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Home > Writing Portfolio > VN Review: Hashihime of the Old Book Town

Posted by: classic mature sex Em | APR-10-2020

Anyone who has met me personally will know that this has been a common whine for me whenever a new ”ironic” /” critical ”/parody VN becomes a main topic of discussion for mature young sex a short while: despite the long history, popularity, and measurable influence of the visual novel genre, one emerges is frequently framed as novelty, and press coverage of this is typically accepted. They are just so outrageous! I barely consider myself an analyst or diehard enthusiast, I simply often seek them out and love them. I’m fascinated by visible works because of both their content and their design as technology and games. Also outlets that are usually more focused on, y’know, videogamey-games try to criticize or give environment with this inclination, they commonly concentrate on storyline content and comparison to non-VNs. Even with just my brief awareness, I want to contribute something to this dialogue( which may be a few months later at this point… but it always comes up once ), on essential features of the physical book type, from a Game Studies perspective.

The terms” Visual Novel” and” Dating Simulator” are not direct translations of how Japanese people define a particular genre of video game, but they were created specifically to give the English-speaking world an idea of what these games are, as Kastel points out in this blog post. They are frequently used interchangeably to describe video games with still-character artwork and a plot that is delivered via text boxes and where the player is occasionally given a choice, usually with the intention of achieving a particular romantic or sexual outcome.

Further, compared to the variety of games available in Japan, very few have been translated to English, much less have gotten an official translation, even fewer have become truly popular or well-known, maybe none at all depending on the level of ubiquity we’re describing. The point made by Kastel is that, in terms of the characters and plotlines that are featured in ”ironic,”” critical,” or parody dating sims, they are frequently working from a learned understanding of what dating sims are like rather than actual experience. Whether this knowledge comes from references to dating sims in other media, like anime series, or jokes about ”weird,” ”retrograde,” Japanese media that are still prevalent online, or whether it is the result of their attempts to parody, critique, or subvert conventions already works from a false or at least incomplete impression of the genre.

But I don’t just think this is limited to issues of plot and character, making high school girls puke and stab each other, or making the player date inanimate objects or fast food mascots or whatever the next wacky and ostensibly ”interesting” thing in an attention-grabbing English-language VN is. I believe there is also a lot of uninformed chauvinism about how some Japanese visual novels and dating simulators are produced formulaically and naively as if the format were simply pre-received, despite how some English-language VNs are purportedly structurally and conceptually innovative.

I think it’s obvious why the visual novel was viewed as a form that needed to be interacted with very Western Game Studies-infused concepts to become ”interesting.” A recent episode of Game Studies Study Buddies spends a lot of time discussing the influential ( for better or worse ) work Cybertext, by Espen Aarseth. As Game Studies attempted to establish its independence from literary and film studies as an academic discipline, Aarseth’s terminology and concepts were heavily influenced by the values of the work, which have frequently been translated into” common sense” in terms of game design.

Aarseth does a lot of time talking about literature in the original text despite this outcome. He argues that videogames are potentially examples of ergodic literature, which is differentiated from nonergodic literature because it demands ”nontrivial effort” where the reader constructs a path through the text, through manipulating a controller, making choices, and so on. However, ergodic texts may not be considered” cybertexts,” a term Aarseth reserves for works that involve some form of calculation in how they play out, as opposed to simply presenting different outcomes, which he associates with hypertext and early interactive fiction works.

It’s worth noting that Aarseth is not making a judgment here about whether hypertext, IF, and ( by extension ) visual novels are or aren’t ”real games,” but it’s fairly straightforward to understand how the implicit values of these categories, including emphasising calculation and simulation over branching path formats, continue to influence future scholarship in game studies. A later diagram by Jesper Juul in Half-Real, explicitly excludes things like hypertext, IF and VNs from the category of ”games”.

Even if a Game Studies text does not explicitly address inclusion or exclusion, the values and remit of Game Studies as a starting point for writing are inherently shaped by these, in theory, kind of flimsy premises. This would seem like a scenario that necessitates the intervention of auteur-y meta and critical gestures, which are the bread and butter of ”elevated” indie or art games when someone influenced by these values encounters what they would perceive as a so-called genre of game, likely originating from another culture, that primarily consists of advancing text and occasionally making decisions.

