There are pros and cons to being turned into a demon slayer in the world of Kuroi Tsubasa. On the pro side, you get superhuman strength and speed, as well as the ability to control your emotions (although, going by the actions of the demon hunter in Kuroi Tsubasa, that last one may be exaggerated). On the con side, you are forced to see the negative emotions of other people as demons. Once they are visible to you, you have to fight them, and you also get to rock permanent purple hair and fangs. Those last two could switch to the pro column, depending on taste.
Kureha, the newly minted demon slayer in Kuroi Tsubasa, doesn’t really get a choice in the matter. She’s followed home from work by a devil, Blackwing, who then takes up residence in her favourite plushie. He performs some kind of semi-possession, and suddenly she’s purple-haired, superpowered and required to face a dark power who is chaining from person to person as part of some mysterious, nefarious plan. There’s no backing out of it: she’s now a demon hunter.
You might spend the first half of this visual novel wondering why Blackwing chose her. Aside from being an innocent – one of the stipulations of being a demon hunter – she’s a little wet. She is bullied at work by an overbearing colleague called Tanaka, she spends most of her free time watching Hatsune Miku-style virtual popstars, and she hasn’t got a friend to speak of. When trouble arrives at her door, she overthinks it. She’s hardly Ellen Ripley.
Still, Blackwing is committed, and there doesn’t seem to be any backing out. So begins a hero’s journey, where the hero learns to stand up for herself, master her new abilities, and follow the ball of thread to the evil power who has plans for our world.
In the past, I’ve talked in reviews about the worst gaming experiences being bad visual novels. If a visual novel’s writing is diabolical, you can’t take solace in good gameplay or solid combat. The writing is all you have. If that writing is then, say, 100,000 words all told, and ten hours in length, then you are locked into a verbal iron maiden, wriggling against the tedium, mistranslations and lack of meaningful gameplay. Some of my worst experiences on the Xbox have been reviewing visual novels.
We’d love to pull the rug and say ‘tricked you!’, but Kuroi Tsubasa is one of these experiences. All our energy has been drained by it. We’re a floppy, human-shaped sock.
To be fair to it, Kuroi Tsubasa isn’t the worst-written of all visual novels. The dialogue has the odd mistranslation and oddball sequence of sentences, but it does make sense. We only had to double back and reread a chat once or twice. It’s even got some charm to it, with a cast of characters who actually feel like different people, each teetering on the edge of sanity. We don’t know what’s in the water in the world of Kuroi Tsubasa, but everyone is the emblem of a particular psychosis, and we’re glad we don’t live anywhere near.
So, what’s the problem? The plot, mostly. Kuroi Tsubasa goes nowhere slowly. A game about demon hunting, a demonic pass-the-parcel, shouldn’t be this meandering and boring, yet it emphatically is.
A big part of that is digression and procrastination. The main character will not flipping get on with it. Kureha will do anything to get out of demon-hunting by laying in, visiting new friends and generally doing the most mundane actions. There’s a Buffy the Demon Slayer deep inside Kuroi Tsubasa, but the writers are more interested in Kureha complaining about work, wondering if other people like her, and generally daydreaming. Buffy the Procrastinator doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Then there’s the narration, which is flipping infuriating. Someone will say something weird, which will be followed by a strange social dance where the person who said something weird apologises, Kureha will wonder why they were so weird, probably apologising herself, and Blackwing – our narrator in this – will commentate on it all, making observations on both Kureha and the person she’s talking to. It feels like a football-style replay, as you analyse and re-watch the same moment through the lens of Kureha AND Blackwing, and boy does it get on our collective tits.
After the first four hours of playing Kuroi Tsubasa, we realised we had gone virtually nowhere. No demon had been defeated, not really; Kureha had gone on some patrols to no avail; and the same events happened on repeat. She got caught arriving late to work. Some friends were made, all with the possibility of them becoming an ally or a demon-vessel in the future. And the vague hint of a larger malevolent force whispered in the background.
There is, of course, very little in the gameplay to suddenly wake you up. There is the odd choice, but these divergent moments feel like they snap back into place pretty quickly (a single ending suggests this is true). The confrontations with the demon-possessed lose their threat and tension when you realise they’re linear. All you can do is tap A to progress, which is fine in better visual novels, but feels like pushing a rock up a hill in Kuroi Tsubasa.Â
You can’t deny the sheer quantity here. There’s a muchness about Kuroi Tsubasa, and clearly this has been loved and raised for years, which makes it so hard for us to slip a dagger between its ribs. The fifty songs are surprisingly varied and really rather well done, with a couple of earworms among them. But 100,000 words is far too much to lavish on something that could have been a short story, and ten hours is about eight too long. The art, too, feels like it’s spread too thin. Core characters like Kureha and Rurika are well drawn, but others feel incredibly rough, with oddly proportioned bodies and faces. Puka, Tanaka and Yamamii are all cursed by small-head syndrome.Â
Kuroi Tsubasa is a visual novel that has a great demon-hunting concept and no intention of delivering on it. The overall effect of Kuroi Tsubasa was like being trapped in a room with someone aggressively reading their fan fiction. It’s meandering, boring, and desperately needs an editor.
We were committed to completing it, but there’s no reason for you to take up that challenge. Dye your hair purple instead.
