plot threads scattered around the place, some of which are more explicit than others — and some of which are handled better than others. I liked Gone Home, but I felt like its "main" story — the one that lets you "finish" the game when you reach its ultimately rather mundane conclusion, despite what it has built you up to expect — was by far its weakest aspect, with much more interesting things going on through the "unspoken" stories: the bottle of whiskey hidden on top of a bookcase; the condoms in a drawer; the documents lying around the place.

To some people, Gone Home isn't a game, much as similar games in the genre that has become semi-derisively known as "walking simulator" aren't considered games either. Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and others like them: all too many people are far too hung up on the rather dull question of whether or not they are actually a game rather than unpacking the dense, interesting narratives that each of these experiences feature.

For some reason, visual novels appear to largely escape this sort of discussion, despite being less interactive than a walking simulator. In your average visual novel, you click through reams of text for hours and hours and hours and occasionally make a choice. In a particular subset of the visual novel called the kinetic novel, you don't even make any choices: you just read and read and read, and then it's over with you not having actually done anything.

Even these almost entirely non-interactive affairs don't seem to get lambasted in the same way as Gone Home and its ilk, though, despite arguably being less of a "game" than something that has a 3D engine, WSAD movement controls and mouselook. In fact, even some of the most well-regarded games in the genre — The Fruit of Grisaia is the most prominent that springs to mind — only have maybe one or two meaningful choices to make in the whole game, with each acting as a fairly transparent means of setting a flag as to which character's route you're going to follow, and whether your get their Good or Bad ending.

I wonder why this is? Is it subject matter? No, I don't think so, because while, say, Gone Home has its narrow-minded detractors for being "progressive" — I think the statute of limitations is probably up on it by now and we can say its main story is actually about a young lesbian couple running away together — there are certainly plenty of well-regarded visual novels out there that deal sensitively with homosexuality, both male-male and female-female.

Is it about artistic intent and the overall "honesty" of the work? Perhaps. Titles such as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture often draw ire for being "pretentious" and, while I enjoyed all of the titles I've mentioned thus far, it's kind of hard to argue with that label. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture in particular feels very much like a case of "let's make this as arty and confusing as possible" before kind of running out of steam in its final moments and getting just a bit too silly and implausible. Dear Esther suffers from a similar problem, deliberately mixing a number of different narratives together — with some randomisation in the mix, too — to try and obfuscate what the whole damn thing is actually about for as long as possible. The Stanley Parable, meanwhile, completely runs with this and knows exactly what it is doing, laughing along with the player at every opportunity, too.

Contrast with a visual novel, such as the one I'm currently reading/playing: Supipara, by minori. Supipara is a kinetic novel: there are no choices whatsoever. Yet it's charming, compelling and addictive purely by virtue of its beautiful presentation, likeable and mysterious characters and intriguing premise that blends the mundanity of a slice-of-life tale with elements of the supernatural.

At no point does Supipara let any part of itself run away or overwhelm the rest of it. Its supernatural elements are incorporated honestly and without attempts to obfuscate or explain them away as quickly as possible, hoping we won't notice — Life is Strange, I'm looking at you. It just is what it is, and it invites you to judge it on that basis. There's no need to critically analyse it just to understand what the fuck happened in it — though this isn't to say there isn't value in applying some literary theory to unpack the various subtexts and themes in it — and thus it can be enjoyed on a number of different levels without Dear Esther's implicit suggestion that "you must be this smart to enjoy this ride".

I don't have an answer to the question "is [x] actually a game?" because your definition of "game" will doubtless be different from mine. Ultimately it doesn't really matter, anyway; the only thing you should be asking yourself when engaging with a piece of interactive entertainment — regardless of how interactive — is, quite simply, "is this a good use of my time?" If yes, great. If no, maybe put it down and try something else instead, while acknowledging the fact that some people might enjoy it more than you. There's really no need for the bitter arguments that have ensued since technology has allowed developers to get a bit more "artsy" with their creations.

Supipara is great, by the way. I'm going to do a full write-up on MoeGamer in the near future once I've read the whole thing, but for now I'll say it's one of the most beautifully presented visual novels I've ever seen, has a compelling, if low-key story, and some grade-A waifus. And what more, really, do you need to have a good time of an evening?

The post 2470: The Not-Games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I penned a lengthy article about The Fruit of Grisaia for my good buddy Matt Sainsbury over at Digitally Downloaded, and it was published today. Please go and read it (it's spoiler-free!); I was really pleased with how it came out.

In the piece, I noted that I believe the 18+ version of The Fruit of Grisaia to be the definitive version, and I stand by this statement, even with the all-ages version on Steam incorporating a few new scenes from the (also all-ages) Vita version to make up for the lack of rude bits. The story is mature and adult, after all, sex aside, so there's really no reason to read a version that is neutered in any way when a version more true to the writers' original vision exists.

This prompted an interesting discussion on Twitter after the fact, not directly related to Grisaia, but to sexual content in games and visual novels in general. We're still in a situation where a visual novel featuring explicit sexual activity — such as Grisaia, or numerous others like it — isn't able to be featured on high-profile storefronts like Steam on PC, the PlayStation Store on PS3, PS4 and Vita, and the Xbox Live Marketplace on Microsoft platforms. And I'm not talking about nukige (the visual novel equivalent of a "gonzo" porn movie, where the sexual content is pretty much the sole reason for its existence) — I'm talking about eroge, which are visual novels that incorporate sexual content as part of their narrative.

The Fruit of Grisaia features a number of scenes where the sexually explicit situations are integral to the overall narrative. I won't give specifics to protect those who intend to read it against spoilers, but suffice to say that in each and every case, the sex scenes serve a purpose, whether it's to reflect the deepening relationship between the protagonist and the heroines, to provide a tragic juxtaposition between pathos and eroticism, or simply to demonstrate another aspect of the characters' personalities. In Amane's route in particular, the sex scenes are very much front-loaded towards the start of her individual path, with the remainder exploring exactly why she is, in her own words, such a slut. And boy does she have some interesting and compelling reasons. But I digress.

The unfortunate thing with this topic is that there's a curious double-standard applied between Western and Eastern publishers in particular. Western publishers such as Rockstar and CD Projekt can get away with depicting explicit sex acts in their games such as Grand Theft Auto and The Witcher, but if a Japanese game dares to show a little skin, it makes the collected prudes of the world clutch at their pearl necklaces (not that kind of pearl necklace) and faint onto their chaise-longues. At best, we get "minor edits" to cover things up and make things a bit less explicitly sexual — Dungeon Travelers 2 on Vita, for example, had an image that depicted a monster girl apparently fellating a ghost changed so that she was just writhing around a bit instead — while at worst we end up with butchered "all-ages" releases cutting out entire scenes.

All-ages releases aren't always bad if they're done well, of course; one of my favourite visual novels, Aselia the Eternal, began life as an eroge but subsequently got expanded to such a degree in its all-ages console format (which was subsequently backported to PC, and this was the version that got localised) that the non-dirty version is now considered to be the definitive way to enjoy that particular tale. But there are cases such as The Fruit of Grisaia where I simply can't imagine them quite working in the same way without the erotic scenes.

The discussion on Twitter turned to localisation specialists Sekai Project, who Kickstarted the Grisaia trilogy and were originally intending to only bring us an all-ages release. After considerable feedback from fans, they eventually relented and agreed to publish a localised 18+ version of Grisaia via their Denpasoft imprint, even going so far as to allow Kickstarter pledges (like me!) to upgrade their donation and get digital copies of the 18+ versions as well as the physical, packaged and digital Steam releases of the all-ages versions.

In my experience so far, Sekai Project know their craft and they understand the art form that is the visual novel. They recognise that eroticism is an important part of many of these works, hence the existence of Denpasoft in the first place. But the concerning thing for some people is that the 18+ releases don't seem to get much attention, even from Sekai Project themselves. Denpasoft's website is a pretty bare-bones affair, and its Twitter account isn't particularly active, whereas Sekai Project is always tweeting about something or other, launching new Kickstarters and generally enthusing about their work — and with good reason.

Why, though, are the 18+ releases dirty little secrets rather than celebrated and promoted alongside the all-ages versions? I don't have a definitive answer for that, only theories, but I wonder how close to the mark I am.

In short, Sekai Project as a brand is keen to promote the Japanese visual novel as a valid art form and type of game to be celebrated by as many people as possible. Their keenness to get their work on Steam shows a keenness to get these titles in front of as many people as possible, since Steam is an enormous market to tap into. Unfortunately, Steam doesn't allow adult content — aside from the aforementioned exceptions for Western games — and so any originally 18+ visual novels that come to steam will have been necessarily neutered. Sometimes there are fan patches available to restore the cut content, though in situations like The Fruit of Grisaia, the all-ages and 18+ versions are completely different base games — the 18+ version is based on the PC original, the all-ages version on the Vita version — and cannot be easily patched.

Sekai Project, as a brand keen to get their stuff noticed, is probably aware of the way the games press has been in the last few years with regard to anything even remotely sexual. As such, their apparent unwillingness to promote the explicitly sexual versions of their games is probably less to do with them being "ashamed" of the content itself, and more an attempt to enjoy a quiet life without enraging the massed heavenly hosts of Anita Sarkeesian's 43rd Puritan Squadron (Polygon Division). Can you imagine what those narrow-minded, sex-negative fun vacuums would make of your average visual novel sex scene? It wouldn't be pretty. Fuck Anita Sarkeesian, and fuck what she has done to intellectual discourse about games as art. (I'm aware it's not entirely her fault, of course, but the members of the press who endlessly bleat on about feminism and the like are pretty much following her cultish teachings to the letter.)

I'm not saying that all visual novels have to have sex in them to be good, of course. But sex is an important part of art, which visual novels are, and sex is also an important part of relationships, which visual novels tend to depict with a strong degree of intimacy. Sex is a basic fact of life, of humanity, and the fact that there are so many roadblocks to exploring it effectively in video games and visual novels is kind of sad, really; thankfully, we're not (yet) in a situation where publishers like JAST, MangaGamer and Sekai Project are giving up on publishing erotic content in the West completely, but we're also sure as hell not (yet) in a situation where a mainstream press site would be able to publish something about a work of The Fruit of Grisaia's ilk without getting a massive hate-boner and then spunking vitriol all over the page, completely missing the point of the "controversial" content in the process; I vividly remember just mentioning Kana Little Sister in one piece on USgamer, and getting attacked by one particularly puritanical reader for "promoting a pedophilic incest simulator".

It's difficult to know how this situation can be improved — or even if it needs to be improved. Could there be scope for a Steam-esque platform that allows adult games to be released and promoted, rather than relying on Web stores that many people have understandable hesitancy trusting? I wonder. In the meantime, I'll keep banging my drum about the most interesting, compelling eroge — and, hell, nukige, since there's plenty of interesting stuff there, too — and hope that at least a few people will listen.

The post 2106: Sex and Games Make Sexy Games...? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Amane's route in The Fruit of Grisaia tonight, bringing my time with this absolutely incredible visual novel to a close, and frankly I'm a bit of an emotional wreck right now, but I will do my best to try and collect my thoughts and post something reasonably meaningful.

One thing I will say before I jump into spoiler territory after the "More" tag is that I'm really glad I saved Amane's route for last. Not just because she was immediately my favourite girl — and still is after playing through her route — but because her route acts as a rather wonderful way to wrap up the entire experience. Her good ending is particularly "conclusive", and as the last thing I saw in the whole work, it feels like I've had a great sense of closure — although, as always with this sort of thing, I'm going to miss these characters very much. At least I have two more games in the series to look forward to!

