のんのびより (Non Non Biyori)

 

 

Non Non Biyori follow the idyllic lives of Hotaru, Komari, Natsumi, and Renge, a group of friends aged 7 to 14 and their little adventures in the rural paradise of Asahigaoka. The show is very episodic in nature and you can pretty much watch in any order you like. I think it’s very hard to add anything new when talking about this, for two reasons. First, everybody already watched this. Second, there’s not that much to talk about. It’s a very well established formula at this point. A group of sweet, endearing characters living the best time of their lives in the Japanese countryside. Non Non is just better than most at it. The plots are not what makes this special though. You’ll go through all the same stuff; fireworks, melon and a hot summer, a beach episode, a school festival episode and so forth. What makes it better than most are the characters, they felt more unique and realized than most entities populating Iyashikeis and CGDCT I’ve seen.

I particularly liked two characters. First would be Komari, one of the Koshigaya sisters. I enjoyed how she encapsulated the ideas children have about being a grown up. Liking bitter foods, reading fashion magazines, liking certain types of music and dressing up. The funny part is she’s actually going through the process of becoming an actual adult through the conflicts with her slacker sister. She finds herself in a position of responsibility at her home, having to perform domestic tasks and helping her sister to not get too unhinged and mediating between her and their mother. It’s interesting how she never realizes those things are what is turning her into an adult, perhaps the most adult, responsible person in her group but since she has an idealized idea of what’s about she gets lost in things like having a phone or using a certain type of clothing. The way the internal conflict of this character is handled is one of the best parts of this show in my opinion and what I enjoyed the most in it.

The other character I enjoyed following around is Kaede, the candy shop owner. Now, this is a character more or less on the fringe of this whole thing. First, she’s the only one who has financial problems, not exactly an iyashikei thing to have in there. It’s a bit of a mystery how she manages to have any money at all. The town is obviously dying, there’s simply not enough kids in there to sustain her business. At one point she agrees to close shop for an entire day for 30 bucks, so times are certainly dire. She also has very little business sense since we can safely infer the families living there need to go to the next town to get basic supplies. She could definitely make more things available at her shop so townsfolk would stop having to do groceries in another town. It seems this candy shop is a very well established business and it’s been there since forever. I think she’s living on some inheritance or something, and is keeping this shop out of some nostalgia or filial piety, that’s the conclusion I got after watching two seasons of this show. The other thing I like about her is her position as observer, this is basically a trope you usually have when the show is centered around children growing up. You’ll have adults around whose life gets a little bit sweeter by watching the whole process and Kaede is pretty much one of those. It helps to see the impact the main characters have on the people around them, which in turn makes them more interesting to watch.

Worth a watch if you like the genre. Art and music are of high quality and add a lot to the show.

ハッピードリームシンドローム

 

It's that time again I come here and tell you this is a beautiful game. You might start to assume I will praise any game I play but that's not true. What happens is I play through several VNs before committing to one. I would have played maybe 10 to 20 min of 4 or 5 titles before finding one I feel like reading all the way to the end and of course I'll review only those that I actually read all the way through. This is the latest one, Happy Dream Syndrome. This is the type of game that makes me wonder why nobody played it and most importantly, why there are so many boring plots for anime each season when they have stories like this lying around the internet. I don't get it. The other 4 guys who played this on yt all loved it and it's 5 stars on novelgame.

The art for this is pretty good. It has its own style going for it and it makes the characters very memorable. It doesn't look like a VN backed by a professional studio of course, but it is still pretty good and it has more charm and strength than a lot of generic 'highly professional' illustrations I see out there on VNs. The music is composed of 3 piano medleys. Not the best but they really work for this game. I had some problems with the gameplay though. Game has a couple of bugs and at least for me it's broken on Firefox. About 2 hours in there's a small animation scene and it doesn't matter what I try, I can't make the clip to load and run on firefox. Had to switch to Chrome and redo a huge portion of the game to get where I was. About 15 minutes of skipping. Free games though, you can't really complain. Lots of routes to take here. In fact I ended up cheating and looking up how to get one of the endings, then I regretted doing it because it was really obvious and the only thing I hadn't tried, despite being obvious.

The story begins with a trope I really like and I think everyone who played a lot of rpgmaker games back in its heyday have a soft spot for it as well. The protagonist wakes up with no idea who he is or where he's at. He lost all memory of his past and it's on the same level of wisdom about the world he's in as we the players starting this game for the first time. Protagonist memory loss must be the single most popular trope for RPG Maker games for the first decade of the 2000s for sure and here we have it, too.

This guy wakes up in a hospital bed full of bruises everywhere. He has no idea what happened. Hospital seems empty so he decides to wander around until finding a nurse sleeping in another room. She explains he was found in the woods nearby and this is a psychiatric sort of hospital. Sort of, because this takes a lot of turns. As you interact with the other patients, things begin to make less sense until it begins to make more sense and then it becomes a matter of who to trust and the it goes all over the place. It's really good. This game also introduced me to something I really like but didn't know until now and that is female characters too old to care for stuffed animals but still have a strong attachment to them for some tragic reason. It hits some really specific commiseration trigger in my brain, hard to explain.

I guess I'll try to give you a not nearly complete run of the whole mystery, in a single paragraph. Spoilers, don't read this if you plan to play this game for yourself.

