[Sunday, March 13, 2005]

 
Random Fandom:
Am playing Bara no Ki ni Bara no Hana Saku after someone recommended the game to me. Have not quite reached the fucked-up parts yet, but give me time . . .

Protagonist: Hyuuga Kaname
The cute klutz "school assistant" (which is another term for a student who did not enter via normal channels and works on campus). He didn't deserve to get raped under the symbolic rose tree while on his way to bury a dead bird as a favour to an underclassman or have traumatic family-related matters, but shit happens to even outwardly nice people. The game is about his search for the guy who raped him under the symbolic rose tree.

The fortunately short and managable cast of characters:

Tsukimura Mikihiko
School biology teacher. (Stop laughing, I know you are!) Has an ecchi voice. If only it was a little more audible . . . Has dubious motives, but Kanami is denser than a brick sometimes.

Tsuchida Norizane
Upper classman who wants to join the Navy after graduation. Knows about Kanami's past family-related trauma.

Mizukawa Hougetsu
Novelist of Japanese and English descent. Blond, older man. Tsukimura's schoolmate of old. And that's his pen name btw. (Genetically impossible, because everyone knows that it takes two blonds to have blond children. Who cares about genetics anymore in BL games?)

Edit: I stand corrected. An English brunet and an English brunette can produce blond sprog due to those recessive blond genes. A Japanese brunet/brunette and an English person with hair of any colour cannot, 99.99999% of the time, have blond offspring because blond genes have been carefully excluded from the genotype for a thousand years. These days, everyone just uses hair dye. XD

Kaneko Mitsunobu
Upperclassman, descendent of a daimyo clan, daddy's an assemblyman, etc. Shame that Kaneko is a degenerate son who likes frequenting the redlight district. And he's a secret fan of Mizukawa's novels.

Hiura Asuza
Young and popular (snotty and bratty) Asuza is well-connected and probably well-heeled to boot. Hate him already. He hangs around with Mayumi a lot.

Kinoshita Mayumi
Without the kanji, I've have thought that that was a girl's name . . . (Wait, it is a girl's name . . .) Orphaned and taken in by Asuza's parents, he's Asuza's best friend and companion. (I don't know what he did in his past life to deserve Asuza for a best friend.) Has an incurable illness. *cue angst*

"Hana kui hi tori"
Pseudonym of the person who sent images of Kanami under the symbolic rose tree to Tsukimura sensei. Possible Kanami's rapist. (Because, seriously, who else takes pictures of ravaged young men lying under symbolic rose trees?) The name is another metaphor or something. Much like hte title of the game.

Game play:
At certain intervals, you can stack character cards atop each other to specify how relationships should go. Which means that you can decide who will be seme and who will be uke. You can also make characters turn mean. Fufufufu . . .

Like the title, the game is probably some metaphor for something . . . And the art style is kind of shoujo, with pastels and big eyes. Many roses in the game, scattered all over the layout, the annoyingly symbolic rose tree plus the rose cursor--one gets Utena vibes after about five minutes. Not all parts are voiced, which is a shame. And it needs more porny CGs.

It's set in the early Showa Era, hence joining the army was a big thing back then. The stage is an all boys school (we never expected an all girls school for a BL game) and there is much about the changing times and the lapse of society into degeneracy or something. Can I have my porn now please?

Labels: Bara no Ki, BL