Martian Successor Nadesico: The Blank of 3 Years is the second Martian Successor Nadesico game to be released. It is the direct sequel to the TV series, bridging the gap between the events of the final episode and Prince of Darkness.
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This is straight up the "second season" of the anime with all the gags, drama and mindfuckery seen in that original anime. Its fantastic and I love it, but hooo boy not all routes were made equal. I don't know if it was a problem with budget or deadlines, or a case of the writers just being meanspirited, but several characters are locked to having unavoidable bad ends where you'd think there'd be a choice at the end but no, nothing. Not that this is a major complaint per-se, but it definitely rubbed me the wrong way seeing fan favorites get all the content they do compared to some of the more unfortunate heroines. Either way, its awesome, just don't go in thinking this is a dating sim or a romance vn cause its really not. (Play the first, albeit slightly mediocre, saturn VN for that)
The anime tie-in game that every anime tie-in game wishes it could be. The Blank of Three Years is a sound novel that serves as a sequel to the original anime series, and one that is pivotal to understanding the feature film released the same year. I'm still not sure what happened to Nadesico, or why they chose to take a multimedia route instead of just making a sequel TV series, but it ends up working rather well, perhaps even better. After the whiplash-inducing, abrupt ending of the TV series, it falls on this game's shoulders to give us the exposition dump we need to even begin to understand the film. Given that the relevant content isn't enough to carry a full series, and that a visual novel lends itself to the task more naturally than the mile-per-second, schizophrenic structure of the TV series, this is a good thing.
The game has four main routes (plus an extra that's dumb and goes nowhere unless you're an obsessive Getter Robo fan), and roughly 20 different endings depending on the girl you go for, the choices for which differ depending on which route you find yourself on. These routes are not created equal, however, in terms of the content of their plots and narratives: one route that ties up the loose ends with the Mars ruins is heavy on hard sci-fi, while another route sees the protagonist setting up a ramen stand with Akito, Yurika, and Ruri (who, of course, gets two endings across two separate routes in this game). A special shout out goes to the idol management route, wherein the right sequence of choices turns your character into a woman offscreen, apropos of nothing, and you get to lez out with your idol. The breadth of content here is great, but also unfortunately means - and this is my first complaint with the game - that certain girls will take a backseat to the plot in their own routes, so you won't be spending much quality time with them. The aforementioned ruins route, outside of a couple cosplay scenes and short epilogues, gives its girls nothing unique to do. One route seeing Ruri become the captain of the Nadesico B, due to plot reasons, literally will not give you a good ending with any girl except one of the new characters (who was curiously designed by Kia Asamiya, who penned the loose manga adaptation of the series), though it does give each girl a hefty amount of unique CGs and scenes with the protagonist at least. There are simply too many endings where, despite doing everything right, you either don't get the girl, or someone dies, or the protagonist does something stupid. Though perhaps it's a little silly to be asking for across-the-board happy endings from a series as irreverent as Nadesico.
The game's presentation is stunning. It looks great, with hundreds of CGs, some of which are such a huge resolution that you have to pan them to see the whole thing (these are usually the sexy cosplay ones). The game is fully voiced, meaning every single line of dialogue is spoken by the anime's original actors, and it's all newly recorded. The music from the show is right at home here, and never gets annoying. In fact, some of the tracks ended up being rather catchy. The OP, both the animation and song, is a total banger, and the ED isn't half bad either. I'm not sure how much I can blame this on the game's age, but the UI is pretty awful. The CG gallery doesn't use thumbnails, but asks you to pick a number from 1 to 205 with no indication of which number corresponds to which image. Replaying the game - which you will be doing a lot if you want to get all the endings/CGs - can occasionally be a chore as the game has a lengthy intro segment it uses to determine which route to set you on, and even then the routes themselves usually don't change all that much depending on your actions. There is a skip button, but it's a skip ALL button; as far as I could tell the game does not make any distinction between read and unread text, so you have to be on your toes constantly lest you miss some new scene.
Of particular note concerning the characters is the inclusion of Itsuki Kazama - who appears in episode 13 and is promptly squashed to death that same episode - as the main heroine (turns out she just teleported!). She shares a deep bond with the protagonist, who at the beginning of the game teleports onto the Nadesico's kitchen with no memory and a picture of Itsuki in his pocket. Each route will expand upon and reveal the protagonist's past with Itsuki, but - and this is something I had to get used to - each explanation completely contradicts all the others, so it's better to treat that aspect of the game as a "what if" scenario rather than trying and failing to connect all the dots. One of the game's gimmicks, because every visual novel needs to have something stupid, is called "Passionate Gaze," whereby your protagonist will lock eyes with a given girl and you need to gaze with the appropriate intensity - that is, not too weak and not too strong - in order to increase her affection for you. To do this, you move the cursor to a part of her body, usually the eyes (NOT the boobs!) and rapidly press A, B, and/or C. It is exceedingly difficult, and I dare say impossible, to do this perfectly without a turbo controller, and finding out a single girl has a single CG locked behind a perfect gaze event promptly convinced me to not even try to go for 100% completion.
