Rewrite+

• Personal Review: The author’s ambition is great, trying to explore many things in one story. But the writing skill isn’t enough; besides family affection, none of the themes are well-developed. It’s not impossible to explore these themes brilliantly in such a lengthy story, but a significant amount of the narrative is wasted on boring daily life and filler, lacking proper emphasis.
• Pros:
  • Rich content, with multiple individual routes that are quite long.
  • The world-building has great potential.
  • Some plot designs are very romantic, such as the male protagonist turning into a tree.
• Cons:
  • The common route is very, very long, and even more boring than Ever17.
  • In multiple routes, the heroines’ feelings for the male protagonist lack strong foundations and are poorly written.
  • The plot is not rigorous, and many details rely on player imagination. I initially thought the Moon and Terra routes would explain things properly, but they introduced even more inexplicable plot points. There are too many examples, like how did the familiars get to the moon?
  • Some settings are too forced. The incarnation of the Earth’s will is surprisingly a human-like beautiful girl who is directly in a romantic relationship with the male protagonist. Its credibility is comparable to a god incarnating as Jesus to perform miracles.
  • Overly romanticized/unconvincing plot. Too many examples; the most obvious is in the Terra route, where the male protagonist single-handedly brings down two major organizations (even though it was previously stated that these two organizations secretly controlled the world, they were defeated by one person?).
• Rating: 7.5*/10

Senren Banka

• Personal Review: A boilerplate anime romance, with no obvious flaws compared to similar works.
• Rating: 7.5/10

WHITE ALBUM: Memories like Falling Snow

• Personal Review:
• Pros:
• Cons:
• Rating: 7/10

Air

• Personal Review: I really like the overall atmosphere of this work. It also contributed classic pieces like “Tori no Uta” and “Natsukage.” Unfortunately, this work has significant writing issues (like many Key games).
• Pros:
  • The music and art perfectly convey the summer atmosphere. To this day, when I think of summer, I recall the Air game/anime.
  • The Summer arc’s shift in perspective back a thousand years is refreshing. The Summer arc’s story itself is also quite engaging and serves as a bridge, helping the entire work interpret the theme of “legacy.”
  • The Air arc in the first half re-presents the Dream arc’s story from different perspectives, explaining some plot points. I personally like this symmetrically structured writing style.
• Cons:
  • The daily life in the Dream arc is as boring as in many Galgames, with nothing very outstanding.
  • The development of the relationship between the male lead and the heroines is roughly written; it feels like they just inexplicably fell in love/became friends. This is particularly severe in the Tohno route.
  • The first half of the Air arc is overly verbose. The first half of the Air arc presenting the Dream arc’s story from a new perspective is good. However, it makes the player read almost the exact same text again. Personally, I believe the same text should only be re-read by the player if there’s a new interpretation.
  • Overuse of monologues. In some climactic moments that require emotional expression, the game has characters express their feelings at length and with great emotion, but during this process, it’s basically one character talking endlessly (and the content of their lines is highly redundant), quickly leading to aesthetic fatigue. I personally feel that being more restrained in these parts (concise dialogue, interspersing descriptions from a third-person perspective) would make the emotional scenes more impactful.
• Rating: 7*/10

Ever17

• Personal Review: A dumpling wrapped for a single vinegar (narrative trick). The filling is so thick you bite ten times before getting to the meat.
• Pros:
  • The narrative trick was quite innovative for its time.
• Cons:
  • The common route is lengthy and requires repeated playthroughs to reach the highly praised Coco route.
  • Characterizations are somewhat stereotypical.
  • The explanation of the world-building is unconvincing (how could such a massive research facility have no intervention after an incident?).
  • Some plot points are unconvincing (being trapped in the sea but acting like it’s a picnic).
  • Some unresolved plot holes (life indicators, kick the can, etc. Different interpretations even conflict. This is because the author didn’t provide enough information, so a consensus couldn’t be reached.)
• Rating: 6*/10

ATRI -My Dear Moments-

• Personal Review: A simple story about a robot gradually developing emotions during its journey, neither exceptionally good nor bad.
• Rating: 6/10

Muv-Luv Alternative

• Personal Review: The narrative pacing is quite slow. The world-building is grand, but the actual plot feels small in scope.
• Pros:
  • The world-building is quite interesting, especially the ending’s explanation of Sumika’s abilities and the protagonist’s existence in this world, which is a revelation.
• Cons:
  • The protagonist’s personality isn’t likable. More fatally, the protagonist’s character growth is minimal throughout the entire game. From the beginning to the end, the most significant change in the protagonist is merely no longer suffering from PTSD after seeing the Beta. I can accept a protagonist who can’t bring himself to kill, but I cannot accept a protagonist who constantly talks about saving the world but hesitates to fire at crucial moments. Simply put, don’t bite off more than you can chew; don’t loudly declare you’ll save the world if you don’t have the resolve to sacrifice your comrades. Your comrades entrusted their lives to you because they believed you could save the world; don’t waste their lives.
  • The combat presentation is extremely crude, which affects the reading experience. Seeing the game’s combat visuals reminded me of when I first learned Photoshop and only knew how to use the free transform tool to move and rotate graphics. The combat in this game is the same: frequent camera cuts combined with sprite scaling, rotation, and translation. It’s supposed to be a serious situation, but it’s so jarring it makes you laugh out loud.
  • Many lengthy daily conversations that serve no purpose in character development. Even from a textual standpoint, the same things are reiterated in different ways several times.
  • The scope shrinks as the story progresses. During the coup to rescue Yuuhi, the author could convincingly explain the actions, motives, and political repercussions of multiple factions. The further it goes, the more it resembles a chuunibyou shonen manga. By the end, Operation Sakura becomes a gamble on the fate of all humanity on Earth, resting solely on the protagonist.
  • The romantic elements of the game clash with the world-building. I know the game sets up that most men have died, so the protagonist is a rare man in the military. But depicting the military as having a school romance atmosphere is simply too avant-garde. Coupled with various flirtations during training/operations, the experience is extremely poor.
  • Repetitive use of a single trope. From the mid-to-late game, it’s basically battles interspersed with daily life. And each battle’s plot design is essentially based on the same template: evenly matched -> crisis appears -> comrades sacrifice themselves for victory. In the battle after, it’s daily life and discussions with comrades about what they’re fighting for. This pattern is generally fine, the real problem lies in the poor description of combat details and the battle after the wheel-spinning discussion of trauma. If these two points were done well, readers could enjoy the details and overlook the overall repetitive pattern; if not, it quickly leads to aesthetic fatigue.
• Rating: 6/10

