Zippora
Zippora \z(i)-ppo-ra\ as a girl's name is of Hebrew origin, and the meaning of Zippora is "bird".
After writing the review for 水の旋律, I took a break from otome games. With a week of break from that awful game, I have come back to write another review about its successor, 水の旋律２～緋の記憶～.
Again, you are hereby forewarned that there are spoilers abound.
水の旋律２～緋の記憶～ (Mizu no Senritsu 2 ~Hi no Hioku~, The Melody of Water ~Red Memories~) is an otome game published by KID in 2006 for the PS2 and rereleased for the PSP in 2010. It is a sequel to 水の旋律 and takes place two years after the original game. This time around, the main character is Kashiwagi Kira. She is a second year at the same school that Shiraishi Hina attends and the ace of the school's kendo team. She was orphaned as a baby and raised by a nun with other parentless children, so she has a great sense of responsibility to help with however she can. One day, when she goes to visit her foster mother, she finds a strange sword in a small shrine in the nearby forest. From then on, she is attacked by vicious crows and meets these people who have a interest in her sword and knows a lot more than they let on.
As with its predecessor, there is a lengthy backstory that takes several different routes to understand. So, this is a warning that there are spoilers abound for the whole game, not just any specific route. Also, I will be assuming you already know about the previous game.
Fourteen hundred years ago, Yaobikuni married and had children twice, the first time was arranged and the second time for love. Her second husband, who she loved, became sick, and, to save his life, she fed him the flesh of a mermaid to give him long life and immunity from disease. It didn't work as she thought it would, because he died and she left him. However, it still worked to a certain extent as he came back to life, only a little crazy in the head and with a monstrous form. For hundreds of years, he tried to search for her. About two hundred thirty years ago, he mistook a Kusou woman, Orin, sent to kill him for his beloved wife, Yaobikuni. Orin fell in love with him and didn't have the heart to correct him. Meeting up with who he thought was Yaobikuni calmed him down and helped him to maintain a human form. Eventually, the rest of the Kusou caught up to them and he finally realized and learned that Orin was not Yaobikuni and that Orin was sent to kill him. Shocked and angry at the deception and revelation, he ends up killing his pursuers and Orin.
During the time that he and Orin were together, they had a son named Shana. He witnessed his mother's death and bears resentment against the Kusou who he blamed for his mother's death and the Ichiyou who were children of Yaobikuni, his father's love. His father, having waited and searched for a long time, eventually died, but his consciousness and resentment was sealed into a mirror. As a child of one who ate mermaid flesh, Shana, too, continues to live a long life. It becomes revealed that he orchestrated the massacre between the Ichiyou and Kusou a hundred fifty years ago. Time jump to present day, Shana, as the clan Yata, is nw setting crows to attack members of the Ichiyou and Kusou clans. However, it is really just a cover for the Yata's real goal: that is to take the "Ten'kuu no Musume" (she who inherited Yaobikuni's power of control over the weather, Shiraishi Hina) and "Ashura no Tsurugi" (the suidansho that Kira holds) to remake the Yata clan as great as the Ichiyou and Kusou. While Shana is the head of Yata clan, the true evil of this plan is Shana's father who often possesses Shana from the mirror his consciousness is sealed in to further this plan.
In most routes, Kira is only able to beat back the Yata, but in two routes, she is able to completely destroy the source of evil.
Oh, that reminds me, do you remember when I said Kira is an orphan? Well, she was raised in the same orphanage as Tezuka Kyousuke, a character from the previous game and also Kira's love interest for the first half of the game. It's an important fact to remember, because it turns out that Kira's parents were members of the Ichiyou clan and also the ones who killed Tezuka Kyousuke's parents. Angst central.
Anyway, while visiting map locations were a major component in the last game, it's only one fourth of total gameplay.
The greatest addition to the sequel is the addition of battles. I know that in my previous entry that I bitched about how useless the guys are in the first game. They have all these awesome mutant powers, but they never get to use it and they get shown by Hina's deus ex machina powers. In this second game though, they actively use their powers, because every other day or so Kira will have to battle crows. To fight, you pick two available guys.
You then pick a location to fight.
