So... I started playing Ikemen Sengoku again. They released a new route that I was extremely curious about. Finally we are able to date Motonari Mouri, the pirate bloke who appeared in a few other routes as a villain. I was in the middle of another route but I decided to leave it just for Mouri. Sorry, Kennyo.
This blog hasn't recieved many updates lately, so I decided to share with you all my initial thoughts on Mouri's route! I think I'm almost halfway through it now, I would be further through if I didn't forget I was reading it for about a week.
(Obviously there are going to be spoilers down below!)
During the first chapter my thoughts were "What the hell is going on?" It turns out they added a new prologue that I forgot to read... The new prologue, or "Act Two", is for all of the new character routes, as well as some of the sequel routes they made for the original cast. I think it's set at least a year after the Act One, maybe? It's designed to work with all the routes, so it never explicitly states if the MC has fallen in love or not.
In the case of Mouri's route, the MC doesn't fall in love with three months, instead she discovers the power of friendship and decides to stay in the Sengoku period for the rest of her life. Her life is rather peaceful until someone attacks her home. It's been a month so I can't remember the details too quickly.
We're also introduced to some new characters in this act! Unfortunately I only remember about two of them. One of them is someone by the name of Keiji Maeda. He seems interesting, I suppose. The other is Kicho. In real history he's supposed to be Nobunaga's wife. Yuki Kaji's voice sounds a lot different when he voices Kicho. Most of the time I've heard him use a more high pitched tone, it's nice to hear him do something else. Kicho is also interesting. I hope he'll get a route soon.
Motonari Mouri caught my eye mainly because he is a villain. Why am I always drawn to villain characters? His seiyuu has also been catching my attention lately. Mouri's design isn't my favourite of the Ikemen Sengoku cast, but I like the bright colours of his outfit quite a lot.
In his route, he disguises himself as the merchant "Shojumaru" in order to infiltrate the Oda forces. That's when he meets our lovely heroine. She thinks "Wow, Shojumaru's such a nice guy!" Then, one day, she travels somewhere with Hideyoshi and Mitsunari. But oh no! something terrible happens (I can't remember exactly what, I think someone attacked a village), and she gets separated from her friends.
Our MC gets kidnapped and suddenly we're playing Kissed by the Baddest Bidder. There's a big auction where the heroine gets sold, and guess who purchases her? Shojumaru, obviously. She's then like "Yay, I was saved!", for about five seconds. It turns out that Shojumaru's actually the evil pirate Motonari Mouri, and he's also a bit of a wanker. He says "I own you now," and treats her like an object. But we all know that our heroine isn't a doormat, so she tries to fight back. But it doesn't work. Then Mouri buys her some lace choker to wear so that she knows she belongs to him.
Then they go back to the Oda, but Mouri's still pretending to be Shojumaru. The heroine tries to tell someone that he's actually the pirate they've been searching for all along, but her attempts always fail.
So far in the route, I haven't really come across any nice aspects of Mouri. There are a few glimpses of his "hidden dark past" here and there. Eventually we'll probably get a few flashbacks of some tragic backstory. The MC seems obsessed with finding out more about him, even though she claims to hate his guts. I find that this game's heroine is always like that with the more villainous characters. She always thinks "They can't be completely bad! There must be some reason why they act that way!" I don't know if that's a good thing or not. It could turn out badly for her one day.
We also find out something very interesting about Kicho. It seems that one day he found a wormhole and managed to travel to the future. Somehow he managed to get back to the Sengoku period, taking his new found knowledge with him. I feel like if someone travelled to our time from five hundred or so years ago, they'd probably die of disease rather quickly. There's loads of new things in the future their bodies aren't quite used to, but we're all vaccinated for. Not to mention that they'd probably be very lost. But it's nice that they are expanding on the wormhole business a bit more. In the other routes I played it was just there as an excuse to bring the MC together with the love interests. There was never much explaination behind it.
So far, this route is going fine for me. A lot of the plot points I've seen before in other games, but that's fine. I'll probably choose the Dramatic Ending like I always do. The romance obviously isn't for everyone, there's a lot of "you're my property" and "you're a useless woman" as well as other types of not so nice language in there, but I've read so much of it now that I don't really care.
I'll write more thoughts on the route after I've finished it, but for now - goodbye!
(I'm also playing Shakespeare's route in Ikemen Vampire, so I'll write a post about that soon!)
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