Samurai of Hyuga Book 5

This is the fifth game in the Samurai of Hyuga series.

I wrote a lot of this review in my head when I was 90% of the way done with the game, so I'll get that out of the way first and then talk about the ending.

I think I liked this one the best so far. One and two had too much of the suggestive content towards your minor charge, and four was super depressing. Three was my second favorite of the batch.

This one feels like the author has finally settled in and figured out what kind of story he wants to write. The ronin MC is sad but moves forward, is tortured and has lost hope but somehow continues on anyway, which is nice.

You spend a lot of this one lugging around the comatose body of your young shugenja companion. I liked how instead of focusing on gross sexual comments towards a minor it found other ways for the MC to be obnoxious/boundary breaking (like trying to clean out earwax). It made me think that the author should just go back and edit out all the crap in the first two games to make it more like this (and maybe to fix the Japanese; it might make sense to pay a native speaker a few hundred dollars to go through and redo the chapter names of all 6 games).

The game has a lot of adult content between the actual adults. I made choices that led to sexual encounters with Toshie because I felt like it fit my character, but because I don't enjoy fictional depictions of sex I skipped past them (they were very lengthy). Other mature content in the game includes frequent suicidal reasoning, torture and humiliation, descriptions of gore and rape (and the consequences of rape).

The main storyline is split in 2. In the first, you are suffering some kind of psychosis after your experience in hell and are trapped by the Silent Lady. You have to break out and then break into her stronghold to try to save the shugenja.

In the second half, you encounter nuns and christianity and have to deal with them and zombies while also being confronted with the concept of forgiveness and redemption (which you have an extreme adverse reaction to).

I liked the depiction of Christianity in the book, as a Christian. It felt very authentic. The MC hates it and doesn't believe in it and is disturbed by its teachings, but it generally sticks very close to the original source material and its believers seem sincere. So it's like the opposite of a straw man; the game kind of debates Christianity but in its full-fledged real form rather than the superficial or sophomoric takes many fantasy games set up as an evil state religion.

The game at this point has dropped almost all pretense of interactivity. At this point each choice is just for flavor text or for getting achievements, with some occasional consent choices for romance. For this specific story, I think it's a good choice. The author didn't want a branching story, he wanted to tell this story, and it feels engaging on the story alone.

Unfortunately, the last 10% of the game did sour my mood. I thought the author had maybe grown as a person and dropped the sexualizing minors idea in the last decade. And that still may be true! But the last chunk (and one fragment earlier on) has your minor companion create a fantasy world where they're older and in love with a romanticized version of you. Now that's not bad at all (when I was 14 I had a crush on Scully from X-Files, having a crush on an older person isn't weird at that age), but it does make me feel like the author has seen the relationship between you and the kid as a romance all along.

I probably won't play the sixth one for a while, because these books, since they have low interactivity, have a big chapter count (25 per most games) and take a ton of time to play (I've averaged around 10 days per book). So I'll take a break and try some others before coming back to this.