Anon03/04/26, 02:33No.50726919
I dropped Haharanman. It's a shame because I really liked parts of it a lot. The music and general feel is just gorgeous; I thought it nailed the Taishou setting perfectly.My issue was with the protagonist, and to a lesser extent the gameplay.
I like Isamu a lot. He's a great protagonist most of the time. But I don't know if there were multiple writers with different visions or whatever, but in what feels like half his scenes he suddenly turns into the most quivering, simpering child. It gives me whiplash every time, because in his other scenes, especially his scenes with Saki, he's a gigachad badass ronin action hero.
The problem got bad enough for me that I ended up just not wanting to play through any of the other heroines' routes, not because I disliked them (I really like all the game's heroines), but because I really hated how Isamu acted when he was with them.
But as I discovered to my displeasure, Saki doesn't even have a dedicated route, despite the game making it really, really look like she's going to. When you get to the end of her bit in the common route, she gets automatically forced into the role of being Isamu's side piece, which felt like a really hollow ending for her to me after what felt like so many wonderful scenes building up their relationship and how they grew from perfect strangers into caring for each other so much.To even continue with the game at all with this point, I'd have to restart from some save like 10 or 15 in-game days ago.
I like the little dreamscape you defend; it's a fun time-management puzzle that's complex enough to be interesting. The issue is that to unlock new areas to defend in the dreamscape, you have to trigger very specific flags. You have to unlock all the areas within the game's 40-day time limit, so triggering these flags is very important.
The game is kind enough to tell you the flags for the next step in the process, but ONLY the next step, so if you're playing blind, you can head into the next set of flags having either already done all of them or having done none. And due to the time limit the latter is basically a forced reset. Even a tiny misclick can be a forced reset, and boy does that get frustrating when it happens a couple times in a row.There's a lot about 母爛漫 I love, but I feel like there's almost nothing left I haven't experienced but H-scenes where Isamu goes full 龍が如く2 "I'm baby" mode. I could see it being someone's favorite VN, but too much of it is not for me.