All right. Let's get spoilery.

I liked Amane the moment I "met" her. There were numerous reasons for this: she was the character I found most physically attractive, for one — I have a thing for long hair, big tits and womanly curves, although seeing that written down it doesn't sound like a particularly unusual thing to "have a thing" for — but also there was something about her personality that I immediately latched onto and liked very much.

I wasn't sure what it was immediately. I thought it might be her "big sister" act that she immediately starts laying on pretty thick with Yuuji as soon as they start to get to know one another. Or perhaps her aggressive sexuality and rather "handsy" nature. Or maybe it was the fact she just seemed like an overwhelmingly nice person, and among a cast of misfits she was by far the most "normal"-seeming out of the bunch.

I knew from my experiences with the other routes, however, that one's first impressions of these characters never ended up being entirely accurate. Amane is a nice person, of course, but her reasons for being the way she is don't come to light until later in her route after she and Yuuji have established their relationship. Prior to this, however, Yuuji has her pegged pretty quickly after he dramatically calls her bluff after she comes into his room demanding a kiss; "she puts up a consistently strong front," he says, "but when push comes to shove it seems Amane's a pretty timid woman."

Amane's timidness initially appears to manifest itself as neediness. She wants to be the perfect girlfriend to Yuuji, but she's also anxious about the secret life he leads. She doesn't want to pry into the details of it — and indeed keeps her promise that she won't bug him for details right up until the end of her story — but that doesn't stop her feeling uneasy.

"I'm kind of… anxious, you know…?" she explains to him. "In your case, it really does feel like you might vanish into thin air all of a sudden."

This concern is nothing new for the Grisaia heroines, with most of the other members of the cast having suffered some form of "loss" at one point or another, but something feels a little different about Amane's situation. Yuuji notices this after a short while dating her, though he writes it off with his own lack of self-esteem.

"Honestly, she's too convenient," he says. "The whole thing gives me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach at times. But then again, that's just the sort of person I am — the sweeter the deal, the more uneasy I become."

This continually weighs on his mind, though, and his thoughts turn to Amane's oddly servile nature when he has free, peaceful moments.

"There are some people out there who find joy in serving others, making them happy, and being necessary to them," he ponders. "I consider them masochists. There's no guarantee that such devotion will ever be rewarded. In fact, I think it's safe to say the opposite is more often true. Maintaining such fruitless devotion for its own sake doesn't make any sense. There's got to be some other motive underneath it all… or so I instinctively suspect."

Indeed, Amane  does indeed seem to have her own motivations for being continually kind to Yuuji, though it initially appears to be a simple lack of self-confidence in her own ability to keep him from straying.

"I may not get all the details," she comments to Yumiko after discussing a teen girl magazine article about the importance of blowjobs to maintaining spice in a relationship, "but the main lesson is clear enough, you know? Men get bored of pretty girls in three days flat, so you better suck 'em off before then! Am I right?" Yumiko, naturally, claims not to have any strong thoughts on the matter, but as we learn in the other routes, she does have something of an interest in all things sexual, though at this point chooses not to share her more secret thoughts.

Amane's worries grow; she starts to believe that the other pretty girls around her will eventually prove too much of a temptation for Yuuji, and becomes somewhat desperate.

"So what sets me apart from the other girls…?" she asks herself. "Something I have, but the others don't… my ginormous tits, I guess?"

And so it comes to pass that Yuuji emerges from the school principal's office only to find Amane kneeling in the corridor offering tit-fucks for 100 yen — a somewhat bastardised form of a joke Makina had made to Amane earlier in the day. Yuuji, displaying admirable self-control, is having none of this.

"I, Kazami Yuuji, am not the composed, cool and confident man you apparently think I am," he says to her. "To be perfectly honest, I was just moments ago worrying myself fairly seriously over my future with you, and what path I should pursue in life. In other words, I was earnestly pondering the possibility of forming a family with you. I've pulled you into my life for my own selfish satisfaction, so I feel obligated to give you something more than sadness and regret. I'm not sure what to do yet, but I've been thinking it over. When the time comes, I want you to look back and think 'I was right to choose this man.' I want you to be happy we were together. I'm reconsidering my very way of life in the hope I can make that happen… and then I get 'titty-fuck, 100 yen!' in the hallway. Can you perhaps imagine what I experienced upon reading this?"

Yuuji does eventually relent and acquiesce to Amane's increasingly demanding sexual appetite, but he still finds himself reflecting on the situation, pondering exactly why Amane is the way she is.

"Slut," he ponders, considering the description Amane habitually applies to herself. "Women are a bit too complex to fit neatly inside the frame of that simplistic concept. Sometimes they want to forget something painful. Sometimes they're simply lonely. And maybe sometimes, it's no one easily defined emotion; maybe it's all of the above and more, an overwhelming jumble of hopelessly tangled emotions. Under such circumstances, women throw themselves at men. Any man will do; sometimes, even someone they despise from the bottom of their heart. Sex is a moment of forgetfulness for them, a band-aid on a wound. Men refer to such women as 'sluts'. Amane confidently refers to herself as such on a regular basis. But however urgent her sexual demands, she's far from indiscriminate. Her target has always been restricted to me and me alone. Almost as if she's decided I'm the only band-aid that can cover up her particular wound."

Yuuji has hit the nail on the head, as he so frequently does, though it's an unfortunate coincidence that kicks off a chain of events that results in him discovering exactly what traumatic event in Amane's past led her to Mihama Academy: he overhears some girls referring to Amane as "cockroach", and later, he decides to ask her about it, as painful as it might be for her to remember the past — though he notes that since she hasn't asked about his secrets, she doesn't have to share them if she doesn't want to, either.

Amane, however, having grown to trust Yuuji implicitly for reasons that become very apparent in her story, explains the situation without hesitation: six years ago, she was on a bus that crashed into a ravine along with a number of her friends and acquaintances from the school basketball club. One of her fellow survivors was a young girl named Kazami Kazuki: Yuuji's sister, whose apparent death following the accident Amane describes was the catalyst for the breakup of his family, which eventually resulted in his father being killed and his mother committing suicide. (We learn in the other routes that Yuuji believes he is the one that caused his father's death, but in fact this was not the case; the exact circumstances are never completely revealed, so I assume this is something that is tackled in the second and third games.)

Amane shows Yuuji her diary, an exhaustive account she kept of the survivors' struggle to keep things together and escape from the situation in which they found themselves. Amane was ultimately the only survivor of the incident, with the others having turned into what she and Kazuki referred to as "ghouls"; driven mad by a combination of malnutrition, illness from eating infected meat — which turned out to be the flesh of one of their fallen comrades — and sheer despair at the terrible situation from which they were unable to escape. "When the world grows warped around you," Amane wrote, "those who can't bend simply break."

Kazuki apparently sacrificed herself to allow Amane to escape, though we never get completely conclusive proof of her death, and indeed by the end of Amane's route there are still significant questions as to whether or not she's still alive. Since Amane is the only one who made it back to society, though, she was the one regarded as the "cockroach", after the theory that if you put a bunch of cockroaches in a sealed jar together with no food, they'll eventually turn on each other and the strongest one will survive.

"I'm the cockroach that got out of that jar alive," Amane muses after Yuuji finished reading her story. "The most durable, most disgusting cockroach of all."

Finally, we start to get to the root of Amane's problem; crippling guilt at being the "only" survivor, Kazuki's uncertain status aside. After suffering hounding from the media, the public and her former friends, she became unable to function normally in society.

"Until I had suffered more than those who had died," she explains, "no-one would approve of my continued existence. If I could live my life entirely for someone else's sake, maybe someday I'd be forgiven. But for that role, I needed someone who would punish me for the sin of surviving. So that when moments of happiness found me, when I laughed, I could simply offer a silent apology to the dead. I needed someone who would give me an excuse for when the voices whispered in my ear. I needed an answer to their resentful curses. 'See? I'm getting exactly what I deserve.'"

Amane admits to Yuuji that initially, despite telling him that she'd fallen in love with him at first sight, she didn't really love him — at least not initially. She threw herself at him in the hope that he would become the person she craved to "punish" her.

"When I first met you, I decided… since I'd stolen your sister from you… I could at least become a stand-in for Kazuki… That was all I could think of," she says. "Since I'm not your real sister, I thought I'd compensate by doing things she couldn't do for you. I wanted… a more dramatic 'punishment,' so I started pushing you into those sex marathons, doing all sorts of extreme things… but at some point, before I knew it… being with you, making love to you started to make me really happy. That's… no good at all. It's hardly a punishment if I love you. All of a sudden, the nightmares, the hallucinations, the voices started coming back… they're all cursing me. 'You're taking all the happiness for yourself yet again!'"

Ultimately, Amane asks Yuuji if he will kill her, since she came to the conclusion that killing herself would have been the coward's way out, but having someone else kill her would be an effective punishment for her "crime" of surviving. Yuuji, of course, refuses, having fallen in love with her himself by this point, but does accept the role of the one to punish her.

"There's only one way I can save this woman," he muses to himself. "And it's not by trying to break the curse of her past. I'll simply accept everything. Knowing her past, knowing her trauma, I'll accept it all. I'll provide her with the 'punishment' she needs. There's no other way. Someday, Amane will surely come to understand. The only person she needs to ask for forgiveness is herself. Until then, I'll be a burden for her to bear. I'll ease her guilt. I'll be her punishment. I'll offer her forgiveness. Even if no-one else in the world does."

And indeed, it seems there are people in the world who are unwilling to forgive Amane: specifically, one Sakashita, the father of one of the girls who died in the accident. Sakashita has gone completely mad with grief and anger in the intervening six years, and, following the schoolgirls' chance encounter with Amane some time ago — the same incident that prompted Yuuji to investigate her past — spotted an opportunity to exact what he saw as "retribution" for Amane's "murder" of his daughter. Cornering them in the valley where the bus crashed as Amane and Yuuji return to the scene to investigate any clues Kazuki might have left behind, Sakashita, an experienced hunter, offers them the opportunity to escape, but there is clear bloodlust on his mind, and indeed he injures Yuuji before the pair have the opportunity to get away.

In Amane's bad ending, she and Yuuji decide to split up in an attempt to divert his attention; Yuuji, mirroring his sister's behaviour six years earlier, decides to act as a decoy to draw Sakashita's attention, hopefully allowing Amane to escape. Unfortunately, Amane chooses this moment to stand up for herself and, after discovering Kazuki's "treasure" — actually a kitchen knife and a note apparently all but predicting the exact circumstances in which she and Yuuji now find themselves — resolves not to run away any more, and instead to protect Yuuji with her life, as Kazuki once did for her. Things… do not end well for anyone involved, let's just say.

In Amane's good ending, meanwhile, Yuuji opts to escape with Amane and cooperate in a plan to foil Sakashita. They are ultimately successful, and this leaves them free to live out the rest of their lives in peace. And the ending literally depicts that: we see Amane and Yuuji graduate, marry and grow old together, Yuuji eventually succumbing to cancer in his twilight years and Amane following a while after. Before Amane dies, though, surrounded by her family and feeling at peace with the world, she realises that it has taken her whole life, but she is finally truly and utterly happy; she has forgiven herself, and believes that she's finally ready to move on and be reunited with her beloved. It's a truly beautiful moment, and a fitting end for her story.

Amane's route prompted many powerful emotions, for sure, but one thing that struck me as I started to learn more about her was that I related to her even more than the other members of the cast, and I came to the conclusion that this was one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place.

