I wasn’t too happy with Hanayaka Nari Waga Ichizoku Kinema Mosaic when I did my first route, but I said I would do a few more routes and give my final thoughts, so here we are as promised.

First I do have to eat a tiny bit of crow and admit that the new work requirements aren’t as onerous as I’d initially thought. You do get fired if you don’t help enough before a big event, but if you listen carefully to the dates Chitomi gives at the start of the month and time your helping so it falls exactly on the 7 days before the event (e.g. if the event is on the 9th then you must help from the 2nd to the 8th) you’ll have no problem passing that part of the evaluation. All those frustrating game overs I had were due to me not reading the instructions correctly. My bad. Apologies to the game for docking it points due to my own laziness.

Now for the routes I did in addition to Tadashi-no-baka’s:

Isami – As usual he’s a jerk to everyone except Haru but quickly falls in love with her. He tries to become head of the family so he can marry her. If I recall correctly, they foiled Genichiro’s plot to frame the next family head for killing the prime minister by getting the prime minister to sell them the company first… Wait, or was that Tadashi’s route? I don’t remember. The route in general was a lot less frustrating than Tadashi’s “I love you but I’m not going to do anything about it” route because for all his idiocy Isami is definitely a man of action. Unfortunately the twists and turns felt too similar to Isami’s route in the first game so I was kind of bored.

Masashi – Similar to Isami, except he’s a jerk to everyone including Haru. Eventually she figures out his personality (though she should really know him by now) and plays him like a harp, so there isn’t much romantic drama on Masashi’s route. The greater focus is on the battle between Genichiro and Masashi for control of the family. It’s not much of a battle though. Everything just goes as Masashi expects it to, with one slight hiccup that is quickly overcome. Just like in the first game Haru eventually gets fired and has to spend some time with Chiyoko in Kyoto until Masashi comes for her.

In the end Masashi becomes family head, Genichiro dies from cancer, and then Haru has to spend 6 years waiting for Masashi to finish first high school and then college before they can finally marry. Wait, 6 years?! Like, seriously? Thanks to the way things were in Taisho Japan she’s only 25-26 when they marry, but still 6 years?! She must really love him. I don’t know why, though. He’s still calling her insulting names even on their wedding day and she has to fake tears just to get him to admit he loves her. I’m like, you waited 6 years for this? But then again he is a billionaire… If you think of it as waiting 6 years for $1 billion instead of 6 years for a stupid guy, suddenly it doesn’t sound quite so bad…

Kisuke – I played about half of the newly-added Informant Mode to see what it was like. The gameplay is pretty much the same, except Kisuke has different stats he needs to raise like Appearance, Information and Looks. He also has bi-monthly reviews he needs to pass and optional quests he can do in town. Since those quests don’t give any useful rewards and Kisuke’s room is a mess with no decoration options, I skipped that part after a while.

More importantly, Informant Mode is just a glorified Haru x Kisuke route. Haru and Kisuke just keep running into each other all over the place and start to grow closer as they talk more and more. It’s supposed to be a more organic, natural route compared to dating the Miyanomori siblings. The problem is that Kisuke and Haru have ZERO romantic chemistry. Maybe I’ve played both games too long, because I can only see him as a big brother or a good friend. No amount of shots showing Kisuke with his robe open could change my mind, I’m afraid. Thus I dropped the Kisuke route halfway through and never found out how he got together with Haru, if at all. Sorry, Kisu-niichan.

Overall – I think I’ve given Kinema Mosaic enough of a chance. I’d say my original opinion that it’s not quite as interesting or as well-written as the original still stands. The problems were minor, but many. One that really bugged me was the character of Mamoru, who just shows up and is quickly accepted into the fold despite killing and injuring a lot of people in the previous game. It’s just so unnatural the way they keep writing him into “comical” situations with the other brothers that just don’t work if you’ve played game one. You can’t add a new character to an existing dynamic and then try to act like he was one of them all along. It just doesn’t feel right.

Another problem is the shoddy main story involving Genichiro, the Prime Minister and a fight for control of a railway company. It’s not like the story in the original didn’t have a ton of holes and “huh?” moments in it, but the game wasn’t as story-focused and the story was more closely related to the characters, so it was largely bearable. In this case some random company merger is nowhere near as personal as the story of a mysterious assassin targeting the family despite the best efforts of the writers to link it to the family struggle.

What’s worse, a lot of time is wasted on the plot with the brothers spending half their time going round and round in circles speculating about Genichiro’s intentions. It’s really boring. IMO they should have gone with a joint route for the first few months so we could get some of that early speculation out of the way. On some routes they figure things out quickly, but on other routes the same people armed with the same information take simply forever to put two and two together. It’s like the worst Scooby-Doo episode ever. And the way they solve the problem never makes much sense in the end. If the Prime Minister was that dumb and easy to blackmail, Genichiro would have done it himself long ago, wouldn’t he?

A third problem is that the characters haven’t changed enough from the first game (only natural for a fandisc, I suppose). I don’t think Idea Factory expected to make a sequel, so they basically pulled out all the stops and revealed everything about everyone’s character in the first game. As a result there isn’t much to learn about most love interests (Kisuke excepted) on their routes that you don’t already know if you’ve played game one.

That’s not to say the characters haven’t grown at all, of course. Tadashi has finally cut the apron strings and is able to relate to Sanae in a relatively normal way, for example. Haru herself has also changed significantly. She has calmed down a lot and is much less nosy and emotional now. A number of characters even comment on how sensible she has become, and the brothers don’t seem to find her as annoying now that she doesn’t poke her nose into every little affair. In my opinion she’s skirting dangerously close to Generic Otome Heroine territory now, but it does make sense that she would mature a bit after one year on the job.

There have been other developments in the game world since the first game as well. You learn what happened to Sanae and the Sumida family after Mamoru messed them up. Genichiro’s ex-wives all reach some sort of understanding and start to get along better. If you do Masashi’s route, he becomes a little more friendly with his mother (as a result of them having pretty much the same argument as they did in the original). In Isami’s Epilogue gaiden you find out that Tae is going to marry Sanji, though it’s not clear whether that’s canon or not because she doesn’t marry anyone in any other route. The question is whether those few new revelations are really enough to justify a new game and the answer is pretty much no.

Of course I wouldn’t have done 3 and a half routes if I didn’t like the game at all. It still contains a lot of the humor and light-hearted romance that made the original Hanayaka Nari Waga Ichizoku such a fun experience. If you want more of the same – which is what I thought I wanted, and I still don’t know what I was really expecting from Kinema Mosaic – then this should be good enough. If, on the other hand, you’re expecting major progress in terms of plot developments, personalities and relationships then you’re asking for too much. Despite the game’s length and abundance of content it really is just a fandisc after all. If I had to do this again, I would dial my expectations way down and wait at least 3 years before playing it, which is what I’m going to do for Tasogare Polarstar, the final game in the series.

Moving on, since Kinema Mosaic wasn’t all that satisfying, I think I’m going to play another otome game soon. Hmm, maybe Meine Liebe? We’ll see.