Review of Yo-Jin-Bo ~Unmei no Freude~
| Subject | Yo-Jin-Bo ~Unmei no Freude~ Yo-Jin-Bo ~ The Bodyguards - Download Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 1 Vote: 6shyshydou on 2025-04-20 |
| Review | I’ve always held some degree of interest towards the otome genre. Enough to have peeked over the great big shoji screen on occasion but never enough to have actually joined in. There’s something so alluring about the vibe that otome gives off. The outfits, the pretty boys, but most importantly, the community. Girls are nice and they smell like flowers and boys are cruel and they made fun of my Mickey Mouse backpack. So that ends now. Starting today, I'm officially an otomehead. An otomale, if you will. And if that’s the case, I might as well start from the beginning. Firstly, if you’re in the market for a period-accurate drama set at the tail end of the Edo period: look elsewhere. Not even mentioning the magical elements that bring Sayori to the past in the first place and informs the entire story afterwards, this game is a comedy with small dramatic flourishes first and foremost. Even stranger, its a comedy heavily relying on referential humor. You heard that right. I’m not talking about era-appropriate references either, I’m talking about full-fledged, shameless, contemporary, post Cold War references that really should have no business being in a game sold as a historical story. I can not overstate how much of this game is just reference humor. Maybe 50 percent of it. I’ll be honest, I’m too young and pretty to get the lion’s share of references, apart from the few that have remained relevant to this day like Pokemon or Futurama. I mean who actually remembers the cult classic movie Little Buddha with Keanu Reeves and Bridget Fonda? Or the critically acclaimed folk rock duo Simon and Garfunkel? I’ll tell you who: not me. But as a time capsule, and I mean as a time capsule for the late 90s - early 2000s, it can be pretty endearing seeing what references they pull out of their oversized beanie. Some may say it was to the game’s detriment to base so much of its identity on outdated media, I say it's the only thing keeping it relevant despite its otherwise lackluster story. As a samurai story, Yo-Jin-Bo struggles to justify its runtime. The common route is pretty meaty, it takes up the majority of the experience, only splitting into different routes about 70% of the way through. That doesn’t mean you get to just pick which route you want at the 70% mark though. The common route contains a bunch of choices that require you go through it every time you wish to switch to another guy, with a skip function that barely skips. And after all that, you’ll quickly realize that every route follows the same basic structure. If you're aiming for a complete playthrough (which the game encourages with a special scene upon completion), you’ll be forced to read through the same last few chapters with very little variation apart from who you brought with you, only the epilogue introducing new scenes. By the end of my whopping 13-hour playthrough, I was more than ready to be done with it. Because of this, I wouldn’t recommend playing through the entire thing. Choose the character which you are most interested in, and you'll have a refreshing 4-5 hours of lighthearted fun. If you still want more, Jin and Monzan both have slightly different ending chapters. But be warned, in Monzan's route its revealed that the main character’s guardian is a leering creep. Character assassination! Character assassination, I say! I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it wasn’t just played for laughs, which it is. The story in general is by and large pretty simple. Simple but narratively effective. How do we get the protagonist in a situation where she can be looked after by the most boys possible, is probably what they were thinking in the writer’s room. And you know what? They were pretty darn successful. There aren't any earth shattering revelations, no third act twists. I don't even think there's a theme apart from “love prevails all.” In its place are hype moments and aura…. Don’t go in expecting Shakespeare and you’ll be fine. The characters themselves are all pretty endearing. They don’t look the best, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll quickly acclimate to the artstyle while reading. Now that I’m truly and completely done with Yo-Jin-Bo, I can confidently say that I found the CGs to be a high point. Well, sometimes… it's a mixed bag. Despite enjoying myself with the cast, they aren’t given much character depth aside from brief glimpses. Each character is given a short scene or two per route (and shocker, they all have tragic backstories), but they aren’t allocated enough time to become fully developed characters. I understand that this is a lighthearted game (with murder and betrayal), but at that point, don’t even tease me with character depth. In the end, it's the voice actors who do the heavy lifting when it comes to giving each of their respective character’s identity. And hey, it's clear they were having a lot of fun while they were doing it. Also, speaking of characters, it annoyed me that despite the main character starting the story as a part of her school’s history club, the game never uses this fact to its benefit. Let her outsmart someone by using her history knowledge. Or damn, just let her tell some fun facts. As it stands, Sayori is a pretty passive character for the most part, and the setting is used strictly as a vehicle to tell its story, and as an excuse to romance hot, sexy samurai men. Well… mixed bag. At the start of Yo-Jin-Bo, the protagonist stumbles on a discarded amulet buried in the rubble of a dig site, forgotten by time and abandoned. Despite being encased in mud for who knows how long, it still shines as brightly as it did when it was first polished. And if I liked the story a little more than I did, this could have served as a metaphor for how this visual novel is a hidden gem, but ultimately, I'm only lukewarm on it. In the end, the game's saving grace is probably its unique sense of humour and how much of its identity draws from days gone past. It turns what would otherwise be a cute but unremarkable samurai story into something weird and anachronistic and interesting, and something worth discussing. Though I had no business rambling for so long. 6/10 you’ll probably enjoy this if you like the double act or manzai style of comedy UPDATE: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the English localization is way better than it has any right to. A shame the translator isn’t credited and I couldn’t seem to find anything about them online. |
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