Midnighticequeen wrote:
The only problem I had with the story was the ending, it seemed a little unfinished. It almost felt like a cheat since all the other problems that they were talking about was never addressed, and we have no idea what happened in the outside word.
This doesn't bother me too much, because the story proper has nothing to do with these elements anyway. I agree that the detail put into the world suggests that there should be more of a story there, but realistically I would agree with delta more than anything; it would almost be better to not go on and on about external events so much rather than expand the story to cover more of them. A brief epilogue might have been a good idea, I guess, just to establish for certain a couple of loose-end-tyings that aren't really any better off left open.
If I had a real complaint with
Songs of Araiah, though it would simply be that I've read it before under a different name. I've mentioned this briefly to Drake already, who suggested I was just reading too much into it, but here's the expansion:
Essentially, the way I see it, it's Starlit Sky with different character names.
Superficially, the set-up is almost identical: young man leaves home early in the morning, finds magic-using woman who appears to hold the answers and be a more mature, more developed figure, they bond, young man discovers that magic-using woman is in fact hiding some deep-seated flaw that he helps overcome.
Fundamentally, both stories have the same theme - to quote an aphorism, "take the long short-cut". Quick-fix answers - Melissa's pre-fab magic, Marivel's memory potion - only keep you happy in the short term, and you're better off in the long run working to overcome your problems in a more thorough manner with real effort put in. This is gone back to multiple times in Starlit Sky, with Marivel offering the potion to everyone she met who had a problem, only to find a better, more-permanent solution with a bit more effort; in Araiah, it's expressed via Melissa's cooking (she can't make anything work when she manipulates magic to cook, but can produce edible meals when she sits down and makes an effort to learn properly) and more-thoroughly with her magic; she'd been relying on the quick-fix pre-fab spells so much she obviously hadn't made any real effort to research how to perform magic herself, which was a source of insecurity. To an extent, it's also the case with Jason's situation; he ran away in the first place looking for a quick-fix answer, which makes him miserable until he puts some effort in to learn things properly for himself.
Unfortunately, I think the theme was really given a better treatment in Starlit Sky; it was a little heavy-handed, but it was something the reader could more-readily take away with them, rather than something that apparently didn't even really consciously occur to Drake, since he claimed I was reading too much into it. Also, Starlit Sky gives the protagonist a better treatment, since his quick-fix/proper-resolution is actually the point of the tale. Also he has a telescope. But really, I doubt it's a coincidence that Drake wrote Araiah, then discarded it and went off to write Starlit Sky, which is like a leaner, meaner version of the same tale. It's just that, in a way, it almost seems a shame for people to have been spending so much time working on this pre-hash of an existing story when they could have been putting their creative energies into something more original.
That's not to say I didn't like Araiah - far from it. It's nicely-written (the odd grammar mistake aside) and the characterisation is pretty nice, and it's got a fairly satisfying arc to it. The graphics are generally pretty nice, and I really liked the attention to detail in moving the characters around the frame to show them moving closer to the protagonist, and so on (although it would have been nicer to have a higher-res sprite for such purposes).
It's been said already, but the intro movie confused me a little. When I first saw it, I was impressed, thinking someone had gone to the effort of laying it all out in Ren'Py transitions and particle factories and so on - which is eminently possible... so it was something of a disappointment to find that it was all pre-rendered. And while many of the backgrounds are really nicely done, there are a couple which stand out as not being quite so good... unfortunately, one of these is the mansion's hallway, which you see
all the time, while the best examples - such as the bridge from Marshall - barely get a look-in.
Anyway, all in all, well done to the team, and congratulations on putting out a pretty nice VN!
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. Closing on the "loved it" but I'm yet undecided... need to let it sink in first ^_^. More details in the spoilies :
I expected one of these endless tunnels of shelves, fading into the dark.
... ...... maybe I'll try breaking the dot someday >.>...
