Yeah, the exclamation point is necessary, and so are the two t's.
Quartett! is a relatively unknown visual novel produced Littlewitch and translated into English by AstCd2 in early 2011. When I say "relatively unknown", I mean not even Akinator knows what this VN is. So why should you care? Because this is a short, lighthearted tale that demonstrates what the VN medium can do when the visual aspect is cranked up to 11.
Yeah baby, you like those line breaks don't you?
[HEADING=3]Characters[/HEADING]
Phill Junhers
Phill is your protagonist, he's not a deconstruction of what it means to be a good protagonist or anything like Taichi in Cross Channel, he's just a likeable guy that doesn't do anything horrendously stupid. He does however, manage to get punched in the face. A lot.
FALCON PUNCH
At least she didn't go Johnny Cage on him. Ow.
SHORYUKEN
As you can see, the art style is very expressive.
Phill doesn't grow much as a character over the course of the story, he's a kind and understanding person at the start and he's a kind and understanding person at the end. That isn't to say he's not entertaining, it's just you're not going to see growth like Shirou's in him. He is extremely adept at pissing off Charlotte.
Charlotte Francia
The tsundere. Phill has an...interesting way of meeting her, crashing into her on a mad dash to get to school and accidentally touching her breasts not once, but twice. Those breasts are quite small by the way, because she's only 136 cm tall, or 4 foot 6 inches. Phill decides to make a point of her height disadvantage often, pissing her off greatly.
Her path mainly deals with A) Warming up to Phill and B) Trying to impress her mentor. Seriously though, she has probably damaged Phill's face more than Tomoyo has damaged Sunohara's in Clannad.
Juni Argiano
The energetic airhead. She meets Phill after a plan by Charlotte designed to destroy his face backfires, greatly. She's got a twin sister (no threesomes, sorry) called May that is overprotective of Juni, and like Charlotte, she enjoys hitting Phill. As seen below, Juni is a lightweight.
May and Charlotte have this little rivalry thing going, the details of which are revealed in Charlotte's path. Her path mainly deals with her confidence and being compared to her sister.
Li Shuhua
The
Her path mostly deals with her timidness and her grandfather's over protectiveness and abuse. Her grandfather succeeds at being antagonizing and her brother (pictured above) does a decent job of putting out the "mysterious badass" vibe.
The side characters are charming, but because this is a short visual novel they are never really explained all that well. Hans and Signina are standouts.
White line text breaks are for chumps, alice blue is where it's at.
[HEADING=3]Story[/HEADING]
The plot revolves around a concert that is held on the 17th of March, where 24 groups of quartets play for prestige and almost guaranteed acceptance in to any orchestra the musicians choose. Earlier, on Christmas eve, Phill is playing violin at Christmas mass. He catches the eye of a lecturer from the Magnolia Conservatorium. The conservatorium organizes the concert on the 17th of March, and Phill is invited to join the conservatorium for his performance. He is assigned to be apart of a quartet made up of himself and the 3 heroines above, one of which becomes his love interest based on your choices.
There is a particularly good twist late in the story. Not Ever17 caliber in the slightest, but it certainly is effective at surprising you. It won't be too long until you reach it though. The first time I played it took me about 3 and a half hours to finsh. Using the skip function from the brilliant interface I managed to complete the other two routes in 3 more hours to get 100% completion.
The lighthearted slice of life style in the early parts is good enough, and the emotions are good too, but you aren't going to bawwing like you did when you played Planetarian or Kanon or...any Key game really, and certainly not like
Bow Chicka Wow Wow
[HEADING=3]Ero[/HEADING]
It could be worse. The scenes themselves are not horribly written, but the reasons for why they are included are. A reverse Tsukihime, if you will. This is where some slice of life padding earlier in the game could have come in handy, to provide context and make it feel like sex an important part of the story. Then again, there's only one VN I've seen that actually pulls off decent sex writing and decent build up to the actual sex, in most VN's you either get one or the other, and this is no exception. It's Ero for the sake of Ero. There are two scenes for each heroine.
So if Quartett! is barely a passing grade in the story department, then why is it worth playing?
Seriously, how do you hide text in images? BBcode hurts my brain
[HEADING=3]Art & Music[/HEADING]
As you may have noticed
Scratches all down my back to keep me right on
This means that the story is presented in a manga style that keeps things fresh instead of static sprites that repeat the same motions. The art itself is beautiful, with watercolors and thin lines that many VN's can't match today. The art style allows for some ridiculous poses and proportions, and adds to the game's lighthearted nature.
As expected for a game centering around music the soundtrack is fantastic. It's not just limited to orchestras either, although they certainly have that in spades. There's perfectly good parts of the soundtrack that are funky, jazzy, and just fun to listen to.
This would probably be a good introductory VN like Katawa Shoujo, Yume Miru Kusuri, or Planetarian.
[HEADING=3]Conclusion[/HEADING]
This is one of my favorite visual novels because of the way its art and presentation breaks the standard VN traditions with great success. It's certainly a story driven game more than a character driven one, but the characters are charming enough even if we don't really get to see into their psyche. Even if you're not a big fan of the visual novel medium it has wonderful art and is a short time investment, so I doubt you'll regret it. For those that do enjoy visual novels however, it's a change of pace and completely different from anything else out there, so it's well worth having a place for it on your reading list...or backlog...
