Hope everyone had themselves a good holiday and Happy New Years
So Bokuben’s final episode last Saturday apparently went ahead to confirm an Uruka end which I would feel good about, but the way they conveyed it felt off since she went off to Australia anyway. It’s a sensible decision for her future but it isn’t so great as a romantic send-off, see Seiren’s Tsuneki route for something similar, only I actually like Uruka. But hey, I got some other criticism to talk about since Bokuben’s publication has yet to end and confirm the real ending.
Let’s start with Alisa, the front and cover girl who is unfortunately billed as the main heroine of this saga and this fact is played with incredibly developer favoritism despite my experiences of seeing incredibly little chemistry with Rean aside from the bog-standard “he was nice to me” shtick. Admittedly, they tried to start off things on the right foot and had Alisa be the first person to interact with Rean before the school year starts and have a friendly conversation. Then later a group fall has Rean faceplanting to her chest which she gets mad about but that problem solves itself by the first field trip, so I can’t complain about how she’s a dumb tsundere. No, my complaint about Alisa is that she and Rean don’t have chemistry, and that this is made doubly worse when you consider my last point about how characters have a tough time interacting with others organically. The most you get when you decide to waste bond points on her is that she’s fallen in love with Rean ever since their incident and some side-bits about how she’s a bit more tech-savvy than most. Given that her character never amounts to anything, we have to look towards her family tree to find something to hold on to but even then, it’s not interesting. Both games feature chapters in Roer, Alisa’s hometown and around the fact that she’s the heiress to the Reinford Company, the Erebonian equivalent to the Zeiss Factory and Epstein Company in Sky and Crossbell sagas. Despite the tech background, very few of Alisa’s characterization is all that focused on the company despite it being the most important part of her character and how both games have her mom view her as not being able to succeed her in the company. You could say not being that focused on that side of her is a plus because she’s supposed to be her own person but not like it matters because she does take part of the company starting from 2’s ending onwards. Both Roer chapters being so mindbogglingly boring made me skip out on the music for it.
Lair of the Idle 