The Grisaia Trilogy Review – Fruits of Many Flavours

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Genre - Romance, Action, Drama Play Time - 100+ hours Developer - Frontwing VNDB Steam

The Blind Leading The Blind

Reflecting a character’s flaws back onto them through their interactions with the heroines has long been a core of the visual novel narrative design. However, few showcase the power of this approach quite like the Grisaia trilogy which takes it as far as possible beyond a simple route structure to match its changing stakes. It is also an uneven experience and it leans into the more absurd aspects of the world as the series progresses to the point of potentially losing people who loved what the original game was at its core. Still there is a reason these titles would birth the greater Grisaia franchise and something in their ups and downs appeals to the audience. So let’s go undercover and dig up the secrets to Grisaia’s lasting influence.

Secrets And School – Narrative and Themes

Above all other aspects of Grisaia’s narrative are the characters. Everything is warped around making sure they can appear as much as possible and all be involved in the plot even when it does not directly concern them. This becoming more prominent when the games move to a more linear structure such as with the second game where Yuuji’s backstory is framed through the lens of the girls discovering his discarded biography. Such a contrivance exists to make sure they are up to speed so they can make choices about their futures rather than being forced aside as the trilogy move in a more action orientated direction. Even the first game’s focus on a single character in its routes adheres to this philosophy. Obviously having other characters constantly push themselves into the heroine’s route would be distracting so instead their presence is felt through the advice or clues they provide to Yuuji. These instances offer a pacing element that reminds the player of the existence of the rest of the cast and gives relief from the darker events in order to remind them of the light at the end of the tunnel. Put together these help create a memorable experience reliant of the likeability of its characters to keep its engagement even as a more direct narrative with its own driving forces takes over.

Grisaia has never been an entirely grounded series

Calling the original three Grisaia games a trilogy is a bit misleading as it is quite clear from the shifting structures that it was an expansion brought about by the unexpected popularity of the first game. This transition occurred slowly over the trilogy as it morphs from a route centric story into a linear narrative with a singular villain. As a result the series can feel inconsistent and someone who liked the first game may not like the third or vice versa. The second game is the biggest victim of this change as it contains after stories for all the heroines from the first game while also containing the set up story for the third title. Here the clash between the linear narrative future and multi ending past makes its presence known as the game tries to reconcile the two in preparation for the third game. By far the most glaring example of this is how it merges all the ending into one and tries to imply all of them took place without explaining how this was done and why the previous status quo was restored despite the dramatically different ways those routes ended. It hand waves it all away and hopes you will just accept this change and move on. To its credit the mess of outcomes it pushed together never interacts with the future plot in a way that draws attention to it through a clever focusing on the heroines future with Yuuji rather than their past.

Yuuji's past is more than a bit out there

The secret world which Yuuji is a part of has always been more than a bit absurd even in the first game, but there it was just one note in the stories of the heroines. However, from the second game onwards it becomes the focus and the games gain an equally over the top villain to match this shift. Gone is the intimacy and it is replaced by high stakes action where Yuuji’s side of the world is explained in much greater detail. It is this shift which is most likely to prevent someone from completing the trilogy as the elements they invested in are the heroines and not everyone wants to give that up for something entirely different. While the transition is rocky, the commitment to the end result does make the third game a distinct experience from the first title and allows for a move away from the route based design into something with its own recognisable identity within the medium. There is an undeniable charm to the way the game tries to tell you about this secret world straight face and it can rely on the strong characters of the first game to lend it a legitimacy for an amusing ride.