And you enter the battle. As with all battles, the whole point is to bring down their health meters. You deal damage by playing a rock-paper-scissors roulette game. You pick one of three signs to play, but you have to time when you press the button, so the the roulette lands on a sign weaker to the one you chose. If you fail to do so, you take damage. And if you take enough damage, you lose the battle. Losing one battle is okay, but losing three is an automatic game over. You still want to avoid losing battles, because, by winning battles, you earn mirror shards that trigger key events towards the guy you're chasing. If you don't earn those mirror shards to trigger key events, you'll be redirected from the true end to a good end.
They probably added in the fights to keep you from falling asleep during the game, but you'll be tired of it after three play-throughs. I discovered it a little late, but there is an auto-battler option. You can access that only when you've completed a route each from the Kusou, the Ichiyou, and the Yata. However, boss battles are exempt; you have to manually battle bosses. And of course, if you lose against the boss, game over.
One nifty addition to this sequel game is that with every new playthrough you begin, you can choose to have Shiraishi Hina, the previous game's protagonist, be with any one of the guys from the last game. It doesn't change the gameplay or story line in any way, but it does unlock some hilarious and fluffy scenes. There's about four additional scenes for each guy (most of them consisting of Hina and her boyfriend on dates) and an short afterstory with a nice CG.
Azumi Yasuhide is a third year at Kira's high school and a member of the Kusou with control over fire. His uncle was the one who carried out the massacre between the Kusou and Ichiyou one hundred fifty years ago under the Shana's influence. That same uncle was also banished from their village and had a child with an Ichiyou woman that turned out to be Tezuka Kyousuke. Within the Kusou village, the Azumi family is hated for the uncle's betrayal. So, Yasuhide is working hard with the clan head to redeem his family. Voiced by Morikawa Toshiyuki (whose voice should not be wasted on a serious-minded character).
Shikibu Yoshino is a student at the nearby college and a member of the Kusou. He's a big flirt and extremely carefree, but he is quite strong at using spells and fudas. He's also cursed by something or other, but it gets broken in his route by the power of love (how trite). Other than that, I found his character rather lacking. Voiced by Kishio Daisuke.
Shitara Suguru should seem familar to you, since he was the pint-sized Ichiyou extremist now-reformed. After he killed the previous clan leader, he was put into confinement and has just been recently released and put under the oversight of Akizuki Ryou. As you'll find out, much of his actions in the first game was due to being brainwashed by Shana. Now, he's incredibly angsty, but he's got a great backstory, so it's easily forgiven. Voiced by Saiga Mitsuki.
Akizuki Ryou is a kendo teacher and the older brother of Akizuki Kei. Those familiar with the first game can easily figure out what his backstory is. Since his younger brother, Kei, was in the first game and his angst was that he became the weilder of a suidansho instead of his brother, Ryou's backstory is that he didn't get to weild a suidansho because it went to Kei. Ryou's story is not that much more interesting that his younger brother's, but it is a little better fleshed out in this second game. Voiced by Kondou Takeshi.
Kashiwagi Yoshiharu looks like a shouta (through his secret Yata powers), but he's taller than Kira and twice her age. As I've spoiled for you, he's actually a member of the Yata clan placed specifically to monitor Tezuka Kyousuke and Kashiwagi Kira. Honestly, I preferred his bad end than true end, purely because I like the bad end CG more. Voiced by Shimono Hiro.
Shana is the Yata clan leader, but he is often possessed by his father's consciousness sealed in a mirror to carry out the missions to kidnap Hina and steal Kira's suidansho. Normally, he is disguised as Kagara Mizuki's doctor, as well as Suguru's mother's confidant, which gives him great access into the Ichiyou clan. He holds resentment against the Ichiyou and Kusou, but he's not as crazy as his dead-father-sealed-in-a-mirror. Personally, his route is my favorite -- I even like his bad route, but that might strictly be because he is voiced by Konishi Katsuyuki (who is one of my favorite seiyuu).
Kagara Mizuki is the secret character in the game. His angst is that he allowed Suguru to attack the Kusou in the last game and is self-exiling himself away from the clan. His route is not particularly interesting, but what is surprising is that out of all the characters in the game, he is the only one that guesses correctly the identity of the Yata, one of them who is his own doctor. Voiced by Miura Hiroaki.
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For all my complaints, the second game is both better and worse than its predecessor. The overall story is expanded from the first game, and although it's a bit confusing, it's pretty good. Character backstories was a weak point, and it's still a weak point in this game. For instance, Shikibu Yoshino, Akizuki Ryou, and Kagara Mizuki's backstories were pretty uninteresting.
