"Ibuki Wormwood, speechless and bitter. Passionate, I asked you if you knew. ”
- Fujiwara Shikata ("One Hundred People")
On a hot summer day, when you graduate, I wonder if you will recall the sweet and sour love time when you were on campus? Or do you regret that you didn't meet a beautiful relationship when you were a student, and you can only watch others enviously feel the happiness of love?
In either case, if you open the game "Love I Want to Convey to You" ("Love × シンアイ彼女"), you may be able to recall or experience the beauty of campus romance.
"Love × シンアイ彼女), (hereinafter referred to as "Love Girl" is a text adventure game developed by Us:track and officially released on October 30, 2015. The plot tells the story of Kunimi Kotaro, a second-year student of Oyokan Gakuen, who befriends four young girls because he joins the Ministry of Literature and Art.
(Heroine 1 Himeno Star)
Beautiful standing paintings, moving soundtrack
Generally speaking, for GALgame, a game form that can only rely solely on still pictures and background music to render scenes and atmospheres, external perception is the most core part of the player's game experience. And in this regard, "Lover's Daughter" has done a very good job.
(Heroine 2 Shindo Color)
First of all, compared with the more retro painting style in many well-known GALs, the characters of "Lovers" are quite beautiful, and they are more in line with the general aesthetic habits of the current two-dimensional group. Secondly, its overall painting style is quite stunning, most of the composition, color is almost perfect, and very soft and warm, and its love theme is very suitable, almost to the point where each standing painting can be taken out as wallpaper alone.
(The only designated ED picture of the well-known UP main video in the animation area of Station B is derived from this game)
The game's background music does a great job of driving the plot and setting off the lingering and feminine atmosphere. In the sound of the piano like a gurgling water, there is the sweetness of love, the love of a girl, the knot of the male protagonist, and the love that can only be swallowed back into the abdomen again and again to pass on to others. These emotions slowly penetrate into the player's heart with the right timing of BGM, allowing the player to break the dimensional wall and empathize with the characters in the game.
(Heroine 3 Koju Yui)
High open low walking plot
As a GAL game, the element of multiple female protagonists for the male protagonist to "raid" is of course indispensable: the soft and cute temperament or the male protagonist's Aome Bamboo Horse Himeno Xingshou, the outwardly arrogant and strong but actually intellectually weak Shindo Caiyin, the shy and cowardly little Ju Yuyi who resembles a newborn little milk dog, and the mature and stable sister of the mature and stable sister of the natural integrity. The four female protagonists have different personalities and completely different types of appearance, each of which has its own shining points to attract the male protagonist, which can meet the aesthetic needs of various players.
(Heroine 4 four incense)
The star line and color tone line in the personal line are of high quality. In the plot performance, through the alternating presentation of reality and memory, taking the love letter written by the male protagonist to the star in elementary school as the clue, a young love story is described in a small and fresh but unpretentious style.
The overall tone of the early stages is exactly as the translation suggests – the love that I want to convey to you. Regardless of the male and female protagonists, always carefully show their hearts, admiring each other but because of their own lack of self-confidence and in the same place hesitant and entangled, stagnant, this kind of behavior full of youth hormones can always make people smile and recall the youthful feelings of their student days. Seeing the moment they finally break the knot and pluck up the courage to come together, the player can only help but sincerely bless them.
However, after playing deeply, the game naturally reveals some problems.
Compared with the high-quality star line and the color line, the remaining two personal lines, the Yuyi line and the Rin incense line, are more perfunctory. Although the interaction between men and women is still warm, due to the lack of plot preparation, the overall plot development is not very reasonable, and it seems that it is only the girl's unilateral upside-down paste to the male protagonist, completely losing the touch brought by the other two lines. It's like a perfunctory plot that caters to the audience, purely for the sake of having more objects to "attack".
In particular, with the star line and the colored sound line in front of the pearl jade, it is even more insincere to be very insincere by the Yi line and the Rin incense line.
The game of commercialization and creative desire
Also controversial is the final hidden line.
There may be some readers who know GAL better, already know that the main screenwriter of this game is the controversial Niijima Yu, who is famous for writing "Yu" GAL scripts such as "Hatsuyuki Sakura". Although in the personal line and color line written by him, the sweet dog food is indeed very warm. However, the overall plot in the hidden line is reversed towards tragedy. Let the player realize that the sweet love in front of them is nothing more than the compassion of The New Island.
(The female protagonist and the male protagonist exchanged their hearts through letters)
In the process of the evolution of the plot towards tragedy, the player can only watch the tragedy happen, and there is no way to avoid such an ending by choosing. There is no such thing as laying the groundwork and forcibly turning the plot, which makes it difficult for countless players to empathize with the characters in the plot. In contrast to the overall relaxed and romantic love comedy style in the early stage, such a setting undoubtedly seems malicious. It even caused some players to feel extreme anger, believing that this was a naked provocation of The New Island to the players.
(After the male protagonist proposes marriage, he chooses not to quit and say goodbye to the real female protagonist)
Before the game was released, Niijima Yuki once said: "The plot of the game is an artistic expression of the feelings I have experienced." The writer takes inspiration from his own life and creates such a plot - a story that knows that the relationship cannot be long-term, but for his own desires, deeply interferes with the long-term life of the person who loves you.
For a creator, the act of expressing his desire to create is not to blame in itself. But looking at the entire game, it is not difficult to find a sense of separation in the tone of the two creations. The core of the creation of the first half of the game, whether it is the quality of the star and color lines, or the Yuyi line and the Rinxiang line written to increase the objects that can be "attacked", are essentially the romantic comedies created by the makers in order to make compromises in order to win more audiences under the demand for commercialization.
When it comes to the hidden line, Niijima Yuki, out of her own desire to create, completely frees herself, hoping to write a tragic theme that is very common in traditional Japanese literature and GAL- the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms, the feeling of material sorrow that fades away after the moment of blooming.
As a result, in the end, in order to knead these two completely separated parts together into a commodity, in order not to let the hostess created by the previous comedy completely collapse, Niijima had to completely abandon the rationality of the narrative and perfunctorily wrote a set of "adults squeezing children" scenes. It creates a world that the player feels embarrassed by, as seen by the protagonist in a shoddy light novel—a "dark and crippled" world where adults are bad people, and only my companions and I are good people.
In fact, no matter how powerful Niishima Yu himself is, within the shackles of seeking an audience and "charming house", the writing displayed cannot control such a theme at all. This game, which has a near-perfect stand-up painting, music, and even an excellent pre-game experience, has finally made countless players angry at it because of its unexpected and unreasonable twists. The contradiction and game of commercialization and creative desire finally created the lamentable ending of this game.
epilogue
In the final analysis, the crux of this work is that the ability of the production team cannot strike a balance between commercialization and creative desire - both sides want it, but they become a lonely boat that cannot be docked at both ends. But if you judge this game as a bad work, it is really unfair. After all, the game's music, standing drawing, and emotional rendering are good enough to make it difficult for any GAL player with a sharp taste to criticize.
But the lonely boat is good, after all, you can see a touch of beauty along the coast. Under the wave of the name "market", such "beauty" is not easy, especially the sweet and sour childish feelings of teenagers, the tangled careful thinking that cannot express love when facing their sweethearts, the description of these aspects is indeed deeply felt. The author's personal eccentric view, for players who love GAL, this game is also not to be missed.
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