Grisaia no Senritsu (グリザイアの旋律) Review

A lot of things in life come out of nowhere. You can’t sort them out by sheer personal effort — mostly it comes down to the course of history.

Plenty of things happen out of the blue. Say you’re a shut-in otaku, and suddenly someone tells you they’ve got a new match lined up for you.

All of a sudden you realize you’ve met this match before.

Then, even more suddenly, she says last time felt pretty good and she’d like to keep going.

And the surprises don’t stop. You check her social media and it’s wall-to-wall normie living — eating out and having fun basically every day. Someone with that personality could never have anything to do with you…

But that’s the thing about “suddenly”… you go in with a “say hi and leave” attitude, and it turns out she likes anime, games, and manga too… and says she’s actually always liked holing up at home.

So the conversation suddenly gets pleasant. When she marvels “wow, you know a lot,” you start thinking that if this keeps going smoothly you might actually escape the single life.

But the real sudden part is still ahead. After meeting, eating, and a few days of pleasant chatting, she turns you down.

“I think you’re great in every way, it’s just that you’re a bit of an otaku. If you weren’t, there’s no way you’d be single.”

So you’re left wondering — being an otaku is a personality trait, what’s so bad about it?

“Mainly it’s that we don’t have any common topics.”

If there are no common topics, then what were we talking about… If she were a nutjob like Princess you could say she’s mentally ill, and if she were a fat otaku like Cola you could say she’s too fat, but what the hell does “common topics” even mean…

And before you can even process it, it’s over, just like that.

Some people say sudden things always have something inevitable behind them, but judging by all the complaints from protagonists in games, the world doesn’t play fair (理不尽). I didn’t believe it before, but now I sort of do.

Sudden things don’t necessarily come from the inevitable. Inevitable things will happen for sure, and the suddenness is just the inevitable thing being flung in your face in a way you never expected — hard enough to knock you silly.

The last DLC expansion story for The Fruit of Grisaia, Grisaia no Senritsu (グリザイアの旋律), was originally announced as a download code bundled as a first-press bonus with From the Future Undying. But six months after that game opened for download, it still hadn’t been dumped online…

So when I was in despair, out of nowhere came the announcement that this game would come to Steam like the other DLC… with a 2016 release date.

2016 is about to bite the dust and there’s still no sign of it, and then while I’m bored and refreshing, the game suddenly goes on sale…

Too sudden.

Grisaia no Senritsu is probably the same kind of thing as Grisaia no Yuukan & Grisaia no Zankou — a small DLC, a side story. Though Grisaia no Zankou at least explained some stuff the main story left hanging, while Grisaia no Senritsu, like Grisaia no Yuukan, is just a plain new story with no real connection to the main plot.

The premise of Grisaia no Senritsu is spelled out clearly enough: Kazami Yuuji goes to America as an outside contractor to bodyguard a nine-year-old girl. Whether the girl herself is protected or not isn’t weighed very heavily — the commander handing out the assignment even says, “If the protection fails, we’ll just declare the mission a failure and you can come back.” Basically, if she dies, she dies, whatever.

Stubborn Yuuji takes the protection job anyway. At first the little girl finds Yuuji a nuisance, and in the end Yuuji does slip up and let the girl get taken.

If there’s anything in the game that ties into the main story, it’s what Yuuji says when facing “mission failure”:

“As the guy named Kazami Yuuji, I can accept failure. But for the codename 9029 that I inherited from my master (Kusakabe Makina), failure is not allowed.”

What comes through in this short story is Yuuji’s worship of his master (Makina), his attachment and his longing. Makina never failed a mission, and Yuuji inherited her codename — he won’t allow that codename to be stained with the disgrace of “mission failure.”

In the end the girl is rescued, and after completing a grueling mission, all Yuuji says is, “If my master were here, she’d have done it better than me.”

If you’ve played the main game you can probably feel Yuuji’s feelings for Makina. I remember Yuuji telling the little girl in the game, “My master Makina saved me, just like I saved you.”

The story’s pretty decent. If it were written longer or in more detail it could work as a standalone route for a game, but obviously Grisaia no Senritsu only counts as a DLC — you can read the whole thing in under three hours. The game has three cards to collect: “Amane’s Melody,” “Kazuki’s Melody,” and… uh… “JB’s Melody.”

This is probably the complete end of The Fruit of Grisaia — the whole trilogy plus the three DLCs. Next year there’ll be a new entry in the Grisaia series, but it’s all-ages, a brand-new game using the school setting from The Fruit of Grisaia.

Oh right, this game is all-ages too. Sure, the heroine’s VA is Akizuki Airi’s, but the character is nine years old… three years minimum, death penalty maximum, don’t forget.