If perhaps you’ve been within a few miles of the otakusphere in the last few days, you will have noticed that something quite interesting has come out of its innermost workings in the form of a doujin-esque visual novel from Hinano, named RenAi Blogger.

Now of course, like most things I write, I’m too lazy to fill you in on the details especially given that many other bloggers have helpfully done it for me – suckers – so I will skip to the meat of this review and that is tearing this effort a new one.

To do this today I decided to disseminate RenAi Blogger in a completely novel and unique format that no other idiotic dinosaur could copy and that is in an exhausting multi-round fight contrasting and comparing it to some other popular visual novels in the industry in a half-humorous, half-serious manner.

Of course, RenAi Blogger is only a four-month, one-person effort and so it would be cruel to line it up against visual novels that took dozens of people years to complete … so I decided to set the bar a bit lower. I figured another doujin effort would be fine – but I only had one of those that I actually played, so I settled for picking up another first visual novel, one that was the beginning in a long pedigree of games.

And so there the three competitors sat…at least virtually, on my hard drive.

One doujin visual novel, and one first-in-a-series visual novel. Can Hinano’s top either?

Round 1: Amount of Paths I Can Complete in A Week
Tsukihime: Well, I completed the game in a week, so five. Five and change if you count Eclipse, the easter eggs, getting all the endings, etc… Still, Tsukihime has one major flaw, in that it obviously is missing a sixth path…

ONE: One. Oh, the irony! Almost as ironic as this game is slow. I’m sure I could have done more of the five available routes… but I really couldn’t be arsed. ONE has one major flaw, and that’s that it is boring as hell at the start and quite frustrating too.

RenAi Blogger: 336. No, really! I did 4 paths in 2 hours. With 24 hours in a day I could do 48 paths a day. Seven days a week, that’s 336 paths. Unfortunately, the major flaw of RenAi Blogger is that it only has 4 paths; obviously Hinano did not do enough searching of the Anime Nano directory. C’mon, at least a Sat-chan path…?

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: RenAi Blogger

Round 2: Difficulty
Tsukihime: It’s a reasonably tough game and if you’re not careful you’re likely to be eaten by a land shark (no, really), but at least you screw up pretty instantly for the most part. It’s challenging but rewarding.

ONE: You’re very likely to screw up – there’s at least one ten-question, multiple-choice quiz with no obvious choice for the right answer, you can’t use the otaku cheat and pick the love-love option every time, and you usually don’t know you’ve messed up until the game suddenly throws the bad end credits at you.

It seems the least punishing game on the surface, but that’s just because it doesn’t tell you “hey you’re going to die alone since you didn’t NOT hang out with Nanase”.

RenAi Blogger: Not bad – there’s a couple false turns you’ll fall for, but otherwise it was a good difficulty. Except for Hinano’s path, which is a pain to stumble upon (only JP can comment on the realism of that). The first day where you meet the heroines is amusing too:

Me: “I want to go to the library.”
Game: “Nah, I forgot what to do there.”
Me: “I want to go to the library.”
Game: “No, you can’t.”
Me: “I want to go to the library, damn game!”
Game: “NO, GO TO THE PARK AND GET YOUR FACE EATEN BY A HAMSTER ALREADY.”

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: RenAi Blogger

Round 3: Comprehensibility
Tsukihime: This monologue. This monologue. This monologue. This monologue is f’ing confusing.

Seriously? I doubt we’re supposed to understand half of Shiki’s drug-induced ramblings at all, but still. I could write this if I had an hour to program a bot to grab random verbs and nouns from a dictionary.

It’s not that bad on the whole, but really Nasu-isms are their own language, and so I have to make fun of them for that.

ONE: Y’know, I really have nothing to say here. Kouhei’s a normal high school student who talks in normal Japanese that is translated into normal English pretty well.

…That’s kind of boring. Like half the cast.

RenAi Blogger: As a Grammar Nazi, I am contractually obligated to act personally offended every time there’s an extra exclamation point or forgotten punctuation, so let me just tell you, Hinano, your game makes me cry inside, even after I get over the fact that I just got branded a pedophile.

All right, it’s still readable, as all three of these visual novels are. But the point stands, that somewhere, some sentence is sitting in a corner sobbing, wondering where its little punctuation mark went.

