Renai Karichaimashita (Koikari) completed:

Rewrite+ is supposedly coming out on the 17th, so I finished up Renai and made room for a new visual novel to plop down just in time.  Like I expected, there was nothing good about the Tsubaki route, as the teacher isn't appealing in any way other than looks, and even there she's beat by Emi and Hasumi.  But now the visual novel is completed, which is what matters.  As I was able to read it in its entirety, I can now enter it into my visual novel hall of fame, at 15th place.  It replaces Aiyoku no Eustia, which having still not come out in full yet, doesn't really belong in my rankings to begin with.  Now everything in my rankings has been played in full, as is proper.

Now if only I could say the same about my top anime rankings, which has 7 series which haven't actually aired yet. >.<.  This is certainly a good mission for 2022 to fulfill.

I'm also nearly done with Children of the Lens, which would be nice to complete before the new year, since in my yearly summation article I said I had re-read the whole series, not just the first five novels.  That same yearly summation stated I had completed Renai Karichaimashita so it's good for things to fall in line.  I have to make sure my yearly summation is accurate by the end of the year.

The reason the Hasumi route is so much better than the others isn't Hasumi alone.  It's the fact that Hasumi is regularly interacting with Emi as well as Yuki, bringing out more facets of her character than what you see when she's only hanging out with you.  She becomes a deeper and more interesting character by casting out a larger web of connections.  I suspect Little Busters! is also much better because the girls you date are friends with each other as well as with you.  They have fuller and more varied existences.  Visual novels should be careful about that, if it turns into making love on an isolated island, essentially what happens with Tsubaki, it gets dull and repetitive quickly.

It's rare for a visual novel to be good, it's even rarer for a good visual novel to be translated into English.  It's even rarer for that translated visual novel not to have a better anime adaption that could be watched instead.  Renai Karichaimashita is one of those super-rare gems and thus a must read.  I wish this combination weren't so rare in the first place, but it is what it is.  Because there's no better alternative, Koikari can easily make my top 20.  In an ideal world it would be considered 'mediocre' and a hundred better visual novels would be translated above it, but that's not the world we live in and we might never live in it.  So you may as well give up and start reading~