SWAN SONG

it wasn't just a local disaster but a world wide thing. Hence why despite how much time passed no signs of rescue crews and such appeared.

I really don't think Aroe has the capacity to consent, and that having sex with her would be almost the equivalent of pedophilia.

Yes, the story starts out in the shitter and goes downhill. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. It holds suspense till the end, but the problem is that in the end it can't capitalize on that suspense. It's overwhelmed by itself and just gives up. It's like the depressing atmosphere got to the writer and he just said "screw it".

Normal ending holds a lot of drama and suspense... and then another earthquake comes and kill everybody. The end. That's it. Fingers snapped. The cheapest way out. I'll give it this though: final scene at the church kind of moved me.

Good end? It's actually worse. We get a tiny bit of revelation from Taeko, but the ending is totally unearned. They captured Kuwagata and suddenly everything turned from a hellfire bloodbath into sunshine and (sun)flowers? Bullshit. I call bullshit.

Characters also have some problems.
Aroe (shouldn't her name be translated as "Aloe"? You know, like the flower?) is totally useless.
At first she's a mystery box. Mystery boxes are good in stories. She's autistic. Great. You have an interesting character. Let's see where you go with her.
...they go nowhere. She just runs around aimlessly. She does nothing to the plot outside of being a lazy "we need to find her" plot device. Autism is just a excuse to have her act stupid. Scenes of her playing cards for instance, do nothing but prolong playtime.
We get no information on her past, her family. Nothing. Zero character development throughout... blah, I can even say she takes a step backwards after loosing her book.
Speaking of the book, Yuka doesn't read the entirety of what was written in it. Go to hell. Someone linked a page that looks like the events of the last 6 days before the earthquake from the perspective of Aroe's "sister", but I can't read Japanese, and Google translate fails me. In any case, this looks like something that should be included in the game, because as it stands Aroe turned from the most interesting character at the start, to the least interesting by the end.

Tsukasa is bland. He doesn't move an inch as far as character development goes, always being calm. His daddy issues don't really get resolved. Most importantly, the Piano subplot remains totally forgotten by the end. Inexcusable, since a lot of other subplots revolve around this one.

Yuka is almost exactly like Tsukasa. Her internal conflicts don't get resolved at all. In the good ending, she talks to her inner child and does shit to calm her. In fact, she makes it worse. Her sickness is inconsequential. She can die at any moment from stress. That's why she decided to shut of her mental emotions and just put on a happy act. After Tsukasa's concert she felt like she had nothing left. Why did she keep on living then? And she survived an earthquake that killed 90% of the people in the city... Nothing changes about her for the positive by the end in both endings. She's just as worthless as she started out.

Tanomura and Hibari are... OK. Tanomura is very cool throughout, but I also think he doesn't get enough character development, and the fact that he just mentally gives up by the end in the normal ending doesn't fit him.
Hibari has a little development, but overall feels like a sidekick character.

Kuwagata. Oooohhhh... man.
He does a complete 180 after getting hit on the head a few times too much. Yes, head trauma and an extreme situation combined with a frail mind can create bizarre shit, but lets say that a transformation can occur given the circumstances.
...he turns the school into a dictator owned whorehouse!!! WTF!!! And everyone in the administration department (minus Tanomura) agreed on this? No one opposed? They all decided to match into battle?
Ooohhh, but wait. After they caught Kuwagata in the Church everything turned back to normal. All those people in the Vigilante Corps just willingly decided to stop murdering and raping.
I could swallow one transformation, but his these characters have a band of mindless sheep behind them that have no will of their own and will do as they are told? A lot of people would in a situation like this, but not all and definitely not to the point of MASS RAPE AND MURDER!
And going back to Kuwagata - in the 2nd part the way he acts and the things he said are opposites, and I don't understand that. He's talking about making a world with rules and clear cut good and evil, but he huimself breaks all the rules, and makes up new ones as he sees fit based on the situation, and clearly cannot distinguish between good and evil in the most basic concept - if it hurts someone else, it's evil.

I could keep on talking about other characters, but I already have enough. I'll point out plot holes instead:
- What happened to the world? We know that the surrounding cities also got destroyed, and at least one has managed to organize survivors in a group. What about the rest?
- The guy that informed Taeko about the quake. Who is he? How did he have the information he had? What happened to him after the earthquake? Seriously, this is a GIANT plot hole.
- Why was the sky cloudy for 3 months straight, and snow kept piling up? Seriously, they where between mountains, slow should pile up much, much more then it did if it kept slowing this long. What's more, I doubt most buildings had slow removed from their roofs, and buildings can collapse because of the weight of the slow during winter! I'm not joking. The buildings where damaged, so they should collapse more so.
- Why did the 2nd earthquake suddenly show the sky and bring a late spring? Symbolism?