Advantage: ONE
Runner-up: RenAi Blogger

Round 4: Harem Fight
Tsukihime: Let’s see…

Ciel: Yes. (Curry gags aside, I’m good with her at Melty Blood and she doubles as a meganekko.)
Kohaku: Yes. (Uh…I’m not sure why. Because otherwise she’ll kill your family?)
Akiha: Yes. (Pettan pettan tsundere~? Oh, and siscon too. Ojou-sama. Etcetera.)
Hisui: YES. (I’m a pathetic otaku, I like shy subserviant women.)
Arc: OK…I relent…this one’s a meh.
Satsuki: HELL YE – … wait … DAMNIT!

ONE: Hmm..

Nanase: OK. (Only one whose path I’ve finished. By-the-numbers tsundere, but at least she’s a blue twintail.)
Mizuka: Meh. (Childhood friend … boring.)
Misaki: Promising. (Shiori Mach II Beta, with an amped-up status ailment)
Mio: I WANTS. (Cute, adorable, and a lot of fun to play in Eternal Fighter Zero.)
Mayu: Haven’t seen her yet. But what’s with all the ‘M’ names?
Akane: I heard her path was good. Otherwise whatever.

RenAi Blogger: Generic lead-in comment…

Hinano: lololol (but we don’t see enough characters like her in visual novels.)
Natsuko: Wai~ (Long hair is good, so is being a meganekko … and I swear, she’s the first “loli” that doesn’t look it in-game. My favorite route, personally.)
Jen: Um- (OK, so I forgot about her route already. I’m sure it was passable. Sorry!)
C.J.: Megane! (Well, yeah. I’ve forgotten a lot about this route too. So I played a bit fast, so what?!)

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: Ren-Ai Blogger

Round 5: Awkwardness of Harem Fight Comparison
Tsukihime: I’ve got no complaints really. You may guess, but this is really just an elaborate setup to rag on RenAi Blogger.

ONE: Eh… sometimes ONE’s harem rubs me a bit the wrong way like most Key ones do for cranking the otaku-fantasy switch to 11. Tsukihime gets away with it because it’s not a generic school life situation, I suppose.

RenAi Blogger: They’re real. Like, serious. 3D and whatever. I assume, anyway.

OK, OK, I assume that some (read: many) creative liberties were taken in the creation of this visual novel in the name of entertainment, but somehow I think using “actual” personas with fake personalities is more creepy than using fake personas with real personalities. Who knows.

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: ONE

Round 6: Moe Factor
Tsukihime: YES. YES YES YES. YES YES YES YES YES.

Uh.

Excuse me.

ONE: Reasonably? Some characters are very strong in getting me in a puddle on the floor, but others are just so, so…meh.

RenAi Blogger: I’m either too sane or too cowardly to run around raving about how Natsuko is moe, so, uh, no?

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: ONE

Round 7: H-Scenes
Tsukihime: Let me tell you a story. This is the story of a programmer named CCY who had only minimal experience to anime and visual novels, who played Tsukihime for the first time. This CCY decided that when Shiki went to sleep after defeating Nero, that Akiha would be the most likely choice for a person to show up at his door late at night.

He later decided that was a bad idea.

Seriously, the Akiha dream scene is the only one that features 1) disturbing amounts of siscon fapping plus maid service and 2) the complete lack of “oh, by the way, it’s a dream so don’t flip out that suddenly all the characters want to rape you more than usual” notification.

ONE: Our protagonist narrates himself in the one H-scene I came across. I found this completely hilarious.

Also, the H-scenes are realistically short, like those of most otaku.

RenAi Blogger: …

…

Are you serious?

…Pervert.

Advantage: ONE
Runner-up: Renai Blogger

Round 8: Did I Cry?
ONE: No, although I almost watered up in a mix of being rocked by the plot and frustrated by an early ending.

RenAi Blogger: No. Didn’t quite laugh enough to get tears in my eyes, either.

Tsukihime: I cried buckets. Don’t misread that!

Actually, it really does share a lofty position with AIR the anime as one of the few works to leave me emotionally shaken to the point of tears. This is naturally an unfair comparison, because now I’m jaded and now I watch haremettes keel over without raising an eyebrow, but still, the point stands that Tsukihime is a very affecting work.

