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.)


Once again, I’ll lead off with my first thought: damn, I lost again.

I tend to have a very bad track record with the character that I think will ‘win’ the heart of the lead male in the end; evident in KimiKiss, KimiNozo, and Shuffle!, not to mention countless shows where I fought insurmountable odds against the childhood friend in hopes of something new.

True Tears adds a wrenchingly close loss to the top of the pile with Shinichiro’s choice of Hiromi in the final episode, and I suppose I should be incredibly bitter that the moe Noe girl that I decided to back got shut down in the end - and I do mean the end.

But like in KimiKiss I’ve found that what the heart and what the mind say are two different things, and while I was swooned by Noe’s unique antics and upbeat attitude, I could easily cite reasons why Hiromi was the more sensible and more logical choice given the flow of the show.

Looking at it objectively Shin has always has sort of a tilt towards Hiromi; the ‘childhood friend’ rule is in full effect as usual, this time in reverse as Shin’s harbored feelings for Hiromi for forever and a half, and strives to express that through his art.

Since of course leaving it this simple as “guy likes girl, time passes, guy asks girl out, fin” would be really boring (or, on the flip side, perhaps impressively unique), Noe comes in to rock the boat like a giant octopus clinging on to a cruise liner (in the best sense of the analogy).

Noe is the counterpoint to Hiromi, the ‘mysterious girl’ who’s open and enthusiastic, and unafraid to speak what she thinks. In a sense Noe and Hiromi, as you would expect, are sort of opposites; Noe is initially outreaching, while occasionally she withdraws inward, while Hiromi is more reserved, yet near the end shows her independent side. It’s not quite as cut and dry as that, but it’s clear to tell that both girls are quite different.

Noe works most as the catalyst of this show, the character that changes people and their outlook. Aside from keeping Jun in the past with her almost repressed-past siscon appeal (reaching out, perhaps, to Jun’s “knight in shining armor” ideal side), she clobbered Shin (and indirectly, Hiromi) over the head with the chicken analogy that drove this show more than any message about tears.

As the catalyst, one would expect her to reap the so-called benefits of this show; quite frequently the heroine that leaves their mark on the male protagonist the most will walk away with the spoils, and yet Noe’s empty-handed at the end of thirteen episodes. Why?

It’s a strange choice if you approach it from this harem-analytical angle - although the character stereotypes that Noe and Hiromi resemble both have strong winning records, Noe’s power in influencing Shin’s picture book and in spurring him into motion in general seemed to have give her an edge.

But in terms of the story, and in terms of Shin himself, it makes a lot more sense for Shin to choose Hiromi - although I will be the first to admit that many of the scenes in the last two episodes hinted at a possible reversal, it never quite panned out.

These scenes were more of a representation of Shin learning to fly with his own wings. As the Raigomaru of his own story, he spent so long gazing achingly up at the sky, wanting to fly, to become something he wasn’t.

In this case, perhaps instead of being a rooster, or a dancer at his family’s traditional festival, he wanted to fly with the birds, and be the picture book artist he dreamed of. Or more traditionally, perhaps leaping off the cliff and attempting to fly represents the age-old problem of attempting to confess to the girl that he liked, to take a step into the unknown and not care about the results.

But, of course, he couldn’t. Whether it was logic that overtook him or simple terror, doing what he believed he wasn’t meant to do seemed illogical and self-sacrificial. He had the fear of the unknown rooted into him, and couldn’t shake it despite his utmost attempts to.

In stepped Jibeta, perhaps Noe in the context of the anime. Jibeta was an ordinary rooster - perhaps a stretch for Noe, but carry on - that was content with their life, that didn’t mind pecking at the ground all their life. Noe’s motives and desire in life is quite unclear, but one thing is certain and that is that she is undoubtedly who she is and never seems to regret it, and this fits in with Jibeta’s character.

Jibeta and Raigomaru spend many days together, perhaps getting along, perhaps not. Raigomaru is the only one who ever walked up to the cliff, that ever visibly dreamed of flying. This, to the viewer, is true again. Noe is surprisingly a passive character, who seems to spur reactions on accident rather than directly interfering in anyone’s life. Meanwhile, Shin is always trying to do something, always trying to reach out to Hiromi, or to interact with Noe at her brother’s request.

