View RSS Feed

Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

AIR Dream Arc Thoughts

Rate this Entry
Having completed Dream and now moving on to Summer, I felt I could at least post my thoughts on it, and maybe compare it to the anime a bit.

Dream consists of three character routes; Minagi's, Kano's and Misuzu's, and I went through them in this order.



Minagi Tohno

I didn't really remember much about her character from the anime, so a lot of this was 'new' to me. Minagi is a very quiet girl and doesn't talk much, but in spite of that the interactions with her are surprisingly enjoyable.

Her route is mainly about her relationships to her mother and to her best friend Michiru. Her mother has... shall we say a mental illness. After she'd given birth to Minagi, she was soon pregnant again but this time had a stillbirth, which made her lose her mind; she still lives together with Minagi but calls her by the name of her dead child, delusionally clinging onto the thought that her child didn't actually die.

There's a good amount of drama and it works, even if it's veiled in more Key magic than most of Key's later visual novels. This was back when they still had no second thoughts about breaking realism if it makes the plot more engaging. But do note that the plot takes FOREVER to get anywhere, so if you're looking for something actually happening, be prepared to sit through a lot of nothing first.



Overall it was an enjoyable arc, even if it didn't stand out much, and dragged on quite a bit longer than it should've. I'll also say that it had the most believable romance out of all three arcs. The main downside was that I didn't really care for Michiru at all and she's a pretty prominent character in Minagi's route. Oh well.



Kano Kirishima

Compared to the other two, Kano is a pretty normal girl. She's quite upbeat and likes taking walks and talking nonsense.

The main problem I had with this route was that it had no notable drama of any sort. Oh it does have drama, don't get me wrong, but it's rather uninteresting. You see Kano occasionally gets possessed by a spirit which causes her to sometimes do suicidal actions or inexplicable things. The problem with this is that it never gets a satisfactory explanation. As far as I could tell by the end of it, anytime Kano is possessed she recites lines the spirit said during her lifetime and it's basically pure coincidence that what she does happens to be suicidal. Hooray.

The only other potential drama there was was that Kano feels apologetic towards her mother because her mother died giving birth to her. But Yukito off-handedly just says that she should learn to be grateful to her mother instead. Well there you go. That plotline ended pretty damn quickly.



The good things I can say about this arc is that the character interactions get pretty good at times. This does seem to be what AIR does best. Yukito, Kano, Hijiri (Kano's older sister) and even Potato all have some good scenes and turn out pretty likeable. If only the route had had any sort of an engaging plot it might actually have been memorable. It had some other good ideas but never really did anything with any of them.

At least the romance was fine, but it's hindered by an H scene which is so hilariously misplaced it's almost funny.



Misuzu Kamio

Misuzu is the main heroine and the one you encounter first. She's a rather childish and lonely girl. As opposed to Minagi, who had Michiru, and Kano, who was quite popular, she doesn't even have a single friend.

You end up moving into the Kamio house during the common route and so you get an insight into their life very early on. Misuzu lives together with her mother Haruko, and I use the term 'living together' loosely because they hardly ever interact with each other. See Haruko isn't Misuzu's biological mother, rather her aunt. And while they certainly love each other, the situation is a bit too much for both of them. Misuzu has an unfortunate habit/condition of having crying spams whenever she gets close to anyone (which also prevents her from making any friends) and Haruko doesn't really know how to deal with that. Misuzu on the other hand feels she can't really ask anything of Haruko in the first place, because Misuzu was 'forced' onto her. Haruko just spends most of the day working and comes home late, spending the evening by drinking alcohol.

It's a bit of a tragic situation, but they live their lives without much of note happening. Enter Yukito. Due to his unique attitude towards Misuzu they can interact for a long time without Misuzu having any of her spasms, which allows them to grow closer, and even when Misuzu does have a crying breakdown it doesn't estrange the two in any way.

But eventually the old story of the 'girl in the sky with wings' Yukito is looking for comes up again, because Misuzu ends up fitting the description perfectly. As predicted in the saying, she ends up getting weaker and weaker, occasionally forgetting things, until eventually she is fated to die. When Yukito remembers this he starts getting into a bit of a panic as he doesn't know what to do to avert that end. The route actually ends on a cliffhanger as Yukito makes a wish to do everything from ever since he met Misuzu for the first time over.



The continuation of this arc follows in the Air arc.

So Misuzu's route isn't really a complete story, making it hard to judge. What I can say is that I liked the way the Kamio household was presented. AIR is all about the mother-child relationships and Misuzu's route definitely had the best and most fleshed-out of the three dream arcs. It even went into Yukito's own relationship to his mother which was my favorite part.

So in the end, I'd say I liked Misuzu's arc the most, followed by Minagi's, followed by Kano's. Although none of the arcs really stood out on their own, sadly. I've only just started the Summer arc and I already like it a lot more than all three Dream routes ^^

As far as I recall, the anime had a really bad problem not really segregating the Dream routes well at all. Like the story of one girl is over, bam she's forgotten about and another girl is suddenly the focus. I don't remember how well the individual arcs are conveyed, but I remember them not making all that much sense. Not that the visual novel makes all that much sense either, but for the most part it was at least satisfying. So far I can't give the visual novel more than an 'eh' recommendation to anime viewers, but we'll see if Summer changes that.

Comments

  1. Shauna's Avatar
    The individual arcs were not conveyed well. xD