Life in Quadrant 4

AKA: 幼なじみは大統領. I was supposed to write a kinda long post and all, but I got lazy. Yeah.

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Re: ghostlightning

While he finds a select number of anime difficult to write about – just about all of them in the list, I would consider to be classics – I find writing about anything to be hard. For some reason, I cannot put out a fully cohesive thought on anything without some sort of rubric or idea of what to write about at all, which is why most of my anime-centric posts end up being simply superficial impression-type posts that display just my surface thoughts on the show. I could have as much difficulty writing about ARIA or Macross (not that I’ve watched the latter) as I do about Saki.
I’ve found that just about everything I try to write up about a show ends up having no actual substance, really. Most posts that turn out as having some substance usually are very emotionally driven (as opposed to analytically driven – I’ll get to this in a subsequent post).
Often a good idea is to go on hiatus for a few months and gain some new perspectives, but I don’t think I’m ready to let go yet – I have a post or two that need typing out before I take my leave of absence from this place.

I don’t remember having read anything about this in recent history, but it feels like a topic that’s been discussed so much before that I feel like I’m beating a dead horse now. Anyway.

There are, I think, two types of shows (and similarly, two ways of watching) – ones that you enjoy, and ones that you appreciate.

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Yeah, I finished it. Actually, it was days and days ago, but I forgot to make a (totally pointless) post. Spoilers possibly there, but nothing too major; more on the flow of the game.

This is, perhaps, one of the best examples I could give when talking about the literary merits of an eroge. Although you could technically do without the ero, leaving just the ge, I think… it feels a little more proper with the former, given Taichi’s character. But man, Romeo, were he to do literature on a different medium, would probably succeed.

On the plot. It stays in the background for some time, until the final few routes. Until then, the characters are constantly at the forefront of the whole kaboodle. And indeed they are very interesting characters. None of them are ever flat or one-sided. There’s a totally different side to them that you only truly see as you progress, and because the way the game flows, you see multiple iterations of them, and the contrasts between side A and side B (and side C) are just downright incredible. And the game doesn’t really dwell on the setting; it’s more used as a springboard for the characters to strut their stuff – all done very well.

To be frank, I found Ever17’s plot to be more interesting, but when it comes to characters, C†C wins hands down. But then Ever17 puts emphasis on the plot while C†C puts emphasis on the characters! So yeah.

Anyway, on the plot – it was quite engaging when it got into high gear, but never explained in detail. That is to say, unlike Ever17 where they give you little hints here and there, then drop the bomb right at the end, C†C just stops at the hints, leaving the reader to piece together the bits of information scattered in the dialogue/monologue.

Some people said Tanaka Romeo’s writing was pretty tough, and that they were pretty off-put by all the off-topic side-comments and jokes. I actually liked it; it feels like an even more casual form of prose, which constantly keeps the tone light in all the right scenes, but he can shift tones and moods to darker, more serious ones very well with just a couple of lines.

Art was pretty good, for such an antiquated (okay, not really) game. The style was reminiscent of someone, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I noticed it was Matsuryu’s stuff. The eyes and the nicely defined anatomy give it away.

Music wasn’t anything memorable, but the light-toned stuff was quite enjoyable to listen to on loop. Voices weren’t super incredible or anything, but there’s no painfully annoying ones either. And Sakuraba’s voice sounds a lot like Koyasu Takehito. His voice is far too distinct for me not to recognize. Or maybe it’s just me.

Okay, bad points. Just one, really.  This isn’t really a “branching” sort of eroge. That is to say, despite choices, you’re pretty much forced to go on a single track, and  it time-loops back if you screw up, which is to say, there are no “bad-ends”. Just one “end”, which you will, provided you actually complete the segments without looping forever, reach at some point in time. In other words, it’s more like a kinetic novel with choices, contradictory as that sounds.

Yeah, so in short, it’s a pretty good game. And the patch has an all-ages version too, for all those who are pure of heart. No excuses. Play it. Youko is watching you.

I went to (investigate) the Power Plant. No, not those smoke-spewing dumps that could kill birds passing by in one fell swoop. Power Plant was a mall, situated in the front of a river, whose pollution levels were high enough to merit a national-level program to clean up the damned thing. At the same time, it was plopped right beside upper-class condominiums and facilities. Almost like putting a mall in a subdivision.

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