YU-NO

[big bad birtha]

The full title of this is YU-NO – The Girl that Chants Love at the Edge of the World.

Description blatantly stolen from vndb:
Takuya Arima is a young student whose father, a historian who has conducted various researches, disappeared recently. During a summer vacation Takuya receives a peculiar package from his missing father, along with a letter containing information about the existence of various parallel worlds. At first Takuya doesn’t take it seriously, but soon he realizes that he possesses a device that allows him to travel to alternate dimensions. Is his father alive, after all? If so, where is he?

I think I'm gonna keep getting pestered to make this thread until I do so, so here's a thread about a visual novel Doppel and I decided to start playing. I've played a few hours into it, but not all of the details of the story has sunk in yet. So far, this seems to be a more freestyle 999 than anything. I haven't played much of 999, but that's the vibe I get from this. If I'm wrong, I don't give a shit.

_________________________________________

I guess as far as a status update goes. Takuya found the all of the school nurse's clothes in the nurse's office, but the school nurse was nowhere to be seen. After that, Ojousama came up to him and took all of her clothes (suspicious). Takuya overheard Mr. Beard and Reporter lady having an obviously suspicious conversation while he was waiting for the teacher/assistant that has the hots for him. After that was a long romantic chat with a teacher. After that, I ran into Ojousama and Mr. Derp walking together from the beach to investigate the accidents that happened at the construction site. I think I could've caught them doing naughty things if I went to the beach rather than fill my promise with the teacher to meet up, but oh well. I didn't want to see how kids with down syndrome were made anyway.

I did get quite a bit of information about Mr. Beard. Apparently, he has changed recently, and has become obsessed with research. As for what the trigger is, or why he's researching so obsessively, I'm still not sure, but he's probably not the bad guy he's been made out to be.

I think me and Doppel are on two completely different event routes. Anyway, this is what happened with me. I'm still on low burner as far as thinking about stuff goes, so I won't actually put some thought into the main mysteries for a while. Most of my events have been more character development/insight than anything.

[Talon87]

This is the game I apparently spoiled for Doppel by Googling for it, finding an AnimeNewsNetwork hit, reading the summary about the OAV, and posting it in an AIM chat, remarking, "LOL, surely this can't be the YU-NO you speak of! " And I really didn't think it was, either. So when Doppel was like, "It is! And I didn't know any of those details! Aaaah! Aaaah! Spoilers! My eyes! @_@", I felt really bad. ^^; But seriously: I had no idea that the game he was talking about was so ancient! If I had known, I might have realized that (in its heyday) it was so popular that it got an eroanime adaptation!

That's pretty interesting if the game allows for such divergent paths so early on in the game that you and Doppel are already on wildly different paths with very different focuses and events. Do you have any idea whether the True End can be had on the first playthrough? Or if there even is one ending which is considered the True End above all the others?

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by big bad birtha

After that, Ojousama came up to him and took all of her clothes (suspicious).

WHAT?

That's going to happen?! XD

Originally Posted by Talon87

That's pretty interesting if the game allows for such divergent paths so early on in the game that you and Doppel are already on wildly different paths with very different focuses and events. Do you have any idea whether the True End can be had on the first playthrough? Or if there even is one ending which is considered the True End above all the others?

Um, I have no idea.

The game system is pretty weird. Basically, after the prologue, you end up in a parallel universe, and the game treats jumping between save points like jumping between parallel worlds, made possible by this machine you have.

Once you are in the first parallel world, you proceed in a series of Y splits, and each encounter with a person puts you in a different line. Items you acquire travel with you across save points, but knowledge doesn't. Weirdly. I think the key is figuring out where people are at certain points in time, and how you interact with them affects them.

For example, in my game, which I assume is the Kanna route, Kanna is sick and needs medicine. Obviously I don't have medicine, but Takuya talked about giving medicine to his mother frequently earlier in the game. So right now, I'm exploring different paths to try and find that medicine, then I'll travel back to the Kanna scene and give it to her.

To show how wildly divergent this game is, here's my game path versus BBB's as of last night:

DCD: http://i52.tinypic.com/zsvck1.png
BBB: http://i53.tinypic.com/315j4tl.png

[Talon87]

Oh wow: it's actually kind enough to tell you with a visual aid. Cute.

[big bad birtha]

Status update time!

I finished my first run through, which I believe is the Mr. Beard/Nurse/Secretary path, or basically the story behind those three. The path didn't conclude itself, so I'm pretty sure all the paths diverge after they're complete. I did find out what was behind the curse in the mansion, the identity of the biker lady, and some information on Mr. Beard. As far as information on the whole time reversing thing, nothing.

