So today I learned Riki and Kud have a kid in Kud Wafter. And she is just super duper adorable ;_;
Wow, poor Kud. With her mother, her daughter, and Riki in the family tree, she looks like the odd one out.
My understanding isā¦ Wafter route is a mixed bag of Kud porn and moe feelgood.
After route removes the H-scenes and has actual emotional storytelling.
The good side to this is that they had the decency to clearly distinguish the two faces of the story.
The bad side is that Wafter is compulsory to unlock After. Whyyyy would they do that. It even covers a lot of the same content.
Take-home from this is: yes, Kud Wafter has a lot of pandering, but donāt write it off so easily. Iām sure it has storytelling value to be found in the After route.
In the 18+ version is mostly as you described.
The all ages version fixes that problem. It basically removes the Wafter part of the 18+ version so you donāt have to read it twice. Also, Wafter contains Shiinaās story (at least it does in the all ages version; not sure about the 18+ version)
I haven't.
To be perfectly honest, Iāve heard enough bad things that Iām not overly anticipating reading it either. But that could just be me having a jaded mindset.
To be honest, Iām afraid most of what youāve read is trueā¦itās mostly a fandisc that panders to people who like Kud a lot like me. But like Asperity said it isnāt completely horrible it does have some good things.
The new characters are really good and have good backstories with decent drama
Shiina is an odd duck in her family; which makes her relateable as Iām sure her mother and sister hate space and rockets as much as my own mother and brother hate Japanese culture.
And Yuuki: imagine Kurugaya Yuiko as mad scientist but she also has a well developed backstory and reasons behind her behavior
There are also some nice slice of life scenes: though Kud behaves a bit weird in some of them though (to make her more moe I guess)
The final part (the āletās throw some drama at Kudā part) was mostly melodrama though. I will give my thoughts with spoilers in the After thread.
@21hunter Mostly sums up how i feel about the game, especially the emphasis that This is about kud and if you (somehow) do not like her you really should not be looking to kud wafter.
Also worth noting is that there is not as much comedy, not to the degree of little busters at least, I would call it more heartwarming but again the bias there.
Shiina is very cute, hers was my favorite back story for the route found a lot of her stuff very heart warming.
@Gnashes A lot of the negativity comes from, much like with tomoyo after, people foolishly coming into it expecting another refrain/after story and being assaulted with fan-service. Maeda has nothing to do with it, not even music. As much as I love kud, it doesnāt even compare to her route either. It is just a kud fan disk and should be treated as such, not every game has to be a kamige and to compare it to such is foolish.
Yeah, which is what I had gathered for Tomoyo After going into it as well. At this point I should honestly just toss what Iāve heard into the background, give it a read with a fresh mind when a TL is finished, and then judge my like or dislike of it in hindsight.
Thatās what I did for Tomoyo After, and I actually ended up liking that quite a bit outside of the first 10 minutes. At any rate, appreciate the opinions all; especially considering Iāve not heard too much of the good side to the game.
I just read up until August 2nd(game starts on July 19th) of the After arc; this is the same period covered in the Wafter arc. Other than the sex scenes, Iām pretty sure all the content from Wafter was in After too. There was new content as well(fortunately?), but it was mostly just smaller conversations here and there. Funnily enough, Riki and Kud still have sex all the time in After. You just donāt get to see anything, and the events are simply summarized vaguely. So to any pitiful souls who read the 18+ version, skip directly to After and nothing of value will be lost; unfortunately, youāre still reading Kud Wafter.
Yeah Iāve been told itās very unusual, since After starts with all the same content as Wafter, just with the sex scenes removed. In that case shouldnāt you have made After an option from the start, instead of making readers re-play all the scenes again?
In that case shouldnāt you have made After an option from the start, instead of making readers re-play all the scenes again?
Probably, or it could have just been one thing, as I said, the sex still happen canonically. It might be that they wanted it to be some artsy surprise cause the title screen and UI and stuff changes completely in After. āAha, you thought this was just lolicon bait, but itās totally not, I swear.ā The game does recognize that youāve read all that stuff, so you can just skip read text.
