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Ricky Controversy · 2009-11-24, 20:34

I'm a recent initiate into the mysteries of Shuffle!, and yes, I am aware I'm pretty late catching the boat. I've never played any visual novels before, and I wouldn't have played this one if I hadn't watched the series in a marathon last week with my best friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the anime: despite the beginning feeling fairly generic, the individual characterization and storytelling picked up rapidly and built to a rather enjoyable climax. Afterwards, I decided to check out the game as A) I've had a curiosity about visual novels for some time, having seen them being played and heard much about them and B) I felt familiar enough with the cast of characters to not feel entirely adrift in the new genre.

At the moment, I have only completed the Kaede route, and am working on the Nerine route. Here are some thoughts:

Spoiler for spoiled a few years later...:

There were parts of the experience I was very pleased with, and others where I was a bit disappointed.

-Looking into the game a bit before playing it, I gathered some misinformation that suggested it was possible to avoid ero scenes in the various routes. I don't have any strong feelings one way or another: ero doesn't bother me, but it doesn't excite me either. My only feelings towards ero in any medium depend on whether or not it adds something of real value to the work as a whole. What happened in the Kaede route left me with mixed feelings. Specifically, it struck me that they set up something interesting, but then only gave it a brief nod. I'm referring to the fact that after they were intimate with each other, both times Kaede reverted back to her usual behavior and it bothered Rin. I wanted to see more of that developed, and maybe see how that affected the people around them. This would have made the final scenes where Rin and Kaede put the past behind them more rewarding to me.

-I feel like the game is too brief and too narrow to do justice to characters that, when they're given the moments to do so, really shine. The cast Navel has put together provides fuel for a lot of really enjoyable story development, but I found myself locked into a route pretty quickly, I didn't get to make nearly as many choices about the story as I thought I would, and once I started to head down the Kaede path, it felt like the rest of the cast fell off the face of the Earth.

-I wanted to feel more affected by the specifics of the setting. As it stands, it feels like that whole background exists just to set-up the arranged-marriage cliche with Nerine and Sia. Not that all cliches are bad, but I didn't really feel like anything else that related to the whole three-worlds/magic/race relations and sundry was at all relevant to the story. The Homonculus experiment, which really doesn't speak to anything that'd be unique to the Shuffle! setting, is about the only thing that really touches the plot, and even then tangentially.

-All this being said, I'm only expressing a wish for more detail because it really has my curiosity stirred. I want to really see the characters of Kaede, Nerine, Sia, Asa, Primula et al explored in more depth, and not just in a bubble, but in their interactions with others too.

2009-11-24, 20:34	Link #74
Ricky Controversy Frandle & Nightbag Join Date: Oct 2009	I'm a recent initiate into the mysteries of Shuffle!, and yes, I am aware I'm pretty late catching the boat. I've never played any visual novels before, and I wouldn't have played this one if I hadn't watched the series in a marathon last week with my best friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the anime: despite the beginning feeling fairly generic, the individual characterization and storytelling picked up rapidly and built to a rather enjoyable climax. Afterwards, I decided to check out the game as A) I've had a curiosity about visual novels for some time, having seen them being played and heard much about them and B) I felt familiar enough with the cast of characters to not feel entirely adrift in the new genre. At the moment, I have only completed the Kaede route, and am working on the Nerine route. Here are some thoughts: Spoiler for spoiled a few years later...: There were parts of the experience I was very pleased with, and others where I was a bit disappointed. -Looking into the game a bit before playing it, I gathered some misinformation that suggested it was possible to avoid ero scenes in the various routes. I don't have any strong feelings one way or another: ero doesn't bother me, but it doesn't excite me either. My only feelings towards ero in any medium depend on whether or not it adds something of real value to the work as a whole. What happened in the Kaede route left me with mixed feelings. Specifically, it struck me that they set up something interesting, but then only gave it a brief nod. I'm referring to the fact that after they were intimate with each other, both times Kaede reverted back to her usual behavior and it bothered Rin. I wanted to see more of that developed, and maybe see how that affected the people around them. This would have made the final scenes where Rin and Kaede put the past behind them more rewarding to me. -I feel like the game is too brief and too narrow to do justice to characters that, when they're given the moments to do so, really shine. The cast Navel has put together provides fuel for a lot of really enjoyable story development, but I found myself locked into a route pretty quickly, I didn't get to make nearly as many choices about the story as I thought I would, and once I started to head down the Kaede path, it felt like the rest of the cast fell off the face of the Earth. -I wanted to feel more affected by the specifics of the setting. As it stands, it feels like that whole background exists just to set-up the arranged-marriage cliche with Nerine and Sia. Not that all cliches are bad, but I didn't really feel like anything else that related to the whole three-worlds/magic/race relations and sundry was at all relevant to the story. The Homonculus experiment, which really doesn't speak to anything that'd be unique to the Shuffle! setting, is about the only thing that really touches the plot, and even then tangentially. -All this being said, I'm only expressing a wish for more detail because it really has my curiosity stirred. I want to really see the characters of Kaede, Nerine, Sia, Asa, Primula et al explored in more depth, and not just in a bubble, but in their interactions with others too. __________________ "366 to Vati," a speculative fiction experiment. Strike a blow to vivify!