I decided I'd hit Kanna's path next, since she seems to be involved in what's going on with Takuya. So far it's just been a "She's a slut!" path. I stopped after picking up some medicine for her.

[Doppleganger]

This is possibly the most "adult" title I've ever played. And I've seen a lot of eroge. It leaves me uncomfortable in many ways, but it's also refreshing in a sense.

I don't know how to properly describe it without calling it "adult" or "mature", and it has more to do with the content than the nudity. There was an implied upcoming Oedipal Complex in the first scene. Takuya's dad married a girl 10 years older than Takuya, who was also his student, and openly discusses the sexual acts he's going to have (forbidden fruit - a teacher and student!) in front of his son at dinner, coming close to teasing his son that he, an old man has this hot young bang buddy and he the son who is more appropriate for her doesn't get her.

Then there's this girl with a pure soul and an innocent crush on Takuya catching him in the act of having depression sex with his teacher. The act scares Takuya but turns on the teacher. Not knowing what else to do, the student confesses to the teacher that she loved Takuya. The teacher and Takuya then mock her feelings privately.

Characters lust after married men/women and try to pursue widows after their husbands are MIA. I know this happens in the real world, but seeing every possible fudged up twist happen in this one small community web is un-settling.

This game is about as far out of my happy zone as I can possibly go, all that's missing is gang rape an incest for me to feel outright anxious to continue. Thankfully, the main character and his minion are affable and entertaining, and the characters not terribly boring/bland thanks to the voice acting.

But I feel particularly unclean playing this. It's penetrated past my penumbras. It's almost like...I'm playing it naked.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Doppleganger

Characters lust after married men/women and try to pursue widows after their husbands are MIA. I know this happens in the real world, but seeing every possible fudged up twist happen in this one small community web is un-settling.

You must really not be a fan of netorare (wife-stealing) hentai then.

[Doppleganger]

NTR?

There was NTR in Sengoku Rance but it didn't bug me nearly as much as this title does. In Rance, the seriousness was diluted by the general silliness and comedy. Likewise, Takuya's apathy and crisp wit dull the reality that the relationships in this story are messy, and IRL I would probably go insane. If one were to strip away the humour and greater mystery and fantastical/sci-fi elements of this story and just leave the character web, I would call it a travesty or train-wreck.

I have almost little to no emotional investment in these characters but I'm already upset with them. There's a kind of petty, childish malice purveying these characters and a total disregard for social responsibility.

It's weird. In a sense, the character behaviour is more believable than in other VNs like the pure souls in G-Senjou or Muv-Luv, but the characters also feel a low more shallow/hollow.

In any matter, I should probably ignore the character development and just try to get as much tail as possible. This clearly isn't a character story and isn't aspiring to be one, so if I dwell too much on things I'll never get finished. I'm already behind BBB, though I've gone through 75% of both routes he's on, but I haven't finished them.

[big bad birtha]

For the most part, this VN takes a more realistic approach to the characters. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. You don't get any annoying archetypes, and everything the characters do is believable, which is certainly a plus. However, for those of us who enjoy stuff with more colorful characters, realistic characters like the ones in this title are shallow and boring (Doppel and I have watched Heartcatch Precure afterall!).

When I saw how the characters in this title acted, I expected quite a bit of NTR. I thought CUYA MOONRAITO! was doing Mr. Old Balls. I am a bit frustrated she's doing that annoying coworker though. I've tried to use the wooden sword on him countless times. Despite how they made it look like Ojousama had a "pure soul", I'm still pretty sure she's doing Mr. Derp.

God I really need to remember the characters' names.

[Doppleganger]

I don't know if this is realistic anymore. I'm about to finish my first route, though I've made significant progress in all the others due to my back-tracking, and I'm quite distressed by how there isn't a single pure soul in this entire title. It looks like everyone is filthy, conniving and adulterous, to the point of there being a bit of an irony in how the most horny guy of all, Takuya, seems to be the most loyal/faithful. Though that's not saying much.

This is getting School Days // Yosunga no Sora level repulsive. Moreover, the game substitutes repetitiveness for "character development". It's skull-fudgingly-painful to watch Takuya ask people obvious things and they not fess up, thus pushing the matter off to a later encounter. The level of interactivity in this title is open enough to be frustrating (in how one has to click on an exact sequence of things, logical or not, before being able to leave) yet restrictive enough to feel claustrophobic (there's usually only one solution to a scene). I feel like I have less control over the story than in a more linear novel.

