2d – Pinkie's Paradise

Kawaii Mini Blimp takes down Mean Trains 20x it’s size! Steel Empire Review

16-Geared Greetings for a 16-bit Game! My dear Island guests for SteamPunk month we are playing a few interesting Steampunk games. I am still working my way through Dishonored, as I am not very good at sneaking games! I lack the patience and can’t exactly tell how not to be spotted. I am MUCH better at Retro games and I fairly quickly adapt to old timey side scrolling shooters. So when I found a Steampunk one I was pretty happy! After I played this game I still was pretty happy! Though I may have punched my table in anger as well.

One Blimp to Rule them all!

Steel Empire came out early 1992 for Sega Genesis and has since seen several re-releases such as for Gameboy Advanced, Nintendo 3DS and even Steam. Created by Hot.B which at the time allegedly was a one man studio, and published by Flying Edge in the west, this game is a quite overlooked gem that still has a pretty loyal fanbase. Steel Empire was published in Europe under the name Empire of Steel which from what I have seen has also a few minor colour variations when it comes to enemies. Though that might be my imagination! This review is based on my own playthrough of Empire of Steel as well as a Let’s play of the American version of the game. I did this to get some insight in how to play this game, as I wanted to see as much content of the game as possible without having to study patterns for days on end.

In this game you play a talented but nameless pilot of the Silverhead Empire in the age of 18XX which might tell a story about an alternate course of events… OR is set more than 1800 years in the future where all resources have depleted. Sources are contradicting each other on that. The world is fully dependent on the power of steam.. except for your Silverhead Empire which even has the power of coldfusion. However you live an isolated life (Wakanda Forever) in the antarctic. The rest of the world is dominated by the evil Sauron (yes.. that’s his official name) who has vast armies as he marches on the Silverhead army to obtain their ultimate weapon, the Imamio Thunder.. also known as “The Lightning Bomb”. If Sauron gets his hand on this weapon he will surely dominate the world.. so you can board a tiny plane or a tiny blimp to stop him! But it will take you seven stages to do so. Now I must admit Sauron is the Japanese name of the guy.. because it kind of brought associations with them.. but let’s be honest.. I rather say I took lord Sauron down with a Blimp.. wouldn’t you?! Plus calling him Styron in Europe and the USA is like having two Richards in the group.. so you call one of them Dick.. It’s still short for Richard.

Red Hot Action

This game, for the most part, plays like a horizontal space shooter like Gradius, Pariodius and of course Chou Aniki (Something Something) plus like one third of the games on Action 52. It does follow some classical genre tropes like harsh difficulty, near bullet hell gameplay and upgrading your weapons and obtaining limited screen clearing attacks. If you played Gradius or R-Type you know what to expect here! Tiny ships about your size that blow up in a single hit on your way to a boss.. and then a boss that is like 1000x times your size and shoots from every of its many openings. With spaceships this always kind of made sense to me.. you know.. there are always several classes of ships .. gradius is Just a story about an X-wing taking down dreadnoughts. With the Steel Empire however.. everything is steampunk flavoured so we get a Blimp that is ..”regular sprite sized” fighting a train.. that doesn’t even fit in the screen. Not even half! So this is a train that is roughly three times high as a blimp.. and 40 x as long.. if not more! That is one big train! But I kind of imagine it is just one really tiny blimp! Which is just a guy sitting in it.. and that’s all the space he has! Held afloat by some hydrogen just!. I always chuckle imagining that.

Where this game differs a bit from its peers is that you can shoot to the front and back. While Silver Surfer on NES also has this function for example this game uses the Sega’s three button system to make it feel a lot more natural and a lot more effective. We have one button to shoot forward, one to shoot backwards and one to release a screen clearing Lighting Bomb should we have them. The arrows control which direction you go.. and that is all she wrote gameplay wise.. .or is it?! Steel Empire, like most other games, relies on killing enemies to drop weapon upgrades. However in this game it’s not just weapon upgrades. It’s an experience! By gathering 3 experience tokens your ship levels up, which might make weapons more powerful, it might make it a bit faster or it might give it more health. What is even cooler.. dying does not affect our weapon level (as long as you don’t play it on the GBA and for the love of all that is sacred .. do NOT play this on GBA). So as long as you have lives left.. you may be better equipped to fight the boss next time.. because you can level up. Each of the seven stages is divided in two sections. At the end of section A you always fight a midboss and at the end of section B you fight the final boss of that stage.

