Sakura MMO Trilogy Review (Yuri Visual Novel Series)

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Without Within Trilogy Review (English Original Visual Novel Series)

In the EVN world dominated by clichéd romance stories, titles by InvertMouse, a long-time indie developer from Australia, stand out in a few significant ways. Staying away from most common genre tropes and easily-marketable story elements, the games he creates often focus on topics such as friendship and struggles of everyday life, rather than grand tales of romance and adventure. The three short VNs in the Without Within series are particularly unusual and interesting in this regard, tackling themes of ambition, motivation and talent in life of an artist, in the rare setting of modern-day Australia and South-East Asia – all of this in a highly comedic style, but not without serious messages underlining the, most of the time, silly storyline.

                Another thing that makes these games interesting is their complicated development history. The first Without Within was a very short, freeware title, published in December 2014 as one of InvertMouse’s earliest works. The second, commercial entry followed nearly a year later, showing up on Steam in December 2015 and offering a much more substantial story, but in a very similar production quality and tone. The final game, however, didn’t release until mid-2018 – by this time its creator had a lot of more experience and technical prowess, which makes it a visibly different experience from its prequels. Still, with how short and thematically-consistent the three games are, I’ve decided to tackle them as a single package – the third part ends in a rather open-ended way, but with InvertMouse moving away from VN development, it’s pretty clear that the whole trilogy should be treated as a complete story and there’s little chance for any kind of continuation. So, what is Without Within series about exactly and what makes it worth your attention?

Vinty’s visual design is just as caricatural as her personality – this, however, doesn’t mean her story is nothing but a sequence of gags

All Without Within games follow the story of Vinty, a comically-unfortunate and unsuccessful calligraphy passionate, trying to make a name for herself within the somewhat obscure niche and struggling to keep her dream alive against the crushing pressures of everyday life, and various discouraging mishaps. Throughout the three WW titles, she is portrayed with a nearly constantly dejected, chibi sprite (the only exception is being her delusional daydreams, where she imagines herself as a star). This represents her hopeless mental state and feeling of inadequacy in comparison to the talented and successful calligraphers she meets in her adventures, particularly her idol and the biggest celebrity in the world of calligraphy, Excelia (she and all other characters outside of Vinty have normal proportions and are drawn with a very decent level of detail). Excelia herself is Vinty’s direct opposite – wealthy, incredibly talented and famous, representing everything she aspires to be at the beginning of the story, but also hiding a darker side that will make Vinty reconsider her priorities. This duo of caricatural, exaggerated characters are the main heroines of the series, acting as both counterparts and rivals for each other, bound by their shared love for calligraphy.

                The first title in the series focuses on the everyday life of Vinty, showing her usual struggles: ugly apartment, hostile landlady, unsatisfying job and hopeless attempts at selling her work on the streets, broken up mostly by her delusional dreams of greatness. The bitter comedy is accompanied by a few choices that will decide whether she can keep her goal of becoming a full-time artist alive, or be forced to give up on it (possibly crashing & burning in spectacular fashion in the process). It’s a simple, somewhat ironic game about motivation and chasing your dreams, and these themes will be the driving force of the story throughout the series. It doesn’t mean, however, that all three VNs are exclusively gag comedies. Without Within 2 follows Vinty on a government-sponsored trip to a calligraphy convention in Melbourne and mixes the humour from its prequel with travel-guide-like descriptions of the experience of leaving her hometown for the first time. This includes links to real live videos of various landmarks and elements of public transportation that show up in the story – these elements will either amuse you or bore you out of your mind, depending whether you find mundane trivia about foreign countries interesting (or possibly plan to visit them yourself and have a real use for all that information). It’s a bit of a strange mix and in certain ways kills the pacing of WW2 and 3 (that one takes Vinty to Singapore and Malaysia), even despite both sequels getting rid of choices and branching paths – if you want to enjoy them, you have to be ready for quite a lot of downtime and trivia between actual story developments.

