Review of Sanse △ Hui Lian -Tricolour Lovestory-

It has been a long time for me to write nothing after finishing anything, basically as a result of my being busy, while I have decided to invest this winter vacation in exploration of galgames and I do have put it into practice. Previous comments from roommate, curiosity about domestic galgame, obscure message from nowhere to review my high school life... It is hard to conclude full reasons for my starting from here but one thing is clear. I want to prepare myself for "dramatic love triangle" work... and maybe learn something from it.

It is not like I have not tried any of this kind. Being a big fan of Mlle Kyou Fujibayashi from CLANNAD, I did "enjoy" the drama from M. Kai. However, this experience spoke aloud that not all triangle dramas are decently smooth like that. Of course my final rating would not be "excellent", but it may be better to be saved for later after a clarification of my perspective. Having complained much with friends of mine, my final quitting this game was, in the middle of Chapter 4 Episode 4, quite sudden and silent. In fact, it might have been earlier if I could have figured out sooner that I could hardly learn anything useful from it.

It was... actually amazing to see my familiar city in a galgame, at least I enjoyed every moments of "getting the point"; It was also nice to have occasional tracebacks to my high school life and had some random thoughts following its implication about "Freedom in Family of Origin", but let's save them for later. The key question here is that I might be too old to go with its flow in a high school context. It is quite easy and also quite exciting for me to critize the flaws of our hero M. Cheng Qiu. However, it is natural for a high school student to be more naive than me "an old guy". How could I make judgements in such an arbitary manner ? And why I so stuck to learn something practical from him ? As long as I came to realize this, the whole story seemed to be less meaningful. So I just stopped my progress and my following comments would be based on only the contents I had explored.

Though impolite, direct comparison is always useful. Further discussion on scenario and charater design would be expanded by simply comparing our Sanse △ Hui Lian with famous CLANNAD. Starting from characters, basically there were no girl of my type. Visual Novel Database labelled our heroines with "tsundere" and "dandere", which are correspond to Mlle Kyou Fujibayashi and Mlle Kotomi Ichinose. I like Kyou, but not for her tsundere character. And Mlle Xiaoju "childhood sweetheart" Mo did no sacrifice as Kyou did. From my point of view, she is a girl of sunshine with sincere feelings but limited capability to solve problems, which is more like Mlle Nagisa Furukawa indeed; On the other side, Mlle Zhi Wen is a classic "dandere" character with many layers and there are many evidences supporting the similarity between her and Kotomi: shy and strange genius, living alone and psychological trauma, etc. Even their stories are both developed by a close friend of their father, and they both have important events like birthday celebration and self-volition to change their future. I do not mean to emphasize the similarity, but it offers an insight to point out something might be strange. In CLANNAD, Kotomi was in generous family love but unexpectedly lost her parents in an accident. Could this affect almost the same as a Chinese-type demanding single-parent family ? It worths a discussion. Also. Zhi seemed to have made her decision at my stopping point. Is it too early for story development and route decision ? We once talked about "Life Interference" problem. If I were the hero, I would be really troubled to make decision then.

Being exactly the same as Nagisa, Xiaoju is also in a family of love. But sadly that is the only "normal" family in Sanse △ Hui Lian. Our hero is also in a tragic family of origin with extremely arbitary and demanding parents that I have never seen in real life. I would rather save a "possible" rather than claim it "artificial", but it is hard for me to stand in his shoe for his choices. Previously I have mentioned my criterion for "entering certain route", where both "to know the girl I admire better" and "to find more suitable girl for our hero" are acceptable. Here, this answer could be developed since the problem could not be discussed alone without a clarification of our purpose. There is no interesting girl and there is no sharing properties between the hero and I either, so there is not really a driving force for me to make a decision. Once we step back to pure problem solving, the final decision is actually a familiar "Similarity or Complementarity" problem and my answer lies in harmonization. There would be no future development with no complementarity, and would be no present acquaintance at all with no similarity. This point of view doubtlessly supports Xiaoju. We can also attribute the gut-wrenching bilateral withholding between our hero and Zhi to this conclusion.

Considering that I have quitted the game. A decisive comment on its message spreading would better be suspended. A cheap word for the "Freedom in Family of Origin" problem would also be "seeking harmonization". Our tradition names it impossible to stage a complete rebellion against our family. However, unconditional acceptance is always an unstable factor devastating one's nature. If we can clearly understand our real responsibility according to our own family condition, it might be easier for us to make decision with no regrets. For me the message spreading is not that smooth, but it might be decent for some younger visitors.

And finally for triangle drama, a key point from my point of view is the growth of characters. The entanglement and tangle are definitely gut-wrenching and that is acceptable; there would be problem solving and problem emerging and that is also acceptable. Considering that there must be a decision, what we audiences want to witness is the growth of character with the reasons of decision clearly given. I was not and shall not be interested in partisan conflict. In CLANNAD, the self-interrogation and awareness is painful but eventually meaningful. Here the growth of characters, especially that of our hero, is disappointingly quite unclear, which does not favor a high rating of me.

Pic shot by Syl in Tricolour Lovestory -Complete Edition-

p.s. Thanks M. Kimiyoshi Maruyama for my looping his Jiuge during my typing.

by Syl & Sylvia @ 2025-01-28 02:07:31 @ Wuhan, Hanyang District
originally posted @ https://www.cnblogs.com @ 2025-01-28