Empire of Steel as I should call it has a fairly strong narrative. EAch is delivered through a flickering cutscene that looks as if you are watching one of those old war time movies. Maybe even before.. The missions you get are quite diverse and fun, with some stages more dependent on your fighting skills while others rely more on your flying skills. As a rule use the blimp for the odd numbered stages which are more combat focussed and the plane for the even numbered stages. This isn’t a hardset rule and you can play this game as you like.. but it seems to work out the best. For example Stage 1 is a straight up clone of regular R-Type gameplay.. where you face a train at the end, while stage 2 is flying through a collapsing cave at high speeds. Stage 3 has you assault an enemy base.. while in Stage 4 you take on a flying fortress.. that means you have to maneuver in a lot of tight corners. Stage 7 feels more like a double Boss Rush in space.. that’s right! In this game you do go into space.. and you can be a BLIMP in space! Just for that alone this game is worth playing! The action is fun and the patterns are challenging as so cheers to Hot.B

Red Hot Air

Unfortunately this game also falls in a LOT of pitfalls of the genre, which.. if you like this type of games may or may not be a problem to you. It happens in almost every single game in the genre.. so I can’t really blame it for doing the same.. but some things are quite annoying. The most obvious would be the bosses. While you face seven stages you expect to fight seven bosses.. and seven minibosses.. but in reality you face either more or less depending on how you look at this. In stage one you fight a train as a final boss, and on stage 5 your fight another train.. sprite swapped.. with only slightly different attack patterns.. when I say slightly different attack patterns I mean it shouts either bigger pellets or faster .. or both.. In stage three and six or you fight the same boss as well.. though one time the ship is green the other time it’s red! To make it more annoying.. the second time you face it.. you don’t have to kill it once but you have to kill it twice.. and as such the game really feels padded out for gameplay time in places.. which isn’t needed because this game is kind of too long as it is. I would have preferred five stages with more diverse bosses. The minibosses also get repeated so in the end we only effectively fight 6 ish enemies in a grant total of 14 fights.

However like I said that is super common, what is less common is the way boss fights work, which makes them both unique .. but also a bit weak at times. Though this mostly applies to sub bosses. They work by having several hitboxes and you need to destroy them all. Which is fine.. it really makes utilizing the shooting back and forth function more viable and fun. The issue however is that these bosses most of the time don’t fit the screen and you are moved from front to back at regular intervals. Your aircraft can not move the edge of the screen that happens based on time… so say you are fighting a battlecruiser and have destroyed everything in the front.. you can only start moving to the back when the screen wants you too.. and if you don’t go fast enough from there it will send you back to the front again where you might not have anything left to destroy.. it basically just lowers your guard and allows the game to sneak in a few cheap hits by killing your attention. One enemy is super frustrating because he can only be hit by your secondary weapon as you can never shoot straight down or up..so some fights can get a bit tedious.

This doesn’t really ruin the space shooty fun.. but does have a chance to ruin your fun is the continue system. You get relatively few continues and will never EVER be able to make it to the end in a single playthrough. Using all your continues gives you a game over and sends you back to the beginning. Classic arcade rules and another way to pad out time. There is however a level select code.. which unfortunately is useless. If you need to start at stage 5, 6 or 7 again using level select codes brings your weapon power back to level 1 .. with that amount of health and fire power there is no way to beat the game.. so the cheat code is pretty useless.. unless you also cheat in weapon upgrades.. and that requires a second genesis controller..which you won’t always have laying about playing single player games. So cheating to skip levels.. doesn’t do anything. This is kind of annoying considering that some strategies you might not discover on your first playthrough because the game can change its own rules. For example in the final battle there are asteroids on the battlefield which just exist to hinder you.. the boss can shoot right through them.. however in his final phase he gets a huge powered solar sail and fire’s screen filling fire eye at you.. wait how ISN”T this sauron? The only way to stay safe is to hide behind the asteroids.. which goes against all previous rules so you will never guess it first try and will gameover here.

Solid as Steel

Like I said most of these things are gripes that come with the entire genre so I don’t think it is completely fair for me to judge the game on those.. it’s just elements of why I like vertical space shooters a bit more.. They tend to be a tad more straightforward. Stage 6 of this game however is super frustrating. You decent underground dodging sky forts down in a small way. you have to blow up bridges fast enough or know how a fort looks .. to dodge it properly.. thuus you need to have played it before.. When I game overed in this stage I nearly quit out of anger.. and I punched my table.. yet after taking a few breaths I realised I was having fun and I wanted to try again. That is where this game really shines. It is not fair, it is not easy and it is designed to make you at least fail one.. perhaps even twice. Yet that is how these things work.. it’s like a crane game where you push that Plushies closer and closer to the edge.. you can’t stop investing in it.

