Of course, that is all pretentious-speak for “I finished True Tears and I can’t decide whether to be angry, satisfied, or moved to tears,” but carry on.

I’ve railed on True Tears a couple of times before for being decidedly normal and unchallenging. It was very good looking and did what it did very well, but it’s kind of like polishing and perfecting a text-only program when everyone had moved on to graphical ones.

Nevertheless I had forgotten that games like Nethack still have their charm, and as such True Tears provides all of the emotion and pendulum drama of a good visual novel conversion.

I could best sum up my conflicting emotions on the superiority of any one recent visual novel show – if you read the recent reviews you will find I waver more than Makoto Itou – by the fact that despite all being in the same rough genre (and a very rough genre at that) all four I’ve seen have quite a unique style to them.

Clannad is two things at once, the ‘crying’ visual novel and the ‘funny’ visual novel.
H2O is the ’shocking / mindscrew’ visual novel.
KimiKiss is the ‘relaxed / slice-of-life / realistic’ visual novel.
And True Tears, is what you could probably consider the ‘normal’ visual novel, everything you’ve seen done before, but done to a high degree of quality.

In the end I will rate True Tears as an excellent example of what to do if you have to do the same thing as everyone else. Would I watch another True Tears? Maybe, despite it all, I’m a sucker for these types of shows – but I’d prefer something with a slightly different flavor.

(Series spoilers, shockingly. Also, this review heavily influenced by the excellent and comphrensive analysis by LianYL over at Riuva.)
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