[Doppleganger]

I feel sick.

It's probably just me, but Takuya does some vile stuff sometimes. I've come across the revelation that any female seems like a fair target for him in this story. There was one notable exception, but nothing as painfully sinful as this.

The person with the purest soul in YU-NO might just be me!

[Doppleganger]

Hooray, I've finished this crack!

YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the edge of the world.

Rating: 8.4 (8/10 vndb)

Brief -

YU-NO is a critically acclaimed VN, heralded as one of the true classics. It has an insanely high rating on erogamescape, and is widely praised by the big wigs of the English speaking VN community. But does this story about transcending space hold up against time?

???

YES-NO.

There isn't an easy answer, a lot goes into this VN and all of it needs to be distilled. Where to start? I think I'll go from most unique, to least unique, as that ordering also corresponds to what I liked most, and disliked most.

Gameplay

Eh? Gameplay in a VN? Isn't that like an oxymoron? Well...yes, in a modern sense.

In the same way that YU-NO's plot makes use of lost technology, its engine is technically archaic but remains unique in that few if any modern VNs use its ideas. The system is designed to reduce "Blick Winkel" interference in the game. That is, in RPGs, the player has access to stat information the characters do not, so the immersion is broken somewhat by the player acting as him/herself along with the character.

YU-NO basically integrates the save system into the story. Players are given a map that outlines all the possible routes and parallel worlds ('parallel' only to the degree of the same characters in the same setting doing different things) and can drop save spots (jewels) anywhere on the map. Players can acquire knowledge and items in some worlds, then jump to a save in another one and carry all that with them.

This save system is paired with an abbreviated form of action options from old adventure games. That is, Look/Talk/Touch etc. options. Unlike systems of old, actions appear only when they have to (except Look) so one can't experiment much, and the Look function is poorly integrated - one has to look at a number of things specified by the director,

This system is very love-hate. You hate it at first because you have two jewels, and once you only have one jewel left, you can't pull up the map and jump between parallel worlds. I ended up using a guide because of this frustration, but weaned myself of it as I got more jewels. You also can't CTRL skip through most of the scenes on first play if it's in a new parallel world, even if the text is exactly the same as you've read elsewhere. Also, having to click like a maniac on the smallest of details over and over is a pain in the arse. This is easily the worst part of the game, but becomes autonomous to some extent, so that eases away some of the mental anguish at going through it.

Themes

There's only one central, dominating theme in YU-NO and it's not pretty - the subjective reality is different from the objective truth. This is told through the erroneous example of "history" as an ongoing, linear record of humanity's exploits. But as Takuya demonstrates, his jumps into the past, and into parallel worlds clearly influence the events of those worlds, but aren't part of the "official" history. Later, we see cases of the future influencing the past, which influences the present, in a closed loop cycle reminiscent of an electron traversing a closed circuit. The theme is very convincing, and is better detailed than Remember11's take on a similar idea.

It's not a comforting theme because the writer, while showing it as fact, doesn't address the more human questions arising from it, like 1) does fate exist, 2) are we prisoners of it, 3) is there any value on human life given fate exists? In two case, a character passes off the death of another character as fate. Arima Koudai, likewise, passes off the death because "that person is alive in another time-line anyway". One can see, then, that the value of human life means little to these two because of the branching nature of reality. They likewise don't seem to acknowledge differences between individuals in parallel worlds like Muv-Luv Alternative did. For example, if one marries a Girl A, and she dies, then goes to a parallel world, how can one believe that's the same girl? How is that Girl B different from a twin/clone of Girl A? YU-NO raises these common implicit questions but gives no concrete answers. I don't like that in a story, I want the author's take on a prescription for what humans should do given this knowledge of how the world works. Takuya was not given any time to ponder this - he reacted emotionally to it, and was thrust off into other parallel worlds. It was almost as if the author, unwilling to be more bold and give his treatise on fate, just shoved the matter under a rug and moved on to other matters.

What bugged me the most is that several characters are aware of this knowledge, and an even smaller few could manipulate it to some extent, but they inevitably fell victim to events they should have known about. Ryuuzouji in particular gave me pause - he's portrayed as being above the system, but is oblivious to how he's a pawn in it. It's a contradiction I couldn't understand, so maybe it was just weak character development.

Characters

This is one of the novel's strengths, but it's really half-praise. The characters are entertaining, and 'realistic'. By 'realistic' I mean excessively casual, and they like to make hilarious sex jokes or pull running gags. This gets repetitive at times, but if one is engaged the dialogue is fresh and funny. Most of the characters are entertaining on their own. My most favourite was Amanda. She didn't have a tremendous amount of development, but she was attractive and fun.

