image

I recently read a visual novel called Grisaia no Kajitsu and was told I should write a review about it. I was slightly reluctant, partially because I’m not sure my feelings warrant a writeup, partially because the last time I said something about visual novels I got like 15 people wanting to fight me about my terrible opinions. Still, here we are.

I went into Grisaia with a some reservations. These Akihabara blockbusters don’t really do much for me and the chance of Grisaia being something different wasn’t all that high. After all, it’s a critically and popularily acclaimed, commercially successful AAA visual novel, just like every other big name VN that has been a lame experience for me before. I didn’t really mind that, though. I suppose what I wanted to get out of Grisaia was to pick it apart and analyse the pieces. Even if I wouldn’t outright like it, I could learn something.

Grisaia turned out to be exactly as I expected. It had nothing that I look for when I want to read something. What it has is a ton of humor, most of which was not funny to me and lazy cliches I’ve seen many times before, arranged in a slightly different and incoherent way. The story structure is incredibly simplistic, to the point of feeling like a deliberate reduction of the stereotypical bishoujo VN story. It consists of spending ten to fifteen hours of happy fun times with a harem of plastic moe archetypes who then are revealed to be horribly mentally broken when their tearjerkingly tragic past is unveiled. The 8th grader’s power fantasy protagonist then fixes the PTSD of his chosen waifu, either with dickings or stupid military black ops asspulls. Amazingly, Grisaia manages to avoid having any kind of common theme of narrative cohesion, with each of the routes going to wildly varying directions that have nothing to do with each other, and the grimdark backstory of the protagonist (or indeed, his own grimdark mental issues) are left unresolved. The writers seem to have realized this too so they’ve made two sequels to Grisaia. Maybe they tie everything together.

Since finishing Grisaia, I’ve tried to think hard what I got out of it. I have a strange deja vu-like feeling that I’ve seen everything Grisaia had before. That all it did was take a bunch of basic tropes, archetypes and stock events and shuffle them around. What can I learn from such an experience?

I suppose there’s something I want to touch on a bit, although it’s not exactly news. I still have trouble swallowing the seemingly mandatory introductory part, the “common route”, which usually consists of nothing but pointless penny-a-word slice of life comedy scenes. I don’t get it. Efficient storytelling is when you first present a thesis (the protagonist’s world in equilibrium and peace), almost immediately introduce the antithesis (something that shakes the balance, or starts turning the wheels of the story) and then work towards the conclusion, the synthesis. Imagine, say, Alice in Wonderland (what a fashionable work to use as a reference!). What if, before her falling down the rabbit hole on page two, there had been two hundred pages of description of Alice’s everyday life? Tea parties with plush toys and her sister, helping mom with the dishes, studiously doing homework? Would that improve the story by helping the reader to get attached to the character of Alice? To me that sounds horrendous, but it’s exactly what most visual novels of Grisaia’s kind do, and even more crazily (to me), to many readers it’s the most attractive part of the story. It’s no surprise that my favourite individual part of Grisaia was a story-within-a-story that bypassed that kind of annoyance.

Earlier this year I read another of these AAA visual novels, Rewrite. While I didn’t really like it either, at least Rewrite had something going for it, no matter how dumb. It tried to tell a bigger story than just the personal tragedies of a couple teenaged girls. It tried to say something, it had something to be figured out, even if it was hackneyed and clumsy. Grisaia is nothing but a lukewarm soup of moe and chuunibyou, the two mainstay ingredients of an otaku media experience. It didn’t leave me thinking, it didn’t leave an impression on me. I didn’t get a feeling Grisaia was trying to do anything except get the reader attached to the cute girls in the cast.

Despite this text being kinda negative, I don’t want to complain about Grisaia’s existence or yet again moan about VNs in general. In fact, I think it’s fine. While Grisaia has nothing to offer to me, many people specifically look for stuff like it. The narrative structure reminiscent of an emotional kidnapping of the reader can be enjoyable if you buy into it. If you actually project yourself into the story, actually get attached to the characters, Grisaia probably works ok. Then it does what it’s supposed to be doing, I think.