While I’m waiting for the fast-forward button on our favorite mahjong manga, I’m working on my steam backlog. Currently, I’m playing a famous visual novel – the one and only – Clannad! I’m sure you’ve heard of it and its infamous ability to draw tears to your eyes.
There will be spoilers within this post, so kindly push the back button if you don’t want to be spoiled.
First stop, Miyazawa Yukine!
Have you experienced a friendly relationship that seemed to be verging into something more?
Are you alive in the early 2000’s era of PC with its Window XP operating system and AOL messenger?
Then, this game might be for you. Without spoiling anything, “Emily is Away” is about your relationship with Emily from senior year of high school to senior year of college; encapsulated by snippets of back and forth online communication throughout the years.
The game itself is very short. It only took me less than an hour to finish. It can also be downloaded for free at steam or here so the time/money commitment is low. And for completionist like me, getting every achievement on steam won’t even take you 20 minutes. (Here is a guide for that) Replayability is low though. In fact, for certain reasons that I will get into later, I think this game would be better served if you played it just ONCE.
One thing is for sure while I cannot say I enjoyed this game, its still thought provoking all the same.
SPOILERS BELOW THIS LINE
In any case, I’ve enjoyed the Saki route and thus, I’ve decided to play another one. And since the very first fork on the visual novel is Toki, I’ve decided to pursue that… (that and its helping mitigate the regular break/waiting time that occurs when the main manga reaches the captain match)
To be honest, I’m also quite curious how the maker of the VN would manage to realistically portray TokixTeru, considering TokixRyuuka is probably one of the most iron clad OTP in the show.
Enclosed in the plus signs are the videos of my playthrough. But, to avoid boring myself and those who would like to watch the videos to death, I only put the scenes in which the Toki route is different from the Saki route. So yey?