I guess one thing not in After though itās not directly sexual is a joke that happens 2-3 times. Itās about Riki having an inner debate about opening a drawer: think one of those where you have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other except there were like 5 different Rikis. For the first couple of lines, that had me laughing my ass off, then it got old especially when it ends with an achievement for obtaining Kudās panties.
having an inner debate about opening a drawer
And let me guess: the said drawer had very delicate contents inside
Time for a shitty spoiler free review of a shitty novel(Yes, thatās the attitude Iām going with).
STORY(Like there is one.)
The novel starts of at 19th of July after the events of Little Busters!. Most students have gone back home over summer, and only Kud, Riki, Kanata, and A-chan senpai remain of the original characters. Riki and Kud are also dating from the get-go. The boysā dorm is being renovated, but some genius hits a water pipe and floods the whole lower floor. Kanata saves the boys from sleeping on classroom floors by allowing them to use the old vacant girlsā dorm, though thatās not technically true because Kud still lives there. Because there arenāt enough rooms for all the boys, Kud, red as a beet, asks Riki to live with her. Now if they were to be caught, all the boys would be kicked out.
[Man that sure sounds like a lazy reason to have a story filled with lots of loli porn.]
For like a week, the two live their lives happily doing nothing but eat and fuck like theyāre on Game of Thrones. After that the writers thought the audience might get bored, so they decide to introduce another loli, a discount Kurugaya, and a girl too best for this sewage waste. We also learn that the city is holding a bottle rocket contest.
[I hope you like model rockets because thatās the main plot for about 75% of this riveting piece of literature.]
So our valiant heroes set out to make the best rocket that ever was, and at the same time Riki aims to add the new loli to his harem. Her mother objects out of fear for her daughterās future as secondary loli. Well, the story moves in the exact way youād expect it to, so they get to make their rocket.
[Now, everything up to this point was so fun that they gave you the option to read it twice before progressing to anything even resembling a Key gameās fecal matter.]
Guess whatās next, another fucking rocket of course. After thatās done, weāve completed about 70-80% of the novel and made our way to the first thing that can be remotely considered spoilers, so Iāll stop here.
Characters
Kud
She was always lolicon bait, but it wasnāt so bad when mixed with all the other little busters. This time itās the same Kud but higher concentration.
Riki
I guess this Riki might be a bit lewder than before, but LB! Riki did some crazy shit too. Theyāre also not very clear about this, but I donāt think this is post-refrain Riki. He acts/thinks more like normal Riki.
Himuro Yuuki
Honestly, I can see people thinking sheās a cool character, but she really didnāt do it for me. She just felt like an awkward combination of Kurugaya and Haruka.
Arizuki Shiina
Because they definitely needed another loli. Shiina is basically made to be a younger version of Kud, and thatās her whole gimmick.
Arizuki Ui
Shiinaās older sister. She has criminally little screen time. Sheās more on the level of A-chan senpai than the other originals. She also works as a maid and flat out turns down the Diki, so Best Girl.
Kanata & A-chan Senpai
They both have very little screen time, and most of that is spent making lewd jokes at A-chan senpaiās expense. It does however seem that A-chan senpaiās family name is Amano, though itās not confirmed.
Music
Iām not a music savvy guy, so I canāt say much other than I donāt have any real complaints other than the atrocious opening. I really like Breath of Stars which is also the first track you hear ingame.
Personal Reflections
Iām not particularly fond of Kud, so Iām obviously not the target audience for this.However, I gravely underestimated how few things KW has to bring other than Kud. An unfathomable amount of this game is Kud talking about food and rocket science. Just as a text, itās unbelievable boring to read. There is so much technobabble that I could zone out for minutes while reading. Not to mention how many times they remind you of the other little busters, and how they are not there to make things interesting. As a story, itās very cookie cutter. Pretty much the first thing that comes to your mind when presented with a situation will happen. Itās some of the most generic plot Iāve seen. Coupled with the strain from reading in Japanese, this was a true chore to finish. Btw, the version of RealLive this is made in does not cooperate well with text hookers. I would never have bother with this thing if it wasnāt for the satisfaction of having read all Key novels in some form. I canāt recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore of Kud fans who also like spending hours on end reading about aerodynamics and rocket building. Worse than that, there is nothing but the technobabble in here that isnāt presented in other Key novels. For goodness sake, save yourself the pain and suffering; a bullet to the forehead is merciful!