While I haven't been through anything nearly as traumatic as she went through, her feelings of being unworthy of happiness and a desire to "serve" others are all too familiar to me. I recognised her anxiety, uneasiness and guilt at being happy or content, and I empathised with her situation greatly. I've felt many of the same things before — for different reasons, yes, and not anything to do with survivor's guilt in my case — and so I felt particularly close to her through the things we had "shared".

Her bad ending was utterly horrifying — by far the most unpleasant (and effective!) of the bad endings in the whole VN — but her good ending brought me to tears for a different reason; she had endured so much throughout her life, toiled so tirelessly for redemption and suffered so much pain that it was a delight to see her finally happy at the end, though it was somewhat bittersweet that her moment of true happiness came as the flame of her life went out. I couldn't help thinking, having related to the way she felt so closely throughout her route, that I hoped my life didn't quite follow the same course as hers.

The post 2103: Amane, the Girl Who Learned to Say Thank You appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Makina's route in The Fruit of Grisaia at last. It's a long route with a noticeably different tone to the previous three I've completed, but it was just as enjoyable.

Spoilers ahead, so I'll put the rest behind a More tag for the convenience of those browsing my front page.

We see a lot of different aspects to Makina over the course of Grisaia's complete story. Initially, she's presented as a shy, young-looking girl who has difficulty trusting new people, so she finds it difficult to interact with protagonist Yuuji. It doesn't take long for Yuuji to convince her out of her shell, though, and Yuuji finds himself an important part of the complete group of friends attending Mihama Academy.

Like the other girls, it's not immediately obvious from the common route what the "issue" is with Makina, but it's easy enough to start coming up with some theories the moment you're presented with the choice that triggers her narrative path: she offers to "buy" Yuuji by giving him all her money in exchange for him playing the role of her father. Up until this point, she'd been referring to him as "Onii-chan" — big brother — but she admits outright that she wants more: she wants a male "authority" figure to look up to, to teach her about things that she doesn't understand, and to love her unconditionally.

The natural first response to this declaration, of course, is to assume that Makina has grown up without a strong father figure in her life, and indeed this is true. It's not until later, however, that the full truth comes to light, and it's a horrifying tale, for sure. But more on that later; Yuuji's initial response to Makina's offer is also interesting to observe, telling us a little something about his character that is hinted at in the other paths.

"Makina wants to use her money to buy me?" he says. "Might as well let her. It's not like my life has that much value to me in the first place."

Yuuji, it seems, doesn't value his own existence, despite having seemingly held on through some unimaginably difficult times in his life. He sees Makina as an opportunity to focus his attention on something and distract him from the darkness in his own heart; something which becomes particularly important later on as their relationship with one another develops.

Once Yuuji formally devotes himself to the care of Makina, he starts to look into her past, and it's not long before he realises that, in his words, he may have "adopted something of a problem child". Leveraging the resources at his disposal — specifically, the school principal Chizuru, whom Yuuji helped out in the past, and his "superior" JB — he manages to unearth some information about the exact circumstances that pulled Makina and her family apart; the exact way in which Makina lost her father, the one person in the world she had felt that she could rely on.

"It's natural for a child to be dependent on her parents," explains Yuuji. "And this death was abrupt, apparently violent… although the circumstances were different, I lost my entire family early on, so I can imagine what it must've been like. The impact of losing your immediate family takes time to sink in. Immediately after the loss, you don't feel sorry so much as numbness. As the days roll pass, you'll slowly come to realise that you're along. That you'll never see them again. When you're finally able to process the fact that you're on your own from now on, emotions hit you like a truck. Anxiety so strong it's more like terror, despair cold enough to leave you shivering, sorrow that turns your legs to jelly."

Yuuji, it's fair to say, understands what Makina is going through. We learn later that he believes he killed his family — though his belief and what actually happened are apparently two different things — but alongside the guilt at his supposed misdeeds, he also feels that yawning emptiness inside; the same bleakness that Makina doubtless struggles with on a daily basis.

Makina doesn't show it for the most part, of course; she's habitually cheerful, upbeat and noisy, bellowing things in her distinctive slang, but it's not difficult to imagine that this is an exaggerated personality she puts on for show in order to hide her true feelings. In fact, it goes somewhat deeper than that; Makina's family, the Irisu clan, is deeply embroiled within that particularly shady side of business most commonly depicted in works like Yakuza, where deception and putting up a façade comes with the territory: it's necessary to survive. And despite Makina's tender years, she's very much at the centre of what Chizuru describes as a "domestic feud" some years ago.

Makina's father married into the Irisu clan, and was a genuinely nice, upstanding person. As he became more and more aware of exactly what he'd become involved with, he became uncomfortable and eventually decided that he needed to share the information on the Irisu's widespread fraudulent dealings with someone. As these things tend to go, however, the Irisu became aware of this and arranged to have him "erased"; Makina was kidnapped and used as bait to lure him out, then he was killed in front of her. To make matters worse, she was left tied up in the room with his corpse for six days after his death, so she witnessed the onset of decomposition of his body, leaving her with some pretty severe psychological scars: enough to hospitalise her for a good few years after the incident.

Makina was important to the Irisu, though, since she was set to inherit the company after her mother stepped down. Infighting between the "main" and the "branch" family ensued as Makina's mother bore Makina a sister named Sarina — the product of a liaison with a different father — and the balance appeared to have tipped in favour of the branch family as Makina was effectively put out of commission by her hospitalisation; most of her family were unaware of the fact that she had recovered enough to start attending Mihama Academy — an establishment specifically put together to nurture those with troubled pasts or severe psychological trauma — and so she had largely been left in peace.

We learn that Makina's peculiar manner of speaking, which at times sounds rather more like a somewhat perverted elderly man than a young-looking schoolgirl, is the result of her rehabilitation at hospital. The people with whom she most frequently interacted — many of whom were somewhat perverted elderly men — rubbed off on her somewhat, and she absorbed their way of speaking. As Yuuji puts it, "she's been sucking up various characteristics from the people around her for a long time now. That's how the Makina we know came to be."

It's not only personality traits that Makina is able to absorb, though; as early as the common route, we're introduced to her extraordinary photographic memory, in which she can memorise an entire book (albeit only in "black and white") and recall its information at will. When this fact is first introduced, it seems like just another quirk in an already strange individual's arsenal, but it later becomes clear that Makina's father entrusted Makina with the same information he was ultimately killed for. This, naturally, makes Makina a very serious threat to the Irisu clan, and so, upon their learning of her release from the hospital and the start of her new life, they begin a lengthy campaign of harassment in an attempt to convince her to come home and take up her "rightful" place as the heir to the company's fortunes.

Makina is having none of this, of course; having been traumatised at a young age by the seedy underbelly of the world that her family was involved with, she wants nothing to do with the situation, instead desiring nothing more than a normal life. She takes on a part-time job at a bakery in the town near the school, and for the first time in her life, she starts dreaming of the future: she longs to own her own bakery and live in peace, spending her days coming up with increasingly elaborate recipes for breads, cakes and pastries. Yuuji, meanwhile, his love for Makina gradually growing — initially without realising it — decides that he wants nothing more than to protect her, and to make that happen.

Once Yuuji does become aware of his feelings for Makina, however, he starts to draw parallels between his own life experience and what he has so far experienced with this strange little girl.

"My master, the woman who single-handedly built me up from nothing," Yuuji reminisces, recalling his former life with the mysterious (and deceased) Asako, whose existence is teased somewhat in the other paths, but not explained in any great detail. "For better or worse, I'm at least eighty percent the person she made me. She found a whelp crawling along the bottom of the valley of despair, reached down her hand, and pulled it up into the world of human beings. For Asako, picking me up might've been an afterthought. An impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decision. Not much more than a whim. Even so, if I hadn't met her, I wouldn't be what I am today. I probably would have given up on life outright a long time ago."

This mirrors the situation with Yuuji and Makina, this time with Yuuji taking on Asako's role, and Makina occupying the space where Yuuji once was. Like Yuuji, Makina has had to effectively begin her life anew, learning how to deal with difficult situations from scratch; like Asako, Yuuji took responsibility for Makina as little more than a whim initially, but this whim grew into something far greater. Makina notices this too, commenting on a trip to visit Asako's grave that "just like you're a papa to me, your master was a mama to you?"

"I think there are few things I'm starting to understand, little by little," Yuuji reflects as he meditates before his former master's grave. "The things I can do. The things only I can do. The things I have to do. And the things I want to do. Tell me something, Asako. Was this how it was for you as well…? Did that small presence at your side end up becoming your reason to live? I'm starting to feel like I can understand now."

This connection between the two of them deepens over time, as Yuuji continues to realise how much alike both he and Makina are — and how she suffers in silence.

"It feels almost like I'm looking at myself in the old days," he explains, looking at her sleeping figure one night. "As though the unpleasant memories I've tried to lock away have forced their way into reality. She can't ask anyone for help. She knows her friends will do everything they can if she does. But even so, she can't ask. Anyone she turns to for help will suffer for it. Because the girl understands that, her lips are sealed."

Recognising this, Yuuji decides to help her without her asking for it; help that she gratefully receives. The two go on the run from the unwanted attention of the Irisu clan, and their friends understand and accept their reasons for attempting to escape — though this doesn't stop them each expressing concern in their own ways. Everyone involved knows that it's entirely possible they'll never see each other again, though, so they make a symbolic gesture: Makina is entrusted with an apple tree seedling to represent the group's friendship, and they all make a promise that one day, they'll come back together to enjoy the fruits of the young tree.

From here, Yuuji and Makina are on their own as fugitives. It seems like an impossible situation, but there seem to be several possible routes out: firstly, if they can stay on the run for three years, Makina will effectively be disowned and give up any right she had to take control of the family. Alternatively, Yuuji conjectures that destroying the "brain" of the beast that is the Irisu clan — Makina's mother — will throw it into chaos and resolve everything.

Yuuji is hesitant to do anything involving killing, though. Following the death of his family, the psychological scars of that incident and its aftermath left him with the delusion that he had a "devil" in his right arm that afflicted him with bloodlust. Asako, it transpires, managed to make use of mental conditioning techniques to keep Yuuji under control and prevent him from becoming violent or even being able to kill again. Asako's death, however, caused this "pin" to loosen, turning Yuuji into something of a "live grenade" that could explode into violence at any point, and the dreadful situation in which he and Makina find themselves looks set to make that eventuality a possibility, particularly as Yuuji's former colleagues at "Ichigaya" — which, we finally and conclusively learn in this route, is connected to the CIA — are retained by the Irisu to track down Yuuji, kill him and take Makina back by force.

Why is Makina so important, and why are the CIA getting involved? It's all to do with the Irisu. The Irisu, it seems, are even more powerful than Yumiko's family, having fingers in a wide variety of pies not just across Japan, but across the whole world. Throwing the Irisu as an organisation into chaos would have far-reaching impacts on the world economy; it's far more than a simple family feud. And the Irisu are already on unsteady ground thanks to their shady, fraudulent dealings and underhanded tactics; should any of that come to light, said chaos and destabilisation would become all the more likely.

Yuuji is, by this point, utterly convinced that Makina is the one thing he has found that he wants to protect more than his own life, and so comes up with an elaborate plan to take care of the situation once and for all, even if it will have far-reaching consequences. Specifically, he plans to assassinate Makina's mother, even if it means his own death.

