Hakuchuumu no Aojashin Thoughts

Embrace the Unazuku

This review will contain spoilers for the entire VN, so I recommend not reading it if you want to go in blind.

Musei is a VN written as a direct appeal to the emotions. Imbued with so much passion, it is obvious what the central idea of Musei will be about. From its opening scene, it establishes the personal journey of Kaito and Yonagi as the central crux of the narrative.

However, before the main story proper can begin, Musei opens up with three dream stories. Each one of the three dream stories have their own self-contained role and also play a part in the grander scheme of the narrative. Each one feels pretty focused by itself and tells a unique story. I also enjoyed how they relate back to the main story as well. Every step loops back to Kaito and Yonagi and these three stories are no exception. Each story has its own mood and style, and yet, it still feels all so familiar. As such, each story acts as more of a piece to the puzzle to the grander narrative as opposed to being just self-contained entities. Each dream story was unique in its own right and offered something different to the table.

I really enjoyed Case 1 the whole way through. Its somberness was poignant the whole way through as reading through the broken mental state of Kaoru was heart-rending to say the least. It was grounded the whole way through and did not waste any time jumping straight into the thick of things. His broken mental state and depression were honestly really relatable at times. Kaoru’s life is slowly killing him on the inside, being stuck in a broken marriage and working a job he is apathetic towards. In the midst of such a midlife crisis, he is able to find solace in Rin, the one saving grace of his life. And even when he is on the verge of committing suicide, memories of Rin flood back to him. I love this story so much, seeing how his mental state affected him and how he was saved by Rin and his love for her. The more somber atmosphere really helped to sell me on the emotions of this case.

Case 2 is a mix of all sorts of ideas and it can feel harrowing at times, yet unfocused during other times. I was left a little disappointed by it by the end. At times, I felt like it was trying to juggle too many ideas at once, so it didn’t really have a clear sense of direction as the other two stories. I didn’t mind that it decided to focus on the theatre stuff a lot more, but I feel it ultimately made the end product a little less satisfactory. There are also a few plot points that are a bit exaggerated or there to inflate the story, like Will and Olivia being captured, but subsequently released soon after so it did not really feel all that important in the grand scheme of the story. By the end, it just felt like the story was just going with the flow and not really bringing out the hardcore emotions like Case 1 and Case 3. I would have enjoyed to see more about Olivia’s plight about being a slave and more of Will and Olivia’s relationship.

Case 3 started off as the weakest of the three, but was able to send itself off with a heart warming message. The events feel pretty insignificant at first, however, Case 3 is able to ground itself with a simple yet effective message and does not diverge from it once it has been established. There’s a lot of banter and setting up in the first half of the story, so it takes a while before it can get going. Kanna’s steadfast belief of following in his mom’s footstep and being able to take a picture of Haley’s Comet is challenging as he starts spending more and more time with Sumomo. In the end, he comes to the realization that maybe there’s more to life than chasing the dreams of another person. Kanna grows a lot as a person throughout the story as he comes to terms with himself. Once he learned the true meaning of his mom’s dream, that being wanting to look at the comet in their own garage, he started to appreciate the value of family a lot more. It really was touching seeing this play out. It is a simple story with a simple message, but the way it is crafted makes it all the more effective.

The main story, Case 0, ties everything together. The first half is filled with emotions and tears. It is a story of Kaito and Yonagi coming to understand themselves and sorting through the various strains in their relationship. There is one scene in particular that will be forever imprinted in my mind. Dripping with heart-wrenching emotion, it felt like the pinnacle of Musei to me. When Yonagi bares everything to Kaio about her amnesiac conditions and starts breaking down, I could feel all their despair within me. Yonagi was scared of losing all those precious moments that meant so much to her. She did not want to pain Kaito by being forced to live with someone who would eventually forget him. And yet Kaito stood his ground. He told her he will stick with her no matter what. This scene is a reaffirmation of their undying love for each other, their relationship is put under heavy strains, but they will persist no matter what because without each other they are nothing. Love is such an important emotion for humans and Yonagi and Kaito are resolute to find happiness together no matter what. At its core, it’s a journey of self-discovery and love.