The afterstories for Hina and her guys are in no way a big part in the storyline, but it's certainly a nice addition. Often with game sequels that uses a new cast, the succeeding game avoids making references to its prequels. However, I'm one of those people who enjoys cameos from older characters. My favorite of all the afterstories is Hina and Kirihara Takahito, because after the boss battle in Azumi Yasuhide, you get to see Kirihara-sen'sei show a jealous streak, and it's awfully fluffy and adorable.
As for the battle component, I freaking hate it. There is absolutely no redeeming factor about it. Period.
It should also be added that like the previous game, it does not have a scene replay system. You can only rewatch the each character's true end.
The protagonist, Kashiwagi Kira, is a lot more affable than Shiraishi Hina from the prequel. She cries less and does not back down from trying to find her roots. She also has a mean sword, and as Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 3 showed us, otome game heroines with weapons are infinitely better than those without. However, Kira has a habit of being unbearably angsty in the first half of the game due to her unrequited crush on Tezuka Kyousuke. So, that's a couple points minus, but otherwise, she's much more tolerable than Hina. (Ironically though, I like Hina more in this sequel when I'm not playing as her. Also, she's seems a lot more level-headed and in control of her weather powers.)
The one major change in the sequel is the art style. While the line art is far better now, it has also adopted cel-shading. I'm not against cel-shaded art, but one of the draws to the Mizu no Senritsu series was the soft manga-styled coloring. So, I'm a little disappointed that they switched styles for most CGs. For flashbacks and ending CGs though, they kept to the old softer coloring style, and it even applies to Hina's afterstory CGs. Here's some beautiful samples of the softer coloring style.
Overall, Mizu no Senritsu 2 ~Hi no Kioku~ is a slight improvement over the first game. It can probably be played as a stand-alone game, but you'll get much more playing the whole series. However, I didn't like the first game very much, and I only played this second game because I played the first game. It's nowhere near as good as Harukanaru Toki no Naka de or Hiiro no Kakera series, but it's not completely awful. You are going to have to put up with terrible art in the first game and an awful battle system in the second, so it all depends on your tolerance of bad games.
After writing the review for 水の旋律, I took a break from otome games. With a week of break from that awful game, I have come back to write another review about its successor, 水の旋律２～緋の記憶～.
Again, you are hereby forewarned that there are spoilers abound.
水の旋律２～緋の記憶～ (Mizu no Senritsu 2 ~Hi no Hioku~, The Melody of Water ~Red Memories~) is an otome game published by KID in 2006 for the PS2 and rereleased for the PSP in 2010. It is a sequel to 水の旋律 and takes place two years after the original game. This time around, the main character is Kashiwagi Kira. She is a second year at the same school that Shiraishi Hina attends and the ace of the school's kendo team. She was orphaned as a baby and raised by a nun with other parentless children, so she has a great sense of responsibility to help with however she can. One day, when she goes to visit her foster mother, she finds a strange sword in a small shrine in the nearby forest. From then on, she is attacked by vicious crows and meets these people who have a interest in her sword and knows a lot more than they let on.
As with its predecessor, there is a lengthy backstory that takes several different routes to understand. So, this is a warning that there are spoilers abound for the whole game, not just any specific route. Also, I will be assuming you already know about the previous game.
Fourteen hundred years ago, Yaobikuni married and had children twice, the first time was arranged and the second time for love. Her second husband, who she loved, became sick, and, to save his life, she fed him the flesh of a mermaid to give him long life and immunity from disease. It didn't work as she thought it would, because he died and she left him. However, it still worked to a certain extent as he came back to life, only a little crazy in the head and with a monstrous form. For hundreds of years, he tried to search for her. About two hundred thirty years ago, he mistook a Kusou woman, Orin, sent to kill him for his beloved wife, Yaobikuni. Orin fell in love with him and didn't have the heart to correct him. Meeting up with who he thought was Yaobikuni calmed him down and helped him to maintain a human form. Eventually, the rest of the Kusou caught up to them and he finally realized and learned that Orin was not Yaobikuni and that Orin was sent to kill him. Shocked and angry at the deception and revelation, he ends up killing his pursuers and Orin.
