I spent all of yesterday playing La Corda d’Oro 3. Getting used to the system, getting used to the guys, trying to pick which ones are the least crazy out of the bunch. I was really into it last night, even slept at 3am. But somehow one good night’s sleep later, eh, all my good vibes have melted into the ether. Oh I still like it, and I’m still going to play it about 10 more times until we’re all thoroughly sick of it, but it’s not shaking my world or anything.

Story: New heroine Kanade Kohinata transfers into Seiso Academy about 8 years after our old crew has left. She joins the Orchestra Club, which is preparing for the 42nd National High School Ensemble Competition. Through the competition she gets to meet and romance a bunch of nutsosbishies from Seiso and from other academies.

Gameplay is largely similar to La Corda d’Oro 2. Read here for a refresher. You still have to practice a score individually and as an ensemble and then add your own interpretation/expression. There are some significant differences though, both in gameplay and in the general spirit of the game. I can’t list them all, so I’ll cover the ones that stood out.

♪The actual competition is a rhythm game. In past games you’d do your best to prepare and leave the rest to the performers, but in La Corda d’Oro 3 you have to actively complete by pressing buttons at the right time and using a special move known as a Maestro Field to fill up your gauge. Here’s a screenshot from the Another Sky fandisc to illustrate:

See the red/blue bar at the top? Whichever side is winning at the end of the show wins the contest. It was hard going at first, but it’s kind of fun in a heart-pounding kind of way once you get used to it. However because so much is riding on the rhythm game aspect, it’s hard to tell how important practice is. Like, is it enough to do the bare minimum of practice and make up for it with good button-tapping? I’m slightly curious, but not enough to risk failure to find out.

♪No more fairies anywhere to be seen, though you can still buy stuff with BP. However Maestro Field attacks are rumored to be hallucinations caused by the fairies… which is kind of scary when you think about it. What other mind tricks have the fairies been playing on the characters? Like, what if all our romantic moments are actually illusions caused by sniffing too much “pixie dust?”

♪It feels like there are more guys to date. 12 versus 6 main guys in Corda 2. But if you add in auxiliary routes like Etou’s and Kira’s, it comes to about the same number. Note, however, that only the Seiso characters and two Amane Academy guys have full-fledged routes. The rest have light teasers to get you to buy the Another Sky fandisc. Yeah, I dunno if I’ll do that… (the gamer lies through her teeth)

♪No more inviting guys on dates on the weekend. Most of the game happens during the summer holidays, which means guys can take you out any time they want. But you can’t ask, you have to wait for them to suggest something, usually story-triggered. Because of that, you spend a lot less one-on-one time just chilling with your crush and more time desperately trying to raise affection so you can trigger the next event.

♪Instead of dates, you can make lunch for the guy you like. It’s a feature that’s more fleshed out in Another Sky. Here it’s pretty useless because you only get to make lunch a few times a month, the affection boosts aren’t that high, it’s a pain trying to remember what everyone likes, if an event occurs at lunchtime your lunch goes to waste, etc.

♪Instead of hearts, you fill up “love notes” to max by progressing through a guy’s events until they all fill up and turn golden. Apparently there’s another ending for a filled-but-not-golden chart. I’ll tell you about them if I ever get one.

The in-game strategy notes are quite helpful, but they don’t tell you that you have to trigger event X by competition Y, so you can find yourself locked out of events if you’re not careful. With a FAQ you could probably get all 12 guys in one playthrough, but for FAQ-averse people like me it’s best to pick a guy or two early and stick to them.

♪The other schools play a variety of instruments, but Seiso only competes with a string quartet. Not even quintet, just the exact same players on two violins, a cello and a viola at all times. IMO it makes their music selections very boring and same-y sounding. Worse than that, 5 out of the 12 gettable guys are violin players, and if you add other string instruments, it’s a whopping 8 out of 12. BOOORIIING. BOOOOORIIIIING.

Speaking of which, the number of scores has been pared down drastically as well so you end up playing the same songs in every playthrough. From the perspective of a classical music fan, this game is a huge step down compared to the first two.

♪There are no friendly girl characters like Amou and Fuyuumi-chan. There’s a reporter girl “friend” named Nia, but first, she’s kind of a *****. She does little to help and instead shows up at bad times to needle Kanade and her love interests and make their relationships awkward. What do people call that, “rock-blocking”? Something like that. ;-p.

Secondly she’s hiding a lot of stuff about everything and everyone imaginable. You can’t consider her a friend when she won’t even tell Kanade her real name or let her visit her room. There’s another prominent female character who works for Amane and who is even more of a <bleep> than Nia. The two friendly-ish girls hardly show up and hardly interact with the rest of the cast. It’s best to think of this game as Kanade and the 12 Princes and not expect the same fuzzy, regular high-school feel the older ones had.

