Lazy Writing
Lolrider
I'm going to be frank, I don't think I played the same game as everyone else here. Maybe I'm spoiled for choice, but I found Harukoi Otome to be frustratingly mediocre when it wasn't being infuriatingly awful.The game relies on cliches and uninspired, pre-packaged plot points, to the point where you basically know what is going to happen with each character before it actually happens. The few actual twists that actually managed to surprise me were ones that had no foreshadowing at all.But even more than that, the writing is just... Honestly, I can't really find a way to describe it that will do it justice. It feels absent minded, or like a rough draft, and I don't mean in terms of editing and proofreading. It reads like a research paper before someone went back to add in sources and justification.There were multiple times in the game where it seemed that the author just got bored of what they were writing and gave up halfway, or otherwise didn't know how to finish what they started. Harukoi Otome is the type of story that gives you the barest exposition possible, and then expects you to understand what it's trying to say, and fill in the blanks, on your own.And, sure, I did know what it was trying to say. In fact, there was never an instance where I was confused about what direction the story was 'supposed' to be going. Problem is, there were multiple times where what the story was 'trying to say' and what the story was actually saying were completely out of sync. Characters that I was supposed to like I simply found aggravating (I'm specifically calling out Oikawa here), emotional climaxes that were supposed to be compelling were instead contrived and tiresome, the plot itself was by the books and ham-fisted, victim blaming, accepting apologies that were never given in the first place, major conflicts that were actually a non-issue, people just being mindlessly stupid for no reason, etc. etc. etc.Also, none of the best girls had routes so what even is the point?Harukoi Otome is one of the only VNs to make me legitimately angry, and probably the only VN to do so on accident. It has promise, and it has some good points, but that is simply drowned out by all the missteps and dropped potential. Which is a shame, because I actually liked a lot of the heroines.
