Trans | Lesbian | 37 | Gamedev | Co-host of @sayitinred

 


 
Currently composing music for @desiderium and writing for Become Dirt


Oh hey, since I'm not on Twitter anymore really, I should announce this here.

I am once again playing the 2008 Yuri Visual Novel Aoi Shiro tonight - And every Tuesday night until we finish!

Join us in 6 hours at 7:30pm EST over at twitch.tv/Invocative where we'll maybe kiss more girls, maybe die, maybe succumb to a terrible curse and gain an insatiable thirst for human blood (see header).

What, you may ask, is Aoi Shiro about and Why, you may wonder, should anyone spend two hours of a Tuesday night watching a game that's now almost as old as its own protagonist?


Aoi Shiro is a yuri Visual Novel and follow-up from Akai Ito, so it not only has the peak of late 00's aesthetic design and a killer soundtrack but a winding, intertwined flowchart of romance routes each rooted deeply in the supernatural mysteries of a pair of small islands where a prestigious all girls' school is holding its summer Kendo Club Training Camp. We follow our protagonist, captain of kendo club, Osanai Syouko. She's a huge dweeb and loves Rules and is denser than most radioactive elements when it comes to the obvious crushes other girls have on her — and that she has on other girls.

This game never had an official localization until this year, when it was suddenly and kind of surprisingly released the HD remaster of both Aoi Shiro and Akai Ito in multiple languages including English. I originally played Aoi Shiro over summer break, when it was a game I had to trawl around forums reading about and waiting for eagerly as the fan translation group Wings of Yuri were putting together an English patch.

Back then, there weren't a ton of options for reading yuri visual novels in English, much less any dating sims on the sheer scale of production as Akai Ito or Aoi Shiro. Akai Ito had a partial translation but because, as far as I remember, its fan patch was never finished I never ventured into that realm. The other two projects I'd followed along were one of the Sono Hanabira entries, which I did play and found to be Not My Thing, and Aoi Shiro, which I played for days and days to the point where if you look closely, you can still see the barbs of the hooks it left in my bones.

So is Aoi Shiro Good? like, really Good?

I cannot answer that question.

Aoi Shiro has a couple really fun routes, one incredible route imo, some truly fantastic music and sound design and voice acting, and some near interminable diversions about the fine distinctions between buddhist sectarian dietary restrictions. You'll move from a silly conversation about how Momoko (pictured above, perfect, unimpeachable) craves Meat and refuses to abide by a vegetarian diet to a winding explication of the origins of local festival legends and the process by which faith in old gods was restored by a mysterious traveling onmyouji who may or may not be the hot girl you saw in the woods last night who also might be an ox demon from a story your teacher told you on the bus ride in?

There's an entire route focused on romancing possibly the hottest woman in the game who is not only many years older than the teen protagonist but also her biological sister (or perhaps first cousin or aunt, I forget the details).

Aoi Shiro has some incredibly charming artwork, some great sequences, some ridiculous choices, and some absolutely aggravating routing that sometimes will let you go all the way up to a characters route but forbid you from starting it until you've cleared several invisible conditions that the game only really makes clear through the clues it slowly reveals about its core narrative mystery.
I cannot tell you if Aoi Shiro is Good or not. I can only tell you that I will be playing it, every Tuesday night at 7:30pm EST, until we finish.


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