Baud Attitude

Normally I don’t follow up a game with its immediate sequel, but I decided to dive into Da Capo 2 and see what it was like.

Short answer: This is some Assassin’s Creed II level of going from “Meh, it’s OK” to “WOW”.

It’s running at the same resolution as the first Da Capo, but the character art and shading are gorgeous.  These three are dialog scenes, not CGs:

Koko must get pretty good reception with TWO antennas.

Look at those clothing details.

More clothing. I may have just discovered that I have a thing for cute girls in ties.

The CGs are also more frequent and more dynamic than the first game.

Your sisters.  Your STEP sisters.  Who you don’t live with, because your grandfather had the sense to kick you out of the house when you hit puberty.

Kotori-from-the-future.  PAN-TSU. PAN-TSU. PAN-TSU.

The male sidekicks in Da Capo 2 are also more fleshed-out and have more personality, and I’m kind of rooting for this guy.

He, on the other hand, is rather upset at my luck with girls.

It’s not just the extra detail and effort put into the character art that really stands out.  It’s this:

Characters have backs, and the scenes are laid out with the characters on multiple levels and scaled to give an impression of existing in 3D space.  I don’t have a TON of experience with visual novels, but this is the first one I’ve seen that did this and it just shows how much extra effort was put in.

I also liked the effort put into the environmental art, and here’s an example.  The main character’s room is a pretty common location in any visual novel, and it’s almost always an almost-too-perfect student’s room.

The detail here that just knocks it out of the park is the asymmetrical stereo speakers.  The reflection of the room in the window is also one of those things that just feels like a lot of love was put in where it wasn’t absolutely necessary.  It’s a little sterile – if I had any complaints, it’s that there aren’t any decorations – but it’s believably imperfect.

Finally, my biggest complaint from the original Da Capo – that you can’t tell who you’re going to run into when you are making choices about where to go – was addressed by the improved movement selection screen.

Sadly, Default Girl doesn’t seem to have a personality beyond “sweet and cute”, and there’s no clear Best Girl from the other three.  Right now I am leaning towards Team Anzu but I’m not 100% sold on that.

Anyway, enough raving.  Just had to gush a bit.

Today I would like to talk about Da Capo, an 18-year-old visual novel that is heavily responsible for my current state of degeneracy.

Not through the novel itself, mind you.  The thing that actually set me down this path was the 2003 anime adaptation and its 2005 sequel.

Anyway, Da Capo was the first anime I watched that was based on a romance visual novel, and the first time I got really invested in deciding on Best Girl.

AND IT WAS OBVIOUS

But, despite this, the protagonist wound up with the NOT RELATED BY BLOOD little sister character, who would have been Worst Girl even if she hadn’t been the stepsister.

Between the two seasons, I sat through 52 episodes of KOTORI IS RIGHT THERE, DUMBASS before the main character finally decided that Nemu was the love of his life, and my sheer incredulity at the ending resulted in a brain-melting epiphany:

“If this show is based on a game, then I could play the game and ensure that Nemu dies alone and friendless and the main character winds up with the right girl.”

So, about a year later, I was in a Sofmap in Nagoya and bought a copy.

I have never installed this game.

And then a couple of years after THAT, it was licensed by a translation company but they were charging way too much for it and the whole Nemu rage thing had pretty much died down so I didn’t buy it until it was super cheap during a MangaGamer sale.

And five and half years later I finally played it. I think we’ve covered that I am a bit of a procrastinator.

It’s… well, I didn’t really like it much.  It plays a lot like ToHeart2, where you go to school in the morning and then decide where you’re going to go on your lunch break and where you’re going to go after school, and adds a question of when you are going to get up in the morning.  The combination of these choices determine which girl you are going to run in to on any given day, and once you have stalked a particular girl enough times you are locked into her storyline which leads inevitably to some HOT AND STEAMY HAND HOLDING ACTION.

The thing is, in Da Capo these choices play out on screens that look like this:

While in ToHeart2, the same screen looks like this:

So you can easily tell that Manaka is in the Book Storage room and you should go there to spend time with the most adorable girl in school and not be distracted by any of those other, less desirable mate options.

DON’T HOLD HANDS WITH CRAZY.

There’s a cruder way to put that, but this is not that sort of blog.

Anyway, point being it is very easy to figure out where to go in ToHeart2, while making sure that you stalk the heck out of Kotori and don’t accidentally wind up confessing your love to your step sister is hard to do in Da Capo.

Putting that aside, however, once you DO get locked on to the route of your chosen Best Girl you have a few days worth of story with no choices in it and then a happy ending and end credits roll.  In Kotori’s case, her story deals with helping her cope with the loss of her telepathy and also some stress related to her sister’s wedding.  It’s a little bit of drama and mostly sweet and at the end you agree to come and meet her family and proclaim your undying love and so on and so forth.

Also she catches a cold. Note proper use of mask.

Oh, right, spoilers, Kotori’s a telepath.  Most of the principle characters have some sort of weird psychic power.  The main character has the ability to create Japanese sweets out of thin air.

It probably wasn’t worth waiting 13 years to finally see the story come to its PROPER ending, but now I can put the anime ending out of my mind forever.

Because this is the girl that WON.

Next up, Da Capo 2, which is set a good 50 years after the first one and features the grandchildren of the main character from the first game and – sadly – Nemu.  So in theory he did eventually at least give his stepsister a pity tumble.

Sorry, Nemu, that’s my head canon and you’re stuck with it.