"As human beings live, they naturally find more things to protect," explains Yuuji earlier in the story. "And when they find something more precious than their own lives, something they would throw away everything else to protect, people undergo a change. Even if it leaves them broken or miserable or poor, even at the cost of their dignity and pride, even to the point of foolishness, they struggle for the sake of that something. Keeping it safe becomes their only joy. The only way they can keep themselves whole."

Yuuji is, of course, talking about himself here, though at the time he delivers this particular little monologue he doesn't necessarily realise the full extent of his feelings himself. As the situation builds to a head, though, culminating in Makina's severe injury at the hands of Yuuji's former colleagues as she attempts to retrieve the symbolic apple seedling from some former lodgings they had fled, he accepts the situation almost calmly, knowing that it is quite literally "do or die" time.

Interestingly, Yuuji's final confrontation with Makina's mother doesn't go quite as you might expect. The obvious and "easy" route out of the whole situation is for Yuuji to kill her, but this leads to the "bad" ending, in which Yuuji's successful assassination is followed by him taking fatal wounds during his escape, and Makina seeing him die in front of her just as her father did. Unable to entirely process this, she becomes delusional that he is still alive, though under the protection of Yuuji's former employers she takes on Yuuji's role of "Agent 9029", and so the cycle begins once again, with another damaged individual rescued from certain oblivion and trained up to be another "loyal dog".

The "good" ending, meanwhile, sees Yuuji keeping the "pin" in his mind and refusing to kill Makina's mother. He is still injured in the attempt, however, though this time his wounds aren't fatal, instead only costing him the use of his right arm. This is, of course, symbolic; his right arm is where he believed the "devil" to reside, and losing it means that he's ultimately and finally able to let go of the past and be at peace with himself, though there's a price: even in the good ending, Makina takes on the role of "9029", though this time around she has the support of Yuuji and the sense that this time, everything might actually turn out for the best.

Makina's story is complex, tragic and much bigger than Makina and Yuuji themselves, and this made it a fascinating contrast to the previous routes I've encountered in The Fruit of Grisaia. Michiru, Sachi and Yumiko's routes were all rather "personal" in nature, whereas with Makina, there's very much the sense of both she and Yuuji being caught up in events beyond their control, swept along by a world they know very little about and have no desire to be involved with.

That's not to say there's nothing "personal" in Makina's route, mind; on the contrary, we learn a great deal about Yuuji's past and the things that make him who he is. Makina's H-scenes in particular see the pair enjoying some extremely frank exchanges and coming to some difficult realisations; there are few things more intimate than sex, after all, since it's the ultimate expression of willing vulnerability to and trust in another person, and so it's entirely fitting that during these scenes the two come to understand one another a whole lot better.

"When [Makina's] innocent, caring eyes fine mind, dark and ugly feelings swell up in response," ponders Yuuji. "'Don't pity me.' 'Don't take me for a fool.' 'What's with that look? You don't think you really understand me, do you? Don't try to accept me, you don't have the first damn idea what I am.' The words rush into my head like a deluge of black mud. A part of me suddenly wants to teach this girl a lesson. To make her break down and cry.

"I'm no longer capable of bluffing," he continues. "Pretending that I'm the one protecting Makina. All I can do now is cling to a younger girl like a child hoping for his mother's forgiveness. I can't even keep myself from breaking down into tears. As I listen to the steady sound of Makina's heartbeat, I can feel the lingering pain in my head quickly receding. Some part of me believed I was cursed. That if I talked to anyone, they'd be dragged down into hell with me. But now, it feels like that heavy spell's been broken."

That right there is love. "Through clouds of darkness come light" and all that; a feeling that I can absolutely relate to, and one which everyone deserves to feel at some point in their lives.

The post 2098: Makina, the Girl in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Finished Sachi's route in The Fruit of Grisaia last night. Once again, this route proves to be significantly different in tone and theme than the others I've seen so far (Michiru's and Yumiko's) — it also felt like it was a bit longer, for reasons I'll get into later.

As ever, this post will contain extensive spoilers for Sachi's route in The Fruit of Grisaia. As such, if you want to avoid being spoiled, don't read! Here's a More tag to prevent accidental spoilage from my front page…

Sachi is introduced almost as a caricature: she plays the role of "the perfect maid" to everyone else at Mihama Academy, right down to wearing a maid outfit when she's not in school uniform, but it doesn't take a great deal of perceptiveness to notice her behaviour isn't what you'd particularly call "normal".

Specifically, it's apparent pretty much from the outset that Sachi's unusually compliant nature and tendency to take things literally is something out of the ordinary. Protagonist Yuuji isn't quite sure what the exact problem is to begin with, but it gradually becomes clear to him as he starts to spend more time with her.

"She resembles me," he says at one point. "Organising her life around diligently following orders, she never allows herself to doubt them, let alone defy those who make use of her. And almost as an extension of that, her 'private' activities are little more than the bare minimum routines of daily existence. Looking at Sachi, I've been seeing myself… and the discomfort I felt was a reflection of my uncertainty about my own way of life."

It takes some time for the exact nature of Sachi's personality to become clear, but it seems obvious that some sort of "training" or conditioning was involved somewhere along the line. Her insistence that "that's how a good girl behaves" seems suspicious the first time it comes out of her mouth, and only becomes more suspicious over time as she says it more and more while repeatedly demonstrating that her only definition of "good" is "obedient, without question", even if obeying orders puts her in danger or at risk of exhaustion, as happens when she passes out in the bath after an offhanded remark by one of her classmates about staying in there until you count to 10,000.

"I've noticed before that Sachi's judgements tend to be delivered in simple, black and white terms," comments Yuuji. "In particular, she has something of a habit of dividing things between the 'good' and the 'bad'."

As Yuuji and Sachi's relationship develops further, it becomes apparent that they knew each other back in childhood, when both of them were going through a difficult time in their respective lives. Yuuji was suffering with feelings of inferiority brought about by his "genius" sister and his parents admonition of him for not being more like her, while Sachi was suffering under the belief that her parents had stopped loving her, because they were spending more and more time working and less time with her. The two were drawn to one another as a result; two unhappy children, neither of whom were quite able to express how they were feeling about life and each other.

The two were eventually separated; Yuuji's family was torn apart following the death of his sister — an incident which he reveals left only him alive, and set him on the path he walks today — and was unable to fulfil a "one-sided promise" with Sachi to meet her in the playground they had spent so much time in. On Sachi's tenth birthday, she waits in vain for Yuuji to show up in the park after fleeing her parents, who had been strangely nice towards her at the time; she believed that their apparent affection was insincere, and ran out of the house as a result. After being away for the majority of her birthday, though, she is reunited with them only temporarily as they finally track her down — and then the pair of them are hit by a truck driven by a drunk driver, killing her father instantly and injuring her mother so severely she falls into a persistent vegetative state, but not before the last words she speaks are the mysterious "Sachi… why?"

These two simple words are the source of Sachi's problem, which in medical terms is diagnosed as a combination of post-traumatic stress disorder (causing her flashbacks of the accident) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (causing her to believe that the accident was her fault for being a "bad girl", and that the only way to atone is to follow everyone's orders without question, and consequently be a "good girl").

One day, Sachi is late for an appointment with Yuuji; the pair of them had been studying together in an attempt to see if there was such a thing as a question that would stump the studious Sachi. Sachi had previously said that she would be a little late, but agreed to meet Yuuji at "the usual place". When the time of their meeting comes and goes, Yuuji and his friends become concerned; when a whole day passes and there's still no sign of Sachi, they start to think the worst.

Yuuji, however, comes to a realisation.

"We all knew what Sachi was like," he says. "We knew she was bizarrely obedient; we knew she was prone to making strange mistakes as a result of subtle misunderstandings. But we'd all assumed those quirks were nothing more than a reflection of her diligent personality. We'd all assumed she would bend those rules of hers if it ever became truly necessary. That's exactly why… I don't want her to be here."

"Here" is the playground the pair of them spent so much time in as children. "Here" would be proof that Sachi had taken the phrase "the usual place" extremely literally in the context of her past promise that she would be "waiting in the usual place".

"Much as I want to find Sachi, those words spill out of my mouth," continues Yuuji. "And contradictory as it might seem, I really mean them. If Sachi's here, my initial concerns about her behaviour were justified. My vague unease will become something far more concrete. Far harder to face. Given any choice in the matter, I don't want that to happen."

Unfortunately, Yuuji, of course, doesn't have any choice in the matter, and Sachi is indeed at the playground — wet, cold, tired, hungry, thirsty and in need of medical attention. She passes out in Yuuji's arms, and he takes her to the hospital, where she is kept for a few days and given time to reflect on her actions. She's genuinely confused by the fact that she had apparently worried and upset everyone with her disappearance.

"That's strange," she says to herself. "I'm not… a bad girl any more, am I…? As long as I'm a good girl… and do what I'm told… I thought it wouldn't hurt any more."

But it does hurt; her flashbacks return, and she's forced, once again, to relive the memories leading up to and including her parents' accident. Through her flashback, we discover at least part of the source of the diligence she displays today: her initial enjoyment of the praise and affection she received from her parents when she did things well or had a strong performance at school, and her increasingly desperate attempts to get their attention as their business grew and they had less time to spend with her.

"If the best possible results weren't good enough," she thought, "it could only mean that my parents had started to hate me. No matter how good my grades got, it wouldn't make them start loving me again.

"Yuu-kun didn't just play with me," she continues, remembering her meeting with Yuuji as a child. "He gave me the attention I'd been craving. When I did well or tried hard, he'd compliment me right away. When I messed up or tried something risky, he'd give me a few gentle words of concern."

Sachi comes to love Yuuji much as she loves her parents — because it's clear she still loves them, even though she had become convinced that they hated her. And this is why it hurts when she feels him slipping away from her, through no fault of her own.

"Sometimes he'd suddenly talk about God or other weird stuff," she remembers. "More often, he'd sit rocking on a swing, staring off into the distance with a blank look on his face. It was the old familiar expression from the first time I met him. The expression he'd stopped making after we became friends.

"I had a vague idea that something must have happened at Yuu-kun's home. But I was still just a kid, powerless to offer any real help.

"Our meetings slowly grew fewer and further between. The loneliness reminded me of the painful days when my parents had first begun ignoring me in favour of their job. Watching helplessly as Yuu-kun trudged away, my mind churned with sadness and fear. 'At this rate, Yuu-kun's going to leave me too…' I couldn't let that happen again. I couldn't let another person I loved abandon me. This time, I had to stop it somehow."

But she's unable to stop it, and not only does Yuuji leave her, but the very next day she witnesses her parents' death. And she becomes convinced it was her fault, particularly after her flashback nightmares start for the first time.

"I had committed the sin of disobedience," she says. "That dream was my punishment for treating my parents cruelly when they tried to celebrate my birthday with me. In that case… I'll become a good girl… from now on… a really, truly good girl… If I'm a good girl, I won't lose anything. If I'm a good girl, maybe… Mommy and Daddy will forgive me someday."

Sachi becomes convinced that being a "good girl" involves following the orders of others so as never to commit the "sin of disobedience" again.

"More than anything else," she remembers, "simply obeying someone's instructions was pleasant in itself. While executing orders, there was no need to think about anything else. The reason for those orders, the consequences of successfully carrying them out — anything and everything else was totally irrelevant. In those moments and those moments along, the burden of guilt I carried with me was lifted from my shoulders. And the image I wanted to erase from my mind more than anything else stayed safely buried away."

Upon discovering the truth behind Sachi's past, Yuuji comes to his own conclusions about her situation.