Toi-kun wakes up in a hospital with memory loss. He wanders around, and finds the hospital only has 3 patients. Asahi, Aki and Leo, a nurse named Meru and a doctor named... Doctor. They're all really, REALLY damaged people mentally though of course you don't know this from the start. Asahi is the first patient you meet and 'solve'. She lost her one and only friend, a stuffed animal toy shark named Garo. I won't go through all her story but basically her problem is she's a complete anti-social individual incapable of being close to anyone but her toy Garo. You find the toy on the same day she's leaving the hospital. You part ways promising to be friends. She lets go of Garo before leaving, which is very weird, it's almost like she is brainwashed. Then you meet another damaged patient, Aki. Aki is only there for the money as he's taking part in the happy pill experiment... but not really, he's just a 'regularly' super damaged person and is coping by pretending he's there by his own volition. I won't go through his story but it involves being poor and having to work from a very young age to support his siblings, tragic stuff. He also ends up being released. Lastly you have Leo, a really nice guy you find in the library. He seems very smart and calm but in reality he has bouts of violent behavior and ends up killing a cat close to the mid-end of the game to great dramatic effect. All these people suspect each other and the actual goals of the treatment they're receiving, and they also suspect the medical staff, and are investigating the hospital by snooping around, so you get caught up not knowing who to trust or not to trust. On top of all this, you're trying to figure it out what is going on with your memory and trying to make sense of what happened and who you're and the staff doesn't seem to care or be able to help. The choices available to you reflect this and it makes for very interesting unraveling. I'm skipping hours of dialogue, but the whole thing makes for a great mystery. Leo's story is one of domestic violence. He and his sister ran away from home but he soon realizes he's just as violent and dangerous as his dad and several things leads him to end up in this hospital. So when you go through all these stories and several flashbacks that you end up connecting by the end, you get to go outside (you were forbidden to do so) and the truth is revealed. As far as your memory wipe, the fact is you killed your mother during one of her psychotic episodes. She is obsessed with her son and won't allow him to do anything because she's afraid he'll leave her too, just like dad did. It's a really sick relationship that ends up with Toi stabbing her in the stomach. Then through some more shenanigans you end up in the hospital that turns out it's not a hospital at all. This is actually a religious cult funded on some weird idea about a God that grants hypnotic powers to a chosen few. These powers are real but it's really hard to find the right people that can open the third eye, so they're basically kidnapping youngsters to test their potential. This is all a secret of course, so they basically have to dispose of everyone who doesn't make it, which means all the other patients you met are probably dead. If you make all the right choices and manage to survive all this crazy rodeo, you find out Meru is conducting all these under orders and she has those hypnotic power herself. You convince her she can leave all this behind and come with you. The end. Also Doctor gets hit at the back of the head and is probably left to bleed to death in the woods. There are really no happy endings here, this is all really tragic but it's also really good and you should play it if you can.

https://novelgame.jp/games/show/4922?fes=1

You can watch someone else playing it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvPXLuwG5UM&list=PL0DEAPIYMmKG1396U8wJU4C06Dnby0yFo

約束の赤い折り紙を

 

As far as I'm aware Yakusoku no Akai Origami is the very first game by Hitotokinoyume, a team of 3 guys. They also released this mostly same game for mobile with room escape elements. I played the PC, VN version. I'm very impressed with their first attempt. Everything is solid and the story is pretty good. There are also some player friendly choices with the design I would love to see in all VNs, like highlighting the routes I already took so I don't have to reload when making a mistake, and showing me the paths I didn't take to reach a particular ending. Not many free stuff out there that will take the trouble to implement those things, it helps a lot. Everything else other than the plot is average though. Average art, average music. The characters do look a little bit uninspired but the backgrounds held my interest as they look like from an old point and click game but in a Japanese setting, it was interesting.

The plot is the main reason why you would play this. Religion plays a major part in the story. It's interesting to see a more 'religious-centric' view on Japanese spirituality. Usually in games and anime you have a very fantastic, mythological approach where you actually see the Gods and all the mythological creatures roaming around and interacting with humans. In such cases, there's no room for an exploration of religious behavior or religious belief, because there's no room for skepticism or thinking critically about religion. The Gods are right there! The Kappas roam the mountains. If a miku is doing something wrong, she just needs to ask the God she's serving and he or she is right there to respond, problem solved. When Mythology is a given like this, it's almost not a religion as a belief system, it's right in front of you. There are no doubts about it. Here though we have a more realistic view. Lots of conflict about belief and rituals and whatnot. It would be interesting to see more games taking this approach, I think it's a fairly unexplored territory, especially if you compare it with the more fantasy-based approach to Shinto and Japanese mythology that is absolutely everywhere in JP media.

I want to say this takes place at the beginning of the Meiji era based on some objects you can see around, but it might be a little later than that since the entire thing happens in a very tiny, isolated village. You have a very influential family, the Utsumi, having to deal with the task of giving thanks to the God protector of the place. Right away there's all sorts of weird things happening. You follow a girl called Tada, as she's trying to figure out all the weird things that start to happen to her on her 16th birthday. Voices whispering in the night, visions of a little girl inside the temple strangling an old man and little pieces of origami paper she keeps finding in the oddest places. As she goes back and forth asking people around about the past of the village and the upcoming festival, the plot unravels.

There's also point and click elements to find clues and objects that unlock more of the story. I'm not fond of that type of stuff in the middle of a VN but all those sections are simple enough and nicely spaced so it never gets annoying. It's a rather long one for a free title but it's worth a read.

https://novelgame.jp/games/show/6509
You can also watch it, some fairly talkative guy played it in 4 parts. Fair warning though, he's very enthusiastic about his own voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7mk813n2hg