During the time that he and Orin were together, they had a son named Shana. He witnessed his mother's death and bears resentment against the Kusou who he blamed for his mother's death and the Ichiyou who were children of Yaobikuni, his father's love. His father, having waited and searched for a long time, eventually died, but his consciousness and resentment was sealed into a mirror. As a child of one who ate mermaid flesh, Shana, too, continues to live a long life. It becomes revealed that he orchestrated the massacre between the Ichiyou and Kusou a hundred fifty years ago. Time jump to present day, Shana, as the clan Yata, is nw setting crows to attack members of the Ichiyou and Kusou clans. However, it is really just a cover for the Yata's real goal: that is to take the "Ten'kuu no Musume" (she who inherited Yaobikuni's power of control over the weather, Shiraishi Hina) and "Ashura no Tsurugi" (the suidansho that Kira holds) to remake the Yata clan as great as the Ichiyou and Kusou. While Shana is the head of Yata clan, the true evil of this plan is Shana's father who often possesses Shana from the mirror his consciousness is sealed in to further this plan.
In most routes, Kira is only able to beat back the Yata, but in two routes, she is able to completely destroy the source of evil.
Oh, that reminds me, do you remember when I said Kira is an orphan? Well, she was raised in the same orphanage as Tezuka Kyousuke, a character from the previous game and also Kira's love interest for the first half of the game. It's an important fact to remember, because it turns out that Kira's parents were members of the Ichiyou clan and also the ones who killed Tezuka Kyousuke's parents. Angst central.
Anyway, while visiting map locations were a major component in the last game, it's only one fourth of total gameplay.
The greatest addition to the sequel is the addition of battles. I know that in my previous entry that I bitched about how useless the guys are in the first game. They have all these awesome mutant powers, but they never get to use it and they get shown by Hina's deus ex machina powers. In this second game though, they actively use their powers, because every other day or so Kira will have to battle crows. To fight, you pick two available guys.
You then pick a location to fight.
And you enter the battle. As with all battles, the whole point is to bring down their health meters. You deal damage by playing a rock-paper-scissors roulette game. You pick one of three signs to play, but you have to time when you press the button, so the the roulette lands on a sign weaker to the one you chose. If you fail to do so, you take damage. And if you take enough damage, you lose the battle. Losing one battle is okay, but losing three is an automatic game over. You still want to avoid losing battles, because, by winning battles, you earn mirror shards that trigger key events towards the guy you're chasing. If you don't earn those mirror shards to trigger key events, you'll be redirected from the true end to a good end.
They probably added in the fights to keep you from falling asleep during the game, but you'll be tired of it after three play-throughs. I discovered it a little late, but there is an auto-battler option. You can access that only when you've completed a route each from the Kusou, the Ichiyou, and the Yata. However, boss battles are exempt; you have to manually battle bosses. And of course, if you lose against the boss, game over.
One nifty addition to this sequel game is that with every new playthrough you begin, you can choose to have Shiraishi Hina, the previous game's protagonist, be with any one of the guys from the last game. It doesn't change the gameplay or story line in any way, but it does unlock some hilarious and fluffy scenes. There's about four additional scenes for each guy (most of them consisting of Hina and her boyfriend on dates) and an short afterstory with a nice CG.
Azumi Yasuhide is a third year at Kira's high school and a member of the Kusou with control over fire. His uncle was the one who carried out the massacre between the Kusou and Ichiyou one hundred fifty years ago under the Shana's influence. That same uncle was also banished from their village and had a child with an Ichiyou woman that turned out to be Tezuka Kyousuke. Within the Kusou village, the Azumi family is hated for the uncle's betrayal. So, Yasuhide is working hard with the clan head to redeem his family. Voiced by Morikawa Toshiyuki (whose voice should not be wasted on a serious-minded character).
Shikibu Yoshino is a student at the nearby college and a member of the Kusou. He's a big flirt and extremely carefree, but he is quite strong at using spells and fudas. He's also cursed by something or other, but it gets broken in his route by the power of love (how trite). Other than that, I found his character rather lacking. Voiced by Kishio Daisuke.
Shitara Suguru should seem familar to you, since he was the pint-sized Ichiyou extremist now-reformed. After he killed the previous clan leader, he was put into confinement and has just been recently released and put under the oversight of Akizuki Ryou. As you'll find out, much of his actions in the first game was due to being brainwashed by Shana. Now, he's incredibly angsty, but he's got a great backstory, so it's easily forgiven. Voiced by Saiga Mitsuki.