"Doing what she's told is an end in itself," he ponders. "Sachi was only a child at the time. This simplistic, obsessive obedience was the sole coping method she could find. The only way she could escape her regret and guilt. Sachi stopped thinking for herself as a self-defense mechanism. Her wounds were so severe that she lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong."

This is an accurate assessment; Sachi's definition of "good" is so narrow that it has nothing to do with "right" from a moral perspective. When her adolescent self was ordered by the school bully to "get rid of a test", she comes to the conclusion that the only means of completely guaranteeing the test will never, ever take place is to burn her school down.

"To take the most extreme possible example," reflects Yuuji, "if someone unambiguously ordered Sachi to 'kill someone' right now, she might commit murder without hesitation. The commandment she imposed on herself is a dangerous thing. A brittle wall, as likely to harm as protect."

Yuuji reflects further on Sachi's situation and his previous observation that she seemed similar to him in many ways. And he finds himself reflecting on the past words of his mysterious "master" Asako.

"At our first meeting, my master took one look at me and declared 'we can still fix this one.' That's why I'm here today. Come to think of it, my master told me something once: 'accepting a favour isn't anything to be ashamed of, kid. But not returning it is. There's no need to overthink this. From that perspective, it's really very simple. Back then, Sachi's presence in my life saved me; and today, I have a chance to repay the favour."

Although Yuuji himself doesn't appear to notice, at least at first, he gradually takes on a role for Sachi not unlike that which Asako played for him in the past. Beginning a romantic relationship with Sachi — knowing full well that her compliant nature would make it impossible for her to reject his initial "confession", as insincere as it is at first — he sets about trying to help Sachi, though he knows that acting as a magic bullet won't fix her problems; she needs to resolve them herself, perhaps with a nudge or two in the right direction.

Yuuji imposes some "rules" on Sachi, again knowing that she'll be unable to refuse them in her current condition. The most important thing is that he encourages her to think about the reasons for requests that people might give her, and the consequences of that request. From there, he urges her to reject or accept the request on those grounds, not blindly.

Between their relationship — which eventually becomes physical when Yuuji convinces himself that touching Sachi wouldn't be wrong, and that she wouldn't be opposed to the idea — and these new rules, Sachi gradually becomes more assertive and inquisitive. This culminates in an incident when Yuuji takes her on a date to the beach; as the sun sets and their pleasant day comes to an end, Sachi makes an uncharacteristically selfish demand of Yuuji to stay a little longer.

"Normally speaking, this would be nothing but a cute moment of selfishness," says Yuuji. "The sort of thing girlfriends are generally entitled to. But in this case, it represents a serious violation of Sachi's internal rules."

It's clear that Sachi has reached something of a turning point, so Yuuji starts to formulate a plan. He asks her two questions: why she made that demand of Yuuji, and what is the thing that he wants her, more than anything else, to realise?

Sachi is unable to come up with the answers to these questions by herself. In conversation with the other girls at the school, they quickly come to the conclusion that the answer to the first question is simple: because she loves Yuuji. The second, however, proves more troublesome.

An opportunity for Yuuji to give Sachi a push in the right direction arises when Michiru blurts out a request for Sachi to "get rid of" an upcoming test — almost the exact same request that led to her burning her previous school down. Yuuji manipulates Sachi's internal rules into her accepting the request, seeing a chance for her redemption.

"If she attempts to use the same method as before, she's almost certainly going to fail," he explains. "That's not a problem in itself. Sachi has to fail if she's ever going to break out of this status quo. But failure alone would likely accomplish nothing more than leaving a new wound on her heart. Failure's necessary, but she can't allow herself to fail."

After considerable effort, driving herself almost to the point of total exhaustion, Sachi comes to the conclusion that the only way to fulfil Michiru's request is to use the same method as last time — but Yuuji knows full well that the sturdy construction of Mihama Academy won't be toppled by simple arson. Making use of his "connections", he first of all "catches" Sachi in the act of trying to burn the school down, then offers him her help. The pair of them set plastic explosives around the building, then retreat to a safe distance. Yuuji gives Sachi every opportunity to back out of the request, but she ultimately chooses to fulfil it by throwing the switch and demolishing the school.

It's only after this bold, irreversible move that Sachi comes to the realisation that Mihama Academy, which she just destroyed, was a place where she was happy.

"If being a good girl can't protect the things I love, then what was the point of all my hard work?" pleads Sachi.

"This isn't a race," says Yuuji. "How long it took you to see what you were missing isn't important. What really matters is how clearly you understand where you went wrong, and how well you make use of that knowledge from now on."

This could well be where Sachi's story ends, but there are still some unresolved matters.

"Human beings are most vulnerable in moments of celebration," Yuuji says. "Growing up in a house where a thoughtless smile on my face could earn me a punch to the jaw, I figured that much out before I even graduated from elementary school. Probably because of that, I've always been pretty cautious about making my real feelings too obvious to others. And by the same token, I'm aware of associating 'carelessness' with 'danger' more strongly than most people. I make a conscious effort to stay alert, if not tense, at all times. But as I've just been reminded, true carelessness is something that sneaks up on you; the nastiest surprises always come when you don't even realise you've let down your guard."

Sachi's nightmares return, more intense than before. Recognising that her previous attempts to be a "good girl" were nothing but a way of running from the problem, she doesn't revert to her old ways, but it's clear something needs to be done to bring the girl closure. Fortunately, it looks like there might be an opportunity to do just that when Yuuji is sent a mysterious key by Sachi's uncle, who had been acting as her guardian at the time she burned her old school down. The key is for her parents' old workshop, which has laid dormant ever since her tenth birthday.

"There's only one thing for you to do about these nightmares," Yuuji tells her. "Kill the source."

Yuuji's powerful words have a strong impact on Sachi, but he doesn't explain exactly what he means. Sachi's initial reaction is that there are two ways she can get out of this situation that involve "killing": killing herself, which will stop the pain altogether, and killing her mother, who is still in a persistent vegetative state, and, in Sachi's mind, acting as a fountain of grief. Indeed, the last choice the player has the opportunity to make in Sachi's route is between these two options, but in fact, neither are correct.

"This must have been what Yuu-kun wanted me to understand," Sachi reflects while visiting her mother for the first time in many years. "By directly facing my guilt in its most raw and undiluted form, he wanted to make me realise this. That so long as I live, I'll never simply be released from this suffering."

In Sachi's bad ending — choosing to kill herself — she almost immediately realises that suicide is not an option for her, and instead resolves to kill "herself" in the sense that she'll overcome her guilt and suffering; consciously erase her past and accept what happened. This is not something that she'll be able to do quickly, and it is something that will take intense concentration; unfortunately, that self-same intense concentration leads to her untimely death in a traffic accident, under almost the exact same circumstances as her parents died. Yuuji, in this case, is the one to witness her death, and interprets it as punishment for his own sins.

In Sachi's good ending, meanwhile, Yuuji takes Sachi to see her parents' workshop, which turns out to have been stripped of all its machinery and turned into an "album", starting with her tenth birthday. Her parents had come to the realisation that they were making Sachi unhappy, and wanted to show that they truly loved her, starting by showing how proud of her they were.

Aware that communication had broken down between them, they wrote her a letter, which was still waiting on the side next to a music box she loved in her childhood. The letter apologises for the way they treated her, and assures her that she was very much loved, and always the most important thing in their lives.

"I didn't want you to kill your mother," explains Yuuji. "Not the woman sleeping in that hospital bed, at least. That accident was too much for a child to process. Too terrifying. Too painful. Thanks to that overwhelming tragedy, you were imprinted with a hollow, false image. An image of two people who resented you and wanted you to suffer. A hateful illusion you mistook for your parents. That's what you needed to 'kill'."

"Even after visiting that workshop," Yuuji reflects later, "neither Sachi nor I believe that we've come to understand everything her mother and father were thinking. The feelings of two parents cut down by accident in the middle of searching for their distraught child… that's probably something you can't fully understand until you have a family and children of your own. But there's one thing that's clear: the two of them wanted her to find happiness even greater than their own. In a way, that bittersweet knowledge will be Sachi's 'punishment' from now on."

Sachi's route was interesting and enjoyable for me. It felt like it was a lot longer than Michiru and Yumiko's routes, though this was in part due to the fact that the resolution of Sachi's initial problem — her erasure of her self in favour of her blind faith in being a "good girl" — wasn't the end of the matter. The route took great pains to tie up all the loose ends by the conclusion, and while in some ways the way things ended was fairly predictable, it didn't stop it from being a touching moment as Sachi finally came to realise she had been wrong about her parents for all these years.

One thing I found especially enjoyable about this route is how it gave us some additional insight into the other characters. We learn, for example, that Yumiko — who puts across a rather straight-laced appearance for the most part — has a bit of a thing for downloading pornography from the Internet. ("If your password's only six characters," says Sachi, "you might as well not have one.") This leads to Sachi soliciting sex advice from Yumiko, with the aftermath of the pair's private porn study session being one of the most amusing scenes I've seen so far.

We also learn — or, rather, confirm — that Yuuji and the five girls are brought closer together by their shared circumstances. All of them have something painful from their past that they are dealing with in their own way; if they didn't, they wouldn't be at that school. None of them judge each other for it, though; instead, knowing what it's like to suffer in silence, they all support one another as best they can, and that's one of the nicest things about this cast, and something that really comes across in Sachi's route in particular.

"An intelligent, pathologically helpful honour student will probably make plenty of 'friends' anywhere they go," says Yuuji. "You're so useful to have around, most people probably treated you nicely enough for their own convenience, and when they realised what you were carrying, when you were no longer of any use to them, I guess they abandoned you quickly enough. That sort always will. But how about the people in this school? You think they're the same way? Do you really believe Michiru and Makina think of you as nothing but their personal lackey? Do you really believe they'd abandon a friend for failing to carry out a single 'order'?"

That, right there, is the heart of Sachi's route. Even if we find ourselves in dark places — whether or not they're of our own creation — it's important to surround yourself with people who love you and will support you. And that's what Sachi comes to understand throughout the rest of her story.

The post 2076: Sachi and the Maid's Burden appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Finished Michiru's route in The Fruit of Grisaia today, and my goodness is there a lot to process.

It doubtless goes without saying, but major spoilers for Michiru's route ahead. I'll put in a "More" tag for those who care about such things. Hit the jump for the full story.

As I predicted, Michiru ended up being an interesting, sympathetic character whose story had a markedly different tone to Yumiko's. Where Yumiko's route had a clear conflict with a potential solution — a "villain" of sorts to defeat — Michiru's is much more complex, and its conclusion is much less "tidy" than that seen in Yumiko's route. It's not that it leaves things unresolved, to be clear; more that Michiru's resolution involves having to live with some ongoing problems.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's rewind and talk a little about the girl herself.

We're first introduced to Michiru in the common route, when protagonist Yuuji comes across her doing vocal exercises in an empty classroom, closely followed by her practicing bellowing out stock tsundere phrases such as "i-it's not like I'm doing this for you or anything" and "d-don't misunderstand!" Already well aware that his new classmates are a little on the peculiar side, Yuuji doesn't probe too deeply into the matter at this point, but it's immediately obvious whenever Michiru interacts with Yuuji or her other classmates that her tsundere personality isn't who she really is; rather, it's a façade she's putting up for reasons that, at the outset of the story, aren't entirely clear.