Clannad

• Personal Review: Poor writing turns a realistic-themed literature into a long and smelly soap opera. Some may argue that Clannad should not be judged by today’s standards. After all, it is an old game from 2004. However, I find this argument unconvincing.

  First, writing techniques and scriptwriting skills do not develop as fast as graphics technology. Many core scriptwriting techniques were already very mature decades ago. Take the plot of a pregnant woman’s death as an example. The death of Ruijue in “The Family” or the death of Huniu in “Camel Xiangzi” are far more reasonable and profound than Clannad in terms of plot foreshadowing and textual expression. These works were written long before Clannad, but their text and narrative can still touch people’s hearts.

  Furthermore, even if not compared to those literary classics, the quality of Clannad’s text is relatively poor compared to games of the same era or even earlier. Here are a few examples: “White Album” from 1998, “Utawarerumono” from 2002, FSN released in the same year, and “Parfait” released the following year. These works are superior to Clannad in terms of text quality and reading experience.

  Furthermore, Clannad’s formula has already been used in Air, but Clannad inherits all the shortcomings of Air without Air’s brevity and poignancy. Therefore, it is difficult to convince me with the excuse of it being an old game. A good script, no matter how many years have passed, should be able to make people feel its power.

• Pros:
  • As a “tear-jerking” work, this work is indeed quite moving in some places. The author is good at finding tear-jerking scenes and conveying emotions in subtle places.
• Cons:
  • Amateurish writing. In story writing, the primary role of dialogue is to advance the plot, reveal character, or convey information. However, Clannad’s dialogue is full of meaningless content that does little to help the narrative. It often rambles on for a long time, only to tell a trivial side story. Many are daily and shallow school trivialities. This content not only does nothing to shape the characters or advance the plot, but also slows down the pace of the entire game, greatly wearing down the player’s patience.
  • The characters’ behavior is very childish. The story can be fictional and exaggerated, but the characters’ behavioral logic and psychological motivations must be self-consistent within the story. However, the characters’ behavior patterns and humor in the game are not like high school students, but more like elementary school students. There are too many such examples to list. The characters in the game often show exaggerated reactions to trivial things, which is incompatible with the mental level of normal high school students. Many characters’ behaviors are difficult to understand. Take the heroine Nagisa as an example. The game tries hard to shape her kindness and innocence, but it is overdone and makes her look like a fool. It is not so much kindness as it is out of touch with reality. This greatly affects the player’s ability to empathize.
  • The characterization is flat. The characters basically have no special features other than the single attribute given to them by the author, and there are almost no other qualities worth exploring. At the same time, some capturable characters do not have their own stories. Their stories are completely centered on the protagonist Tomoya. You don’t know what they do at home, what their hobbies are, or who they are without Tomoya’s involvement. In short, the characters in the game are all tool-like people created by the author to promote a specific plot or trigger a certain fixed reaction. This also greatly affects the credibility of the plot. A good story is when the false is taken as the true, the true is also false. Even if it is all fictitious, it must make you feel that it is true, so that you can invest in it and believe everything that happens in the story. However, Clannad has not achieved this at all.
  • The story setting is far-fetched. Although this work is a relatively realistic story as a whole, there are also some surreal settings. These settings are not cleverly integrated into the story, nor are they reasonably explained. On the contrary, these settings seem to be just a tool for the author to achieve a dramatic effect. For example, the light orb, Fuko’s setting, turning into a cat, and other scenes. If you want to add supernatural elements to a relatively realistic story, you’d better give a reasonable explanation. This kind of supernatural phenomenon without foreshadowing and explanation will only make people feel out of place and inexplicable, which seriously damages the overall tone and immersion of the story.
  • Deliberate and repetitive plot design. When reading Clannad, I often have the feeling that Majida Jun is pressing my head on the keyboard and shouting, “Cry! All of you, cry!” Many tear-jerking scenes either have no warning, or are avoidable but are forcibly created by the screenwriter. In addition, looking at these tear-jerking scenes alone is also overdone. Many scenes would be more moving if written with a more implicit and restrained brushwork. After all, readers are not fools. But the author is afraid that you don’t know that this is a tear-jerking scene, and can’t wait to write the word “tragic” on his face. As a result, the originally touching plot becomes kitsch and pretentious. This low-level technique is no different from canned laughter, and I would like to call it canned crying.
• Rating: 5/10