Solace In The Arms Of Another – Characters

As the stars of the show it would have been easy for the heroines to overwhelm Yuuji and render the protagonist a secondary character in his own story. The solution which the games arrived at is to have each of the heroines reflect an aspect of Yuuji and force him to come to terms with it in inventive ways. For example Sachi acts as a mirror for how his past traps him just as it does her and Michiru explores his duel nature as he is split between two worlds just as she has been for a long time. Through this framing of their actions an equal focus can be spit with Yuuji in order to create a dynamic between them where each explores their identity through the other in an organic manner. In addition, it provides a reason for the player to care about each route as part of a complete whole since it is only by going through each of them that they can gain a proper understanding of the protagonist. With the second game the heroines no longer act as separate reflections but instead join together through the lessons they learned to become a complete and more developed version of Yuuji which he can learn from as he takes the final steps to becoming as free as they are now. It also works as fitting conclusion to the heroines’ arc as they shift from being helped by Yuuji into the role of his saviours and equals. A continuos emphasis on this function for the heroines creates one of the few thematic through lines of the trilogy.

Everyone has their demons to fight

If there is one issue with how the characters are executed it is in their tendency to behave out of character or make jumps of logic which seem to only exist to create drama or progress the plot. This is mostly confined to the third game where the outlandish events swing the narrative from one tense situation to an action scene and back again at speed. As such the characters must be adapted to match and while the game tries its best not to push this too far it inevitably makes them act oddly to meet the narrative demands. These alternations are brief and the game never dwells on them for long in order to obscure the issue as much as possible and if you are willing to roll with the game’s direction it is easy to overlook. However, given the importance the trilogy has placed on characters as the drivers of the narrative, these inconsistencies stand out more than they would in other visual novels and this harms the feeling of the characters being actual people. Perhaps the most noticeable example of characters behaving oddly is the alternative ending of the third game where Yuuji has to jump through a few logical hoops and behave contrary to his ongoing character arc thus contradicting the entire game beforehand. This is an extreme example but it does showcase how widespread the problem is within the story.

Glistening Fruits – Visual, Audio and Technical

Taken from an audio and visual angle, the Grisaia trilogy might appear to be nothing special at first glance, a solid example of its genre but nothing more. It is easy to see why with the characters sticking to relatively realistic designs featuring school uniforms and suits, the locations being the standard fair for the genre and the music which occupancies it being nothing the player has not heard before. How Grisaia manages to push beyond this initial impression is through the small details and how it merges these parts into an emotionally resonant whole. The aforementioned uniforms all share the same basic structure but are subtly customised to communicate the personality of the characters and even hint at their hidden problems. This is then utilised through clever placement on screen and a proper understanding of what music to play to hint at what is going on in the characters heads or make a particular event hit hard. In turn this makes the moments of down time as engaging as those of high drama with it being clear that the game always has something going on for you to keep an eye out for. Ultimately this quiet form of presentation is something almost invisible from a glance, but helps maintain the player’s sense of involvement and keeps them playing without them ever really knowing the exact reason they feel this way.

Grisaia has always been able to sell its absurdity pretty well

From a technical stand point the trilogy remains consistently mediocre throughout with only the expected suite of features, but it is interesting to note the decline in the importance of choices over the three games. The route based approach of the first game placed an importance on having a convincing way to transition into a divergent path, but even here we can see a minimalist ladder structure where the routes are presented sequentially over the course of the common route. Over the following two games almost all choices are stripped away to focus around a linear and controlled narrative so it can lean more into its action aspects. What choices do remain tend to make the characters behave oddly in order to accommodate this sudden alternation to the direction of the narrative and the outcome is somewhat messy. Overall the transition from one style of choices to the other was not handled particular well, but it ends up being such a minor aspect of the game that it is easy to forget them.

Conclusion

Trilogies which spawn organically from the success of the first title are often a bit messy in execution and Grisaia does not avoid this fate. The shifting from a route based structure to a linear one, the changes to character behaviour and dynamics and de-emphasizing of choices all contribute to this feeling. However, in order to compensate for this unevenness Grisaia focuses in on its characters and the more outlandish or action elements of its first game, combining them into an identity all its own by the third game. Of course this leads to an alienation of players who liked the more down to earth aspects of the original, but this seems to have been a price the series was willing to pay given they doubled down on it in Phantom Trigger.

Verdict –

Despite their messy and uneven quality, this trilogy invests the player in its characters and pulls them on a wild ride which aims to entertain at every turn.