However, by the second half of Case 0 begins, it heavily diverges from its initial path. It bites off more than it can chew and tries to expand its scope and scale to more than it should. There were a few times I thought the story would end, since it would have been a great thematic end, but instead it decided to expand its scope and try to make the narrative seem bigger than what it seemingly originally intended to set out to do. When Kaito finishes experiencing his flashbacks, and goes out to meet Yonagi, that would have been the perfect place to end, both thematically and from a narrative standpoint. All three dream stories end with a parting end, so having the main story end on Kaito and Yonagi’s reunion would have been a perfect parallel. Instead, Musei opts to go beyond that point and add in more elements to make their situation seem artificially wrose, like Yonagi contracting the same disease as Kaito’s mother. At this point, it is obvious that Yonagi will recover anyways, so it just feels pointless. They use the pretense of the illness to go more into depth on more sci-fi that do not really have a bearing. I know Laplacian at their core is a sci-fi company, but just because a story can have sci-fi implemented into it, doesn’t mean it should. Case 1 is a perfect example of crafting a grounded character-focused narrative, and if Case 0 stuck to its guns instead of branching out into more esoteric sci-fi ideas, it would have been better for it.

It’s disappointing in the sense that the sci-fi stuff kind of feels heavy handed. Musei is not a story about the science aspects and the twists regarding the more scientific components of the world and story. As the tagline suggests, this is Yonagi’s story through and through, and Musei excels when it focuses on the more character, human aspects of its narrative. The whole purpose of the story was to find some way to recover Yonagi’s memories and once that was accomplished, all the sci-fi elements afterwards felt accessory, like it didn’t need to be there to create a satisfying story. It is a journey of love involving lots of sacrifices and when it extends itself beyond that, it does not work.

Musei shines its brightest when showcasing its character and their emotional states. Whether it be monologues imbued with self-hatred and despair, conversations that emphasize the aspect of friendship or a quiet moment between lovers, Musei just knows how to craft these magical scenes and immerse the readers right into them seamlessly. So when it diverges from that and focuses on sci-fi, it just feels off. In a sense, it feels more artificial and that is not a good thing. There is no need to explain in heavy detail every single peculiarity of the world around them, like the illness, the place the characters are living in is a sham and so on and so forth. To me, it just felt like padding.

By the time the second half of Case 0 rolls around, I feel like Musei relies a bit too much on technical jargon and other such scenes when it is not a story meant for that. By the time the main story reaches its climax, it tries to become something it isn’t and I feel like that is a major misstep and disservice to the characters. The strength of the characters can stand strong by itself without having to rely on massive narrative set pieces and building up insurmountable scales with sci-fi elements, including giving another character a whole flashback to themselves in order to make them more sympathetic and expand on the topic of the illness. There really is no need, since removing the focus from Kaito and Yonagi this late into the story is just plain weird.

By the time it ended, I was left with a bit of a bittersweet taste in my left and that was not due to the nature of the ending but more on how unsatisfactory it was compared to most everything that came before it. It tried to spin the narrative into something it wasn’t. For the most part, the dream stories felt concise and to the point, but for the main story, there is not the sense at all. It just keeps on dragging out the sci-fi elements when the character narratives were all but complete. Cutting out that whole part and ending on their reunion would have raised my opinion of Musei so much more. Even as I say that, as a whole package, Musei was a really satisfying read and there really is nothing quite like it. It deals with the themes of love and connections so well, that I can’t hold these flaws against it too much.

At its core, this VN is a love letter to Yonagi. She is the focal point of the VN and when the narrative starts to veer away from her, it becomes recognizably weaker. Looking back, this is an experience I am very glad to have the opportunity to savour. While it is held back by an overly ambitious endgame that steers away from the main point of the narrative, for the most part, it is an emotional showcase of two central characters and that is what I will remember most when I think back on Musei.