All that said, it's a real pleasure to interact with the characters outside the context of the breakneck pace of the TV series. The huge cast and fast-moving plot meant a lot of characters fell by the wayside in the show, and thankfully even those with relatively fewer scenes in this game still feel nicely fleshed out and fun to talk to. One of my favorite bits is the ability to romance a girl who probably had two minutes of collective screentime in the show; in fact, she gets more content in the game than some of the more relevant characters. Compound that with the tying up of loose ends from the show and the ever-present mystery of who Itsuki is, and you have, much like the TV series, a game that checks pretty much every box and far exceeded my expectations.
One final thought: I was a little shocked to find that the game does not have a "canon" route leading up to the events of the film; it's more that the film follows an amalgamation of the four routes, though it's not hard to tell what information you need to take into the film. A novelization was released just a few months after this game that tells, I imagine, a canon, linear account of this period from Ruri's perspective, but it's incredibly hard to get ahold of for a reasonable price outside of Japan. Oh well!
The game has four main routes (plus an extra that's dumb and goes nowhere unless you're an obsessive Getter Robo fan), and roughly 20 different endings depending on the girl you go for, the choices for which differ depending on which route you find yourself on. These routes are not created equal, however, in terms of the content of their plots and narratives: one route that ties up the loose ends with the Mars ruins is heavy on hard sci-fi, while another route sees the protagonist setting up a ramen stand with Akito, Yurika, and Ruri (who, of course, gets two endings across two separate routes in this game). A special shout out goes to the idol management route, wherein the right sequence of choices turns your character into a woman offscreen, apropos of nothing, and you get to lez out with your idol. The breadth of content here is great, but also unfortunately means - and this is my first complaint with the game - that certain girls will take a backseat to the plot in their own routes, so you won't be spending much quality time with them. The aforementioned ruins route, outside of a couple cosplay scenes and short epilogues, gives its girls nothing unique to do. One route seeing Ruri become the captain of the Nadesico B, due to plot reasons, literally will not give you a good ending with any girl except one of the new characters (who was curiously designed by Kia Asamiya, who penned the loose manga adaptation of the series), though it does give each girl a hefty amount of unique CGs and scenes with the protagonist at least. There are simply too many endings where, despite doing everything right, you either don't get the girl, or someone dies, or the protagonist does something stupid. Though perhaps it's a little silly to be asking for across-the-board happy endings from a series as irreverent as Nadesico.
The game's presentation is stunning. It looks great, with hundreds of CGs, some of which are such a huge resolution that you have to pan them to see the whole thing (these are usually the sexy cosplay ones). The game is fully voiced, meaning every single line of dialogue is spoken by the anime's original actors, and it's all newly recorded. The music from the show is right at home here, and never gets annoying. In fact, some of the tracks ended up being rather catchy. The OP, both the animation and song, is a total banger, and the ED isn't half bad either. I'm not sure how much I can blame this on the game's age, but the UI is pretty awful. The CG gallery doesn't use thumbnails, but asks you to pick a number from 1 to 205 with no indication of which number corresponds to which image. Replaying the game - which you will be doing a lot if you want to get all the endings/CGs - can occasionally be a chore as the game has a lengthy intro segment it uses to determine which route to set you on, and even then the routes themselves usually don't change all that much depending on your actions. There is a skip button, but it's a skip ALL button; as far as I could tell the game does not make any distinction between read and unread text, so you have to be on your toes constantly lest you miss some new scene.
Of particular note concerning the characters is the inclusion of Itsuki Kazama - who appears in episode 13 and is promptly squashed to death that same episode - as the main heroine (turns out she just teleported!). She shares a deep bond with the protagonist, who at the beginning of the game teleports onto the Nadesico's kitchen with no memory and a picture of Itsuki in his pocket. Each route will expand upon and reveal the protagonist's past with Itsuki, but - and this is something I had to get used to - each explanation completely contradicts all the others, so it's better to treat that aspect of the game as a "what if" scenario rather than trying and failing to connect all the dots. One of the game's gimmicks, because every visual novel needs to have something stupid, is called "Passionate Gaze," whereby your protagonist will lock eyes with a given girl and you need to gaze with the appropriate intensity - that is, not too weak and not too strong - in order to increase her affection for you. To do this, you move the cursor to a part of her body, usually the eyes (NOT the boobs!) and rapidly press A, B, and/or C. It is exceedingly difficult, and I dare say impossible, to do this perfectly without a turbo controller, and finding out a single girl has a single CG locked behind a perfect gaze event promptly convinced me to not even try to go for 100% completion.
All that said, it's a real pleasure to interact with the characters outside the context of the breakneck pace of the TV series. The huge cast and fast-moving plot meant a lot of characters fell by the wayside in the show, and thankfully even those with relatively fewer scenes in this game still feel nicely fleshed out and fun to talk to. One of my favorite bits is the ability to romance a girl who probably had two minutes of collective screentime in the show; in fact, she gets more content in the game than some of the more relevant characters. Compound that with the tying up of loose ends from the show and the ever-present mystery of who Itsuki is, and you have, much like the TV series, a game that checks pretty much every box and far exceeded my expectations.
One final thought: I was a little shocked to find that the game does not have a "canon" route leading up to the events of the film; it's more that the film follows an amalgamation of the four routes, though it's not hard to tell what information you need to take into the film. A novelization was released just a few months after this game that tells, I imagine, a canon, linear account of this period from Ruri's perspective, but it's incredibly hard to get ahold of for a reasonable price outside of Japan. Oh well!