The quality and depth of the characters themselves is inconsistent. Some girls are really well developed (Kanna), while others horribly so (Ayumi). Pacing for each route varies and makes a noticeable impact on the passion for the girl. Ayumi goes through the second most terrible stuff in the game, but I absolutely hated her, so I felt nothing during her scenes. She also lacked the reasoning and intelligence to really respect her, as opposed to Kanna. Mio is somewhere in the middle as a more innocent romance option.

Takuya himself is a mess. He suffers from many of the same problems Shirogane Takeru did - that is, he jumps to conclusions and repeats them until he's closed off his mind from considering other possibilities, leading to bone-head revelations later on. He is also painfully hard-headed. Oh, he's quite the amusing clown (I liken him to a young, virgin Rance) but he's pretty emotionally stunted, and doesn't bring much to the table as a character. He's a personality, and basically that's it.

He's also a bang maniac and does some pretty amoral stuff. I cringed, and was horrified at some of the things Takuya did, which were really incongruent with his flanking behaviour.

There's also incest.

It sucks.

Plot

The main plot is decent. Takuya wants to find his father, and has to use the Reflector to travel across parallel worlds in his pursuit. His adventures lead to the epilogue, which is long and an exotic adventure along the lines of Muv-Luv Unlimited. But while the epilogue is cool, it is incredibly predictable. This might be a side-effect of this VN's presentation style, which is so familiar to modern audiences something that was taken as a joke actually spoils the novel proper. I notice G-Senjou had this problem too, but not Muv-Luv, which had its spoilers so obscured by insanity it was impossible to place how they fit together into the grand plot scheme.

There are several loose ends/plot holes as well, or at least contradictions. I felt the game was sloppy with some really big questions. For example, causality is said to be unable to flow backwards, which is why during a Chaos Correction sequence Takuya loses his memories when he's blasted to a random spot on the Divergence Map. But why do his items remain? Technically speaking, causality is still going in one direction because history isn't linear!

Setting

Par, maybe below par. It's an ordinary sea-side city with a secret history, not the most compelling of universes. That changes in the epilogue a bit, but the novelty wears off quickly enough.

However, like early era adventure games, the graphics convey a sort of creepiness not often seen in modern VNs. At times, it was creepier than something like Chaos;Head, primarily because of the graphics and music. The Japanese voices (which I associate with anime) sort of lessen this eerie factor, reigning the game's scary out of the otherworldly and mysterious back into a more palpable realm of comfortability.

Some aspects seem out of place, like they're modern conventions in an old game. Eriko-sensei's BDSM is familiar to anyone who has seen modern anime, but feels downright bizarre in an old game like this. The treatment seems modern, but it's decked in old artwork. I originally described this an "old porn" feel, but it's really like "anachronistic porn".

...

So there we have it. I gave a lot of complaints for a novel that I gave a higher rating than Sharin no Kuni, Remember11, and G-Senjou no Maou, but I gave a lot of weight to the thematic demonstration and the integration of the gameplay into the theme's ideas. It feels like one step further than Ever17 in this regard. The characters were also entertaining, with a spread of quality. That's more or less what I got with G-Senjou and Sharin, with basically the same setting.

Worth playing? Yes if you are a visual novel middle-weight. YU-NO is too frustration to be an intro title, but it'll be too predictable for a VN vet. So if you the reader are someone with a few VNs under your belt, but not a ton, this VN would be ripe for you to try.

[big bad birtha]

I'm impressed you managed to finish this. As you know, I couldn't stand trudging through the repetitive conversations and boring character development to finish. Actually, the characters are downright boring.

I personally think the title's more worth a 6 at best, though. Sure, for its time, it might have been amazing, but for me right now, I find it a chore to play.

Anyway, congratulations. Not only did you manage to dig through the dull as hell Koihime Musou, but you beat this too, both things I couldn't stand. You have nerves of steel, sir.

[Doppleganger]

Thanks. I wasn't going to post again, but I read a history of YU-NO and learned that Ryu Umemoto, the composer for YU-NO, died in August of this year.

I'd neglected to mention this in my review, but I found YU-NO's music to be very good. The themes stick out in my head, meaning I'd rate it either 8/10 or 9/10, alongside or maybe slightly below AliceSoft's Rance themes and the tracks to Muv-Luv Alternative. I would have awarded this even before knowing Umemoto did the music (I thought he was the director).

I've been trying to find the YU-NO music actually, but the torrent I downloaded didn't have a functioning .rar.