Vinty’s idol and rival Excelia is a polar opposite of the protagonist and just as exaggerated – the setup that works fine for comedy, but can hardly handle shifts into a more serious tone

While the gag comedy and overly-detailed descriptions of Vinty’s travels somehow merge into a particularly slow, casual SoL experience that will not be to everyone’s taste, but is not objectively bad, the issues with this formula show up as soon as the games introduce serious drama. This transition first happens in the ending sequence of Without Within 2, when Excelia is exposed for vandalism of other calligraphers’ work and loses her reputation in the community, after which she is comforted by Vinty. The dramatic reveal and the heartfelt moments after it are not done terribly, but simply feel out of place due to the earlier tone of the game and the exaggerated features of both main characters. This issue becomes even deeper in Without Within 3, in with Vinty and Excelia go on a joint trip to Singapore, to solve the mystery of the “ghost” of famous calligrapher Kiki showing up in various places connected to her life. At some point the investigation transitions into a fully-fledged backstory segment for this character, who died of cancer at an early age before reaching her full potential, and her turbulent friendship with Tai, another calligraphy star.

                The story of Tai and Kiki is hands-down the best part of the whole series, showing a deep and dramatic tale that I never really expected to find in it. However, while it’s meant to have an important meaning for both Excelia and Vinty, helping them reshape their goals and attitudes towards life, it also showcases their flows as characters – both of them are, more or less, caricatures and by the point Without Within 3 was made, it was very hard for InvertMouse to give them proper depth without breaking up the whole formula. Especially for Vinty the conclusion is kind of unsatisfying – as the butt of every joke, she’s just as unfortunate and unskilful at the end of the journey as she was in the beginning, her only success being the fact of finding a bit more balance in her approach to art and competition. While not the worst possible payoff, it makes you wish for something at least slightly more hopeful and substantial.

The detailed descriptions of Vinty’s travels and locales she visits are occasionally interesting, but hurt the pacing of Without Within 2 & 3 significantly

When it goes to production values, each Without Within game was an improvement over its predecessor, especially when it goes to the number and quality of CGs, but they’re also very consistent stylistically. Vinty’s chibi sprite is always contrasting with rather detailed backgrounds and good-quality portrayals of other characters – none of it is ever particularly amazing, but solid nonetheless and especially the third game impresses with its sheer variety of visual assets, representing the many locales visited by the heroines. Also, all of the games feature catchy, energetic soundtracks, which honestly help to keep the slower moments of Without Within 2 & 3 reasonably entertaining.

                In summary, Without Within trilogy is unusual and sometimes contradictory, but I still find it worth experiencing. It rarely conforms to your expectations, telling a rare story about being a small-time artist without dishonest wish-fulfilment or tacked-on romance plots. Even its most dramatic and exaggerated moments are, in their core, mundane and painfully realistic, telling simple truths about life and struggles of an unsuccessful creator (which, in relative terms, might be the majority of people that ever attempt becoming one). It comments on our reality and explores real places rather than providing means of escapism, but if that is something you’re interested in when you pick it up, you most likely won’t be disappointed.

Final Score: 3/5

Pros:
+ Unusual story with interesting themes
+ Fun, humoristic storytelling formula
+ Well-stylized visuals and good soundtrack

Cons:
- Lacklustre character development
- Poor pacing in the sequels
- Inconsistent tone of the third game


VNDB Pages (Without Within 1, Without Within 2, Without Within 3)
Buy Without Within Trilogy on Steam

EVN Chronicles First Anniversary Rant & Annoucements

tl;dr: I'll be switching to one post per two weeks, to avoid burnout and focus on RL responsibilities more. I'm moderately content with the place the blog is nowadays and hope to continue it ad infinitum. I might also mix in some random otaku-media-related posts outside of the usual time brackets, to keep things interesting for myself. If you're interested, enjoy the lengthy rant below!

Hello and welcome to the EVN Chronicles first-anniversary overview & announcements post, where I'll be doing a bit of a summary of my experience of writing this blog for the last 12+ months and outline my plans for the future. A little bit over a year ago, in June 2018, I've decided to move my blog, then called Pride of the West, from being hosted exclusively on Fuwanovel Forums. This came after eight months of posting reviews and commentary about EVNs every week, channelling my newfound passion for the medium. Apart from my own enjoyment, that project was explicitly oriented towards one goal – fighting the negative stereotypes about non-JP visual novels and promoting the quality games within the EVN niche. While it was EVNs that introduced me to visual novel formula and got me hooked on them, I realized that many people in the core VN community still considered them universally trash – poor, uninspired imitations of their Japanese predecessors, with only handful of exceptions being even worthy of a closer look. The idea I wished to change, at least within the context of discussions on Fuwa itself.