So now that I decided not to weigh it’s genre errors against it .. is there anything left to critique ? Yes there is! The music is incredibly inconsistent! Some tracks are absolute zingers and remind me of the classic Sega tracks while others are really bad and lack that Sega.. Grayish sound. With Gray sound I mean that metally.. industrial sound that Sega has compared to Nintendo.. if Nintendo makes a track for say .. F-Zero it would sound Blue.. Red and Potentially Gold.. If Sega would do it it would be Brown/Copper, Silver/Grey and Navy. That’s how it is supposed to be.. but here.. we get way to tranquil music.. almost pastel colour like at times which do not fit this game at all. There are a few very good tracks in the game that sound Sega.. but in a Steampunk game it should have been more.

Weirdly one of the biggest issues the game has.. to me kind of became a strength. This game has a lot of lag/slowdown when a lot of stuff is being shot at you. But because of the difficulty I welcomed it.. it allowed me to skillfully dodge these shots as the controller reacts perfectly in unison with the lag.. as it almost was a form of Bullet time. It wasn’t but trough this lag I could learn so many patterns. There is a lot of stuff happening on screen.. but in a way we get at least a bit of time to analyse what is happening here!. The gameplay is simple enough and the sea of bullets is dense enough to look impressive but never as big to cause dispair.. due to the slowdown I kind of ended up feeling like a major badass perfectly steering trough.. even when the game did not lag as much those earlier moments training with it made me just so much better. This is finally a horizontal shooter I can beat, and it is one with a unique setting and nice mission structure too.

The game has a lot of issues.. but it is also a game that keeps being fun despite of its issues and that is what makes a good game, at least in the retro department. Is it a classic? No.. but if you want a Steampunk game for an evening you can do a lot worse than this! It’s charming to be a Zeppelin that takes down huge trains! It has a unique and fun presentation, and the blimp is just cute! Especially in the later stages when everything is bigger than you.. but you have leveled up so much that you can decimate the screen easily. It’s super weird yet it’s also super iconic and this retro game walks a good line between unique enough and classic enough to be fun in this day and age! A very solid game..maybe not the way Scott calls his games solid.. but 7 out of 10 solid!

It’s Impossible! … Not To Have Fun! Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair Review

Konichi-what a satisfying feeling, to treat yourself to a game for your birthday and have it be as good as The Impossible Lair is to me! For those who read my rambling and store them in their head a bit , it might not come as a surprise but one of my favourite Platforming franchises of all times was Donkey Kong Country. I adored those games. So the Sequel to the already amazing Yooka Laylee came out.. and it would mimic the classic Donkey Kong Country games rather than the Banjo Kazooie franchise. I was more than hyped to play this. I figured content would be a bit lacking though so I bided my time to find a good sale.. I sure as heck got my money’s worth now!

Don’t Worry BEE Happy

The Impossible Lair is the second Yooka Laylee game by Playtonics Games, published by team 17. It enjoys moderate success on Meta-Critic with about a 7.7 user score consistent out of 78 positive reviews, 17 negative ones and 9 mixed ones. I’d say the grade is slightly low.. but that is because this game comes with a bit of a warning and unique concept. The game has a self imposed style difficulty level, with a rather steep drop in the deep at the end. It is a game without difficulty settings but instead, you as the player are more or less free to determine your own difficulty level. This however.. does not apply for the final level.. which is a very harsh stage. One life.. and if you lose.. you get booted out of the level.. and since it’s a 30 minute level… it isn’t easy! Lots of people do not like this system and think the last level is unfair.. but I honestly don’t believe it is. It’s a very natural evolution of the old school difficulty system that blends in perfectly with the ban on traditional stock of lives. Most people play this game the wrong way I think.. and I might have found the perfect way to do it!

The entire concept of this game is that the final stage of the game is also the very first stage of the game. A small story tells you how Capital B, the franchise enemy uses a device called the Hivemind to control all the bees in the world. This leads the queen of the Stingdom to be overpowered and her precious shield gets stolen. Yooka and Laylee but in the fight and get to play the Impossible Lair stage from the beginning. In theory.. you can beat this game in about half an hour.. if you are a god tier gamer.. there even is an achievement tied to it.. YET people think.. because there is an achievement for it.. it should be doable.. but this game takes a different approach.. it shows you through the achievement it is near impossible to do this. Like.. offering a money fee to people who can hack into your new security system.. it’s not like you want to hand out that price.. you are confident that your thing is impossible to crack!

