/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>20512229
Only a side-character. She is very good though. I generally like how Kure writes most villains. A lot of writers give villains backgrounds to redeem them. Kure doesn't. He does it to explain how this shit came to be. It's not to forgive, it's to understand. And this character fits right in. She didn't get born insane. She had to get insane.

Most of the insane characters of Kure aren't really openly insane anyway. It may take a while till you realize it, as "just a little bit of a weirdo" is hardly enough to call a character insane. And even once you get it revealed it's not your overacted "weird laugh" insanity or whatever. The characters just do something. Something you may have suspected all along. And they do it without thinking that it's weird. You could call it a sickness. Something that could be a thing in reality as well. Something where they simply need help. Not just something that's supposed to be "cool". A reason why I like his villains, which tend to be the same kind of insane as well, female or not.

Mori Dreamers simply has the issue, that it takes a lot of time with fairly random side-stories after the great opening. Tokihate was overall way shorter and as such was a better experience overall. The high peaks of Mori Dreamers may however be better. Dreamers 2 is a lot more of a mixed bag, as it features my least favorite Kure villain, but also one of my favorite ones. I just hope he never goes back to moege. I gave Princess Evangile a chance, but holy crap no. The villain in that was also really fucking awful to the point I started to believe moege have some shitty guidelines on how to write villains: Has to be absolutely bad and in the wrong without a doubt so that the player/protag is definitely right. Also has to be an ass. I've seen this type of villain in a LOT of moege. And they never make sense. How can such unreasonable people get to be school chairmen and whatnot? They behave like raging 5 year olds that somehow got a lot of power at their hands. Oh well.

>>18393067

A lot of the common route are little short stories. Basically there's a setting that some kinda ghosts can possess people. Normal people can't see them and they are simply a part of the world. If it happens, the person in question will die soon. That's the way the world works, and completely normal. But there are some red versions of that, those possess people who are generally having very destructive or twisted thoughts, or want to kill someone or similar stuff. In that case the person gets eaten more or less from within and if he or she kills someone, the corpse and anything related to it (i.e. blood) will vanish a short time after the death.
The main cast more or less fights that, which works from within "dreams". It's not quite that straight forward but it should give an idea. This is also where the horror happens.

There's an overall idea that is followed, but that's a spoiler for the prologue I guess. At some point that's going in full force. The horror is over at that point, more or less at least. This is also the biggest mystery part, although the separate chapters have some "what's going on?" as well. In the end the whole work however is much more psychological than anything else. And it works, if you ask me. Unless you want romance. That part... is frankly very unsatisfactory. Not sure if I was the only one who found the routes very lackluster, aside of the main girl's one which finished the main story.

So, done with Mori Dreamers. Once again a little Kure typical, eroge "killing" eroge.


The game is roughly split into 2 parts, with the second part being essentially the character routes.

Part 1 is roughly speaking about the protag and how he deals with what happens with and to Madoka. After the (in my opinion fairly strong) prologue, the game does spend some time which certainly feels a little "filler", but this is where most of the game's spooky time lies and it's not bad or anything. After that you get the main-plot. There's also some mystery aspects here and there. For the most part those work out fine, though I felt that one chapter was rather.. convenient. It was a little too obvious what was going on, while the protag needed forever to catch on. (It's where I put the game on-hold) Probably the one biggest weakness of part 1.
Overall I quite liked the mainstory. The main characters were mostly interesting and offered fair and nice moral dilemmas. Villains don't grow on trees and I feel like the more important ones were shown rather nicely with logical backgrounds. In fact, I would've wanted a bit more about some of them. The one on pic related was quite nice. Though at least there are reasons given, and there's no back-paddling. Way too many authors love their drama which doesn't actually exist, because that leads to easy solutions. So the authors just overdramatize everything and leave out information, just so they can end up saying "hey, it's actually not bad and this person is great after all!". Not here. There's enough given to show, that there's a reason why the characters act like they do, and what motivated to them to do so in the first place. It's "understandable" why they ended up like they are, even if it's not acceptable what they do. And I like this grey-ish tone. Won't make a mass-murderer a good guy, but at least you know how that ended up happening and how fucked up and sad the world we live in can be. It's all a fairly nice tragedy.

And then comes part 2, the routes. Oh boy. With the exception of the main-route and a small part of another one, you could think, those come right out of a moege. It kinda makes sense that there's some fluff, story-wise, but that was just.. no. The main-route is the best idea to play, the rest should probably be ignored. This is way too heavy on the "eroge expectations". In fact, one funny thing about the game is how unimportant the heroines are for the story. They have a role in the setting, but the main-story does not really include any of them. It felt rather weird. But of course you need a certain amount of heroines with routes and ero-scenes, or else your game won't sell, so, there you go. Kure doesn't exactly excel at those "moe" scenes though, and the heroines are also honestly not made for that stuff I feel. I also heavily missed a bridge between part 1 and 2 to make the romance a little.. more understandable.
But anyway, the main-route continues the plot of part1 a little bit and gives some nice backgrounds. It's actually a route that feels like it belongs to the game. So I'm not complaining too much there. Though this route does have a fair amount of fluff as well, before it shoves the girl aside and does plot. Yep, the main-heroine doesn't matter. Why would she matter? Could be literally any other girl as well. Made me wonder, why it wasn't just written like that...


Overall I enjoyed the spooky stuff and the main-story quite a bit. Presentation was also fairly nice (over 160cg, fitting atmospheric music) and so on. But the engine is utter garbage. Oh boy. Not as terrible as Chaos;Child's, but it's not that far away.