The first hint that all is not well in Michiru's inner world comes during a conversation with the group about friendship. As the conversation progresses to the topic of "best friends", Michiru seems to develop some discomfort in her chest, and eventually sidles off making an excuse about feeling "anaemic". Yuuji suspects that this isn't the whole truth, but out of respect for Michiru — and a desire for a "normal" school life — doesn't poke his nose into her business, instead just making sure she's all right before returning to the group, no questions asked.

This incident repeats itself a few times, until Yuuji discovers a rather strange truth about Michiru: whenever she complains of discomfort in this way, it's usually followed by a dramatic shift in her personality. Rather than the loud-mouthed idiot that most of her classmates know as "the usual Michiru", this "other" Michiru is relatively softly-spoken, yet articulate and assertive. In many ways, she's the polar opposite of her "pseudo-tsundere" counterpart.

There are a number of possible explanations for this behaviour, and the game takes care to not necessarily give a definitive answer as to what's causing it, though it leans rather strongly in the direction of cell memory theory. Michiru's heart isn't her own, you see; it came from the body of a girl who was completely paralysed in a traffic accident, since Michiru herself suffered from a life-threatening heart condition in her childhood. This "other" Michiru, it seems, may well be the personality of this other girl, who had taken to "coming out" whenever Michiru appeared to be in distress in order to resolve her problems, then sink back into the darkness again.

Michiru finds herself in distress rather a lot. A traumatic childhood in which she was repeatedly physically abused by her home-school tutors left her with deep mental scars and a feeling of utter uselessness. "I sorta feel like… I should be huddled up in some little corner of the world instead," she confesses to Yuuji one day. "Breathing real softly so no-one notices."

This "huddling up" coincides with how she deals with her moments of distress; she retreats into her own inner world — which she imagines as "the bottom of the sea" — and hugs her knees to herself, allowing the "other" Michiru to come to the fore, not always voluntarily. When she "wakes up" from the experience, she often finds that her life is "better" somehow, or that the problem has been magically resolved in her "absence".

Eventually this starts to get to Michiru somewhat. She's aware of the fact that she's simply running from all her problems. "If she's that much better at everything than I am, maybe she should just take over my life full-time," she says to Yuuji during a moment of reflection. "What's the point of me even being here? If she's that much better than me, why do I even exist?"

Michiru's inferiority complex is tied in part to her childhood, but also due to her perception of the world as being a place where nothing is constant and she can't rely on anything. She deliberately chooses not to become attached to anyone or anything, because she knows that she'll only lose it and be sad about it; an exception to this comes in the form of a stray black cat that she adopts early in the story, which she refuses to give a proper name to, instead referring to it simply as "Kittymeow" (or "Nekonyaa" if you want to be Japanese about it!) "I didn't want to give him a real name," she explains. "Like I said before, everything I care about goes away before long. I didn't want that to happen again, so… I mean, if I gave him a name we'd have a real connection, right? That kind of scared me."

As a symbol of her trust and growing love for Yuuji, though, she agrees to give the cat a name, since it's spending all its time hanging around with her anyway. Yuuji, believing that this experience will be good for her, helps her come up with a name for the cat, and Michiru develops strong feelings for the cat as a result; she sees the name they came up with together as being "very special" simply by virtue of the fact that it's something they did together.

Regrettably, though, all does not end well. In Yuuji's words:

"The cat died. From an objective point of view, 'a stray cat was hit by a car.' NOthing more, nothing less. In the animal shelters, abandoned pets and feral strays are disposed of in the tens of thousands every year. To the world at large, the death of that cat is essentially meaningless. But a precious fragment of Michiru's world was stolen away before her very eyes. From that perspective, we're clearly facing a gravely serious situation."

This experience, seemingly confirming all Michiru's fears, pretty much breaks her, and she attempts to put up a brave front, with mixed results. "I don't need to be happy," she says. "I'll just keep breathing and forget about the rest. Stop hoping. That should fix everything, right?"

By this point, Yuuji and Michiru have been "dating" for a while, though at Yuuji's insistence — and Michiru's seeming agreement — they had only been pretending to date as a means of passing the time over the summer while their classmates were all away. Both of them clearly know that it's more than that, though.

"Please," says Michiru in a particularly deep bout of depression, during which she confesses that she wants to sleep with Yuuji, even if it's a purely physical act with no "real" feelings. "My heart hurts. I don't think I can stand this much longer. I want a reason why I can be here. I want something to help me believe that I matter. Hurry up and… pretend to love me already!"

Seemingly — perhaps temporarily — convinced that she at least matters to a small degree to Yuuji, Michiru eventually explains the details of her life, and the traumatic events that made her the person she is today. The abuse at the hands of her tutors left her feeling she was "a piece of trash", a "stupid, useless person", and her physical condition only left her feeling even more inferior, like she was a burden on her parents. Isolated and ostracised as a "ghost girl" at school, she eventually makes contact with another human being, ironically as this other person is about to end their own life. It's Michiru's intervention that stops her from jumping off the school roof, but Michiru herself confesses that she only intervened because she thought it would be "unfair" for someone to be able to kill themselves when she didn't have the courage to escape this world herself.

Michiru's friend — whose name we never discover, interestingly, despite the fact the two were "best friends", in Michiru's words — is herself a somewhat troubled individual, though in a different way. The girl had found herself involved in an abusive relationship with an older, married man and, as unfortunately so frequently happens in such situations, had convinced herself that she truly loved him, and thus endured some terrible abuse — physical, mental and sexual. Ultimately, Michiru finds herself unable to "save" her friend, and the other girl ends up killing herself anyway, leaving Michiru with the burden of loss weighing heavy on her shoulders.

This event is essentially the main reason Michiru has such a distrust of becoming "close" with anyone or anything. She's afraid the same thing — or something like it, at least — will happen again, but in her own distress over the matter, she forgets something very important: everyone has these worries; everyone worries about losing the things they love; everyone is sad, distraught, grief-stricken when a piece of their world is taken away.

As the "real" Michiru sinks ever deeper into a pit of absolute despair following the death of her cat, she retreats further and further from the world around her, to the eventual degree that she attempts suicide herself through an overdose of the tranquilisers she'd been taking to keep the "other" personality subdued as much as possible. Retreating from reality so much that the "other" Michiru becomes the dominant personality, Yuuji eventually manages to get her to confess what she believes to be her true feelings: that she wants to die.

In her bad ending, she attempts suicide again after agreeing to be examined in the hospital following a particularly bad series of incidents. This time, she washes down a larger quantity of medication with alcohol, and leaves herself with brain damage in the process. Yuuji sticks by her, but all life is gone from her eyes, and she can barely communicate with anyone; ultimately, she loses any chance she might have had to be at peace with herself.

Her much longer good ending, meanwhile, sees Yuuji making the surprise announcement that he'll kill her. Dosing her up with muscle relaxant, putting her in a coffin and burying her "alive" in her favourite place — where she'd said much earlier that she wanted to be buried when she died — Yuuji waits patiently by her side, secure in his own trust that she will pull herself out of the mire of darkness she's caught in. He'd specially prepared the coffin to be easy to break out of, and to allow a small airflow in, so it would be unlikely that she'd die of suffocation, and his belief in her was what told him that this would be an okay thing to do.

Yuuji's lesson may have been harsh, but it works; keeping the rest of his classmates in the dark, he convinces them that Michiru really is dead, even showing them her "body" in the coffin and inviting them all to share their final thoughts with her. Even the normally stoic Yumiko breaks down in hysterical sobs at the knowledge that Michiru is dead; Michiru, meanwhile, who is conscious but unable to move for all this thanks to the muscle relaxants, hears her classmates' true feelings towards her, and comes to realise that her death may well feel like it would resolve her own problems, but it would create all manner of new problems for the people she left behind. It also becomes extremely clear that Michiru's presence, while not as obviously helpful as that of people like Amane and Sachi, had been holding the group together to a certain degree.

"Let me tell you something, Michiru," says Yuuji as he's wheeling her "body" out of the dormitory, supposedly for her cremation. "Death isn't 'the end.' First of all, the people you've left behind have to try and say goodbye. The idea that you can just vanish into thin air is a load of self-centred crap."

Given time to reflect — and time to converse with her "other" self — Michiru comes to some conclusions.

"'From now on.' I haven't really thought about that so much lately," she says. "All this time, I've been focused on enduring the pain from the festering, miserable wounds the past left me. Even when I met someone new, I'd find myself thinking about what happened before. Biting my lip when they weren't looking. 'What's the point? It'll be over someday.' I've got to live facing forward. I can't spend my whole life looking back over my shoulder."

"Are you saying you're going to forget about me?" says the shadow of her dead friend from her schooldays, deep within her mind.

"I won't forget you!" says Michiru in response. "I won't ever forget. But I don't want to use you as an excuse to run away any more. I don't want to let myself think 'I'm useless without her' every time something bad happens."

Yuuji's painful lesson was difficult but necessary for Michiru to grow beyond that which was holding her back: he knew all too well that he couldn't "save" her himself, because that wouldn't achieve anything whatsoever.

"Human beings exist within their own private bubble of solitude," he explains. "Our pain and sadness can't be cured by gentle words. Offering gestures of sympathy can make you feel good about yourself, but for the recipient it's meaningless at best. People don't need a crutch or a saviour. They need to overcome their own suffering or find the strength to accept it. And when someone needs help getting to that point, I'm willing to lend a hand."

"The girl who shut herself up inside a box and waited for rescue is gone," he continues later. "Michiru's come to understand that she's the only one who can save herself. Of course, people can't live alone. We need the help of others. But what really matters is finding our own road — and the strength of will to walk it. Human beings don't have wings on their backs. We have no choice but to make our way forward on the two legs we were given. Life is just a long series of such small steps. There are plenty of things still undone, plenty of problems still unresolved, but that's inevitable. Anyway, wouldn't wrapping things up too neatly be a little boring?"

The conclusion to Michiru's story comes with her acceptance of her selves — plural. "I don't know how or why it happened," she says, "but there are two minds in this body. It doesn't belong to either of us alone." This isn't, by any means, complete closure to her issues — if anything, the fact that she's now able to carry on perfectly normal-seeming conversations with no-one but her other self proves to be troublesome for Yuuji in particular — but, as most people hopefully know, the best way to deal with an issue is to first of all accept that it's happening in the first place. Only from there can you move forward.

"The world isn't so complicated," muses Yuuji. "Walk forward and you'll find the future. Turn back and you'll find your memories. Cut off a piece and you've got a story. This is just one small part of one such tale."

Michiru's route was powerful and emotional; I'm not ashamed to admit that the chapter "Broken Biscuit" in particular had me in tears. More than the raw emotion, though, Michiru's situation proved to be a thought-provoking exploration of what it's like to live with feelings of inferiority and lack of faith in yourself.

Everyone develops different means of coping with these sorts of situations; Michiru made use of her "other" self. Whether said "other" self really was the product of cell memory theory or simply a creation of her mind, it ultimately helped her come to terms with a lot of things. And while I wouldn't describe Michiru as being completely "healthy" at the conclusion of her story, her acceptance of who she is, the dropping of her façade and her willingness to finally live for herself instead of the approval of others made for a fitting conclusion — and the beginning of a new chapter in both her own and Yuuji's lives.

Not everyone is able to make it that far; not everyone is able to "save" themselves, but, among other things, Michiru's route shows that you can find hope in the strangest of places, even when everything seems utterly shrouded in darkness. Words I should perhaps take to heart myself.