The truth is that visual novels and dating sims have always had a structurally innovative and experimental streak, and this is obvious even to a dabbler like myself. Never ( never!! ) have I had this! played a dating sim or visual novel in Japan that featured that structure. Beyond characters and themes, its core structural tension is that it is a game that remembers, that you can’t just blithely reset and perfect the routes of each girl to ”beat”. But is there really a twist here? I’m not talking about the newest AAA game or the ”improves” on the imagined model that Doki Doki Literature Club ”improves” on because it is sexist, tropey, and has a basic understanding of more subtle topics like sex and romance. The way that a lot of Western devs assume they all have to be is a sort of projection that seems based on problems that are extremely common in Western games as well.

Anyone commenting on parody VNs should probably play through the structure depicted in Hato Moa’s Hatoful Boyfriend, which is much more common. Thematically connected, with hints about other characters and the larger machinations of the settings sprinkled throughout all the initially accessible routes, are thematical, and are cumulative because secret, alternative, and true routes only become available after passing other routes.

Tsukihime, another VN that has a bit of a presence in English anime fan communities due to the popularity of Kinoko Nasu’s other work like the Fate series, also conceptualizes its routes into two categories, near side and far side of the moon, setting them up in a schematic of relations to each other and also the main character. An eventual ending arc must also be unlocked, and the player can be instructed on how to avoid it on their next playthrough when they make a choice that leads to a ”bad end.” A good visual novel typically builds on itself over time and tucks away interesting surprises in its far corners. Almost all visual novels are self-aware, on a mechanical level if not explicitly stated in the text.

That a videogame could be so, well, game-able seems like an anxiety that’s unique to the presumption that videogames are doing something particularly unique, generative, even influential, even beneficial, which are checks that Game Studies early on built its reputation on probably being able to cash … Interfaces have to melt away or be contextualized as a visor or other object within the game, the line between cutscene and gameplay has to be increasingly blurred, and these tendencies are touted as ”innovations” ”increasing realism\ Practically everyone has the same set of options as the entry menus and the same set of general options that are available while playing. You will be able to start a new sport, or fill one of your existing save games, and often you have really many of these, encouraging you to keep either instantly before or after a determination stage to examine afterwards. There are occasionally menu items for Extras that let you unlock character profiles, video segments, and pieces of the game’s soundtrack. They also have a gallery where the CGs ( full screen illustrations of specific events in the narrative rather than the individual character sprites ) you’ve unlocked are kept grid-free and call you back every time you go looking for more paths.

The majority of the camera is used for figure fairies, background, and CG photos while you’re playing, and a word box serves as both a description and a description of what’s happening. An adult subject properly lacking one or two of these functions but they are all quite common. You may exposure settings on the fly, evaluate the backlog, skip forward, enable auto text advancement, save and load, and do this whenever you want to. The text may generally be advanced by using the spacebar, enter vital, or mouse click. The resources provided here now provide compelling proof that sensory novels are a self-aware style. In Hashihime of the Old Book Town, a sensory book that I have played just and am apparently reviewing in this blogging blog, this feature is represented with an empty eye. When you reach a fresh option place or field, ”Skip” quickly forwards through text you have already seen and profits to user-advanced word.

How they are produced and consumed is fundamental to the structure of visual novels. Rather than presenting a continuous single experience, or players taking in the game as such, he argues otaku are just as likely to experience a game as database, to jump around and through, grabbing onto what is of interest. The Vice article I linked to above mentions Hiroki Azuma, a media theorist specializing in studying Japanese popular culture, but doesn’t make the point that is most pertinent to the discussion of visual novels. Azuma discusses how the database’s format allows for the itemization, division, and organization of once-coherent media objects.

Azuma uses the example of freeware programs distributed online which extract and sort all of the character, setting and CG images of a visual novel to reveal the variety of ways otaku engage with visual novel games, both experiencing the VN as a total narrative, and a system made up of many different parts. In her study of Neo-Baroque aesthetics, Angela Ndalianis discusses the unintended playstyles of players who discovered ways to directly access the files for cutscenes and assets of FMV games like Phantasmagoria. The VNs provide the player with the tools for its own partial disassembly, despite not quite the level of access that the software Azuma mentions provides via the ”skip” option and a number of other common interface features. Azuma notes that players who approach games with this ”hacker” mindset are explicitly aware of, and perhaps enjoy the fact that videogames ( broadly, not just Visual Novels ) do not offer true” choice” or ”agency” but rather are just a series of recombinations of existing assets.