♪As I said in the title, the game has a lot of sports anime tropes. Like “this is the 3rd years’ last summer so we have to make it count!” and “I wanted to win to make the captain happy,” “I wanted to play more with everyone.” You even have characters going jogging together as training for the big event and crying on each others’ shoulders when they lose, being banned from competing because of a fight, etc. On top of all that, you also have the evil coach-type character, the arrogant rivals, the friendly rivals, the arrogant-turned-friendly rivals, etc etc etc. This game would feel perfectly normal if you replaced “music” with tennis or basketball.

Lalalalala~ Music and Love~
That’s enough for the gameplay side. Now let’s talk about the guys. They’re all either boring good kids or stark raving mad. Note that I actually like boring good guys in an otome game, which is why I enjoyed the first two games so much. Apart from Yunoki (and maybe Kira) everyone was nice and normal. This time I’d say 6 are boring normal, 4 are too quirky for my tastes, 2 are downright nuts.

Normal boring guys: Your childhood friends Ritsu and Kyouya, your kouhai Haru and his buddy Nanami, rival characters Yanagizawa and Arata from Shiseikan Academy. But Arata is too bubbly and childish, it’s annoying, so I won’t be doing his route.

Quirky weirdos: Your teammate Daichi, viola player, aiming for medical school. He seems normal at first glance, but he’s way too flirty and these playboy characters are always hiding a secret dark side somewhere. If you think “Wow, you’re totally judging him by his looks, maybe he’s just a nice guy,” you just wait and see when I do his route. I’m sure I’m right.

Togane and Yuki, rival violinists from Jinnan Academy. Houzumi, the delinquent trumpeter with a heart of gold. Usually I would include him with the normal guys, but he’s always beating Arata up. Violence is bad, mmkay? If you say “Well he only hits Arata, he wouldn’t hurt me,” it will be you in the domestic violence shelter ten years down the line, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Call the psych ward: Sei Amamiya, the “emotionless” guy who wants to know what love is so he can overcome a creative slump. Leiji Myoga, another violent madman who makes his debut by punching a character for touching his violin. A violin that is soooo important to him that he just left it unattended in a store where anyone off the streets could have taken it. It’s all downhill from there, but I’m almost done with his route so I’ll talk about the little nutter next time.

And no matter how carefully you progress or how normal they seem at first, sooner or later half of them will declare themselves to be depressed and stop hanging out with you. Then you have to beg them to practice with you and stalk them with music until they deign to look your way again. So it’s not enough to shoulder the burden of the Nationals, I have to play therapist too. Oh boy~.

Amamiya GET!
𝄞I wanna know what love is~~~~~♫
𝄞I want you to show me~~~♫

I chose Sei Amamiya for my first route 50% out of laziness and 50% because he’s a piano player and I love the piano🎹. Amamiya’s backstory is that he’s one of many musically-talented orphans gathered at Amane Academy by the totally-not-pedo Evil Russian founder Alexei something. Alexei is a verbally and emotionally abusive mentor who convinces Amamiya that his music will never be worth anything unless he can fall in love.

So Amamiya meets Kanade in a music studio, they make beautiful music together and they strike a deal: he helps her practice, she lets him practice falling in love with her. So they hang out for a while doing “couple” stuff like going on dates and taking lovey-dovey photos together. Somewhere in between them watching fireworks together and him standing her up in the rain, he realizes that he’s actually in love with her. Or so he says. But in reality he acts exactly the same way towards her all the way until the final scenes, so I’m not really convinced.

Anyway, once Sei finds love, Alexei Jerkovich comes back and tries to take him overseas to make him a music star. This somehow means cutting off all ties with Kanade…. ??? Because Mission Accomplished or something so he doesn’t need her any more, dunno.

This is Amamiya’s “depression” episode, and if you stalk and pester him long enough, he’ll run all the way from the train station to the music hall during the finals and passionately declare his love for Kanade. And in the after-party once Seiso beats Amane in the finals, he’ll mutter some more sweet nothings in her ear, roll credits, the end.

Ehhh. For a first route, it wasn’t bad. Sei is always very polite and helpful, and Kanade did skill up a lot by practicing with him. But because he’s deliberately keeping her at arm’s length all the way through, you never learn much about him. It’s up in the air whether Kanade even knows his true nature, since they rarely interact outside of events and they never talk about anything personal. But it’s an otome game. If the writers say they can’t live without each other, who am I to argue? And they all lived happily ever and Amamiya was cured by the power of love, hurray, hurray.

What’s next?
Of course I already have late-stage save files for getting Leiji Myoga, Haruto Mizushima and Yukihiro Yagisawa. I might not make it for the latter two unless I really hustle, but Myoga is practically eating out of my hand already. After these three, I’d like to do Kyoya and Ritsu Kisaragi and also Daichi Sasaki for the sake of completion. The rest of the guys I don’t really care about. I’ll be seeing a lot of them when I play Another Sky anyway, so no need to rush.

As for any other games, I’m on a break from serious gaming, at least for this week. I feel like I’ve seen enough of Tokyo Xanadu eX+. It’s too soon to start Atelier Escha & Logy. Part of me wants to continue Chaos Rings III, part of me can’t be bothered. Same with Dragon Quest 7. So I’m just gonna chill and chase hot guys for a while until something calls out to me. Ciao!