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: ONE

Round 9: Hilarity
Tsukihime: Neko-Arc! Kagetsu Tohya! And on and on.

Tsukihime the game for the most part is serious business – there were probably a few funny parts but very few come instantly to mind (the only one I can get is Shiki and Hisui’s disagreement over honorifics) but outside of the canon storyline it maintains its stride in excellent fashion.

Perhaps this is because of the following category, at least in part, but the sheer size of the Tsukihime universe has allowed more than its share of amusing side stories.

ONE: Well, a few moments made me smirk but checking my screencap folder of ’shots I should save for later because they’re interesting’, I’ve got only about 20. Remember, that’s 20 three-line dialogue boxes.

RenAi Blogger: Pick your poison – traps, lolicon jokes, internet references, in-joke absurdity, the list goes on.

At this point (and by ‘at this point’ I mean ‘I exhausted all the funny material on the other sections and am just now finishing this section’) I should be breaking out the “by anibloggers, for anibloggers” stamp on this one.

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: RenAi Blogger

Round 10: In-Joke Potential
Tsukihime: This Chair, The Anime Is a Lie, Isn’t it Sad, So Moe I Might Die, etc. It could spawn in on itself for all eternity.

ONE: Meh. AIR and Kanon were cooler, even in EFZ. I suppose Mizuka’s time freeze attack was pretty cool but I have no idea how that ties in to the VN itself. So…no.

RenAi Blogger: If you ever have read Hinano’s blog, many of the events in the VN are side-splitting. Damn it, didn’t I just do a section on comedy?

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: RenAi Blogger

Round 11: Fangirl Bait
Tsukihime: Arihiko? Yeah, right. How about some Shiki x Nanaya selfcest?

Actually…that one might be plausible. Shiki is probably manly enough with his hax mode to make the fangirls scream, even if he does have homely glasses and a friendly grin and hair that doesn’t cover his eyes.

ONE: Supposedly there’s a secret ending, or path, or something you can unlock with some guy in the music room. I don’t know. Both Kouhei and Sumii the Harem Runner-Up aren’t attractive really.

RenAi Blogger: Protip – you can actually SEE Chase’s face in some of the scenes! Didn’t they ban that in one of the Ren’Ai Production Acts?

Also, LMAO ROFLCOPTER XDD etc @ Impz.

Advantage: RenAi Blogger
Runner-up: Tsukihime

Round 12: Bad Ends
Tsukihime: Many amusing ones. I think the first one I remember is being spontaneously eaten by a shark when picking the wrong route with Arcueid in the hotel. (That should lead to some amusing assumptions…)

Then there’s some serious ones, some weird ones, some sad ones (damn right Sacchin gets a whole chapter for her bad end), and … well … a lot of bad endings. When you have to fight people AND romance the ladies, life gets difficult even for a pimp like Shiki.

Also, Neco-arc and Ciel-sensei are always a treat after each ending.

ONE: You die lonely, after many months of pretending you’re on someone’s route. And by “die lonely” I mean “continue your normal life except without a girlfriend and with some depressing music in the background.

RenAi Blogger: Well, you can get called a lolicon, end up alone, get Nice Boat’d, be cockblocked by JP, but I think getting yaoi-paddled to death is tops, bar none.

Advantage: RenAi Blogger
Runner-up: Tsukihime

Round 13: Does This Game Make Me Feel Smart?
Tsukihime: I got owned by being cocky a lot of the time, true. My mark of good things here is whether 1) I can pick the right choice and 2) if the right choice is exceedingly dumb or not.

Here, you can’t skim through the game jumping through obvious choices like 1) jam it in or 2) don’t jam it in, and if you read the text you actually do gain some hints on what is the correct thing to do – the first Nero fight comes to mind.

So in conclusion, I’m not sure if Tsukihime makes me feel smart, but it doesn’t make me feel dumb and it sure as hell makes me feel badass.

ONE: No. Dear God, no. It took me at least two full playthroughs plus a couple dozen reloads to get on my first path.

And that was because I consulted a walkthrough, the greatest sin of any game player. So no. ONE makes my head sad, perhaps because it’s the most realistic and makes you do a lot of stupid things to end up with a girl.

