Tsumi no Hikari Rendezvous - 罪ノ光ランデヴー

Interesting title by minori here, I can understand why it slipped under the radar when it released and it landed un the half 70s in EGS, I still believe people should give it a try though. It has some unique and heavy focus on themes that you don’t see often in eroge, the execution is where you can say it’s lacking, but it’s not that simple since it does peak impressively high at points, however the bad parts are also quite noticeable.

Like the title says it’s about a game of encounters between 罪人 and 光 which are defined as sinners and happiness in the story, or maybe more precisely about finding the ray of light that illuminates the happiness within their sins. The structure is quite simple with three main heroines, one of them being the main heroine and true route. The main difference here is that rather than there being a common route is more of a long prologue that acts as an intro and the first part of the main heroine Ai’s route, sadly this ends in disaster for their relationship since Ai is doesn’t think she deserves happiness, and our protagonist is not ready to be the light of happiness, at least not yet. Overall the prologue is intriguing enough and solid enough, the themes of the game wouldn’t fit to have a normal common route so very much appreciated for pacing purposes. After that is where the two “side” routes open and needed to unlock Ai’s route at the end.

The story takes place in the countryside inaka setting where our protagonist has never left the town, his father used to run an orphanage there with the idea of bringing new blood to the town, sadly there was a mysterious fire that ended with the orphanage and his father’s live, soon after his mother left with his sister and he ended up alone in the town with his grandmother and their two osananajimis Tsubura and Celica. The game starts years later after the incident, right after his grandmother dies and suddenly two transfer students come, first Ai, a mysterious girl that resembles the protagonist’s paintings (he’s an amateur painter since kid) and second Fuuka, an older girl that ends up staying in his house since she has nowhere else to stay at.

The first side heroine is Fuuka’s route, to be honest calling it “side” already feels like I’m committing some kind of sin here… Talking about her without spoiling at all is basically impossible, but the gist of her character is that she’s the oneesan teasing personality. She is very familiar to the protagonist and he starts wondering if she is her older sister, the foreshadowing alone would tell you she is; it’s actually handled extremely well and a good chunk of the route is doubting whether she is actually or not. Her route is basically the best thing in the game and one of the best eroge routes I’ve read and basically the reason I’m writing this post, regardless of the rest of the game’s quality, I highly recommend to read it just to experience her route. Not that the rest of the game is unreadable or anything, but it’s just that good, absolutely worth it. It takes the theme of the games really far and the title drop at the end says it all, very high praise. I liked the writing on a more technical level too, all the allegories with 光, 罪, 幸せ, etc are quite nice, wish I knew who of the four writers did this route. If I had to say anything negative the “accident” part could have been avoided or done better, felt kinda cheap.

The second route is Tsubura’s, or you could also call it Celica’s route since she is much better and the only positive thing about this route, probably the worst part of the game and where you can tell quality is rapidly going down. Anyway the route is about arranged marriage which probably says it all, she’s meant to marry some rich family son for the greater of the town. She’s scared of taking any decisions and leaves everything to people around her, most of the character development comes from this angle where she starts looking a bit more for herself and overcoming the guilt of committing the “sin” of not saving the town with her marriage. In general the route is very previsible and everything gets resolved easily when she realizes she likes the protagonist… It has some good lore and backstory on the town, like Tsubura’s father “sin” where he couldn’t save the protag’s father and now it is all coming down to the pre-arranged marriage due to regret. However anything important here is repeated again in Ai’s route so in general it feels pretty useless only existing to fill the heroine quota, at least the route is fairly short. You can even tell it’s probably a different writer and done separately since everything is toned down compared to the rest of the game, also doesn’t even have any uses of NVL scenes from other PoV in comparasion with the rest of the game.

Ai’s route starts kind of good, it’s much more uneventful than the rest of the game so far, protagonist gets to sort Ai’s shit and they get back together very quickly. Not that it wasn’t present before, but there is more of a focus on family themes, the most interesting scenes in the route are finally revealing what happened with his father and some of the Fuuka scenes. By family, rather than in the sense of blood related family, it’s more of a broad concept of being close to the people you care about, friends, gf, etc. It’s pretty fitting for a inaka setting; it comes around well expressed in the route, it basically has no conflict, but it is still endearing to read.

The prologue is probably more engaging overall and this part just feels like an after story but closes the game in a nice way thematically. The final stretch feels kinda like rehashing the final part of the prologue with the protag this time answering Ai properly to get their happy ending together, honestly feels kinda unnecesary at this point since you’d think Ai must have already realized that they don’t need or deserve their sins or a bad ending. I’d guess they thought they need to put a more climax drama sequence at the end, but wasn’t needed at all imo. It makes Ai look like too much of a schizo character, much more than she needs to be, although having her going full insane, even in the other routes could have probably spiced up the game, but they probably should just have avoided all that part. The ending itself is nice and well fitting finish point. I guess you could say the route isn’t about committing any sin; it’s more about understanding the concept of being sinful.

At the end of the day Ai didn’t even do anything sinful and she’s just a bit cooked, which going back it basically means Fuuka is the only route that actually pushes the narrative anywhere which feels a bit of a let down since I was expecting way more crazy shit after her route. Thematically the game is interesting since you could say that the concept of sin is close to regret or guilt, something that everyone and every character has at some point in a story, building a story around that shouldn’t be too complicated, so building a story about characters being purposefully sinners and finding their happiness that way is pretty cool.

I also did the Mikan Blossom fandisc. Mikan is the art club leader at school, this fandisc gives some background to her character since in the main game she doesn’t get the focus despite saying a lot interesting stuff whenever there is a scene in the art club. She is an interesting character but we never get to know anything about her in the main game, in comaparsion to say Celica that at least gets the spotlight in one route. The fandisc provides the background story and her place in the themes of the story, despite that I feel she is still belongs more to something like the Sakurano games than here, but still cute and short if you are interested in her character.

As any minori VN the presentation is stellar, a lot of animation, massive amount of assets number with great usage, good scripting, etc. They didn’t take any shortcuts with graphics or sound aspect of it. The art and backgrounds are also specially nice, not too much of a fan of the massive tits on the characters though. The one negative I have to mention is that they really shouldn’t have made the protagonist faceless, or if they did at least not script it so you see his faceless ass all the time, looks so off a lot of the time standing out in a negative way considering how much care they place into the presentation.

Overall it has made me more interested in trying out some of other minori’s VNs, after I did Trinoline I kinda crossed them out, at least their VNs relased in the 10s, wasn’t a fan of that one at least at the time I read it, don’t really remember much about it now. But overall they seem to have a lot of ups and downs in writing quality so it’s probably worth a shot to their other titles in case there’s some other hidden kami route there. I’d at least recommend Tsumi no Hikari Rendezvous if you don’t mind the uneven quality jumps, but I’d assume most VN readers are fine putting through some jank to read some true kami, I may be a little bit biased since the oneesan archetype is more favorite kind, but it is worth reading for her route alone, and the game isn’t that long to begin with, should be in the 15-20h range in total.