The post 2070: Michiru, the Girl in the Box appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"Personality starts off like a cube," says The Fruit of Grisaia's protagonist Yuuji in Yumiko's route. "When we're young, we clumsily bump our corners against other people in the form of childish conflicts. Eventually, our sharp edges are worn away to leave something more like a sphere. That's more or less what people are describing when they say someone's 'softened'.

"Moderate collisions with others help us mature. But when those first impacts are too strong, they can have a different effect: instead of losing our corners little by little, we splinter in strange, harsh ways, warping into crooked shapes. Once crooked, it's hard to become a sphere. Even as the people around them mellow, their sharpness only grows harsher, and everyone who approaches ends up getting hurt."

I immediately liked this analogy when it first scrolled across my screen following Yumiko's revelations about her past. And, not for the first time, I found the writing in a visual novel resonating with me somewhat. While I'm in no way comparing my life situation to the struggles Yuuji and Yumiko have to deal with in The Fruit of Grisaia — struggles which I won't discuss specifically here, for those who are interested in reading it and wanting to avoid spoilers — I could certainly relate to a lot of the sentiments involved.

Most recently, I've been becoming conscious of how I've "softened" somewhat in the last few… months, maybe? My own personal struggles over the last five years — and even earlier than that, to a lesser degree, if I'm completely honest — have certainly chipped away at my original "cube", and there have been more than a few crooked splinters here and there that make me into a not-exactly perfect specimen of normalcy. But then, who is "normal" anyway?

Some of those sharp edges feel like they're wearing away a little bit, though, after a long time. I contemplate my new part-time work in retail and realise that I'm actually quite enjoying interacting with other people, both colleagues and customers alike, even despite my long-standing struggle with social anxiety. I contemplate my fight against my once-constantly rising weight, and how I've scored a resounding victory over it so far by shedding just under five stone since February of this year. I can look in the mirror now and not hate myself; I can speak to other people now and not worry that they hate me.

In other areas, there are still sharp corners and splinters, though, preventing me from becoming that perfect "sphere". I still harbour a considerable degree of resentment towards people who have done unpleasant things or treated me unfairly in the past, and I just can't seem to let go of those feelings. There are nights when I can't get to sleep because my mind insists on replaying some of my most upsetting memories over and over again — sometimes with slight variations depicting how I wish I'd acted, sometimes unfolding exactly as they did in reality — and this makes it clear that I'm still rather more "crooked" than I'd like to be.

I don't know if I'll ever be that perfect "sphere"; by this point, I feel like I've "splintered in strange, harsh ways" so many times that it probably won't ever happen, but I can at least try to round off as many corners as I can and make the best of things, one day at a time.

The post 2068: Personality is Like a Cube appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Spoilers for not-quite-all of Yumiko's route of The Fruit of Grisaia ahead!

When we're first introduced to Sakaki Yumiko in the common route of The Fruit of Grisaia, it's clear that she is both troubled and likely to be trouble for Yuuji. When Yuuji first tries to introduce himself to her, she initially tries to ignore him, and subsequently tries to slap him when he persists. This eventually escalates into her lashing out at him with a box cutter whenever she sees him, a fact which Yuuji's fellow students just shrug off as being "something she does", because they've all been through it too. Yuuji, being a certified badass, shrugs off Yumiko's attacks without injury easily, and eventually they stop altogether, though she still proves herself to be a prickly individual who is generally unwilling to interact with others.

Except it's not that simple. Throughout the common route, Yumiko can often be found lurking on the periphery of the rest of the group's social activities; they're all aware of her and take care not to exclude her, but they also don't try to force her to participate in anything. It's clear that even if she doesn't show it on her face or through her behaviour, she finds comfort in being around people who care for her and are considerate of her feelings. Even the foul-mouthed Makina proves herself to be enormously perceptive of Yumiko's personality traits, accurately "reading her thoughts" in one particularly memorable scene.

In the common route, we're given a teaser of what has made Yumiko as withdrawn, sullen and prone to lashing out as she is — it's clearly to do with her father. Upon returning from a shopping trip to the town, a number of the group report a suspicious-looking black car outside the station, though those who have been at the school longer know that this is a sign that Yumiko's father is coming to inspect the school, which it seems he financed and had built. Yumiko, meanwhile, refuses to see her father, instead preferring to watch his cursory inspection of the school grounds from the dormitory rooftop; it's clear that he's not really inspecting anything, but is instead hoping that he might be able to get through to his daughter.

When Yumiko's route proper starts, we're given a bit more information about Yumiko's father, who has already been suggested to be a not very nice person. Indeed, early in Yumiko's route, we're given a third-person scene (i.e. protagonist Yuuji isn't present for it) in which we see Yuuji's handler JB and Yumiko's father discussing how they might get Yumiko to come back to her family and be prepared to take over the family railway business. Yumiko, until now, has been having none of this, of course, and so her father resorts to desperate measures, requesting that JB assign Yuuji to bodyguard duty for Yumiko and then arranging for her to be attacked and abducted. What he didn't count on is that Yuuji is more than capable of taking care of a few hired thugs, particularly as they had been specifically instructed not to actually harm Yumiko — at least initially.

Yumiko is initially resistant to Yuuji guarding her, insisting that "it's not as though [her] life's anything worth protecting", and that she "doesn't particularly mind if someone does come for [her]". The initial attack from her father's men puts her somewhat on her guard, though, and from that point on she is less resistant to Yuuji's efforts to protect her, and gradually softens towards him over time, eventually developing feelings for him because she's come to rely on his protection — a feeling of safety and security that she's never enjoyed before.

Yuuji, being a stubborn idiot prone to inadvertently annoying women with non-deliberate insensitive comments, of course, doesn't notice that Yumiko has started to feel something for him — or refuses to admit that this might be a possibility, at least — but sticks beside her "because it's [his] job". When JB pulls him off the case at the request of Yumiko's father, he is somewhat surprised to receive a direct request from Yumiko to continue working as her bodyguard in a private capacity.

On one excursion, the heavens open and Yuuji and Yumiko find themselves trapped under a bridge in a torrential downpour. Something doesn't seem right about Yumiko's behaviour to Yuuji, and it's not long before things come to a head; a thunderclap and flash of lightning absolutely terrify Yumiko, who crumples into Yuuji's arms in an uncharacteristic display of weakness, fragility and reliance on others. Having already come this far in showing her fragile side to Yuuji, she then relates the story of how she came to be the person she is today, and what she is doing at the mysterious school.

Yumiko's mother was the daughter of a pair of struggling business owners. She married into the Sakaki family primarily for financial and political reasons, and bore Yumiko as the family's only child. Being a girl, Yumiko was an immediate disappointment to the family, who had been hoping for a son and heir apparent, but Yumiko's mother was much too weak to survive another pregnancy, and eventually succumbed to a debilitating psychological disorder that saw her and Yumiko retreat back to the countryside and her family home. She was hospitalised, and Yumiko was left to live with her grandparents, who resented her existence because she was a symbol of their failing business, and how they wouldn't be able to rely on the support of the Sakaki family forever.

Yumiko tried to stay positive amid this bleak situation, but the youthful joy she once had at the simple sight of a passing dog eventually gave way to bitterness and resentment. Her only outlet was her neighbour, who had formerly been employed by her grandparents as a servant, but now continued to help them out for free. Yumiko was the only one to show her gratitude, and she resented her grandparents for taking advantage of her right up until her death — a feeling shared by her daughter and son-in-law.

Her hospitalised mother gradually comes to show an improvement, eventually reaching a point where it looks like she's going to be discharged from hospital, but suffers a catastrophic relapse upon hearing the news that her husband — Yumiko's father — had taken a mistress in her absence, and said mistress had borne him a son.

A year passes, and Yumiko's bitterness grows, since her mother had relapsed so severely that she couldn't even remember anything about her family. She had no-one to rely on, no-one to talk to, no friends, which is why when her father's aides come to collect her from her grandparents' house — bearing the offer "if you let me have Yumiko back, I'll continue supporting your family and your business" — she jumps at the opportunity.

Initially resenting her father for the anguish he caused her and her mother, Yumiko eventually softens towards him as he appears to be making a genuine effort to reconnect with his daughter. It eventually transpires that he is only doing this because his illegitimate son died and his mistress abandoned him shortly afterwards, leaving Yumiko once again as the only potential heir to his business. Feeling a familiar, growing sense of rage at this, Yumiko is in a fragile mental state and is pushed over the edge when she overhears one of her classmates speaking untruths about her.

Prior to this, she had taken to expressing her anger through destruction. "The clicking of the blade emerging from its sheath," she relates. "The sound of something once whole being severed apart. Those had become calming sounds to me. How wonderful would it be if I could slice away my femininity with a single box cutter? How wonderful would it be if I could sever my fate with the touch of a blade? How wonderful would it be if one movement of my hand could cut me free of all the troubles that coiled around me and choked the air from my lungs?"

The first thing she destroys is her long, black hair; an attempt to "slice away her femininity" and look more like a boy — a largely successful effort, though one that causes people to shy away from her even more than normal. Later, she destroys her artwork and the diary in which she had written down all the growing positive thoughts she had been feeling as she had mistakenly thought her father truly loved her.

And ultimately, the event which sees her totally severing her ties to her old life: she stabs her classmate, whom she had previously thought was a friend, but who had turned out to be just as much of a turncoat as everyone else in her life.

Yumiko escaped a criminal conviction for her violent outburst, because money can make anything go away, and her father knew that very well indeed. Knowing that the situation couldn't continue in the way it had been, however, he offloads her onto Mihama Academy, where she meets Yuuji, and her life undergoes some considerable changes once again.

When Yuuji ends up injured in the line of duty protecting her, Yumiko is wracked with guilt, not just at the trouble she's embroiled Yuuji in, but at how much she's hurt her other classmates too. This guilt eventually manifests itself in her deliberately allowing herself to be taken away by her fathers men and capitulating to whatever demands he might have — which turn out to be her attendance at a school in America, far away from anywhere she could possibly become a problem.

Yumiko's father doesn't count on Yuuji's stubbornness, though; spurred into action by a text message from Yumiko apologising for a situation that is in no way her fault, he eventually rescues her following a dramatic chase, and the two of them begin a life on the run, during which period they both eventually manage to admit their feelings for one another — though it takes Yumiko essentially sexually assaulting Yuuji in the middle of the night to spur the latter into action and contemplate that she might actually possibly maybe be interested in him.

Yumiko and Yuuji making love for the first time — and, for that matter, the subsequent time, during which she admits that she "doesn't dislike" playing a submissive, masochistic role — is a turning point for Yumiko in particular, and to a lesser extent for Yuuji. Yuuji reveals that he has some sexual experience thanks to sex workers that were laid on for him in a previous assignment, but comes to realise that sexual intimacy with someone you truly care about is on a whole other level of pleasure. Yumiko, meanwhile, allows this ultimate expression of intimacy as a means of demonstrating that she trusts Yuuji absolutely; the pair of them continually push the boundaries with each other to see how far they will each go, and it turns out that they both feel absolutely comfortable with one another after all the time they have spent together.

Yumiko's growth is pretty touching to see, but tragic at the same time. On more than one occasion, she ponders whether it's acceptable for her to be happy, or whether she "deserves" it. Yuuji has to admonish her several times for apologising when it's not necessary, though she does the same for him too; eventually the two settle into a pattern of gratitude for one another, neither of them quite sure how to deal with having been alone for so long and now having another person to take into consideration.

I haven't quite finished Yumiko's route as yet, but I'm excited to see how it concludes. There's been plenty of drama and touching, emotional moments so far, and the whole thing is clearly building towards what I hope will be a satisfying final confrontation with her father. I'll just have to wait and see how that pans out!

