Aokana: Four Rhythm Across the Blue Extra 2 (蒼の彼方のフォーリズム Extra 2) Review

In Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, the character Misaki Tobisawa gets called “Best Girl” by a whole lot of Western players.

Sure, everyone knows Best is a superlative, but Western otaku are all DDs — every girl they see is Best Girl. You can just read Best Girl as waifu.

Put it this way: in the Western otaku aesthetic, they lean toward girls like Misaki Tobisawa — relatively real, emotionally driven, a little fragile, and if she’s got a bit of pride buried in there too, even better.

Everyone knows Sprite, the developer of Aokana, has been dead for years. Back in the day they voluntarily walked away from the Galgame market, ditched the sequel they’d been planning, and citing “the shrinking industry market” went off to do mobile and browser games. Turns out mobile didn’t work either, so they slunk back to making Galgame… merch.

Yeah, after Sprite came back from the dead they didn’t exactly rush to make games again — they started selling merch, just like they were doing right before they went under. Maybe merch really does pay, because Sprite was having a grand old time with it. Right when players couldn’t take it anymore, Sprite finally announced their new title…

Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue Extra 2.

So after all that buildup, they made a fandisc. Of course it came bundled with plenty of merch — this shitty company clearly has selling merch down to a routine.

The game came out a while back, it’s not a short read, so let’s just talk about how it is.

First off, like the previously released Extra 1, this is a single-heroine route — a standard fandisc, telling the afterstory of the protagonist and Misaki Tobisawa. After winning the championship, Misaki falls into a kind of aimlessness. For one thing, she’s still not really interested in FC flying; she entered the tournament just to prove herself, not because she actually wants to make a living at it. On the other side, winning the championship brought enormous pressure — basically every competitor now sees her as a rival, and every match and practice session comes with hostile eyes on her.

This Misaki starts feeling uncomfortable in all sorts of ways, but she’s still an FC competitor, so she enters a few practice matches — and somehow finds herself taking heavy hits. A bunch of jobbers who were mediocre at the last tournament are suddenly giving her hard fights. She can’t tell if she’s going all out or not, she just feels tired…

After that the plot unfolds pretty conventionally: the protagonist talks her through it, Misaki figures out what she actually wants, realizes she still loves FC deep down, and even decides to go pro. Things progress romantically with the protagonist too — wedding photos, a symbolic three rounds of sex, a promise to meet at the top someday, and the game’s over.

As a fandisc, there’s nothing really wrong with the story here — just the usual inner turmoil, the sappy sweet talk with the boyfriend. But as a “hot-blooded sports” story framework, reading this game was genuinely unpleasant for me.

Unpleasant how? Because our heroine Misaki spends almost the entire time getting her ass beat.

From the start she’s facing all kinds of challenges — people keep inviting her to matches, and the results are uniformly “smiling off the court, motherfucker on it.” Everyone turns into a demon once they’re in competition mode, launching every kind of merciless assault on poor Misaki, and their reason is always the same: “You won the championship once.”

In a way this game is like the MV for Jay Chou’s “Class 3-2” back in the day — your victory easily makes you the number one target for every competitor, and you can only face challenger after challenger under hostile eyes, either beating them or getting beaten.

But the dumbest part of this game is that these “challengers” are all the near-jobber characters from the previous game. Meaning Misaki already beat the final boss in the last game — and that final boss could wipe the floor with these jobbers easily. That purple homo counts as a “mini boss” at best, and a “mini” one at that. Was it really necessary to have the heroine spend this so-called fandisc getting wrecked by suddenly-buffed jobbers?

The game’s explanation is “everyone improved after the last tournament” — but what the fuck, everyone else improved and only Misaki got worse?

Yeah yeah, I know, the writer wants to use these scenes to show how cruel competitive sports are, that anyone in the circuit is legit, that three days apart makes you see someone with new eyes. But could you not write it so goddamn frustrating? So Misaki has to bust out her ultimate just to clear trash mobs? Couldn’t you throw in some new boss?

Honestly I get it — Sprite couldn’t be bothered to draw new characters. No money, and old characters are ready-made and cheap.

And that “cheapness” is exactly what robs this fandisc — with zero new characters — of the catharsis the original had. You watch your beloved Best Girl get provoked by “jobbers” over and over, mocked and sneered at, barely saving face by a sliver. That’s nothing like the “backs against the wall, then break through” feeling of the original. Maybe the writer wanted to amplify Misaki’s inner conflict, but this clearly goes too far. This is a fandisc — we’re here to see our beloved Best Girl, not to watch your own Best Girl get humiliated. Nobody’s into that except the pathetic black-shark virgin otaku too scared to lose his virginity at a soapland in Japan.

And the romance writing isn’t anything to write home about either. Only three HCGs, and the romance is just crudely hitting a church for a wedding CG. What works best is the game’s final confession and definition of Misaki:

One of a Kind

Unlike unique, unlike Only one, this phrase means especially rare, one of a kind in the world, extremely “rare” (unambiguously) — and somehow it feels romantic.

For most people who like Misaki, after all these years, being able to hear Kyoumi Asakura’s voice in new HCGs again, being able to see your Best Girl on screen again — that One of a Kind feeling gets to you easily.

Even if the story is so Boring.