So after reading this route, I found it was not as horrible as people have made it sound, in my opinion. I think the two parts of the route, the Kirishima family arc and the ancient Japan mother-child arc, were all pretty well done on their own. They just could have been correlated much better. Thinking back on it now, the way Yukito and Kano and Hijiri all interacted with each other reminds me a bit of other strong friend groups in anime. They were very pleasant to read, and you could really feel each character and how they all felt about each other. I also thought it did a good job of giving Yukito a character arc outside of the main route, which you don’t normally get much of in my experience with multi-route visual novels.
Kano as a character is okay. I never quite found myself loving or hating her, which I think brings the route down for me more than the total lack of correlation between the two stories. She felt…I don’t want to say “incomplete” but she certainly didn’t feel as fleshed out as she could have been. I just feel like this route is the definition of “average” “5/10” “indifferent” for me. I didn’t dislike it, but I never had my ears perked or was sitting on the edge of my seat. It was okay.
