Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

So I just got done reading Emi's route. As it turns out I was already locked dead into her route by the time I made that previous post.

No more than a few lines after where I stopped did Hisao realize his feelings for Emi, and soon enough it turned out those feelings were mutual. And they lived happily ever after.

...yeah right. This wouldn't be much of a romance visual novel if the story ended right there. Now naturally speaking any more will be spoilers, so if you wish to avoid being spoilered, I advise against continuing.

On a whole, I quite enjoyed this route. The themes explored during this route are interesting and Emi herself is a pretty great character. It was well-written and managed to create a good atmosphere where Hisao's thoughts and feelings were easy to relate to just about all the time, while of course Emi's side ultimately became similarly understandable and relatable.

And of course, the route had quite a nice bit of humor thrown in.

Spoilers for all of Emi's route

Most of Emi's route focuses on the problematic situation of one half of a couple putting great importance on opening up to each other while the other has great difficulty doing so. Just when can that 'wall' be felled, and how can you avoid recklessly and hurtfully hammering at it? The way this route handled it was pretty good, I must say.

Emi has a trauma she still cannot leave behind her and one which would probably haunt her for quite long still. In the accident that changed her life many years ago she lost not only her legs, but also her father. She was forced head to head with the fact that "these things happen". As a result, Emi has put up a defensive barrier, not letting people come too close to her in fear of potentially losing them and being hurt all over again. Partially as a result, she is convinced that she needs to overcome her trauma by herself and thus avoids speaking about it every time it comes up. Her way of running is almost a metaphor for her mental state. She looks only at what lies directly ahead of her. Not beyond that, not behind that.

Does it work? It may for her, but I can easily relate to how hurt Hisao reacts to her attitude. He knows she is still suffering from her past trauma but he cannot help her in any way. However, in his quest to find out what he CAN do, I was happy to see him stumble upon what has over time become one of my ground beliefs.

During the course of the route, Hisao gets a letter from his crush where she laments that Hisao had an attitude as if he had given up on happiness. This is what ultimately snaps Hisao out of his uncertainty, and it's something I wholeheartedly agree with; not to look into the past with regret, but forward with what you learned from it.

Now overcoming Emi's barrier is not easy. It comes to a climax when Hisao comes over to Emi's place to eat, during which an awkward conversation comes up. Here's where the route splits in two as you either make the smart decision not to follow Emi when she awkwardly leaves the table, or you do follow her. Depending on your previous decisions, you might be stuck with doing the latter either way. No matter if you follow her or not, eventually Emi angrily tells you to leave. Although if you didn't follow her before, she ends up looking apologetic rather than angry.

If you did follow her, the relationship sours heavily and for a week Hisao and Emi avoid each other until Misha speaks up and you are given one last chance to salvage the situation. If you do not, the relationship crumbles and you get a bad end. If you do, or if you made the smart decision before at Emi's house, there's finally an "I love you" and Emi manages to gather her courage to open up more - and the two go visit Emi's father's grave.

I like this line, it illustrates just what I was talking about before. If there was going to be a bus accident on the way back, who could have prevented that? Scratch that, who could have seen that coming? No one. There is no one to be blamed, there is nothing to regret. In the past, mind you. When Hisao says that it doesn't matter he obviously doesn't mean he would be fine with it, no I'm pretty sure he would be sad at the loss of potentially lots of happy months or years, but nonetheless what happens happens and you cannot and could not have changed it. Remember the past for how happy it was and continue to try to find it in the future rather than lamenting its loss.

And that, ultimately, is something Emi can finally accept as well. There will be a parting eventually, and it may be sad, but up until then times can be happy, and the times beyond can be happy as well. Having had a meeting and a parting is the most natural thing in the world and accepting that can lead to happiness.

And this is what Emi's route, in my eyes, does a very good job at presenting. The romance is good, the story is good, but what I feel like praising this plotline the most for is for how well it handled its themes.



And that's it for Emi's route. If the others can live up to this one, I am glad.

On that note, I think I understand Katawa Shoujo's structure a bit better now. Act 1 seems to be the part where you 'pick a route' and everything beyond that is deepening into one character's route. By the "Library" menu I can see, as shion/Pumpkin nicely pointed out last time, that Misha does not appear to have a route, but the other four I mentioned do. Emi's route didn't even take four and a half hours to go through, so this visual novel doesn't seem to be particularly long, maybe 20 hours.

I am getting a bit annoyed at the Skip function though. It does what it's supposed to but I think it's like 4x slower than most other skip functions I've seen in visual novels. Also, the "disable adult content" option seems pretty flawed. It literally only censors the explicit sex scenes and leaves some other NSFW parts like the nude character sprites in.

Regardless, next up... I don't know who yet. Maybe I'll follow order and go with Hanako next. Maybe it turns out the route order is fixed and I just didn't notice so far. We'll see.