Score: 15 golden loli sex scenes
She was always lolicon bait, but it wasnāt so bad when mixed with all the other little busters.
At least, I and Kud are the same lolicon.
Kud Wafter anime is apparently in the works
http://blog.livedoor.jp/geek/archives/51539308.html
Same staff/studio hopefully!
So will this VN ever be translated? Iāve been waiting years to be able to read my favorite Little Busters heroineās VN but my Japanese is not at that level yet.
It looks like Project Wafuu has all but announced cancellation so will this VN never achieve the blessing of an English translation?
Dog knows.
Kud Wafter makes me skeptical from the premise alone. A game spun-off from a visual novel that, while featuring a nominal amount of romance, was far more interested in exploring friendships and how they hold up to the test of time, instead honing in almost exclusively on the fluffiest aspects of romance. Itās why Iām kinda glad the film is bring back the old gang for at least a couple scenes.
I played this game over the past couple of months and posted a review of sorts for it on an /r/visualnovels thread, and a friend encouraged me to make an account on here and share it in this thread as well. So yeah, I hope some of you enjoy reading my thoughts on this game (which are pretty different from most of the opinions Iāve seen on this game until this point) and am willing to respond to any comments on it.
So a couple months ago the crowdfund for the Kud Wafter anime started on Tokyo Otaku Mode and I watched the really cute trailer and started feeling nostalgic for the parts of LB! (and Kudās route specifically) I liked, which idly got me thinking about playing the actual game and uh yeah I decided to go ahead and play it.
There was a weird condition that led to me enjoying this game as much as I did I think. Namely, that itās been years since I played Little Busters. I barely remember what kind of characters Kud and Riki were but was already incredibly fond of their pairing when I played it and over the years itās boiled down to just ādang those side routes were pretty ultimately pretty eh, but Kud and Riki were really fucking cute togetherā so Iāve if anything invested myself more into the couple than when I actually played the game. The time gap also meant I could not notice any meaningful character discrepancy. I have the idea in my head that Kud was a lot more zany but it isnāt solid enough to start bothering me when I perceive Kud as a relatively mellow character in this game. Riki in particular has lost all of his identifying characteristics in my mind other than being ānormal and meek-ishā so who knows if he changed at all here.
Yet, probably more than anything else when it came to influencing my eventual enjoyment, I expected this game to be truly trite awful garbage. Iāve only ever heard how insanely bad Key h-scenes were, that this game was a loli fanservice nukige hell, and it had basically no redeeming value whatsoever. Instead I got a game that had a really earnest slice-of-life story of a couple living day to day on their summer break with some of the better ero Iāve read in this entire medium?
In case that sounds like Iām overpraising it I should clarify, Kud Wafter is an incredibly āboringā game. I meant living day to day very literally. Almost every single in-game day would follow a pattern of wake up, eat breakfast, do some stuff (bottle rockets), eat lunch, do some more stuff (more bottle rockets), eat dinner, then do some homework, shower, sex, sleep. Occasionally the scene depicting a meal would be skipped, but Iāve read dozens of conversations between these two characters about what Kud decided to cook that day and how ćććć it is. There was a loosely ongoing plot but for the bulk of the game it never takes over everything that happens, the game continues to depict all the little moments where you just do something else not related to whatever is actually going on in your life. All the haphazard āI feel like ordering this todayās and āletās eat here instead because they have air conditioningā kind of decisions. Itās a really just a relaxing time with nothing wacky or over-the-top occurring at all. Riki and Kud were cute and led a happy little life together that I felt I was voyeuristically creeping on as opposed to just reading the story of. Thatās all I ever really wanted out of the game anyway.
The most surprisingly stand-out part however, was the porn. It was just veryā¦ genuine? I can see being bothered by these characters being sexual (I wanted to play the all-ages version myself but couldnāt really find it) but when the scenes started it seemed like such a natural evolution of where they were with each other and the way the scenes developed over time was so believable and adorable as they went from fumbling over each other and not even being able to have penetrative sex successfully (with multiple blueballed scenes as a result) to engaging in awkward roleplay and teasing each other over random small kinks. The scenes did become more porny as the game went on (with the final one even being over the top multiple round simultaneous orgasm stuff), but itās one of the few games where I felt like the ero was a real important part of the story being conveyed rather than just ātime to press the porn buttonā.