This rubs a lot of people the wrong way with this game.. but I , who was born without the ability to give any fudges about prestige like things such as achievements or victories over others.. and is just here for the fun, love this idea. Based on what type of gamer you are you can immediately see if pursuing “platinum” is something you can do.. and I can not! .. But I am getting a bit of track here! Once you die in the first stage you get booted out and the overworld opens up.. here you can travel to twenty five-ish chapters by exploring the overworld and exploring the stages. Using T.W.IT. Coins you find in stages and beating special stages you unlock more and more areas in the overworld and learn more about the game. Inside the stages you try to make it to the end and free.. one of the 48 beettalion bees. Why? because they become your hit points for tackling that final stage! Man I love that concept!

To BEEt or not to BEEt that is the question

_{Yes I know I spelled that wrong}

Here is how most people tackle this game.. okay so I need to free all the bees.. and then go tackle the final stage. Most negative comments I’ve seen are of people trying to rush things. Just beat all the stages and gather the bare minimum of T.W.IT. Coins to go through the final stage without any disadvantages or advantages.. This however is the WRONG way to go about that. The game technically is fairly hard.. though with infinite lives all stages are beatable.. so many people delude themselves that just by beating the game you are good enough for that final stage.. then they plunge into a half hour gauntlet of grueling challenges completely unprepared for what is to come. Most negative reviews say “I was having a lot of fun with this game, then I reached the final stage and could not beat it.. what a fricked up game 0 out of 10… Well first of all if you have 90% fun… just don’t like the last stage.. it is NOT a 0 out of 10 game. This game makes it fairly clear it’s not about beating it. In fact I would have been perfectly content with getting across the finish and just enjoy playing in some very fun stages. See how far you get!

Yet I think if these people played the game the way I play it.. they would have had a lot more fun! You see.. beating an area , instead of going to the next one first I take a crack at the Impossible Lair first.. to see how far my current Beetalion will get me! Usually that isn’t very far.. because the final stage REALLY is hard.. but this means I slowly make my way through sections of the stage.. getting a feel for the layout of the place. If I get tripped up by a section with a lot of buzzsaws .. I then will make sure that I 100% complete a stage (as in find all T.W.I.T. Coins) as a practice for that section. I then move on to get the next batch of bees and repeat this process. Yes I failed a few times in the last stage.. but this way I am not going in blind and in the end have to do a 30 minute stage blind. I notice I am keeping my bees with me for longer as I go as well. But here is the truth.. YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE… just like retro games gave you a game over resetting all progress.. this game mimics that by just yeeting you out the final stage without checkpoints. You get good by losing.. not by beating stages. That’s how these games always worked.. Now there is just a lot of stuff built in to have fun with.. without beating the final stage.

BEE a Hunter

The story in this game is practically non-existent , an evil guy causes trouble. .you have to travel to his castle to beat his ass… and that is exactly why I love this game so much. Never did I feel compelled that I needed to see the ending, it’s just a part of the skeleton that can help you have fun.. but even if you miss a single bone somewhere.. you can probably still have fun! Finishing this game is a cherry on top of a sundae.. or for me.. a chocolate pudding as I don’t like Ice Cream. It’s not the ULTIMATE goal needed to enjoy the game. There is so much to do that can give you satisfaction.. beat all the 48 regular stages! Find all the tonics in the overworld.. solve all the pagie challenges. Open all the Paywalls (These are the names for checkpoints you open with the T.W.I.T. coin resource). There is cute dialogue from familiar and unfamiliar NPC the overworld is colourful and creative and allows you to use all your platforming skills in a 3d setting.. almost in a zelda-esque way. There is so much to do! This is a 12-ish hour platform game and that is a lot for the genre!