So I finally have the context to explain what about Hashihime is so structurally compelling to me after about 2000 words. The player simply controls the pace with which the text and the visuals move. The first route, putting Tamamori through the same three days ten times, does not present the player any choices. Tamamori, the protagonist, is trapped in a time loop, a typical visual novel plot device that demonstrates a sense of self-awareness regarding the player’s ability to choose between time hopping and choice-redoing. The Higurashi games as well as some works by VN dev Ebi-Hime are examples of this format, and this kind of visual novel is occasionally called a ”kinetic novel.”

Hashihime is a text of repetition. Tamamori spun his wheels in the capital for a year before trying to fail once more in the 1920s Japanese. Not just that, he once failed the entrance exam to the Imperial University. not very good. He’s so in the thrall of his boring day to day life and internal fantasies that it takes him a while to realize he’s in a time loop, and even then he repeatedly messes up trying to avert the death of his friend Minakami, and avoid getting killed by a mysterious masked giant. The first path leads to a bittersweet conclusion when he finally persuades Minakami to travel back to the city with him by train, where all the other characters ’ fates are assumed to remain… He repeatedly tries to finish writing the same stories and bring closure to the same characters who make up his vivid hallucinations.

Then you start over, a Tamamori who is completely unaware that they are once more stuck in time. This loop between the loops of older Tamamori’s experience and the player-character Tamamori’s experience is another scale of time loop that exists in the game. The Skip button also comes in handy in this situation. The game will play through the conclusion of the first route if you choose the option that leads to the same outcome as before. Each of the alternatives have to be reached in a set order, so the routes are accumulative, rather than truly separate” choices”. In various roles, Tamamori encounters an older version of himself who has witnessed the Great Earthquake of 1923, which decimated the capital a year from the events of the game, as well as the eventual use of the atomic bomb against Japan in World War II. Tamamori will now be given one inflection point from which to choose in each subsequent route, giving him the opportunity to make a different choice.

In form, the stories place the infinite inexhaustibility of the digital ( and of the portion of Tamamori’s life that can simply be reloaded and reloaded and reloaded ) against change over time, the inescapable actual fact of embodied existence. The next steps take range from a straightforward childhood friend romance to a typical” true” route scenario in many romance VNs with some supernatural intrigue in the form of a straightforward time loop and the spirits that enable it to a variety of alternatives.

As more and more characters develop time-looping abilities and cross over into more intricate relationships, Tamamori travel down the path of crueller, stranger, and more outré forms of romance as a result of Breaking with this story. By the end of the final route Tamamori has essentially become the older, wiser version of himself who enigmatically appears in previous routes, and has established an unconventional partnership with the masked giant figure, so only by playing through the increasingly unconventional alternative romances are the scenarios which lead to elements of the most conventional romance created.

Tamamori pleading or wishing that all of the characters could return to their innocent friendships and daily lives, despite it being an increasingly unrealistic dream, is a common scene across several routes. It encourages skipping and a notion of the routes as being cumulative throughout the entire narrative. It tells us which choices matter, the points where you must do something different than before. Character relationships and political and supernatural intrigue change irreversibly, coloring the player’s interpretation of events they’ve already experienced several times before, instead of a consequence-free regeneration at the beginning of each route. In this way, Hashihime constantly winks at the idea of its structure as a BL romance VN and makes thematical comments about it without using the Visual Novel’s format as a pretext for technical or conceptual immaturity or as a barrier to overcome.

And then, all of this without even mentioning that this is, also, a porn game, that each route ends with an uncensored and fully voiced gay sex scene. And I’m not really referring to the writing, voice acting, or the quality of the art for an evaluation, either, despite the fact that I thought most of them were ”good.” Although this is how I feel about many of them, I found it to be an engaging, formal, and interesting play. It’s specific to a particular subset of interests within the already particular group of people who play Visual Novels. I’m not particularly suggesting that everyone go out and play this game right away, which is a characteristic of this review.

Even though Hashihime is marketed as a videogame, the fact that I wanted to write about it as a videogame made me think about how even constructive discussions of visual novels frequently preface statements that these games are ”mostly reading,” don’t have much ”gameplay,” or ”are mostly bad, except-.” Game Studies also seems to struggle or outright reject the idea that many people play visual novels, see the activity as ”playing a game\