As dead as the site is nowadays, Fuwanovel still holds a great community, to which I owe much of passion for VNs, and which encouraged me in writing about them, in a major way

While I was, and still am extremely grateful to everything that the Fuwanovel community offered me, the slow decay of the site itself and the lack of control over my content made me realize that I can't rely on it as my only platform, even if I'm doing it just for the fun of it. This led to me establishing this humble site on Blogger, while also changing the brand I wasn't fully – the weirdly supremacist-sounding Pride of the West became EVN Chronicles, slowly fleshing out its new identity and formula, with gimmicks such as Shovelware Adventures series and somewhat standardized game jam coverage. Since then I had great fun writing posts every week and polishing the often rough, old content from Fuwa, but also kind of stressing myself out with keeping the schedules and staying even marginally relevant within the VN community (mostly through Reddit activity, as Fuwa's deterioration was only progressing, even if I'm still one of the most active members there).

At that same time, I've launched two affiliated activities – a Twitter account and a Steam Curator profile. All of it, by most measures, grossly unsuccessful: over the year, my blog had gathered 50k pageviews, mostly from sharing my articles from Reddit. I've earned around 150 Twitter followers, including a few genuinely paying attention to what I post and over 190 Steam followers – rather miserable numbers for sucha long period of uninterupted activity, but kind of expected considering the ultra-niche nature of what I do. I've also received, over time, progressively more positive feedback and got contacted by many developers willing to send me review copies – along with the experience of making interviews with people such as NomnomNami, Zetsubou or ebi-hime, it was probably the most satisfying part of the experience and I really cherish some of the contacts I've gathered over this period. I've also spend embarassing amount of time mindlessly watching Blogger stats, but I'm sure if you ever made a site or blog of your own, you've been there too...

Statssss, my precioussss statssss...

So, what all of this means for the future? First, during all this time, I kind of put my real life on hold, while I was dealing with some family and personal issues, but can't afford to focus on the blog this much for another year or two. Writing on a weekly basis also made it hard for me to tackle longer titles or just read VNs for fun, something I'd definitely want to reclaim. Thus, for the foreseeable future, I'll be switching to one post every two weeks, with possible extra material posted whenever I find time and energy to write something extra. I'm not the fastest reader or writer, having to deal with my dyslexia every step of the way, so the previous schedule was taxing, to the point I'm not exactly sure how I managed to keep it up for this long. On the other hand, this means some of my projects, like my next Yuri Game Jam coverage, will take the form of one longer post, instead of a few shorter ones. I'll also want to make an odd post from time to time, with various ideas, such as reviewing RWBY or writing about my experience with Japanese music, following me for a while now. In the end, this is not a commercial site, but my personal blog and I have to keep it interesting for myself, just as I strive to make it fun to read.
          There's also something very personal about this site and how I approach it, that I think I should talk about a little bit. For many years, I've been dealing with my compulsive video game habits, eating the vast majority of my free time and energy, and eventually killing off any more creative hobby I picked up along the way. My transferring to otaku media, including VNs that prioritize interesting narratives over time-burning gameplay, was a way to cope with limiting my involvement with "traditional" games and working to change some parts of my lifestyle. The blog was a huge part of this process, which, for the most part, turned out successful. For this reason alone, it's not something I could imagine myself fully dropping any time soon. It provided me with a lot of fun and encouregment, and I want to thank anyone that followed my work this far – you made this possible and while it might not be obvious from the previous paragraphs, it means a world to me. The whole VN community turned it interesting and inspiring probably more than any other group I got into over the web, and it's hard to express how happy I am that I decided to dive into this niche. And I hope you'll be willing to join me in next chapters of this silly, self-indulgent journey through the world of EVNs – there's still a lot, a lot to write about here and a lot of fun to be had. ^^