11eyes: Resona Forma Review

11eyes: Resona Forma is the fan disc for 11eyes. I actually played it a long time ago, but only went through Kuraki Misuzu’s and Tachibana Kikuri’s routes — at the time the patch was incomplete and I couldn’t read Japanese, so the rest was a wash. Picked it back up recently and found that more of it has been translated, plus I’ve got enough Japanese reading ability now to sort of fumble my way through. So here we are.

I’m genuinely attached to 11eyes. It was my first visual novel with gory blood-spraying and dimension-hopping magic battles — before that everything I played was pure romance, mostly straight-up moe stuff. And I really do think 11eyes has a lot of unique ideas in its setup and structure, the fight descriptions especially, the sheer variety of magic writing — sword styles, sorcery, the later scientific magic, hand-to-hand combat. It covers basically all of it and never really fumbles any of it.

The most interesting thing to me now is the Void Boundary chapter bundled with the Xbox version and its take on modern magic: magic chant code stored on a server, magicians connecting via phone and remotely loading curses to cast, with magical duels including big-data attribute analysis and network-layer attack and counterattack. Even now I haven’t seen a battle written with that kind of idea again.

“For friends and tomorrow” is 11eyes’ theme. For friends and tomorrow — maybe because 11eyes was popular enough that a fan disc was inevitable. The fan disc is called Resona Forma, which is Latin, or should be Resonating Form — you can read it as “resonant form” or “resonance mode,” hinting at the various resonances between the Eye of Aeon and its bearers, and also signaling that the game is an IF, Before, After structure presenting all sorts of possibilities.

The game is split into several chapters. Beyond each character’s After chapter, the important ones are the witch Lieselotte’s IF chapter and the Before chapter about the apostles hunting the witch Lieselotte.

Per 11eyes’ setting, Lieselotte was originally a pure, nun-like existence, but her town was overrun during the Northern Crusades. She was tortured in the flames of war, gang-raped, humiliated, and finally an old male sorcerer shoved a jade stone into her nether regions to fuse with her body, granting her enormous power. She became an immortal, unaging witch — Lieselotte — and began her revenge on the world. Later she met the Eye of Aeon bearer Verard and fell in love with him. After Verard died, Lieselotte, with nothing left to live for, wanted only to die, but as a witch she was immortal and her body would always revive, so she started doing every evil thing imaginable, eventually praying for the world’s destruction. In 11eyes proper, the witch finally gets run through by the protagonist, a later bearer of the Eye of Aeon — but that’s another story.

So in this If chapter, the If is that before Verard falls in battle, he uses the Eye of Aeon’s power to travel back to before Lieselotte’s castle town is overrun, and with his own ability, single-handedly drives off the Crusader assault and keeps Lieselotte safe.

“Don’t hate this world.” Meeting the still-young Lieselotte, Verard leaves those words behind, and then the Eye of Aeon’s time-travel power fades and Verard vanishes.

Lieselotte, who fell for Verard at first sight, probably never saw him again — never had the chance to meet the man he’d become years later. She became a pure nun, never became a witch, and passed down to generations of children the legend of the warrior who protected the town: Verard, the one who came from another time.

Broadly speaking, if you know Lieselotte’s past from the main game, this story hits hard. The original tragedy averted — it still leaves you sighing. Worth noting this story was probably written by the scenario writer behind Shoujo Shin’iki — why do I say that? Because it’s full of flexing, and it’s still flexing all over the place without explaining anything.

The other Before chapter focuses on the witch-hunting process. There’s honestly not that much to say about the plot; the real point is fleshing out Kuraki Misao. All the magicians get killed by the witch, and only Kuraki Misao, in her beloved’s final blow, completes the seal on the witch — sacrificing herself to watch over the witch for all eternity. Which is why in the main 11eyes, the dark-elf-ified Kuraki Misao has that whole “you don’t understand anything” bitter, haunted attitude.

Also worth mentioning is Nono Shiori’s After route — though calling it After is a bit off; it’s really another story told from Nono Shiori’s perspective, filling in gaps in the main story. And finally, even in a fan disc there’s a new character: Kenji’s little sister!

And the sister’s CV is Harada Hitomi!

But! There’s no route for her, so you can’t pursue her~ Meaning even with all that, this newly added character is basically useless, and she drags you through a mountain of the most obnoxious katakana hell.

All in all, 11eyes: Resona Forma is a reasonably sincere fan disc, and for a fan like me who loves the main game, it’s satisfying enough.

So why am I playing this now, you ask?

Because I saw this…………

Yeah, I’ll admit Mayoi no Futari has a story that’s a bit whatever, but it’s not bad enough to be a landmine — at most it’s just drawn way too horny. Still, if they’ve gone this far, I figure Lass is probably about to kick the bucket.