Tonics make your life easier or harder.. you find them hidden in the overworld, once found you unlock them with feathers, you can carry three at the same time and these provide modifiers to the game world, some make your life easier.. for example I used the “do not lose T.W.I.T. coins after death” one.. This one makes sure I keep my coins even if I do not bring them to a checkpoint in time! This means I can leap to my death to obtain some of these.. saving me a lot of frustration. This does mean however that the feathers I collect at the end of the stage get reduced.. to compensate for that I use a tonic that sticks googly eyes on the enemy making them look more cute.. but gives them two hit points instead of one! Which increases my feather count. Then I use a tonic that makes Laylee the bat.. more tranquil..
In this game you start with two hitpoints. In phase one you have Laylee riding on Yooka but once you take a hit she begins to panic and flap about.. if you can collect her before you take another hit or you are fine you regenerate that hitpoint.. if she flies away.. your can not be hit anymore or suffer your demise. So having her more stable allowed me to try some zanier stunts. There are a lot of fun modifiers, such as inverted controls for more feathers, more invisibility frames for less feathers and lots and lots of visual modifiers for no other reason than just to have fun!

“But wait A minute Pinkie.. did you not just say there were 48 bees to collect.. but only 25 chapters.. how does that work”… well my sharp eyed friend.. or people pretending to be clever to the insight I just provided… Most stages have two varients. You can unlock a second mode by interaction with the overworld. For example a book on a pond might indicate a stage featuring lots of water elements but by eating an ice fruit and having Yooka spit it at the stage portal.. that same stage is suddenly frozen solid.. which completely alters the stage layout and path. These alternate stages are very fun and it’s always a surprise to see what happens. There is a stage where the book gets covered in sticky honey suddenly turning a horizontal stage into a vertical stage. There is also a certain book you can read the wrong way.. suddenly you have to backtrack this level.. chased by deadly lasers.. but since there is so little time.. you more or less travel atop of the first stage. Think of these as the reversed levels of Yoshi’s crafted world.. but done a lot better. It’s not just beating the stage that is a challenge.. it’s also finding a way to unlock the counterpart in the overworld that is a delight.

Finally there are the Pagie challenges, the collectable/Jiggy variant from the first game is back in this game.. not to be collected by you but to use that power you unlocked before in your favour.. but you have to prove your worth to them. The challenge is simple .. beat all the enemies in a single screen without dying and the pagies will reshape the overworld. Allowing you to find more tonics, unlock more alternate stages, get more hit points for the final stage.. or even just find hint signs that provide you with clues where to find a particular type of treasure. Most of the time you can choose what you want to focus on to make progress. You will need to collect some coins in the stages to get past paywalls in the next areas but I never had too much trouble getting enough of those things without straining myself or feeling I was forced to do this. Even if i did .. feel like “I really should get extra coins in this stage” I either made it training for the final stage OR I decided to reward myself with a vanity tonic and would use my hunt for the coins to reward myself with vanity! It’s super fun and motivating that way.. everything just reinforces each other.

This might STING a bit

Is this a perfect game? No!… Yet in sale I only payed like 10 euro for it and King Coconut and the Shy Coconut helped the blog get some funds for reviewing projects like those..as well as the Buddy Coconut.. so I was super content. I do have a hand full of grips with the game though. First of all I find the music slightly forgettable.. I love the overworld team and for good reason. It’s Grant Kirkhope. It is fantastic. He made music for both the original and for Banjo Kazooie and it has that distinct feel. He doesn’t do stuff for the 2d stages and that is okay.. because his style fits the overworld more.. that feels a bit Banjo-esque.. The 2d stages feel like Donkey Kong.. and two people where put in charge of this Matt Griffin, who does a very good job at capturing that DK spirit but making it feel original and David Wise.. who makes every stage he designs the soundtrack off sound like that Royalty Free Ukulele music that is everywhere on YouTube… Can you guess which one is the one I consider a downside?! A few stages in and you can really tell who is who and that kind of irked me a bit. On the one hand we hear how good the music can be.. on the other hand we see what I as an anime fan would call.. musical filler episodes. Blegh! Luckily half of the music is still good!

The second issue I have with the game is it’s level design.. well that is the wrong worth.. the level “assets” and esthetics. While it is nice that zones are themed we do not get that many themes and it all has this really familiar aspect. The buildings in the desert world look different from the ones in the forest world.. but it feels more like a skin change than an actual change in the assets.. The best way to describe this is.. that everything in the background feels a bit “Little Big Planet ” You know that game with sackboy! There are loads of assets to make your creation look unique but it is all tied to a very similar style. So a tree house looks the same like a cactus house.. the cactus house just has .. hacienda style wallpaper. It makes the stages a little less exciting than the original game or it’s big inspiration Donkey Kong. There we have a volcano world, a theme park world.. a swamp world (Okay that is the second Donkey Kong but it’s just so good) and here.. you’d get.. a Roller Coaster going to the same forest assets.. some hue shifted wood textures to make it look a bit darker.. to signify we are in the swamp.. maybe there is a pool of water.. but all in all I always kind of keep expecting sackboy to come stumbling through. The stage challenges and level design as in.. how to get from A to B is fantastic though. The set dressing is a bit stock.

