I am a critic... I do not have to offer a solution. I criticize. That is how reviewing works. Or do you expect Roger Ebert -- to bring up a prominent example -- writing endlessly about what could have been done better in scene A and scene B? Certainly not.Nekken wrote:It sounds like you were expecting to see some kind of disability-related crisis in each path. What sorts of things were you thinking of?oneyoudontknow wrote:1:
No. What the game fails to deliver is a convincing depiction of someone who is blind or suffering from some other kind of disability. It is too nice. Too positive. There is never some real kind of crisis.
What I would have loved to see might have been something that breaks a flow a bit. Makes you think, interact with more characters and less of the positivism.
True ... but ... when he moves towards his room for the first time, he there is some tv room with other people or so ... why does he never go there? Such simple things are missing.Nekken wrote:Hisao is never particularly big in the social scene of his school, it's true. The closest he ever gets is joining the Student Council, and even that is mostly behind-the-scenes work. But given that he transferred into the school halfway through his senior year, I'm not sure that's necessarily unrealistic: he hasn't had much time to integrate, he isn't going to get much time to integrate because he will graduate in less than a year, and everyone in the school would know this. That doesn't leave much opportunity to get into the loop, so to speak.Lilly says in the Hanako branch, that the school is far from perfect and has cliques and groups, which would create some 'trouble' or so; bullying or what not. Such is never there. There is hardly ever a reference to what is going on in the school; Hanako's incident or the epileptic fit are two examples for the contrary. The player is never in contact with this ... is never immersed on such a level as to experience it and to see the reactions of the 'characters'.
Crazy hair ... some small slip ... the things that make us human. At university I had to tell something a lot of time to move the rest of toothpaste from this mouth away. Again, the simply things ... they are not there.Nekken wrote:I'm not sure I understand: what do you mean by "non-immaculate"?Then there is the aspect of the disabilities. Why does Lilly never appear in an non-immaculate kind of way?
Swing and a miss. You fail to get what I am referring to with in a too streamlined kind of way. If everything is positive and nice and we are a wonderful (but strange) kind of family in this game, then why do we need such disabled characters in this setting after all?Nekken wrote:But the game wasn't trying to get you to pity them: quite the opposite, in fact. You aren't supposed to pity them, and a significant part of the game is devoted to telling you why you shouldn't.To name an obvious example. In order to pity them, the game would have had to move a good deal in another direction.Three of the girls -Shizune, Lilly, and Rin- have been dealing with their disabilities their whole lives. Especially in Lilly's and Rin's cases, dealing with the world around them has become almost a background detail: their efforts are not insignificant, but they are automatic, and not the sort of thing they'd think to call out unless specifically asked. Shizune's disability presents more difficulty in dealing with people than with things, but as her path progresses they actually do touch on this.What should have been done is to show the struggle a bit more. We, the normal ones, have difficulties in getting along and progress, while in this game everything was depicted in a too streamlined kind of way.
Emi is a different case, having acquired her disability later in life than any of the others. Even in her case, though, she has had eight years to learn how to deal with her disability, and she's stated to have put in a lot of up-front effort into doing things like re-learning how to walk. By the time of the game, that effort has paid off, but there are still things she has to deal with: we see what happens, for example, when she doesn't take adequate care of what remains of her legs.
Hanako is another case entirely, as the only one who really hasn't dealt with her disability (though even she is trying to). It's also interesting in that things get much, much worse before they get better (if they ever do), and it's all the player's fault. Although you help her achieve a sort of catharsis by the end, that's really the only thing you do to help her, and then only after you've managed to mess both of you up rather severely.
see above. Same issue.Nekken wrote:Marginally, yes, but as far as this goes I found more value in the questions the game leaves unanswered. How did Lilly plan on getting back to the house from the cornfield? Rin specifically mentions having trouble with shirts: what about pants, especially given that she wears the boys' uniform? How did Shizune learn sign language in a household (and, sadly, educational system) so hostile to the idea? The game touches on the basics of their situations, then asks enough questions to leave the reader wanting to know more, and I think this is a good thing.What does the game give you at the end of the day? Are you able to understand someone better who is blind?
I suppose the word cruft could use some work, but I honestly don't think that there's anything wrong with the pacing itself. Except for maybe Shizune's route, but that's justified by how Shizune prefers to compartmentalize the events in her life, so of course the plot itself would seem compartmentalized.