I was going to do an audio commentary on this, but since not everyone listens to those, I’m going to put it in the text instead. Emi did win the poll with 5 votes, so we’ll be doing her route first.. sort of.
The way the routes in this game work is a little strange. Like most date-sim type VNs, it works by giving you a certain number of points for each answer you select toward a particular girl. However, at the start, we’re only going to be able to choose between Lilly and Shizune. In fact, the way the game determines which route you’re on is based off how many points you have between the two of them.
As a result, we have to go through most of Shizune’s first act before we can access Emi’s. Therefore, most of the updates after this one are going to be on Shizune’s route. Once we get to the point where we can switch, I’ll do so.
This also means we’ll probably be doing Shizune’s route second, because this game doesn’t have a true scene select menu the way a lot of VNs do today. The developers kind of expected that to switch routes, you’d start from the beginning again and work your way through.. but that’d lead to a lot of repetition.
Looking back, I feel like this part is a little too wordy. Hisao is always kind of like this, but here it almost seems like the writers were trying too hard to do the Max Payne cutscene thing. It’s kind of ironic given that they’d likely seen all of the threads where people would take Tim Buckley’s garbage webcomic (before Loss was a thing) and strip out 80% of the words in an attempt to make it funny.
: “Nakai.”
: “So you are. Excellent. I’m your homeroom and science teacher. My name is Mutou. Welcome.”
We won’t see a whole lot of Mutou, so he doesn’t get a dialog portrait.
: “The head nurse asked for a brief check-in visit, but there’s no time for that now.”
: “Oh, should I go later?”
: “Yes. We should get going and introduce you to the rest of the class. They’re waiting already.”
This choice is something I’m going to refer to as “Point Zero”. This is the actual spot from which all of the routes originate. Starting with this update, you’ll find banners at the bottom of any update that has a choice that changes which route we’re on. If more than one girl is listed, it’s because we’ll need to do part of one route before going to the other one.
While this choice seems inocuous, it does matter which one we pick: the top option gets us no points, while the bottom one will start us on Shizune’s route. We’ll be picking the bottom one, but not in this update, as I want this one to remain route-neutral. My goal is to avoid repetition as much as possible, so ideally you can read through most of the routes with little to no repeated dialogue.