RenAi Blogger: Most of the time, yes, surprisingly. I got burnt my first time, but I can attest that to getting railroaded onto the lolicon path. C’mon, Chase is only like what, two, three years older?

This game inspired this section though, mainly because it exhibited good mastery of A Very Important otaku lesson and that is to know when to be a romantic sap and when not to be.

And damn right I fist-pumped every time I managed to clear the final choice hurdle on the first attempt. Bring on the distorted personalities, real life.

Advantage: RenAi Blogger
Runner-up: Tsukihime

Round 14: Usefulness as a Real-Life Aid
Tsukihime: Well, I’ve never seen any dotted lines when taking my glasses off. I don’t have a little sister, any maids, a sad childhood friend (or any friends really) and I’ve never met anyone who tried to kill me or suck my blood. Never even used a pocketknife.

ONE: Well, I’m not living by myself and stumbling across a bunch of random stereotyped girls who want to jump my bones.

RenAi Blogger: Wow, the Book Off in New York has two floors? I’m jealous – out here they only have one. I want to go now.

Advantage: RenAi Blogger
Runner-up: ONE

Round 15: Realism Factor
Tsukihime: Not realistic at all, but why the hell would it need to be? It’s so over-the-top dot-stabbing, vampire-slaying, Nasu-monologuing action that it works great in its own right. Not realistic in the terms of the real-world, but a believable fantasy world.

ONE: Well, I’m not living by myself and stumbling across a bunch of random stereotyped girls who want to jump my bones. I am, however, experiencing deja vu.

RenAi Blogger: I was thinking about giving RenAi Blogger the edge in this one … but in C.J’s route Hinano actually sells a copy of her doujinshi. That’s a suspension-of-disbelief breaker if I ever saw it.

Advantage: Tsukihime
Runner-up: ONE

Round 16: Cost
Tsukihime: Um … well… I bought Melty Blood Act Cadenza for the PS2. And the Colorful Moon art book. And a keychain from Fanime.

ONE: Er … ah… I bought the Kanon R1 DVDs. And the AIR R1 DVDs. And about a billion Megami posters of Key characters.

RenAi Blogger: Free!

Advantage: RenAi Blogger
Runner-up: Tsukihime

Overall Standings:
Two points awarded for each 1st place, one point for each 2nd.

Bronze Medal: ONE (2-5-9) – 9 pts
In the Middle: RenAi Blogger (5-7-4) – 17 pts
Third From Last: Tsukihime (9-4-3) – 24 pts

Verdict:

So, should you play RenAi Blogger?

The stats say that it’s better than a Key work, albeit worse than another doujin effort, after all.

If you’re here you’re either a rabid fan of mine that reads all my posts, in which case I would like to humbly thank you for sticking through a post that was pieced together over three very discombobulated days, or, less likely, you’ve already played RenAi Blogger (or Tsukihime, or ONE, etc) and want to hear me insult it.

So, the question becomes: should you have played RenAi Blogger?

I think, if you’re here right now, the answer is yes. I’ve gotten me enough of a piece of fangirl rage in real life to know to say that.

But seriously, if you read my blog, you’re probably either a aniblogger yourself or pretty into the anime blogging scene (or anime in general) and you would be a great target audience for this kind of work.

What RenAi Blogger lacks in length, depth, or punctuation it makes up with that feeling of a true doujin work, one that really was made by someone who knows the scene. In this case the scene involves lots of cheesiness, New York-itude, and internet memes, but hey, whatever works.

You’ll smile, you’ll laugh, and maybe if you’re less restrained you’ll be endeared to the character designs.

And for God’s sake, you can finish it in an hour or two, about the same time it takes a lousy internet connection like mine to download it. You’ve wasted that length of time in worse ways before.

If RenAi Blogger proves anything it’s that indie efforts from the aniblogger community are way cool and well-recieved by other ‘in’ hipsters like me. So, who – and what’s – next? Somehow I just pictured an aniblogger Wario Ware-type concoction…*

-CCY

*I don’t expect anyone to take this seriously, so don’t tell me I’m crazy for demanding something like that…

(And yes, my next post actually will probably be an analytical one.)