Hey y'all. Welcome back to my impressions of KoiChoco. I'm now on the Chisato (canon true ending) route and doing this portion slightly different than my previous posts. I finished Isara's route at the 31 hour mark the other night and immediately jumped directly into this route with a guide this time. Let's Jam!!!
Here are the rules for my play so you know what to expect from this portion:
I'm going to openly gush about a small handful of observations right off the bat. Both of these routes are definitely mirrors of each other by design and structure. I don't know if all the routes are like this yet but while skipping through scenes to get to the new parts and making the choices required to activate Chisato's route, I noticed something I didn't notice before: both girls have the same general body structures with similar hairstyles and heights. Canonically, Yuuki has always been in love with Chisato; they've been close since at least the wedding of a mutual adult friend when they were very young children. It could be assumed that Yuuki would have a preference of a woman similar to her if he had to choose someone that's not her.
In one of my earlier posts, I recall making an observation about how he thought about Isara's breasts against his back when he first met her. Earlier, in both routes, Chisato grabbed him from behind in a similar fashion and his inner monologue was almost word for word the same about the size and feeling of the breasts of both characters. I'll come back to this point later because of an event that happened that was related to a problem I had with the other route.
I'll finish this section off with an observation about the Title Screen that ties directly into the last point. Isara is in the very back, face half covered, fully pointing off into the distance with her body and the shortest character in terms of height if you don't take distance into account at all. Michiru, the cat girl, is the second tallest character physically facing the same direction as Isara while paying full attention to Yuuki. Both characters were presented as complete outsiders to the Shokken (Food Research Club) with no direct connections through the members of it. Isara's plight (and by extension the entire plight of the Keitoku students) is a major focus of the plot, so of course she would be at the center of everything. Chisato is the main girl, so of course she’d be running towards the player and be the tallest on the screen. It's beautiful visual story telling.
In the Isara route, Yuuki got to meet her two younger brothers, Chii and Nii, around halfway through her route. She early on discussed their goals to become students at Takafuji Academy (the main school), her financial situation and this pretty dark nugget about her father not being around but still alive. There's no music here and Chisato was the one that openly and warmly connected with Isara. Yuuki actually came across as almost indifferent and cold towards it.
It hadn't been disclosed yet how it happened but in a later scene, Yuuki was speaking directly to the player about Chisato's younger brother dying right before both of them met. After Isara brought up her brothers, Chisato also became openly upset and later that night came over to Yuuki's room, asked him to eat the chocolate she brought over, and made him promise he would never leave his "big sister." I wonder if part of Chisato becoming jealous of Isara and Yuuki's relationship was akin to a sibling being afraid of their elder being taken away from them.
I don't remember the earnings from the festival being discussed like this in Isara's route in as much detail. Instead, Yuuki and Chisato were fighting because he was more focused on Isara than winning the election as early as this point. I love how there actually were changes related to the mindset of the characters instead of these things being shared between both routes. There was also a bit of a change in how Yuuki treated Isara.
Context: during the Training Camp (whenever everyone came together to prepare for the official election after Preliminaries were finished), there was a scene where Yuuki and Isara go out grocery shopping for the club. Upon Chisato's wishes, Mifuyu was sent with the two of them (to "observe") and the conversation moved from Isara openly flirting with Yuuki and pursuing him to her badmouthing her boss. She didn't show this particular side of herself until the hospital scene at the very end of her route and Yuuki was rightly shocked by it at that point. Here, I got the impression that it was because Mifuyu was there, and she was a bit annoyed by that interruption.
Speaking of Mifuyu, whenever she's annoyed, she crosses her fingers together. In the Title Screen brought up earlier, Isara's in the same pose, and with her face half hidden from the camera, one can interpret this side of her as somewhat malevolent in this particular case. What if Isara was portrayed as almost a villain in Chisato's route?
In the rest of this scene, Isara was nothing more than a Keitoku sent to help with the election; Yuuki thought she was cute but wasn't romantically interested, so he was just "kind" to her. There was a particular line where she was talking about a specific change to the dinner menu to help accommodate for a request that was made and he completely disregarded it here when in the other route, he was willing to make the same compromise but out of spite due to the requester being the two "monkeys". I'm currently interpreting the intention of this early part of where the routes diverge as this: with Isara, Yuuki was a better man because he was thinking about other people and the consequences of his own attempt to be a good man; with Chisato, he was only concerned with helping her get over her past trauma for the benefit of both of them.
This scene is an edit using three different images that were shown back to back on this route; I just lined them up with the backgrounds to make a specific point that most players may not notice. This was towards the end of this session but the developers did something cool here that I really want to talk about. The top image was from the original Isara route but was an exact copy here. Hazuki wasn't at the camp in that route due to being hung over, so she never said this line. I brought up that I interpreted the scene as Isara basking in the "Twilight of her youth" in a previous post. I'm surprised at how on point I was.
That's not the only thing about this though. Michiru and Isara both were first years but were not on friendly terms when this scene happened in Isara's route. I'm getting the impression that the position of characters and order in which they appear in specific scenes like this was something that the developers may have actively thought about for narrative and character building reasons. The order of when these sprites were shown might be important if they come up again: 1) Hazuki 2) Isara 3) Michiru.
If I had played this in the original intended routing order, I would have seen Chisato's breasts within the first 10 hours of play. It took over 20 for them to come out in Isara's route. I appreciated the restraint in the latter and realized why I was confused. I'll keep this section fairly brief but do have some words.
The Isara scenes I think were artistically "awkward". It felt like a depiction of two characters that didn't know what they were doing and were imitating what they thought they should do. It took a long while to get to that point, and I don't think the payoff was meant to be satisfying for the player; at least it wasn't for me. Instead, just both characters being bad at it and still enjoying each other's company, that was a good message to take away from the ending scene where it was implied that the two of them will probably get married in the future.
With Chisato, it's straight up fan service but wasn't fully presented as just that if you take into account its replacement in Isara's route. It happened during a moment of both Yuuki and her being emotionally naked with each other in a bath house. Her breasts popping out of the towel and her freakout about it was a well-worn trope in other works. Isara didn't replace her, though; it was the gay guy making uncomfortable, unwarranted advances while Isara was having a bit of a bad time in the girl's bath house with club members that hated her. What was the intention of that change?
I hope that the Chisato route ends up not being a complete dumpster fire. This was the original locked in route used to unlock every other route and the full story. By playing the routes in a different order, I hope to see how well planned they were.
I also wanted to make a correction to a concern I had prior: Mike and Yuuki were classmates prior and knew each other through Chisato. I rewatched the scene for this route and the writers were consistent with that element.
Oboro had both a Mickey Mouse (with his iconic laugh as the chime) and a Garage alarm clock (proving that someone in universe sees the propellor on his head and made a clock in his image). The latter even quoted him multiple times as its chime with the same voice actor.
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts here, and I'll be continuing to post in the future as I go. What were your thoughts? Are you also playing this? Leave your comments below, vote and reblog. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful night.
