Heartache 101 ~Sour into Sweet~

author=Dozen
An offer of exceptional benevolence.

As Dewelar said, I can't take credit for just doing what I do, but I do have an idea in mind for this request. Are you any good at doing art? I was thinking about doing a "fake" event CG for the good end scene using the PICTURE tag.

So I decided to give the DLC characters a try since I haven't given them any love yet. I unlocked Noriko's ending, but ended up with Shoko because apparently her affection score was higher. Funny, that. Anyway, I'm probably going to try again, this time stripping out the characters I don't want to pursue.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to write this post is because Noriko is fcuking adorable. That's all.

Havn't actually played the game in a while (Except for story testing.). I'll need to check out Noriko some time week.

Review: Playtime with the Magic Girl
- Kuwabara Emiko by Marrend



This route was quite an interesting experience, to say the least. The route is a little quirky at first, seeing as how the player attempts to date a woman who he assumes to be in college.. and actually turns out to be past college. Not only that, but this route contains plenty of references to games made by RMN, including Heartache itself. Emiko is practically a huge advertisement. Even past that, she's like an in-universe stand-in for the author, and the story has some mythical themes later on.

Unfortunately, I feel like Marrend wasn't taking this route so seriously, or maybe he just lost some of his arcane charm, because it was just satisfactory for me. But, this is a completely subjective review, so it might just be that this story didn't appeal to me personally.

STORY: 4/5
- The events that happens between the characters.

Pretty cool. I will say that it's not amazing. The story did not leave me with a charm that, say, Riho or Junko did. The story mostly takes place at the Market Street, seeing as how Emiko works there. The initial part, for me, was annoying. Marrend was trying to drill through the fourth wall, I tell you. The amount of references just left me feeling like I was watching a commercial. Well, of course it wasn't that bad, but it still left something of a sour taste in my mouth.
However, it's really adorable seeing the two bond through goddamn video games. I don't know how plausible that is, but I'm willing to ignore that. They form a relationship at a nice pace, going slow enough to show that Emiko has a life away from the player, and yet fast enough for the major events to happen when they need to, and when the reader wants them to.

Now.. I'm not a major fan of fantasy in my realistic, slice-of-life Heartache world. That's why the latter portion of the route, when Emiko finds out she is a MAGICAL WIZARD FROM ANOTHER WORLD*, killed me a little bit. That's more of a personal issue, really. I would have rated this lower if Marrend failed to make the bonding and romancing interesting. You can see the subtle and less subtle bonding between the two protagonists during Emiko's crisis/the fantasy events, and it was that development that let me survive.

*Not really. I'm not actually sure. The route itself does not tell us where she got the powers from directly, but I'm guessing one of Marrend's games would explain it well enough.

CHARACTERIZATION: 3/5
- The characters themselves and how they contribute to the story.

Good, I guess. Emiko is pretty solid. She's a person. She has friends, family, habits, tendencies, mannerisms, etc., but I feel like she's way too solid. In the beginning of the story, she seems to be completely fine. She was stable and supporting herself well, she had no issues of any sort, and the main conflict isn't about the person, it's about the person's magic powers. Other characters have their own problems that affect them.. not their bodies, that reflect on how they act and what they do. Emiko could have been any random shmuck, but the crisis would still be able to apply to them.

I wanted to support her as she dealt with her personal problems. Since I couldn't.. I wasn't so satisfied.

The player feels more like Marrend than flowerthief's player, but Marrend writes the player well enough so I didn't notice this until I read the story a second time. He doesn't change very much throughout the story, but I guess Emiko and the player clicked. There wasn't a need for him to change much.

EXPERIENCE: 4.5/5
- How smoothly the route goes for the reader.

Great. There are some missing brackets and periods, but otherwise, no issues that can be accredited to you.

CONTENT: 2.5/5
- The amount of stuff there is to do.

Well, fuck. I so badly want to give Marrend another 1/2 point here for finally managing to write forty main-route stories on one character (this is an accomplishment for him), but it's still only forty damn stories.

OVERALL SCORE: 14/20
This would be, like.. B-. Satisfactory. For me, that's good enough.

I'm not a professional reviewer. This is completely subjective. I probably missed a lot of things, and some of this info might be incorrect, so don't take this review too seriously.