#kono you no hate de koi wo utau shojou: YU-NO

[qedmirage]

A Funny Thing in Yu-No

During the course of the game, you'll take some of the heroines out to Cafe Evening, and talk with them. There's a funny thing I'm noticing about their body language, thought I'd share. Oh, and this is a 90's H-vn, so there's a lot of pantyshots here below the cut. Short skirts, clear tables, etc.

Anyways , here's the first such encounter a typical player will see, with Eriko Mysterious Red-haired Woman:

These aren't comprehensive, it's just a showcasing of some of the sprites and body language they have.

Next up is Mio Shimazu, who admittedly has one of the harder routes to complete. She's first seen from a distance, pouting:

And then has typical tsundere stuff going on:

But in what's likely the last route a player will clear, you take Kanna Hatano to the cafe. She gets one sprite for the entire conversation:

Anyways, I love this... terminator? we have.

[qedmirage]

So I've been playing the old PC98 VN, Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shōjo: YU-NO, or YU-NO for short. It's neat! The usual play order seems to be Mitsuki/Eriko, then Ayumi, then Mio route before the last few; and while the first two routes are straightforward, the Mio route hits you with a puzzle that definitely belongs in a PC98 game. In order to escape a locked room our protagonist has to enter two keycodes onto two different keypads. The last person to get stuck in the room (who died of starvation...) happened to leave behind a note explaining it all, and a computer program to help plan out your answers. The passcodes are clearly placed on the sides of the keypads in base-12. Except:

They're in a code, unique to the mysterious ruins below Sakaimichi. Dead end, right? Not exactly. Spoilers follow, it's a clever bit of the game.

If you paid attention to the opening cutscene of the game, you probably noticed the Jewel that our protagonist's father hides inside the clock; they're important plot trinkets. But did you also notice that the clock is...weird?

The base 12 is a hint, but if you get stuck, close the game and boot it up again, you'll see this again at the end of the (skippable) cutscene. The glyphs are pretty easy to decipher if you think about it; 1-5 has as many triangles as they are, then 6-12 are 6+ one of the first six glyphs. It's a puzzle best solved with some notebook paper and a few screenshots in another window. Really a blast to go through. Yu-No is an eroge, but it's also an ambitious adventure game from '96, the era of some truly insane adventure game puzzles.