White Album

White Album ended up on my to-play list after an emotional journey through To Heart - the impeccable distance between Akari and Hiroyuki, the genre-defining tears of Multi's story, and the amazing English of Lemmy led me to penciling another Aquaplus work (which I originally cluelessly noted as 'wait I thought White Album was Leaf? who is Aquaplus [Leaf's worksafe brand, or vice versa]') into the 2025 bingo board.

Knowing only that White Album means - in the kindest form - dramatic suffering, I coinflipped into White Album 1 (which seems to be the less popularly-acclaimed) due to a significantly smaller How Long To Beat, and ended up picking the PS3 copy for an impressive, possibly Amazon-bot-glitching price of 400y (though without dusting off my capture card, I was left taking pictures of my TV from my position on the floor - pardon the quality).

15 hours later, I have successfully failed at what can, in bad faith, be called Cheat On Your Girlfriend Simulator by completing the Yuki Route... I certainly have mixed feelings! (Though perhaps different than that of the protagonist.)

White Album, for a game that frames itself around starting you with a girlfriend in college, and then introducing you to your girlfriend's coworker, your girlfriend's manager, your girlfriend's mutual childhood friend, your girlfriend's upperclassman, and a random twintail high schooler who doesn't look her age, doesn't really center itself around manners of faithfulness or temptation (at least not when on the straight-and-narrow route) - and I don't particularly think that it would be instantly more compelling if it did!

Instead, show business (idol business?) takes center stage here, to the palpable exhaustion of my still-burned-out-from-years-of-Starlight-Stage mind.

You find yourself a Random Dude (named Touya) alongside Yuki, your girlfriend and rising pop star, who, at first slowly, and later quickly, is pulled away from you by the nature of her industry and of... well, being someone with a goal and the means to achieve it.

A lot of the narrative centers on how you (someone who seems to hold an endless amount of show-biz-related part-time-jobs) feel somewhere between unworthy and unable to stand alongside Yuki - are you holding her back? Is she straining herself for you? Is your relationship - built on generic platitudes and shared high school memories - really so important that it's worth maintaining over a once-in-a-lifetime career?

And this is reasonably compelling! The midpoint of Yuki's arc has a really sharp moment where Yuki's manager, Yayoi, uses her body as a bribe to convince you to back off of your girlfriend; Yayoi doesn't care if you really come onto her or not, she doesn't care what happens to her, she only has Yuki's career in mind.

Yayoi calls this single-minded grindset of hers 'a difference in values (from Touya)' - a sharp arrow from someone who has a vision they clearly believe in and value possibly higher than their own self.

It's a strong enough moment that it got me to waver where the rest of the game hadn't - it made me legitimately question if I really should be giving Yuki more space at a crucial moment in her career. Does it really have to be me around for Yuki? Wouldn't someone more suited to the industry be better? If she's happy and successful, isn't that enough?

But ultimately I feel the game design, although it starts in sync with the narrative, ultimately lets down the narrative (as well as feeling like an overall drag).

White Album consists of about four months of picking who you wish to spend time with each day, with each meeting consisting of either a more meaty event, or some small talk that improves your conversational abilities.

The small talk, especially in the middle parts of the game, is quite interestingly built - it's clearly responsive to larger story beats, even across characters, and it's a fun way to tease little bits of personality out of everyone (for example, Haruka, the childhood friend, enjoys neutral answers when it comes to leading questions like 'do you prefer me fashionable or plain?').

And my favorite part of the design is during points in the story where you really want to talk to your girlfriend, but she just never seems to show up! It's a little bit where you can assign personality to natural RNG (and/or design).

But contrary to how the trunk fades away as you find yourself on any route in a traditional VN, the gaps between story in White Album only feel more apparent (and not in an organic way) with this system design.

Multiple times in Yuki's route there are gaps of 1 or even 2 weeks between major story events - cliffhangers where you find yourself in a position where, realistically, you'd be finding some way to take immediate action. Times where you'd want to consult friends, do some soul searching, chase after Yuki at any cost as she's pulled away from you... and yet you're stuck viewing the same repeated tutoring event for Mana.

(I am a little bitter that, if you are a good boy who attends Mana's Friday tutoring sessions every week, you will run out of unique tutoring events by about the two-thirds mark.)

And in the end I found Yuki's story to not end that satisfyingly - the dramatic pull in the final month is Yuki getting NTR-coded by the Sketchy Virtuoso producing her for the upcoming American Idol competition (colloquially), as she stays over at the office more and more, his touch getting more physical, her voicemails to you (1990s, natch) more incoherently anxious.

There's a strong undercurrent of you trying to find a way to do something for her, to reassure her - and moreover yourself - that you're there for her. Yet the game gives you no meaningful way to do so - no schedule-sink where you could improve yourself or find more ins into the industry.

So instead you pass the time going to your upperclassman friend and saying 'wow! sure is a cold winter this year' until Yuki, on the eve of the competition, calls, inconsolable and begging to see you, at which point you sprint to her apartment, the eyes of the paparazzi be damned.

Then, in short, the two of you bonk for the first time, and it fixes all your brain chemicals. Suddenly Yuki's empty apartment feels warm and full of her spirit, the two of you gain an understanding that your bond is unbreakable and you'll always be there for each other, showing each other sides of yourself that the TV cameras aren't able to capture. (I elide how much the writing likes mentioning CRTs when referring to Yuki's public image)

She wins 2nd place in American Idol and you immediately sneak into a side entrance of the studio (with permission) and greet Yuki, who calls out to you by name as the cameras roll.

One surprising undertone in Yuki's arc is that you spend nearly zero time trying to hide your casual time with other girls from Yuki, and a large amount of time trying to hide the fact from the public that you are dating an idol (for obvious idol reasons).

And yet, the climax of Yuki's story just decides that... this doesn't matter? Did it ever matter? Was it never clear you two were dating from how you go around school together on the days she attends, or that you go on dates on the town, or that you randomly stop Yuki in the TV building and pick small talk options like 'do you remember why we went out?'.

It's all just so confusing to me.

I do praise White Album for letting me play what is a relatively honest first play without forcing me to go 100% on one character's route to see her ending.

I chose to stick by Yuki, a mixture of inertia ('well, I mean, I don't Not want to go out with her') and hard-to-quantify purpose ('she has a lot of faith in me, and I feel right repaying it to her'), but also spent significant amounts of time with Mana - a character who is simultaneously coded as 'overachieving honor student who feels neglected by her absent family' and 'we need The Small One' - attempting to act as a good role model in her life without stepping over the line.

Though even without any feelings from the main character, the scarf Mana knitted for Valentine's Day may indicate something... in a notable bit of organic gameplay, Mana called me at night and asked if I was free tomorrow, to which I responded 'yes', and only after I hung up did I realize it was Feburary 13th and I very much definitely needed to see Yuki on that day.

(And the game's small talk allowed me to chat with Mana about how I found her present on my doorstep when I got home that night!)

I tried to work up the effort to run through White Album's repetitive small talk a second time to explore Mana's route, to see what sort of angle it gives her when paid more attention... but I found my enthusiasm just a little lacking, so here's this review.

If I had to pick a second route, I might try chasing after Misaki, who is not only a upperclassman at school but your male best friend's crush - which is to say, a spectacular amount of heartbreaking that I feel like *must* result in an exceptionally different gameplay tone.

After all, I am conscious that playing just the straight-forward (though still hardly devoted) route in White Album feels like I'm missing a lot of the game's surface, and I'd like to see what the writing thinks of letting drifting apart happen, whether naturally or dramatically... but maybe that's a story for another time - or White Album 2.

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