A new doujin VN released at C102, caught my attention looking up new releases since it looked fresh from a new circle with cool setting and nice art.
It’s in some sort of dystopian future where WW3 has been going on for years. The protagonist Kai is some soldier for Lagoon, a city made from and for kids completly aside of adults in an amusement park, looked like some Peter Pan city.
In a mission he meets with Mio a girl soldier who’s been abandoned and decides to help her out. He soon discovers that her brain memories works through a NM-card, a device similar to some sort of disk drive that stores her memories since she can’t do it naturally. Soon enough they start living together in Lagoon developing a relationship.
This doujin VN has been moving some sort of waves since it was released last year at summer comiket, it’s been pretty popular around Japanese circle and it’s already officially translated to Chinese and Korean and I kinda expect an English TL soon too, wouldn’t be suprised. When Kemco announced their console port I got curious since they don’t really do ports of other games. I Grabbed it without knowing what to expect but to my surprise it was totally my kind of shit since it’s some ボーイミーツガール セカイ系ish with a lot of supernatural 伝奇 SF stuff.
The plot follows Hikaru as the protagonist that until now his live has been some kind of hell with his parents dying when he was 5, been bullied in school and by his aunt too until one day she ditches him sending him to a small island in Okinawa with his grandfather who has been missing for god knows when. He finds himself homeless in the island and meets with a cold enigmatic girl called Lilun in similar circumstances, He tries to get closer to her to survive and soon enough he discovers she is a real witch that comes from a different world that can use magic. From there they start living together trying to discover the secrets of this magic and its link with the past of this island.
Akai ito is one of the most famous yuri VN released in the 00s, probably due to shortage more than anything, but also has some fame by its high quality writing and elaborated 伝奇 setting.
I went in and grabbed it when the PC port on Steam released a few months ago since I had it on my backlog since forever ago, but since it was PS2 exclusive having to emulate it and stuff pushed it to the bottom of the list. It’s nice they took the chance to bring it to modern platforms and for a cheap price made me jump on the bandwagon on release, the port is very basic though so don’t expect much; the controls are rough and have/had some bugs but they mostly fixed the annoying stuff. Had to do some 1~2 month stalling but finally got myself to finish it.
This game really catched my interest since it was revealed from the premise, themes, visual directing and everything looked exactly like my kind of thing so much that I decided to also play through Crystar, the other game from the director/writer. To be honest I was always a fan of Hisaya from Sola and Kanon so I was meaning to play it at some point but finally took the chance to get into this games. I finished Crymachina recently so some random thoughts and how it compared to Crystar ahead.
It’s a republished book from the defunct Fujimi Mystery Bunko label, Seikaisha has made a really nice version with beautiful color illustration and great presentation (as usual from Seikaisha). A good thing because the old version was considering as some sort of yuri classic but the only way to obtain was to pay 6k yen plus in the secondhand market.
Criss Cross was released in 94 originally, and rerelased as a Bunko version in 97. It is famous for being the first trapped in a VR RPG, and also winning the gold prize in the first iteration of the Dengeki contest in 95. It starts with a few manga pages of our protagonist ゲイル(Gale?) getting into the world of “Dungeon Trial” and walking for a bit until he faces a skeleton monster.
Short doujin VN focused around the struggles of facing the exams to enter university. The protagonist doesn’t have any dreams about what he wants to do with his life but since everyone says going to college and getting a job is the most likely way to achieve happiness in life, he’s determined to follow that path. Close to his house there’s a rooftop where he goes on Sundays at sunset (hence the game’s name), where he regularly meets two girls that seem the polar opposite of each other, Manami and Ren, both of them are also in his last year of school with the exams coming up soon.
Kurogane Communication was pitched as some kind of media mix project that released an anime, manga, and light novel around the same time, I am unfamiliar with the anime and manga but they seem like rather mediocre without much going on, however Akiyama Mizuhito was in charge of writing the LN and it is basically the only reason this series is remembered nowdays, he wrote both books in 1998-9 at the same time he was doing E.G. Combat. By the little I’ve seen about the anime and manga they seem very average and are a complete different thing with just the same outline of the setting and characters, so I’m not interested at all in them and will just talk about the books.
Debut series by Mamizu, he is a highly regarded Light Novel writer from the golden Dengeki era with a few series published, today he’s mostly known for beign the creator(?)/writer of the anime K. This is not the first book I read from him, a while ago I read through Giniro Fuwari which was good but kinda unfinished, in the atogaki Mamizu mentioned he tried a similar approach than he did with Infinity Zero so grabbing this seemed like an easy choice.
Title: 鉄コミュニケイション
