Kanuchi! After finishing

Iyaaa, nagakatta~ Well, I finished two routes in Kanuchi (Mitoshi and Ukitsu), so now I’m pretty sure what most of the routes are like.

After finally finishing, I understand the complaint I’ve heard the most, about the main character. Aki is a normal girl which is pretty normal for an otome game, but here in many of the plot scenes it’s Kayana at centre stage, and often Aki’s not even around. Kayana, whom I really like, is a very strong character with an interesting backstory and she makes a strong impression on everyone she meets. Aki…not really.

Having said that, after playing two routes, and being able to skip a lot of the repeated plot points, it doesn’t seem as bad as it did in the beginning when I was expecting a typical story arc of someone falling for Aki. Maybe it was because of the different route, but I could believe that Ukitsu was starting to like Aki. Maybe it was because I knew what to expect. In this game, the story and relationships are just starting – even at the end of the game, you’re just starting to get a feeling of where the love plots will end up. And at the end, it’s a cliffhanger – like a season finale. If you hate loose ends, you might want to wait to pick this up until the second half comes out.

It’s interesting and rewarding to do repeat playthroughs as well. When you finish someone’s route and use that save to start over, you get several scenes involving them and showing some of their backstory that you didn’t know when you played through before. It’s a little weird because of course now you’re going for someone else, but those scenes are just enough to break up the loong long stretch to where the next character starts getting their specific events.

Oh, now…the gameplay! Yes, this is an Otomate title and it has tons of dialogue. But there’s also the smithing mini-game (is it still a mini-game when it’s a big part of the game?). I love gathering and crafting games. I’m a total nerd for them, in WoW I’m attempting to have one character with each skill maxed, and in this game, it was really fun to complete all the possible weapons and cooking recipes.

How it works is that every day you can go out to an area and gather until your bag is full or your energy is gone. Then when you gather enough, you can make something – though if your smithing skill isn’t high and the item’s difficulty is, you’re likely to fail. You gain skill by smithing easy stuff. Weapons start off using common ingredients and gradually move into rare item territory. You also use these weapons to fill orders. The orders are sometimes for finished weapons, sometimes for ingredients, and the harder they are to get or make, the more money you make. Then you can use that money to buy bigger bags, a fast horse to carry you gathering in a shorter time, or medicine for your grandfather. It also increases your ‘trust’ statistic, which has a couple effects on the game (I only know of one so far). And of course, you have to make enough money to pay your rent etc. to the guild.

There are over a hundred smithing ingredients (I’m not sure how many, but a lot), and each area has only certain items available. What I did was actually draw maps of each area, because ingredients show up the same places all the time. For example, there’s a beach area where pearls are found in a certain empty spot on the beach. If you go into the cave there, you can gather gold. And in the farthest area, there’s a ruin where you can pick up Parthenon Stone and Rune Stone, very rare. It’s annoying on your first playthrough, because it takes a long time to figure out where things are and gather enough for a certain recipe, but one great thing, a total lifesaver, is that you can carry over your money, ingredients, bag and horse into another playthrough. Now that I’m on my third, I have a bunch of each ingredient and probably won’t have to go gathering at all (though I will to get ready for my fourth run through ) Also, you can gather food items and then cook food (which never fails) that you can bring to recover your energy on your outings and keep gathering.

I don’t want to talk too much about the story because a big part of the game is finding out what Kayana’s history is and about each character. I’ll just finish and say that though I can understand why some people might not like it (Aki’s lack of story, and the very low level of romance), I’m really enjoying it now, and I’m pretty sure I’ll do everyone’s route. Then I’ll start waiting for the second half to come out in a few months…

2 Responses to “Kanuchi! After finishing”

1. Yamialexa says:

   October 23, 2008 at 11:05 am

   I don’t really like cliffhangers, so I’m a little sad about that. As for romance, I might miss that too, unless the story’s entertaining enough to let me forget about it.
   I was already wondering how two heroines would fit into one game, so no big surprise there I guess.
   Well, I got it and I’ll see. Have you got any information about the second part already, like when it’s coming out exactly?
2. admin says:

   October 23, 2008 at 1:25 pm

   It is pretty entertaining, with lots of intrigue, so hopefully it will catch your interest.

   I don’t know yet about Part 2, but the mags (which I didn’t get yesterday, sucky!) should be here soon with hopefully more info. I’m hoping it won’t be too long since they don’t need to draw too many new characters (I think the setting moves, so they will have to do some of those). I’m wondering if there will even be a minigame in that one, since you can master smithing in this one.