Kana: Little Sister

Visual Novel Community Visual Novel Talk
#21

I hate it either way. Multiple scenarios should contain varying levels of “bad” endings and varying levels of “good” endings. Hell, having nuetral endings is good too.

For me, the whole point to multiple endings is to offer diverse consequences for actions. If the end consequence is equally as bad or good, no matter the action, then the game can only ever hope to be decent. Most are simply horrible. If you are going to be just dark or just light, then just offer one path. Otherwise the whole point to multiple endings is not just lost, but intentionally ignored.

#22

My only two problems with Kana, beyond a few suspect lines in the translation, both involved the “happy” ending.

[spoiler]First, it seemed to be doled out too whimsically for my tastes: if you take Kana to an amusement park, you get a miracle; if you take her to the library, you get shafted. Where is the order or meaning in that? Certainly, Kana’s life was constrained by her illness, but all of our lives are time-limited; we all will eventually die, and any of us could die tomorrow. Does the author really mean to imply that a life of leisure is more virtuous and deserving of a miracle than one of study?

Second, it detracted from the “thrust” of the game otherwise, which was clearly about surviving (and in some cases thriving after) a devastating event, rather than emerging victorious over it. The truth, as much as it may pain us, is that we cannot dodge the fate encoded in our genes.

Although I definitely see Kana as the better game overall, I preferred Figures of Happiness’s handling of a similarly unlikely “happy” Minamo ending, by sequestering it from the rest of the story (similar to Crescendo’s Miyu storyline) and casting it as a nearly impossible triumph of subconscious, preternaturally aware free will over fate, rather than just whimsy.[/spoiler]

(subsequently edited for clarity)

#23

And you get that with Kana just fine. Sure, there’s no good endings, but lots of eroges lack good endings. They’re certainly far from necessary, and occasionally even undesirable. And you can’t deny that the endings in Kana are diverse, unless Kana leaving is just as bad, to you, as her DYING. Heck, there’s even plenty of variety in the ‘mood’ levels between the other endings. I think it’s a good assortment of outcomes, really.

Nice to see something beyond the standard one-route-per-heroine, one-generic-bad-ending setup, and you have to also recall that Kana is a very short game. It contains 8 hours worth of reading all up. If it had too much variety with that sort of length, you’d see an ending two hours after you started =P

#24

Simple difference in taste then.

I don’t mind dark or depressing as a single end. Or the opposite. However, I expect true diversity of consequence if a game offers choice… if it doesn’t then the game has failed or stumbled on a fundamental level for me.

I think part of the issue though, is with the idea that “no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter”… I don’t buy the idea in real life, so if a game forces a “fate” on a multi-branch story, I don’t buy it there. Not just taste then, difference in philosophy as well.

#25

What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? It very much matters - how on earth you can interpret the ‘Kana lives’ ending to be the same ‘fate’ or just as bad an outcome as the other routes is beyond me, and even the other routes are vastly different in how they work.

Realistically, if you know someone with a terminal disease, what is the chance that your actions - no matter what you take - would manage to influence this person’s chance of staying alive?

The point is that there IS true diversity of consequence - the endings are different, different events occur and I believe that they are mostly traceable to your standing with the story’s characters at the time as determined through the choices you made.
This wouldn’t be solved by adding a ‘good ending’. In fact, if Kana had a good ending, it wouldn’t be a particularly good story. It’d feel cheap, and that’s not the sort of story Kana is.

#26

Hm, yeah, I meant nakige. Indeed amazing what one letter can do.

#27

Insofar as the endings are concerned, there are couple of endings that are redundant: #4 and #5 are not substantially different from one another. They could have been consolidated into one ending with no ill-effects.

If they had more time and budget to work from, they could have expanded on #1 ending in which Kana lives. Bear in mind that, although Kana spends most of her time hopitalized, she is nowhere as isolated as prisoners held at Guantanamo. At the same time, despite her conditions, she is growing up. Post-transplant Kana is very different from her pre-transplant counterpart. She is no longer content with the role of a chick inside a nest. With this change, it would be interesting to develop a storyline in which tensions build up between Kana and Taka. More tension and drama could be added if Yuta and Yumi take up more active roles.

#28

Then there are those of us who have an overwhelming, all-consuming love for Kana, that transcends the bounds of eroge and everything else. There are games and them there are games. Crescendo and YMK are pretty good, and I’ve played them both several times. But Kana brings out the fanatic in me. The first time I played it, I went 48 hours without sleep. And I play it annually and have for the past six years. It’s an occassion that I loook forward to every year.Interestingly enough, I’ve never found the scenario where she lives, and I don’t think I want to. I know it sounds evil, but my pleasure in the game comes from the tears I shed at the end.

#29

Kana was one of my first eroge; I played it not six months after I started learning Japanese. Great eroge; although I’ve come to like the writer’s other works more, it still has a special place in my heart.

#30

Kana Little Sister was also one of the first visual novel I have tried as well. After going through a couple of sessions, it felt like a personality test of some sort. Took me a while to get the #1 ending, although I found #3 the toughest. During the course of going through Kana, I used to joke to myself: Darn … I think I would be a better teacher than a brother, since I kept on swarming her with books instead of kid’s stuffs!

#31

And really, in my opinion, The Yumi ending where he runs into her after the book is published is really the best ending.

#32

I have been re-playing KLS several more times within the last few months. Now that I am thinking about it, I would say that the #3 and #6 endings stand out the most. The #3 ending is where Taka sort of mentally ‘crashes’ and drifts into a delusion until Yumi painstakingly brings him back to real-life. The #6 ending is where Taka publishes Kana’s diary and, thanks to that diary, Yumi understands and forgives him. In the other endings, Yumi becomes stranded, which feels rather sad. She has not done anything bad to taka, including that brief elementary school episode involving Taka’s ‘love letter’. It is the sender’s responsibility to properly deliver whatever message he wants to send to the intended receipient!