Yet one day, Jibeta is standing on a cliff higher than Raigomaru would ever dare to stand on. Jibeta, the rooster who had never tried to fly before, made the most magnificent attempt of all, leaping off the cliff … yet, of course, plummeted to the ground, resulting in Jibeta’s death. But unlike Raigomaru, he had tried.

Noe’s leap in itself is tough to place. Her physical jump at the end of episode 12 is the obvious choice, but one could say her metaphorical leap is when she first really accept Shin as her ‘lover’, after he asks her out. Before that she had never really interacted with the real world, never really cared - ironically, she could be compared to the Mai Kawasumi and Hayami Kohinata-type on the other end of the spectrum, the type that likewise had no contact with the world and with reality. The difference is, Noe fought it with delusion instead of seclusion.

But when she started ‘going out’ with Shin, Noe’s brief moment of flight, Noe changed. She began seeing people (Hiromi) as threats, began realizing the truths of the world (Jun) around her. And eventually, she began sinking like a rock. Her escape from reality was like Jibeta frantically flapping its wings, convincing itself it could fly. But of course, such an escape couldn’t happen.

Shin ended up with Hiromi, and Jibeta ended up face-first on the ground, unable to fly off into the sunset.

Her sacrifice, romantic-wise, was for the better for both her and Shin, however. Shin as Raigomaru, as the story goes, was inspired by the attempt of Jibeta, by Noe’s feelings for him, to set things right and make things clear. And although Jibeta’s story is over in the terms of this book, Noe’s isn’t, as perhaps she can ‘rebirth’ herself into a new persona, a new Raigomaru, not deluding herself with any false acceptance of the truth.

In the end the story is about these two characters, the Raigomaru and Jibeta, Shin and Noe, despite that they didn’t end up together. These two were the catalysts in the show, Noe who inspired others to action through her own actions and Shin who caused a lot of action, both through his own doing and through his inaction.

Hiromi, Jun, everyone else, were all relatively passive characters who had a bit of their own story and motive, but mostly found themselves riding the waves of the plot. They all break free at the end - Hiromi gains her independence from the vaguely oppressive household, Aiko breaks her lingering attraction to Shin, and Jun wrests himself free of his lust for Noe.

I could expound on them as well, but the best way to probably put it is that these characters were stars of their own Raigomaru and Jibeta stories as well, in a sense. There is not one Raigomaru, one Jibeta, but many, and it’s just a choice of which one everyone wants to be.

Perhaps this post didn’t end up being a series review so much as a deconstruction of the show itself, but chances are, if you read this far in the post past the jump, you’re looking for another view of the show, not a standard ‘what was good, what was bad’ chart. That’s something you should have already decided for itself. I just hope to expose another viewpoint (which, admittedly, was helped along by a decomposition on a much larger and much more impressive scale)

In the sake of completion, the visuals of True Tears were indeed quite gorgeous, something that never hurts, and the music was beautiful - if not memorable. Pacing was reasonable (no real filler here, although some character’s stories may not have played as big a role), and the conclusion was satisfying.

But I feel this is a show that has much more impact when viewed through the right lens, a fact I proved to myself by sitting through the ending relatively unaffected, until I read the aforementioned analysis by LianYL at Riuva and began tearing up reflecting on the show.

True Tears is probably a bit of an ironic show in that it takes so little - the bare-bones visual novel concept with the bare-bones typical message of “Be truthful to yourself” - and spins it into quite a comprehensive and worthy story, with a bit of the typical “who’s going to win?” entertainment value as well.

Although I hesitate to call anything the best of 2008 at this point, True Tears is definitely worth six hours if you can take it at more than face value, and maybe even if you can’t.

-CCY

(Also, for more opinions on True Tears, since I didn’t really draw from a lot of other posts, I will link you to IcyStorm’s Metareview of True Tears, where he links a bunch of other final thoughts that might be of interest.)

This post is tagged Series Review, True Tears