AIdol

[got_quiet]

Name: AIdol
Status: Complete
Site: https://ebihime.itch.io/aidol
Pairing: Gen with m/m and m/f side pairings
Description: A scattered plot largely about an AI Idol



AIdol is an odd little game with a main plot that feels relatively straight forward. The MC, Hana, is a high schooler so shy she is basically a shut in. She is obsessed with an AI idol named Aiko, and by chance is contacted by Aiko on a fan board. Aiko is dealing with some glitches, has lost her memory of her primary programmer, and is now desperately seeking him out. She enlists Hana's help for this, and the rest of the game is Hana trying to figure out what to do about the problem.

 

Along the way Hana runs into a large cast of secondary characters. There are 4 members of a PR department for the company that owns Aiko, there are three other Idols, four convention goers that Hana runs into who help her out. A barista, a rival programmer and his family, and Hana's mother. All of them have very lively personalities, and some of them have extensive plots all by themselves. Hana spends most of the game insisting that she is morbidly shy and experiencing socialization almost for the first time in her life, so it's kind of a relief that it felt like half the scenes in the game don't have her in it.

A lot of VNs don't spend much time PoV skipping and stick closely to the MC, but this one spends an extensive amount of time elsewhere. There are a number of scenes dedicated to an affair two people are having, for example, which doesn't have anything to do with Hana's mission until suddenly it does. And there is another sub plot about one of the other idols, Rei, who is blind, and how her family treats her because of it. As a consequence maybe of this decision there are not many choices to make in the game.



The pathing also does not seem to be very complex. There are technically 8 endings, though I think most of them are just bad ends, and maybe two are full ends, one if you're kind of cold to Aiko and the other if you've been friendly to her. As such I didn't feel like I had much control about how the story goes. There are no LIs or real branching paths that I could tell, so the replay value is mid. The second playthrough I picked a few different options and the result was that instead of meeting one pair of convention goers first I met the other pair. The thing is, both pairs of convention goers aren't really important to the story in any way. In fact, after spending maybe the first half of the game with them, the second half forgets them completely. The MC doesn't think about them and they don't help solve the central problem of getting Aiko to her programmer after they've sort of been nice to Hana for a little bit.

The plot is therefore kind of disjointed and maybe a little uneven, but it's not terrible, and even though it feels kind of scattered, with lots of characters interacting with each other in a way that is so tangential to the mission, and the mission as a result feeling like a minor part of the whole game, I liked the way the characters were written, and those asides didn't really feel like distractions while I was playing because I was honestly more interested in how the two guys having an affair were going to end up screwing themselves over, or if the naughty Idol was going to end up with the flustered intern, than I was if Hana was going to be able to help Aiko.

The ending of the game was pretty rough for me. For one, it again suffers from leaning on elements of the story in which the MC just had nothing to do with. The blind Idol, Rei, turns out to be an important part of the story, and the MC barely meets her for a moment in the entire game. The way she's treated by the narrative also irritated me somewhat. From the very beginning the game wants to make very sure you understand that she is blind. Every sentence in which she is the subject must remind you of this fact. If the game mentions something happening, it has to add that Rei can't see it. Because she is blind. She can't see, you see. I got very annoyed with this very quickly, and the way her parents treated her annoyed me even more. Granted, the parents are not supposed to be entirely sympathetic in the way that they treat Rei as incompetent and incapable, failing to help her develop a social life, refusing to let her have hobbies, insisting that they were unable to find any sort of educational solutions for her, and generally thinking that because she is blind she won't ever be able to have anything resembling a functional life. The father sort of kind of learns his lesson at the and, again through no real effort by the MC, but I still came away from the game largely thinking, man, what a piece of shit.

Another point that I wouldn't call a problem, but maybe a question that is raised within the game, is both the humanity of the AI being "rescued," and the damage that AI idols are doing to ideas of perfection, performance, and human worth. One of the idols resents Aiko because it's not possible for a real person to meet that ideal, and this puts unrealistic pressure on humans who are trying to compete. Another character feels that the AI is not worth as much as the well being of humans, and is willing to sabotage Aiko for the benefit of someone else. These are some interesting problems, particularly when the characters themselves get into arguments about how real Aiko is, and I wasn't entirely satisfied with the conclusion, which appears to be that Aiko is real, the MC's love for her is very important, and those that think otherwise are incorrect. Perhaps it is my luddite side coming out. I do like myself a good "what is personhood" question. It's just the way that question was posed in this context I don't know if I agreed with the answer.

In all other aspects the game is pretty good. The music is nice, and the art is decent. The text is a bit of a pain to read if you don't put on the darkest most high contrast option, which others have complained about, and even then it's not great, but at least at that point it's readable. Otherwise it's hot pink on white. And the controller integration was a lot better than it usually is for renpy games. There are a few problems, such as not being able to easily toggle options, but with so few options I found that was not as big of an issue as it would have otherwise been.

 

I'd give this game a pretty firm "it's fine." I didn't love it or hate it. It's not too short or too long. The story had interesting moments. The biggest issue was that I didn't find myself particularly moved by the MC's feelings, which were perhaps the least interesting in the cast.