Making my way through all of their titles, reading âge has been extremely fulfilling, regardless of the entry or topics explored.
Going through MLA: Total Eclipse now and it's been really good, on top of that it's elaborated and reflected on that MLA fantastically, being the perfect VN to accompany it. One of the things I didn't like from the Trilogy after finishing it initially was that "touch and go" way some minor themes I found interesting were handled. Now having also read this and with what I've been told about Schwarzesmarken, I understand the vision for Muv-Luv's & âge's visual novels. They've created this extremely comprehensive world where basically I pick out any possible topic, macro or micro, common or uncommon from a hat, and these entries have explored it to an extent I feel is more than satisfactory. Very often better done than many of the other 30-100 hr VNs I've read that have the same topic as a major theme, but that's thanks to the background of MLA taking the brunt of worldbuilding and plot shit for me.
So seeing people who ended up liking Trilogy it's unfortunate people under this post have other âge entries on low or no priority, but understandable VNs are pretty much always a huge time investment. Thinking this is a small reason why some parts of the Trilogy are so misinterpreted by a lot of people. A good example in Trilogy, even a main character like Mikoto, a ton of her character isn't explicit and a large group of the readers think she's just <!gags and bad parenting!>. Now imagine for side characters, and themes both minor and major, that are expanded on in later entries. Just look at ML: Unlimited with bizarre shit like the Game Guy chapter, and <!hell the structure of Alternative itself makes it a dead giveaway!>, it's pretty easy to tell a good lot of these ideas put in to be explored in full in both Alternative and the subsequent ML entries. A lot of the people I know who were indifferent on the trilogy have become big fans after those subsequent entries, Schwarzesmarken and TDA especially.
As for non Muv-Luv stuff, I finished Rasen Kairou 2 recently, which was probably my favorite exploration of trauma itself and the ways it's handled & a great suspense game, held back by it biting into its predecessors identity as nukige first story second, but ultimately it proved to me that barring Rasen Kairou 1, which had a plethora of production issues (had to be rewritten completely for one), âge's VNs pretty much never have missed for me. Kimi ga Ita Kisetsu, became my favorite romcom VN. Probably the only VN to have a large positive impact in my life outside of fiction. So I genuinely don't expect less than greatness from âge now.
Which leads me to the company âge itself. If âge shut down tomorrow I'd be more than satisfied with what I've got. What Resonative and Integrate can be excite me a ton, but I have no clue if those'll ever see the light of day. These non VNs they've been releasing recently have probably ate up a fuck ton of cash, on top of being mediocre. Cash that they could've used to make another visual novel. And those VNs they release have pretty much unmatched production, Total Eclipse looks just marginally worse than Tsukihime Remake and TE came out 8 years earlier. So fuck knows where they get the money for another Schwarzesmarken quality VN lmao.
Worst case scenario there are still a ton of developers running that keep me excited for the next decade of VNs, but if another dev ever captures my heart with their stories consistently like âge does I'll be really surprised. Muramasa has been the only VN to match up.