As I completed most routes in August's latest title, so like usual my bunch of impressions. It *should* be spoiler-free outside of its respective tags, of course.
- The common route was fine and had nice amounts of comedy. The general interactions between Kyoutaro and Kana and Kyoutaro and Senri was quite well-done and the former's a funny mix of comedy. As usual I have nothing much to complain about the heroines: Their deredere-moments, which appear frequently were cute.
- Kyoutaro was also a nice change for an MC: An extreme book-a-holic/bookworm, smart and can read the reactions of others well. For plot-reasons or not, it was nice to see how he became more "social" even though it depends somewhat on whether you go for a girl's normal end or one of the true ends after 2nd+ run
- All normal routes felt rather normal. You had, fortunately, non-dragged out drama. For some reason Senri's route felt longer until the confession occured, thus the h-scenes also appeared more rushed IMHO.
- During the normal routes, the supernatural element, which was introduced in the beginning, was very rarely utilized and receives only importance during the "true common route" (self-created name
) aka 2nd run+ after the opening played for the second time.
- IMHO August did a fine job in also developing the side characters fairly, should you choose to venture in their respective story. Not like Lovely Quest where you got simply the h-scene.
- True routes vs. normal routes: Except of Tsugumi, August decided to let Kyoutaro use the first-name-basis post confession during the normal individual routes, but not during the "true" routes. It's no big deal, but for me always a bit head-scratching. In addion pre-confession the "true" route(s) were for the main heroines largely the same except of ~ two individual scenes. Maybe the name "true end" is for the main girls just misleadingly chosen by the walkthrough writer.
Conclusion: Personal preferance, but similar as with Fortune Arterial I prefered the normal ends more than the second ending(s), just that it's in this case due to the "better" individual feeling. The individual drama should be forseeable without much trouble given the hints that appeared already in the common route. It's hard to give a girl-rating as all of them had *awww*-moments, but I've grown a soft spot for Kana
.
And I'm done with the appendix routes for Hatsukoi 1/1. Simply due to the (obvious?) large amount of icha-icha and couple moments they blew away their counterparts in the regular game, even though Kyou's regular route was imho solid enough. As I said many posts ago, Maya's what-if-outcome should have been her regular route conclusion.
According to Micchi's blog there's no appendix for Runa and Midori(?), which can make you think how much the writers liked Runa's route themselves