[Spoilers] Weekly Thread #40 - Coμ - Kuroi Ryuu to Yasashii Oukoku

I typed up a portion of this up shortly after finishing my play-through. I intended to make my own self post (since there were no "Just Finished Comyu" posts at the time) but I never got around to finishing it until now. Pretty much everything I said after the h-scene bit is new, so if someone thinks I'm ignoring something, just outright wrong, or otherwise disagrees with me, there's a decent chance I just forgot a thing in there somewhere, so feel free to point it out.

If I had to give a one-word impression of the Coμ, I'd have to call it "solid". I gave it on 8 on VNDB because there's very little that I can say is outright wrong with it, but there wasn't much that quite blew me away, either. [I might end up dropping that to a 7, having let some time pass.]

One more specific thing that I noticed (pretty early on) is that Akihito is kind of a whore. I mean, I can accept the "wanting to connect to people" idea, and I thought that was actually handled pretty well. My issue was more with the blatant, fan-servicey cheating on girls he's involved with. I don't have anything against h-scenes or whatever, but there was no real reason for Yoruko's, Rondo's, or either of Haru's scenes to be there. They kinda make the MC feel like an uncaring ass. Especially Yoruko's, though. That was way out of left field. If nearly every woman in sight needs her own h-scene, just make some goofy 10-minute "bad end", boot me back to the bad choice, and keep the main route a tad more... single-minded.

Just my opinion, anyway.

Probably my main complaint is that the characters in Comyu seem to lack depth. Every once in a while, you might catch a glimpse of something deeper going on, but it's often skimmed over. An example off the top of my head would be with Izawa and his sister(s?). Maybe a total of 60 seconds in the entire game discusses the subject, and it's one of the very few things that keeps Izawa from being anything other than a merciless member of the city's underworld. When Kururi "died", I felt just about nothing: she was little more than the slightly annoying senpai on the roof with weird connections. Basically, they could make me give a damn what happens to the characters, but devotee their time to other things instead. That isn't an objectively wrong way to write a story, obviously, but it's note quite the way I like it.

Put another way, I think the game lacked focus. Ultimately, a lot of the events in the story (many of those involving the round table and Caesar's army, for example) didn't matter much to the overall plot. A case could be made for the two groups representing opposing perspectives on moral matters, but I feel like the ending basically said, "eh, fuck morals, just make it work" (terrible over-simplification/possible mis-remembering, but, you know). Had some of those sequences been cut or shortened, and more emphasis put on the main characters, I think I would have cared more, and felt more invested in how everything ended.

While the characters were not always, in my opinion, particularly well-developed, they're all still pretty entertaining. I didn't think it was ever as outright hilarious as, say, Grisaia no Kajitsu, but there were definitely some good chuckles to be had, here and there.

The action scenes were, again, solid. Never quite as intense as Muv-Luv Alternative or the like, but it had its moments.

Art.

Pretty good.

I could undoubtedly say more, but I'm already above 600 words, and it's about 1:45am for me right now, so my list of positives is pretty brief, but there's a decent chance I'll come back and add more later.

Again, I'm missing a lot, but let me know if you disagree with something, need something elaborated, etc. and I'll do what I can.

/r/visualnovels Thread