Nestor's Cola

What to say? This game was phenomenal. A couple of years ago, everyone was talking about “Saya no Uta” and how badass it was. I installed it and discovered it was entirely in moon, and tried it out anyway- aside from it being entirely incomprehensible, it was also very gory. It was only later that I learned it was done in “typical Nitroplus style” where it’s dark, bloody, and … grim. So, encountering this a couple years ago, my first reaction was to uninstall, delete, and forget about it. What’s the point of playing a game you can’t understand? I kept it around, though. you’re always hearing about translation groups picking up projects and I figured if it really was badass, I could wait.

Bang, right out of the blue, a few days around the Christmastime, the TLWiki popped out with an announcement that they were at 70% translation. a couple days later (those fuckers work fast!) they had a 100% complete beta patch. So, I downloaded the patch and installed.

Story: Man, you can get a summary of the story over on wikipedia if you want to know what it’s about. Saya, though. Saya hit me the exact same way Kohaku did in Tsukihime. Beautiful, sweet, playful, and she’s hiding something. She’s dangerous.

I didn’t get a very strong feel for the other characters because they seemed to be incidental, only there to drive the story along. Of course, part of it is the main character’s disconnection with everything around him, but the other part of it is that they didn’t feel as tangible or as welll done as Saya. Even Yoh, who … well, I do feel bad for her, terribly bad for her. She and Oumi were the only two that stood out besides Saya. There’s a scene where Oumi goes to Fuminori’s house (and later, Yoh does the same thing) that really fleshes out their characters.

Menus: Navigating around inside of Saya no Uta is a breeze. I had a little beef with moving from “previously viewed text” to “current text”- it’s not as intuitive as I’d like, but it’s not really that big a deal.

Patch/ Patching:You did see the brilliant and blatant TLWiki link up there and got the patch from their site, right? ‘course you did! It’s a lot more straightforward than their Chaos;head patch- install the game, back up files, unzip patch, copy patched files in and overwrite. no one-touch patch here, it takes a very small level of technical expertise. Minor. Like Copy/ pasting files.

No downloadables, but you can have a cute Saya~

Editus; more to say:

I took a break from playing games and focused my attention on other things, but every once in a while someone would start a Saya image flood and since I’m weak, I ended up playing through Saya no Uta a second time.

Lovecraftian references aside (and I picked them out substantially faster the second time through) there was a question of … (semi-spoilers ahead) whether Saya understood morality. With the exception of Fuminori’s abandonment of common morality, social graces, and tact in the face of his … affliction, (I don’t believe) she had a lot of interaction with enough people to cement morals. The counter to that of course is that she did feel shy/ guilty about her eating habits, which says that there probably was at least a recognition of wrongdoing, though playing with the neighbor and her sadistic abuse of Yoh reflect otherwise. A shame it wasn’t explored further.

A second thing I’d like to mention is the … “bad” end. I didn’t particularly like that ending because it was very sad, but the second playthrough was a bit more rewarding. I mean, sure the other option was sort of a … melancholic end, with the spores and shit, but frankly, the sad end was tragic in a romantic way and Kouji was portrayed as … a hero, liberating Fuminori from Saya, (but I still couldn’t help but feel Kouji was a dick) so there’s enjoyment there too, despite how much it sucks.

On the verge of tears, Kouji continues to swing his pipe furiously. The monster’s slimy fluids fly through the air, joining with the blood already covering his face.
The creature extends one thin, trembling tentacle to touch Fuminori’s shoulder, then lovingly caresses his blood-stained cheek??
And then it stops moving.
Even in its final moments, the monster would not let go of Fuminori. It died joined with him.

Man, that’s intense.

Finally, I’d like to be the first to stand up and say that Saya no Uta gets a lot of bad PR. Just running through a few reviews via google, I see “disgusting”, “terrible”, “sick”, and shit like that come up a lot in relation to Saya no Uta. I happen to think that there is a specific kind of person that gets off on condemning things he doesn’t clearly understand, and Saya no uta is a shining example of something that’s easily misunderstood. However, if there’s an open mind and an attentive eye, I believe that anyone can see past the gore and violence and see the love story that exists beneath the… for lack of a better term, candy coating.