The final gripe I have with this game is the tiniest one. There is not enough interaction with NPC’s .. mostly from Laylee.. I loved how bold she was in the last game. While I do get that there is less dialogue in a 2d platform game, plenty of elements in the overworld and sometimes even in the stages talk to you through a small text balloon. It would have been funny to give Laylee a bit more flavour and would make everything pop. If a Pumpkin tell “hey you are not support to be here” .. it would be fun to say Laylee tell it to shut up or she will eat squash tonight..or even give her some 4th wall breaking humor.. that once you encounter the living fans in the overworld Laylee would comment, they are really running out of ideas. Simple stuff like that could help the game pack that Yooka Laylee flavour a bit more. THe rest is there.. but the two main characters don’t shine as brightly as I would.

BEE Plus

Time for me to score this game! It is tricky to do this for everyone else so do take note that this is just for me personally. I do think fun, challenge level and time needed are all self imposed. What do you define as beating the game, what do you think is fun to do within the confines of this game?! I really like this.. it has that shovel knight.. feeling of picking your difficulty, there are plenty of ways to make it easy.. there are plenty of ways to make it hard. Neither should be a gripe as you can choose not to use it. I will admit that the plunge into the final stage is a bit too steep and I would not call the final stage a great success. It might have been better if you had a few sub tiers and chose to continue at the last checkpoint with the amount of bees you had left when you got there -1 for each try or go back to the beginning if you lost too many bees in that segment. Had they done that I would have been perfectly content with this game despite it’s minor flas like generic music from Mister Wise.. and a lack of unique polish here and there. Controls are tight..graphics are fine and in sale it is super affordable.

Now I do have to conclude that not everything in the game is as fun as it can be. Honestly if I have to give advice to people who liked the Donkey Kong Country games.. I’d say the best way to play this game is to pick it up on sale.. play the stages until you had your fill.. try the impossible lair and if you did not reach the 50-70% marker (depending on how many of the bees you got) and just end it right there! Quit while you had fun, this is a game to have fun with not one I’d say you really need to beat. It’s a neat achievement to check off your list but there is no big epic ending you would need to do it for. It’s the classical video game ending with a story wrap up.. in the vein of those classics.

There is no deep lore you will miss. No secrets that will be needed to play the third game if there ever will be one.. which I would hope mixes the two playstyles. This is a game to have fun with.. and the game knows it!You can literally put glittery effects when you defeat an enemy, or put googly eyes on an enemy to make them cuter.. sometimes those eyes are on their bumholes! Teehee! Cinematic filters, Dramatic Sepia.. tonics that make you have to play this game like a bat.. Everything screams that this is just a game to have fun with and that’s what I did ! Strawberries all around!

Pinkie in Search of a Waifu (Part 3) Aoi Hana

It’s almost Valentine’s day and by the looks of it , I am going to be all by myself. To prevent such an incident from happening next year , on this blog we have started the quest to find me a Waifu! In this episode we will look at the third of Fred’s four suggestions. After which I will need six more to start our Bachelorette series. Where we pit these girls against each other to earn the roses and find out who will be my waifu! So keep the suggestions coming. Today we look at the anime Aoi Hana!
Who will get to live with me in my Bachelorette mansion?!

Warning:
This article contains spoilers for the entire series of Aoi Hana. That being said these spoilers are all fairly obvious outcomes of their respective story. As far as I am concerned none of these spoilers ruin the show due to the way the show tells its own story and how the inevitable the outcome of the show feels.

Sweet Blue Flower

What is it with Yuri series and the colour blue? Is blue some sort of symbol colour for gay girls that I am unaware about. I don’t think it’s much of a thing in the Netherlands and my Italian friend didn’t know about it either! Italians love blue so they should know! I really wonder though! Yet I can not let that distract me. Aoi Hana is a show about two childhood friends Akira and Fumi who reunited with each other once they start commuting to their new schools. Both join their respective schools drama club and their paths begin to cross more and more. Fumi is a lesbian woman and Akira is mostly oblivious to love. We see them form relationships with others from friendly ones to romantic once as we explore what is is truly important in any relationship. This all is set on the background of their drama clubs performing the play Wuthering Heights which in its core is about a toxic relationship. So this is one of those heavy analogies shows!

