#me: so what do you know about ryoma sakamoto the shinsengumi and the bakumatsu period???

[doctorwormcore]

my brother and i are playing ishin and my years of hakuouki are fucking me up

[confinedmadness]

[Review] Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds

Overall

I’ve now finished all the routes in Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds and would like to compile my thoughts into one last post. Every time I finished a bachelor’s route, I did write my thoughts about it in separate posts. Links to those posts are found below. This will be pretty long.

Art

I love, love, love the art! It’s so beautiful. My only complaint is that the guys don’t have equal numbers of CGs. For example, the most number of CGs for a character is 10. However, poor Yamazaki only gets 6!! And even among those with the same number of CGs, it isn’t equal. For example, Harada and Heisuke both have 10 CGs each. But Harada is with Chizuru in 7 of them. Meanwhile, Heisuke is with Chizuru in only 3 of his 10.

Music

The music is also good. “Corridor of Memories” and “Yearn for his Heart” are my favorites. I just really love good soft, touching music. Though the comedic music and the red light district music are also fun.

Translation / Text

I’m on the fence about this one. On one hand, the translation wasn’t wrong. However, sometimes the word choices and the tone just didn’t fit. When Hijikata suddenly says, “The hell you say?” or when Kazama says “Shit happens”, I just end up frowning because I personally feel the first one would have been better if it was written properly “What the hell did you say?”, while the second one could have just been “That’s just how things are.” 

I wish they’d taken into consideration the personalities of each character and took that into account when translating their dialogue. Not everyone speaks the same way. Not everyone spouts out slang. Some people are formal. Some people are too casual.

I also mentioned this in my post on Souma’s route, but “senpai” isn’t “teacher”. And though this is low priority, I wish they’d done something to show that Sakamoto speaks a different dialect from the Shinsengumi guys. (Especially since they’d taken the time to get a voice actor who actually speaks the dialect.)

Also, there were a lot of typographical errors--repeated words, missing words, wrong word order, etc. It becomes bothersome after the first 15 instances, and it breaks your immersion into the story.

Interface / Controls

I don’t really have problems with the interface and controls per se. The interface is easy to understand and navigate. The controls aren’t complicated, either. However, there are bugs here and there where suddenly the story won’t move forward no matter how many times I click my mouse. But then I pick up my controller and it continues no problem. As well as vice versa, I mash my controller buttons and it doesn’t work but I switch to my mouse and voila!

Voice Acting

Overall, I think the cast did a really good job. Some of my favorite voice actors that voice characters in Hakuoki are: Yoshino Hiroyuki (Heisuke), Miyano Mamoru (Iba), Kaji Yuuki (Souma), Ono Daisuke (Sakamoto), and Tsuda Kenjiro (Kazama). And while they did awesome as usual, other performances I enjoyed were by Morikubo Shoutaro (Okita), Toriumi Kousuke (Saito), and Ito Hasumi (Kaoru). 

I like the fact that they got Ono Daisuke to voice Sakamoto using his Tosa dialect. I found out through some searches that Ono actually voiced other fictional versions of Sakamoto Ryoma for the same reason. I know the Tosa dialect Ono speaks may already be different (evolved) from the Tosa dialect Sakamoto spoke in his time, but the fact that they made that effort was really nice. (Which again brings me to the point that I wish they’d made the effort in the English translation as well. But I understand that’s difficult to do when there’s no equivalent.)

Also, Tsuda Kenjiro’s voice is always a stand-out. I felt similarly when I first heard Kazama speak as when I heard Hatori Hanzo from Nightshade speak (which Tsuda also voices). Sometimes, I close my eyes and feel that any time now Inui (Prince of Tennis) will rattle on about his newest Inui Juice, or that Kaiba (Yu-Gi-Oh!) will yell “YUGIIIII”  😂

History

Admittedly, I’m more of a Sengoku Era girl than a Bakumatsu Period girl. And my experiences of the Bakumatsu period in a fictional story is limited to the anime/manga/film Rurouni Kenshin, the drama Tenno no Ryoriban, and the otome game Ikemen Bakumatsu. None of which really inspired me to look further into the history. 

This time, though, I did a lot of reading. I really love how they incorporated the historical events into the storytelling. As well as how they portrayed the characters’ deaths.

What was a little confusing, though, was I didn’t know at first that the game shows dates following the lunar calendar. So I was searching for events that happened in January 3, 1868 only to find that it is equivalent to the western date January 27, 1868.

Routes

In order from ‘awesome’ to ‘meh’ according to me (though the middle is pretty dependent on my mood), here are links to my individual reviews on the routes:

Okita Souji

Kazama Chikage

Yamazaki Susumu

Saito Hajime

Harada Sanosuke

Sakamoto Ryouma

Toudou Heisuke

Sanan Keisuke

Iba Hachiro

Hijikata Toshizo

Souma Kazue

Nagakura Shinpachi

Well, that was honestly difficult to rank. In terms of raw fun, Yamazaki’s route is probably my favorite. But when story and depth and the like are considered, Okita and Kazama’s are definitely on top. In terms of whose route I’m interested to play in Edo Blossoms, Iba will be high up there. But I didn’t really enjoy his Kyoto Winds route that much. So yeah, take this ranking with a grain of salt.

I mention this in probably every individual review up there, but I wished they put more effort on the bad endings. I do understand though that there is little that can be done with the suddenness of the events in the bad endings but I wished more care and thought was put into it. Just a shame that it’s an ending but it’s really just there to tell you “Oops, not the right ending.”

Also, consistency is a problem depending on whose route you’re playing. Things that were mentioned earlier on suddenly become a surprise for the characters later on. It’s kind of frustrating.

Yukimura’s Ending

I really like this ending. It’s probably the most realistic, too. I’m glad it’s there.