Of course there isnāt only good things to say. Once the first route ended the game had a second more serious route (which was basically the exact same through the time range covered by the first) that offered a bunch of sweet romantic scenes between Kud and Riki in place of the newly gone fanservice/ero ones, but once it reached new territory it basically became a true successor to the Kud route itās a sequel to. That is to say, it had some so-so drama that just got worse and worse as it went on (for way too long). The most positive comment I could make about it is that the voice actors did a good job and itās not as bad as the original Kud route. Fortunately the drama is actually a pretty small part of the script (around 1/8th of the total thing by line count) so Iām able to compartmentalize it well and pretend it isnāt there as much as it was (but it was pretty dang bad lmao).
All in all though Iām glad I played Kud Wafter. It wasnāt amazing, but it was fun to be able to go through a game I only had passing interest in when I exclusively read English because I assumed it just wasnāt in the cards. Especially since in the process I got to form my own opinion on this game Iāve heard demonized so much by people who never even got to give it a chance. So yeah. Fun cute game.
Fun fact 1.5% of all lines in the script contain wafuu~.
The most surprisingly stand-out part however, was the porn. It was just veryā¦ genuine? I can see being bothered by these characters being sexual (I wanted to play the all-ages version myself but couldnāt really find it) but when the scenes started it seemed like such a natural evolution of where they were with each other and the way the scenes developed over time was so believable and adorable as they went from fumbling over each other and not even being able to have penetrative sex successfully (with multiple blueballed scenes as a result) to engaging in awkward roleplay and teasing each other over random small kinks.
This is probably the most surprising thing Iāve read from your review. I mean, the way you describe it does sound quite genuine and down-to-earth, at least more than most other eroge with focus on the h-scenes.
At the least, saying that:
Itās one of the few games where I felt like the ero was a real important part of the story being conveyed rather than just ātime to press the porn buttonā.
is very contradictory from what I have heard from other people, most notably from @HeliosAlpha (though I wager he wouldnāt be the most objective source of opinion on this subject, heh)
Especially since in the process I got to form my own opinion on this game Iāve heard demonized so much by people who never even got to give it a chance.
I guess the biggest issue is, especially with Key works, that we have been coddled with countless amazing works over the course of the years, such that the moment they release something mediocre at worst but decent at best, it is instantly marked as āshitā. The exact same thing happened to Charlotte, and then again to Harmonia, and it seems Kud Wafter started the whole thing to begin with.
Although when you mention:
That is to say, it had some so-so drama that just got worse and worse as it went on (for way too long).
I guess thatās where it gets hit the hardest. I donāt think itās a lie to say that, for most people, their main expectation when getting into a Key work is compelling drama. With Kud Wafter apparently lacking that, I would imagine that most people would be highly disappointed when it comes to that sort of thing.
I guess the best way to describe it (based on your review) is that Kud Wafter is a decent game in the sphere of visual novels but suffers from the stigma and expectation that comes from being a Key work.
(then again it seems to me that in the sphere of visual novels, nowadays, being ādecentā is no longer good enough lol)
Fun fact 1.5% of all lines in the script contain wafuu~.
Thank you for confirming this, for scientific purposes
I guess the best way to describe it (based on your review) is that Kud Wafter is a decent game in the sphere of visual novels but suffers from the stigma and expectation that comes from being a Key work.
(then again it seems to me that in the sphere of visual novels, nowadays, being ādecentā is no longer good enough lol)
Yeah I can definitely see why some people take that point of view conceptually, though where I differ is I think what it does well it does better than most Key games (admittedly saying this off just LB!, Clannad, and Rewrite, excluding Planetarian as itās more than a bit different) since outside of a few fun events I did not really enjoy my time with the laid-back slice of life stretches in those three games (with Little Busters coincidentally enough doing the best in comparison). And the places where it fails I think are merely comparable to the weaker portions of the other games (Little Busters and Clannad side routes, Rewrite routes are completely different in tone and thematics so I wonāt try to compare them).
But yeah it definitely lacks the āwow true routeā that Key games are so renowned for.