***(I really hate this shwo’s intro.. it has very little to do with the actual show)***

The contenders for the Waifu list are limited to the main characters this time, as all four main characters show at the very least a hint of being into women. Most secondary girls or women are rarely given enough depth to see if they are into girls though after watching the entire 11 episode series I can fairly certainly say we got no other contenders. Having said that, my attention has slipped throughout the course of this show a few times so I might have missed a subtlety.

The four main characters are Manjoume Fumi a first year who is socially a bit awkward. She is emotionally very frail and cries a lot and the most fully convinced lesbian in the series. Her best friend Okudaira Akira is about her counterpart. She is bubbly , tiny energetic and a super positive entity that smiles with everything even her own failures… she is referred to Achan by Fumi. Their childhood tradition. Sugimoto Yasuko is the bisexual popular girl that every girl wants to be with (even the straight ones) the cool kid. She plays basketball and is tall and butch and thusly gets the male lead role in the school play. She has her heart set on Fumi..but keeps a secret in her heart as well. Finally we have Ikumi Kyouko who is Akira’s classmate and she is desperately and very one sidedly in love with Yasuko. She is an artist who joined the drama club to be close to Sugimoto Senpai but gets more than she bargained for when she finds out her new friend’s best friend is in a relationship with the woman she loves.

Triangles Everywhere

I will admit I struggled with this anime a bit. It is not necessarily a bad show though. I really loved the story it had to tell. What I like less is the way it is set up. Take for example the main love story that is central in these 11 episodes. Yasuko and Fumi , it is a somewhat toxic relationship where Yasuko is very much depicted as a selfish person. This is shown throughout not one but two triangle relations around the talentful basketball player. First of all there is Kyouko who loves her while she is with Fumi. This sours the relation between Fumi and Kyoko..to an extend. They aren’t mean to another but very tense still. It would have been an interesting dynamic if Sugimoto would not have one sidedly loved her male teacher, kinda using Fumi as a rebound. Throughout the show we also see Fumi notice her relation is not going that well and be more drawn to Akira…who in turn kinda, but not really, shows interest in Kyouko.Who is also desired by her fiancé in name only Kou. It all feels very convoluted for an 11 episode manga and in the end that does form a bit of an issue.

It doesn’t really help that the instigator of everyone’s misery, Sugimoto Yasuko is a fairly horrible person. She is super petty, often has temper tantrums, she is snobbish and selfish and a very VERY poor loser. Near the middle of the show the stage group performs Wuthering Heights, which is about the toxic love between Heathcliff and Catherine and the audience speaks their minds on how terrible Catherine is, she is an analogy for Sugimoto herself. Which brings me to another little gripe I had with this series. This analogy feels a bit hammered in. Wuthering Heights is a fairly well known novel by Emily Bronté and one would figure people who see the play either know the story or go there to support their family.

Instead we see the crowd analyse the story so the anime and manga can make analogies… and that’s not the only times stuff like that happens. For some reason this only happens to Yasuro though. Like the show really wants to hammer in how terrible this person is. By the end of the show she sees the error of her ways ..but because she doesn’t get what she wants she then decides to bail on everyone and go study abroad. While doing this we see newspaper headlines on how the girl has pushed her basketball team to great heights how they need her and now she bails for petty reasons. We see her family acknowledge how petty she is and she mistreat Kyouko to a ridiculous extend. Even when the latter is trying to get closure she is shown to ignore the message that would give the other girl some closure finally. We get it! Sugimoto Yasuko is bad! She will not be my Waifu Pick.

Friendship is love too!

Because of how clearly toxic this relationship between Fumi and Yasuko is from the get go we are all waiting for her to end up with Kyouko or her Achan and the show is at it’s best when the old love is out of the picture. Luckily enough that is plenty of time still. The show really shines when it’s just Achan and Fumi.. or even the little summer camp with all their friends but Yasuko was adorable. Fumi begins to develop feelings for Akira who still has this weird non flirty but very connected kind of way. I really liked those feelings because they actually felt genuine. While Fumi clearly loved Yasuko the doom flag was raised from episode 2 so on a subconscious level I never really bought it.