The post 2067: Yumiko appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've finally reached the end of the rather lengthy common route in The Fruit of Grisaia, and so it's on to the unique routes for each of the main cast members. I've decided to explore them in the order Yumiko > Michiru > Sachi > Makina > Amane so as to save my favourite heroine for last, but this also apparently works out quite well narrative-wise, since Makina and Amane's routes sound as if they are more important with regard to the series' overall continuity.

I've already started on Yumiko's route, but haven't read enough to be able to comment on it with any particular authority as yet, so I will save that for another time. Instead, I wanted to reflect a little on the common route, since it was very enjoyable in its own right.

The Fruit of Grisaia's common route is actually more of a collection of short stories loosely organised into chronological order to allow for references to past events and a certain degree of character growth as the chapters proceed. By the time you reach the decision points that determine which unique route you'll be proceeding down, you'll have a pretty firm understanding of all the characters on at least a superficial level, plus astute observers will have picked up a few hints as to what their own personal stories will be all about.

Aside from the overall development, though, each chapter of Grisaia is pretty much a self-contained story in its own right. They open with protagonist Yuuji delivering some philosophical narration about the situation, then the scene itself unfolding, then Yuuji wrapping things up with some conclusions from his own perspective. It's a structure that works well, and it keeps things moving along; none of the chapters feel like they particularly drag, even though there's not a lot of "action" in the whole common route, and the tone bounces around between comedic, romantic, dramatic and tragic between different chapters, giving you a chance to see all of the characters respond to various situations and understand them as people rather than archetypes.

And that's quite a key point, as I've mentioned in previous posts on the subject: none of the characters in Grisaia quite conform to the stereotypes you're clearly supposed to think of when you first see them. Amane's onee-san act is stymied by her Kansai coarseness; Makina's loli appearance belies a foul mouth that would make the dirtiest of dirty old men blush; Sachi's compliant nature and habitually calm tone of voice makes it all the more surprising when she comes out with a surprisingly cutting remark; Michiru is fully aware of the fact that her tsundere personality is a deliberate act, as is everyone else; and Yumiko… well, of the lot of them, she, so far, appears to have so far been the one who conforms most to her stereotype, but she's also the character whom Yuuji has had the most difficulty connecting, so I don't doubt we'll learn more about her in her unique route.

Peppered throughout the common route's short stories are little hints and clues about the cast's histories, though nothing is quite made explicit until towards the end of the common route, and even then there are still a lot of mysteries. Who is Yuuji, for example? What is his mysterious "job" that he keeps referring to? What is his connection with the school and its principal? Yuuji represents probably the most intriguing mystery of the lot, but the other cast members all clearly have their own skeletons in the closet, too.

But because those skeletons are all rather personal to the individual characters, they're left to be explored in their personal routes, leaving the common route free to let its hair down a bit and indulge in some light-heartedness such as the obligatory "beach episode" (which features a hilariously filthy scene between Sachi and Michiru) as well as everyday happenings around the school that give us an ideal of who these characters are and how they relate to one another. It's a close-knit bunch that starts to feel rather like family after a while — an observation that several characters comment on a few times.

So far, then, the common route has thoroughly enraptured me in the world of The Fruit of Grisaia and smitten me with its characters — all of them, too, which is nice; usually in this sort of setup there's at least one cast member that, even if I don't actively dislike them, I feel as if I like less than the others — and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how their stories unfold. And, from there, the fact that there are two sequels to look forward to at some point down the road makes me very happy indeed.

The post 2066: Reflections on Grisaia's Common Route appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In an effort to steer away from three solid days of ranting about games journalism, I asked my followers on Twitter for some suggestions of things to write about, and got a few nice ideas, so I'll be making use of those over the next few days.

I thought I'd start with a request from my friend Mr Michael Cunningham, who wanted to hear a bit more about The Fruit of Grisaia, the visual novel I'm currently reading, and which I gave some first impressions of here.

So far, I believe I'm still in the "common" route of Grisaia, since I've only made a single choice so far, and that didn't come until after a considerable number of hours of reading. The lack of interaction hasn't been a problem, though; the early hours of Grisaia are clearly intended as a means of helping you get to know the characters and the context in which they find themselves, and the distinctly leisurely pace at which the early hours of your typical visual novel such as Grisaia unfolds allows it to dangle some truly tantalising mysteries in front of you, mostly with regard to the backgrounds of the characters and what has actually brought them all together.

Even the basic concept of Grisaia is still a slight mystery to me at this juncture. Although the early hours have been relatively typical high school slice-of-life so far, there's clearly something more going on. From the protagonist's frequent references to his mysterious "job" and use of military terminology and tactics to the unpredictable, trope-subverting nature of all the heroines, nothing seems quite "right" in Grisaia's world, and that's what makes it so intriguing. The fact that the school which they all attend has no-one but them in it — making for a student body of just six people — is perhaps the biggest mystery: why are they all there? What has pulled them out of "normal" life? What is the school for?

Amane initially appears to be the most "normal" of the cast. She likes to play the role of the older sister, and does so with great enthusiasm, particularly when it comes to protagonist Yuuji. Yuuji is initially resistant to her advances but eventually allows her to indulge a little for the sake of having a marginally quieter life, because even when she's getting what she wants, Amane is forthright, frank, open and honest about everything — arguably to a fault.

She's also seemingly very much at ease with herself as a woman, happily stripping off and getting changed in front of other people (including Yuuji) and wearing clothes that emphasise her curves. She's also rather sexually aggressive towards Yuuji even as they're first getting to know one another, often grabbing him and pressing herself against him, and on one memorable occasion, sneaking into his room while she thinks he's out and inhaling his scent from his clothes and his bed; Yuuji catches her just before she starts masturbating.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Amane yet. I certainly like her a great deal, but I have a feeling that her forthrightness may, in fact, be compensating for something. Exactly what, I couldn't say just yet, but I'm pretty convinced that there is more to Amane than meets the eye.

Makina is brilliant. Initially presented as the dimwitted loli of the group, it takes a little time for Makina to take to Yuuji, but they eventually bond, much to the surprise of Amane, from whom Makina is otherwise almost inseparable. It transpires that Makina is far less stupid than she likes to make out, and that she may well be putting on an act for her own mysterious reasons.

This doesn't mean that she's entirely "normal", though. Her impressive ability to take mental photographs of books she's reading and instantly recall information from them — albeit only in black and white — reminds Yuuji of his deceased sister, who had a similar ability. Perhaps not coincidentally, Makina quickly starts calling Yuuji "Onii-chan", despite his resistance; much like he softens towards Amane somewhat, so too does he eventually just let Makina continue along in her own bizarre little world.

Perhaps the most amusing and intriguing thing about Makina is the way she talks. Far from being stereotypically cute and shy, Makina is foul-mouthed and frequently comes out with things you'd expect a dirty old man to say. Amane occasionally admonishes her for this, but since she occasionally slips into her own Kansai region colloquialisms, she doesn't really have a leg to stand on in this instance.

Again, I wouldn't like to conjecture what brought Makina to Mihama Academy in the first place, but it's clear that something traumatic happened in her past; so far, however, the conversation has always been steered away from it any time it looks like getting into dangerous territory.

In contrast to Makina's front of stupidity, Michiru actually does appear to be pretty dimwitted. Obsessed with the tsundere character trope to a fault, Michiru deliberately tries to act as stereotypical as possible, but in the process frequently breaks character in order to seek the approval of others — and, to a certain degree, herself — on how well she's doing at playing the spoiled princess.

In keeping with the other characters, though, there's seemingly a lot more to Michiru than meets the eye. As time progresses, whenever she is alone with Yuuji, she seems to want to open up to him somewhat. In some instances, she drops the tsundere act completely and attempts to have a serious conversation, though her inability to articulate herself in anything more than the most simple terms sometimes means she finds it challenging to get across quite what she wants to say.

Michiru is clearly struggling with depression — perhaps as a result of a condition or illness she has. Her adoption of the tsundere personality is a coping mechanism designed to hide any outward signs of her pain and suffering; by being deliberately aggressive and contrary about everything, she puts up a formidable barrier around the truth that lies in her heart, though, of course, I'm sure by the end of her own narrative route we'll get to the bottom of exactly what is bothering her so much. She is the butt of a considerable number of jokes throughout the common route, but I have the distinct feeling she's going to end up being one of the most sympathetic characters.

Sachi (right) is something of an enigma. Sweet, innocent and largely emotionless to a fault, something in Sachi's past has caused her to become someone who takes everything she hears absolutely literally. This means that a joke about how she should wear a maid costume all the time because of all the hard work she does for others means that she now wears a maid costume whenever she's not in her school uniform; it means that someone requesting "the freshest milk possible" sees her catching a train out to the countryside to go and milk a cow.

Sachi's initial impression is that she's a thoroughly nice and considerate person, but there's something else at work. Occasionally — particularly when she's dealing with Michiru — some uncharacteristically hurtful, acidic comments will come out of her mouth. There's evidently some bitterness festering beneath the surface, though for the most part, she simply refuses to talk about it and quickly puts her façade of being the perfect maid back up.

The other thing about Sachi is that her tendency to take things literally means that she has absolutely no sense of shame or propriety whatsoever. When Yuuji jokes with her about the power a glimpse of lingerie has over men, she turns up to school the next day in nothing but lacy undies, stockings and suspenders. When she and Yuuji are cleaning the dormitory bathroom together, she falls over and gets her maid costume wet, then subsequently decides that the appropriate thing to do — after another joke from Yuuji — is to take it off, attach it to her mop ("to cover more ground") and continue the rest of the cleaning job in her underwear. I anticipate that this aspect of her character in particular will cause more than a few awkward situations by the conclusion.

Finally, Yumiko is the most obviously fucked up of the main cast. Initially refusing to even speak to Yuuji, instead preferring to first of all slap him when he approaches her, and subsequently attack him with a box cutter at every opportunity, the barriers around Yumiko's heart are nigh-impenetrable, it seems, but Yuuji's ability to shrug most awkward situations off — perhaps due to his own background, which he hints at regularly throughout the common route without explicitly explaining it — means that he takes her violence and anger in his stride. He eventually manages to get through to her enough to be able to speak to her and subsequently have an honest conversation with her, even spending some time with her alone without her trying to attack him.

Yumiko's basic character trope is that of the perpetually grumpy "student council president" type, but rather than being a blushing, awkward individual beneath the façade, it's clear that her outward grumpiness is a sign of outright rage and bitterness bubbling beneath the surface. She is, so far as I've read at least, the biggest mystery among the main cast — both to me and to the rest of the cast, too. She keeps herself to herself, and no-one seems to know anything about her history. No-one even seems to know where she's going or what she's doing at the weekends when she sneaks out of the dormitory in the early hours of the morning carrying a tote bag full of "wooden objects". I'm looking forward to finding out more about her.

That's what I know so far, then. They're an interesting bunch of characters, to be sure, and I'm really looking forward to each of their routes to discover exactly what makes them tick and what has brought them to the strange circumstances in which they find themselves. I sense it's going to be a long road to find out, but up until this point, it's been a compelling and intriguing ride with a ton of tantalisingly unanswered questions.

Number one visual novel of all time? I couldn't say with confidence as yet. But it's certainly one of the most immediately compelling, well-written — and well-localised — ones I've read for quite some time, and if you have the slightest interest in the medium, I'd encourage you to support it.

The post 2060: A Fruitful Relationship: More Grisaia Impressions appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.