Haughty and greedy, with no talent but for destruction; 

I must be a wolf.

The unusual one

The story begins on a cold November morning, with Aoko still in bed at 8 o’clock because it was her school’s anniversary, and she only got into bed three hours before. 

Unfortunately for her, the phone starts ringing… this part is in the demo, so I’ll jump straight to after the opening scene.

A day in her life

Aoko arrives at school, which is completely devoid of students. She heads straight for the office to meet her teacher Mr Yamashiro, a man in his mid-twenties. 

“Ah, good morning Miss Aozaki. You’ve heard all about it, yes?”

“I have, an hour ago at my home. And absolutely nothing about this whole business beforehand.”

“Ahh. You seem to be in quite the bad mood today, as well.”

“It’s just in your imagination, sir. There isn’t anything special about today.”

“I see. I hope that’s all it is, but please, don’t treat him that badly. To be honest, we don’t really know how to handle this, either.”

“About that, sir. I haven’t heard any details about this case yet.”

“Mmn, didn’t you hear it over the phone?”

“Just that I was giving an introduction to a transfer student. It was an explanation with no rhyme or reason.”

Yamashiro tells her that the new student, Soujuurou, is rather ‘off’ in more ways than one, and they want someone from the same age group to help him get to know the school. Aoko gets pretty annoyed about the teachers pushing their responsibilities onto the students, but is more concerned about how exactly he is ‘off’.

Aoko asks him why they have chosen her for this. Yamashiro tells her it’s, more or less, because she’s a really nice person, and gets a death glare for it.

The perspective switches to Soujuurou, who has been waiting for an hour in the meeting room, just listening to the sound of the rain and feeling slightly happy that there is still one thing in common between his home and this ‘alien world’. 

We go back to Aoko who, in contrast with the patiently waiting Soujuurou, is very angry. From a report, she found out that Soujuurou has lived his whole life in the mountains, in a place without even electricity. 

“Talk about being hopelessly cut off! We’re talking about before the war here! Who’s he supposed to be, Robinson…?”

She just cannot imagine the thought process of a person who’s been living cut off from modern society like that. Yamashiro tells her that the first thing he got shocked by was the phone. ‘Wow, a phone’s really useful, huh,’ says he. And he has heard of schools before, but never actually been to one until now. “It felt like talking to, well, talking to some small animal who doesn’t understand you.”

Aoko understands now why the teachers had given up, and she wanted to as well, but she’s too proud to back down. 

“Um, Miss Aozaki? I do trust you, but I’ll make sure, just in case. Just, well, be kind to him, please. Could you perhaps make a smile?”

“I’m not good at making myself smile. Not that I’m not trying.”

“Ah, I understand, that’s good… really, that’s great. To know that even you have things you’re not good at…”

Aoko gets more and more annoyed by the way Yamashiro keeps egging her on to be ‘nice’, and starts feeling more and more like Soujuurou is an obstacle or enemy she needed to defeat. That Soujuurou has robbed her of her beauty sleep didn’t help.

They meet. And for the first time, Soujuurou realised that it was possible for someone to lose the sense of time.

Aoko was slightly surprised for an instant, for some unknown reason. Soujuurou appeared exactly as she had been told, but she feels that there is something she could not accept completely.

Soujuurou was slightly surprised as well, for a clear reason, though he did not know how to put it correctly into words, and so left the answer blank. But he was sure that, during this moment, he felt the touch of something like fate.

***

I will stop here for now. From now on, I’ll try to do these play sessions in shorter sections so I can update more regularly. To be honest, I haven’t played Mahoyo since the last time I posted here (so exactly one month ago) and I really, really want to make time to play this, even if I have to slow down work on Neko slightly.

On another note, it goes without saying at this point, but this really is a very pretty game, even more so than it appeared from the demo. Many scene look at first like they are individually done CGI, and they end up being sprites on a scrolling background. 

Finally, I might skip or at least CliffNote some of the less meaningful sections, most likely combining several in one post. I do want to get to the good stuff ASAP. ^^;;