All the other girls are connected through friendship.. a friendship that deepens over the course of the series and the show does a really fine job of depicting how friendships can mean so much more than just to find your significant other. Fumi has friends, Sugimoto has not, one gets a fairly happy end, the other is miserable. Romance shows tend to .. hype up that significant other over anything in the whole wide world where nothing else matters anymore.. this show keeps its feet firm on the ground.

I might even go as far as to say this isn’t actually a romance show. It’s not about love.. in the romantic way.. it’s about unrequited love and false love more so than real one. It’s about how romantic love can be such a strong desire that sometimes we are just chasing ghosts. Kyouko is one of the strongest examples. Not only is she desperately in love, with sugimoto senpai, she herself has a suitor who is desperately in love with her. Kou her fiancé in name only is often strung along for a ride that will only inflict pain on him. Even when he asks Akira to help him pick out a perfect give to please her, she immediately knows the gift is to perfect to be from him! They aren’t compatible which made me think that Kyouko and Akira just might be.Kyouko is being pictured as desperate though even if she tries to move on she simply can not let alone with Kou. In the end we get a girl that has her charm but also still feels kind of mean spirited and also a bit toxic so our little painter will not be moving into the Bachelorette mansion with me!

A blooming flower

That leaves us with Achan and Fumi-Chan , by far the best characters in the entire series. Some of the best characters I have seen in a fair bit and while I do think they would fit nicely together the ending of she show keeps things fairly open. Which apparently is a huuuge issue for people all across the internet. To those people I really have to ask if they watched the same show as me. There are incredibly strong implications that the two will get together, simply for being two non toxic people and Fumi realising how to cope with relationships in the end. She tells the only cure for unrequited love is moving on gracefully and to only have room in your heart for one love. While Fumi was obsessed and in love with her cousin at the end of the show she realises that wasn’t her first love at all, her first love was Achan..so she could finally let her cousin go. Now she only has one love in her heart which is Achan. Should that love go unanswered she has the tools to move on gracefully. All the flags for a successful relation fall into place at that moment. Fumi will find her happy ending no matter what. We have seen hints that Akira might swing that way as well so it may just be a matter of time.

That being said I can still use the vagueness of the ending to snatch Fumi as my Bachelorette contender. While I love Achan for her quirky behaviour the character is simply way to immature to me. I found her voice a bit annoying in all honesty even though I do like the quirkiness of it I think I would get annoyed with her fairly soon. While I am happy and cheerful minded like her, I do not have the huge amount of energy she has and would not be able to find my rest with her. She is a great and loyal friend who would be fun to hang out with Yet I would get that same energy around since she is Fumi’s best friend as well. The latter has shown she can perfectly live with Achan just being a friend.. as long as I managed to conquer Fumi myself though.

Fumi is the only person I really respect in this series, she has shown growth and has become more confident even if she is still the easily to cry loveable socially awkward girl she was at the beginning. Miss Manjoume has accepted who she is by the end of the show, something she very much struggles with in the beginning. She isn’t as afraid to tease and to have fun. She also isn’t afraid to defend herself even if it hurts others. I could not be with someone who constantly diminishes themselves just in favor of others.

It’s very annoying when something you love gets a bad review or if that restaurant you like and love to talk about gets called gross a few hours before you go eat there. If I love a person more than anything in the world and they keep devaluing themselves to below everything else.. it kind of feels like that love is being devalued as well. The person that I love more than anything in the world feels like they need to give up everything for others because they are not worth more… that would include they would give up me. I went through that once with an eternal good person.. and that just doesn’t work. You have to somewhat love yourself to be loved.

Fumi does this the best , she matters, what she wants matters. When we first see her she can barely pick anything from a menu.. or a club to join .. but in the end she asks for what she wants, she tells people her needs and lives by it and we see a much happier Fumi, who doesn’t just cry from sadness but for the first time we see her cry with happiness. Those type of tears are from a woman I could see myself being with! Those are the tears of a strong woman.

In the end I got to watch a very enjoyable show, that is slightly bogged down by the character of Sugimoto. There is just to much going on with her and things drag on to long in her romance. I hated the unnecessarily nude intro as it barely has anything to do with the show and skipped it every time. Yet there is still a quite enjoyable anime that stumbles for me around the fourth till seventh episode. Those could have been removed and put at the end to give us a stronger sense of closer for an even better show. The art style with it’s fluffy looking backgrounds took some time to get used to but grew on me as charming. All in all a good anime to put on for valentines if you do not want something overly sweet.

More Pinkie in Search of A Waifu

-Liz and the Blue Bird
-Bloom into You

Please suggest a show in the comments!