[hyl]

After finishing every story in Hatsuyuki Sakura i can say one thing

Pure Rage!!!!!

One of my first WTH moments came at the end of the (fixed in the first playthough) regular Sakura route.

Spoiler for spoiler:

Which had pretty much a bad end. But i still liked it because of this scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKz8o-djNsc

My actual rage comes from the true route: Graduation
I really liked it from the beginning till the climax . It had a nice mixup of comedy, lot's of deredere moments and drama at the end. But both endings of that route left me with a really bitter taste.

In fact i didn't really like all of the endings.

Spoiler for spoiler:

Because the main character Hatsuyuki ends disappearing at the end of the story, because he was a ghost (Ghost child or in fact the king of ghosts) from the start. Or in the case of Aya's route, she lost her memories about him.
I am still pissed at both endings of the true route. My favorite 2 heroines: Sakura and Aya don't get a truly happy ending there.
Seeing that i was actually hoping for an actual happy end after all of the somewhat dissatisfying endings of the regular 4 characters,

However the story was overall ok. Sometimes they felt a little dragged and every story became sometimes a little overdramatic for me at the end.
The plot about ghosts could have been used better for the plot and it was pretty much only served to add drama to the end of the routes.

I liked the stories in this order.

Sakura> Aya > Shirokuma> Nozomu > Azuma

Spoiler for spoiler:

Sakura, because it was the true route and it was probably the best written of all the stories. Also it was the most related to the ghost story.
Aya, because i liked the character and her route was also canon with the true route because it was set 1 year before the current one.
Shirokuma, because of the character development/changes that she has gone though after the timeskip of 2 years.
Nozomu was probably one of the sillier and more comedic stories, which went way too dramatic at the end for no good reasons.
i liked Azuma the least, because her story had pretty much nothing to do with the overall story (mostly about her figure skating) except that she was haunted by a ghost.

The music was in my opinion quite good. Not just the opening and ending songs, but the BGM's were nicely varied and when it was quite fitting for the mood/atmosphere when it was used. Especially the tracks "Freak of Nature: start" and "Ghost parade"

As for the seiyuu's, it was a mixed bag for me. Some did really great, while most of them were pretty bad in my opinion.
Especially Shimizu Ai and Fuuri Samoto did a really good job with Sakura and Aya.
I didn't really like kadowaki Mai's role as Nozomu, because i am probably not used to her voicing characters that way. The other female seiyuu's besides Yoshida Airi (voicing Megumi and other side characters and a ghost)were mostly ok but i disliked most male seiyuu's in this one. One problem for me (because i really like to listen VN's as well) was that every seiyuu were also voicing random students or other people. Even the more important side characters in certain routes were voiced in pretty much the same way (hardly any attempt of trying to change thier voice) as they did with the regular characters.