Kurugaya’s route is my least favorite one in LB. And I’m not even sure why. A couple of reasons come to mind, for example, that I don’t like sad endings or that I have neither liked Kurugaya as a heroine (though I liked her as a character) nor could I relate to her emotionally. But I’ll try to dig a bit deeper.
But first, the things I did like.
I liked how the route was not following the standard procedure of a girl being troubled and Riki becoming her knight in shining armor. Same goes for the fact that it was Riki who displayed and voiced his love first and kept fighting for the establishment of a romantic relationship. There’s also Love-Love hunters and all this stuff with the original Little Busters. Rin not trying and not being helpful, the boys trying but not being helpful, either. And I can relate to @Kanon in that the scenes with the old gang felt more entertaining than those with just Kurugaya.
I also find the idea of rebelling against the inevitable and fighting for a lost cause, the way it was presented in this route, quite charming. “Facing forward”. I like the ideal of fighting for your love despite knowing you cannot succeed. Normally, the reason would be society, or something tragic like a deadly sickness. But in this route, the enemy was the world itself. And I personally think this was to the route’s detriment. My impression after first reading this route was that it’s about a girl who was not allowed to live out her love. It felt like the author had deliberately… forbidden her from getting a happy ending. Like he wanted the lovers to struggle against some kind of unfairness without bothering to show its source. The ending was sad, but the route itself didn’t provide a reason for why it had to happen, thus my dissatisfaction.
This time, in my second readthrough, I knew all about the “why” and the route wasn’t nearly as confusing. But I still couldn’t relate emotionally. Maybe it was something about the way Kurugaya had “faced” the problem? She didn’t tell Riki anything about the looping and by the time he found out, she was already hurting him by forgetting things that mattered to him and the impossibility of her desire was already becoming clear. Also, what was her reaction when Riki did find out? She told him, and not for the first time, to forget about her who was supposedly unable to reciprocate his feelings. Quietly, and with a portion of self-loathing. Maybe I just wanted her to burst out in tears loudly and cling to him. Being more vocal about her emotions. But to be fair, that wouldn’t be like her.
I generally feel like in this route, both Riki and Kurugaya tend to not communicate problems to each-other. Riki, too, refused to tell Kurugaya about the bullying. While they do fight for their feelings, they do so… quietly, for a lack of a more fitting word. I’m more used to the way Key normally does things, by breaking open one’s chest like a wrecking ball and seizing one’s heart.