Akizuki Ryou is a kendo teacher and the older brother of Akizuki Kei. Those familiar with the first game can easily figure out what his backstory is. Since his younger brother, Kei, was in the first game and his angst was that he became the weilder of a suidansho instead of his brother, Ryou's backstory is that he didn't get to weild a suidansho because it went to Kei. Ryou's story is not that much more interesting that his younger brother's, but it is a little better fleshed out in this second game. Voiced by Kondou Takeshi.
Kashiwagi Yoshiharu looks like a shouta (through his secret Yata powers), but he's taller than Kira and twice her age. As I've spoiled for you, he's actually a member of the Yata clan placed specifically to monitor Tezuka Kyousuke and Kashiwagi Kira. Honestly, I preferred his bad end than true end, purely because I like the bad end CG more. Voiced by Shimono Hiro.
Shana is the Yata clan leader, but he is often possessed by his father's consciousness sealed in a mirror to carry out the missions to kidnap Hina and steal Kira's suidansho. Normally, he is disguised as Kagara Mizuki's doctor, as well as Suguru's mother's confidant, which gives him great access into the Ichiyou clan. He holds resentment against the Ichiyou and Kusou, but he's not as crazy as his dead-father-sealed-in-a-mirror. Personally, his route is my favorite -- I even like his bad route, but that might strictly be because he is voiced by Konishi Katsuyuki (who is one of my favorite seiyuu).
Kagara Mizuki is the secret character in the game. His angst is that he allowed Suguru to attack the Kusou in the last game and is self-exiling himself away from the clan. His route is not particularly interesting, but what is surprising is that out of all the characters in the game, he is the only one that guesses correctly the identity of the Yata, one of them who is his own doctor. Voiced by Miura Hiroaki.
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For all my complaints, the second game is both better and worse than its predecessor. The overall story is expanded from the first game, and although it's a bit confusing, it's pretty good. Character backstories was a weak point, and it's still a weak point in this game. For instance, Shikibu Yoshino, Akizuki Ryou, and Kagara Mizuki's backstories were pretty uninteresting.
The afterstories for Hina and her guys are in no way a big part in the storyline, but it's certainly a nice addition. Often with game sequels that uses a new cast, the succeeding game avoids making references to its prequels. However, I'm one of those people who enjoys cameos from older characters. My favorite of all the afterstories is Hina and Kirihara Takahito, because after the boss battle in Azumi Yasuhide, you get to see Kirihara-sen'sei show a jealous streak, and it's awfully fluffy and adorable.
As for the battle component, I freaking hate it. There is absolutely no redeeming factor about it. Period.
It should also be added that like the previous game, it does not have a scene replay system. You can only rewatch the each character's true end.
The protagonist, Kashiwagi Kira, is a lot more affable than Shiraishi Hina from the prequel. She cries less and does not back down from trying to find her roots. She also has a mean sword, and as Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 3 showed us, otome game heroines with weapons are infinitely better than those without. However, Kira has a habit of being unbearably angsty in the first half of the game due to her unrequited crush on Tezuka Kyousuke. So, that's a couple points minus, but otherwise, she's much more tolerable than Hina. (Ironically though, I like Hina more in this sequel when I'm not playing as her. Also, she's seems a lot more level-headed and in control of her weather powers.)
The one major change in the sequel is the art style. While the line art is far better now, it has also adopted cel-shading. I'm not against cel-shaded art, but one of the draws to the Mizu no Senritsu series was the soft manga-styled coloring. So, I'm a little disappointed that they switched styles for most CGs. For flashbacks and ending CGs though, they kept to the old softer coloring style, and it even applies to Hina's afterstory CGs. Here's some beautiful samples of the softer coloring style.
Overall, Mizu no Senritsu 2 ~Hi no Kioku~ is a slight improvement over the first game. It can probably be played as a stand-alone game, but you'll get much more playing the whole series. However, I didn't like the first game very much, and I only played this second game because I played the first game. It's nowhere near as good as Harukanaru Toki no Naka de or Hiiro no Kakera series, but it's not completely awful. You are going to have to put up with terrible art in the first game and an awful battle system in the second, so it all depends on your tolerance of bad games.