"Are you ready for your free market lessons?"

John Locke gulps

Voltaire breathes heavily

Adam Smith nods nervously

Baruch Spinoza sighs

"Yes Zun from Touhou Project" they all say in unison

(This is a cross-post from my blog. https://saab900blog.blogspot.com/2022/05/hello-charlotte-and-conversations.html)

I don't understand why I love Hello Charlotte. Not in traditional terms, anyways.

Most of my favorite stories have elements that I can easily understand as to why I fell in love with those stories in the first place. Evangelion and loneliness, Fata Morgana and empathy, Subahibi and subjective reality, Omori and forgiveness. With Hello Charlotte, it's not that easy for me anymore, and I don't really understand why. And I don't really understand why I don't understand. It's not especially subtle with it's themes, I feel like I understand what etherane was trying to say, and what feelings she was trying to impart onto me. I feel like I mostly understand the narrative, in a way that left me satisfied. In every respect, I should feel satisfied moving on from this work. I can't though. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Why am I so fixated on this story?

I've been thinking, and I think it's because it's more than the sum of it's parts. I can't really think of any other reason. And I think the reason why I'm so confused on this game is that, in general writing terms, I don't really think it's that good. To say the narrative is loose would be an understatement - it feels less like a progression and more like a tangled ball of yarn, going in and out of various plot threads like trying to untie a knot. The characters are not especially affecting to me, nor was the ending, or the music, or art. And yet, when I think back on the time I spent with this series, an indescribable feeling bubbles up within me, a feeling I feel so rarely that it justifies me writing this more-of-a-rant-than-review thing.

Hello Charlotte is honest.

This story knows what it is. It knows that it's "narrative" is convoluted and messy and not really thought out, like, at all. It knows the characters are mostly run-of-the-mill Tumblr-esque RPG Maker fanfare. It knows the music can be grating, and the gameplay boring and frustrating, and that it kinda seems like it thinks it's smarter than it actually is. And it all ties back to what a story is. Should a story need to be enjoyable to be good? Should a story need to be tightly written to be considered worth the time investment? It's typical critique ideations like these that I come back to time and time again. I've tried and tried to unspin this tangled yarn of what a good story is. I still don't know - no one does really - but for me, I think the conclusion that I feel is right is that a story is different for every story. Some stories are lectures. Other stories are invitations. Every author and the stories they create interact differently with the audience, and I think that, above all, Hello Charlotte is a conversation.

Of course, the individual is going to interact with these stories in different ways. Just because I felt my experience with Hello Charlotte was a heartfelt conversation with the author doesn't mean that others feel that it might be a self-important lecture, or an ignorant invitation to some fairytale utopia that doesn't exist. Those are just as valid.

To me, Hello Charlotte was an honest, back and forth talk with etherane. It was a conversation about trauma, about the cyclical nature of stories, about beginnings and endings. Saying that a story is personal is a copout in my eyes - every story is personal to the author - but to Hello Charlotte, it felt less personal and more person. I felt like I met part of the author through this story, their faults, their strengths, their imperfections. Which isn't to say I feel like I met the individual, because that's silly - all I'm saying is that I feel like I was able to feel what they were feeling, or at least a part of what they were feeling at some point in their life, if at least for a brief moment.

Hello Charlotte is a work I can't really describe with words. All I can say is that, I've never experienced a work that feels this authorially oriented, rather than audience oriented, if that makes sense. It feels like truly delving into the mind of someone else, and connecting with that mind. Even if that's fake, even if that's silly, I think that's what this story is: a conversation, ending in connection.

Gouyoku Ibun, the 17.5th Touhou and the first sidescroller in the series. Community had assigned it so many red flags during the troubled development phase, the game finally crawls past the release date.... And it turns out to be such a unique startling thing I'm astonished how special it's shaping up to me.

Here, behind the usual touhou mysticism hides another modern fable that denounces greed as the biggest threat to environmentalism, but its tale is optimistic and uplifting in resolution. Brash dialogue and PoV heavy plot structure make up story layers that are such a delight to peel, building up the timeline of events with many moving parts and personalities that bounce off each other in a way that's full of energy and style. I seriously envy people that happen to go in this game unspoiled, there are such surprises along the way that ensure no touhou fan would be left feeling indifferent.

And on the other side of increasingly shiny coin is the culmination of over 15 years of Tasofro's experience of creating games where girls shoot A LOT of bullets and let you have elegant tools to JUNK them. Balancing between cautious evasion with chip potshots and rabid flurries of attacks isn't much unlike other sidescrollers, but all the haphazard mobility you have put against swarms of projectiles on screen leads to such a unique moment-to-moment dynamic, there's simply nothing else that plays like it. Coupled with how different playable characters feel – it's nearly euphoric. These playables share no identical moves or tools, their styles are different, their mobility is different, their resource management is different, their meters work differently... They shouldn't work all in the same game, but they do, and they fight the same enemies on the same stages. Where Kanako has to gallantly float around the field and invoke crushing forces of nature, Murasa haphazardly grapples herself all over the screen and setups air juggle combos. The mad playstyle distinction becomes the very means of character expression, it truly makes you feel like a wind goddess or a ship ghost with murderous tendencies, one could say.

And I ain't even gonna fully touch on the artstyle or music, how much it's doing with this few pixels and what a cool vibe the remixes of classic themes are. Gouyouku Ibun is such a sensation for me and I wish others get even a fraction of emotions I experienced. Maybe wait until the english patch is cooked to completion, but otherwise even if you're even tangetially interested in Touhou, you should pay attention to this game, you're in for a threat.