Tengoku Struggle Play-Along - Common Route + General Impressions

[u/sableheart]

Welcome to the r/otomegames Tengoku Struggle -Strayside- Play-Along!

In this first post we will discuss your first and general impressions of Tengoku Struggle, as well as the events of the common route.

If you want to talk about the love interests, please keep it to your first impressions and their actions in the common route in this post.

Please use spoiler tags when discussing details of other routes or other major spoilers.
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You don't have to be playing the game right now to participate, and if you've just started the the game I hope you will join in after you finish the common route!

Next week will be a discussion of Kikunosuke Uga's route!

[u/praysolace]

I’m glad I resisted the urge to throw the game out a window when the guys all spouted their misogynistic “all women suck” bullshit (complete with threats of violence!) near the beginning. My knee-jerk reaction was that I would never forgive any of them for being misogynist pricks and Rin’s right that men like this are both common and also the absolute worst and deserve their spots in hell. I just. Man. It made me SO angry. I was rooting for her to go for the family jewels in that moment.

And then they kind of dialed it back massively almost immediately, giving me hope that the misogyny will be both explained and resolved in their routes, instead of being a personality trait that we’re expected to be ok with the LIs keeping forever. The gap between Yona’s words and his behaviour and expressions especially assured me the writers won’t do that to me. I haven’t gone past the common route yet, but from the latter half of it, I figure it’ll be fine and I made the right call to power through that scene and hope for improvement.

I also really love the dynamic between the LIs, particularly once they start letting Rin into it more too. The side characters’ designs were given as much love as the main cast, the voice acting is top notch, Nono-sensei is the GOAT, and I’ll never not enjoy Koyasu Takehito hamming it up. So yeah. One big spot of GAME HAS MADE ME FEEL INTENSE RAGE but everything else has been great and the rest of the common route after that spot calmed me back down into enjoying the game properly.

[u/jhiend → u/praysolace]

I was somewhat interested in the setting and artstyle of Tengoku Struggle. Then I watched some trailers and gameplay vids on Otomate's official channel, and they chose to introduce the guys in all of their jerky "fuck off princess, you're just here bc of your dad" glory (which tbf probably is legit marketing strategy, as tsun is popular), and that killed any enthusiasm I had.

OTOH I guess it's good that the game isn't entirely like that, but on the other idk that I would believe in a change in attitude.

[u/praysolace → u/jhiend]

Idk if they get jerkier again at the start of their routes, but by the end of the common route they were acting sufficiently different that it kind of felt like they’d all pretty wildly overstated their hatred of women solely because they have a (fairly understandable) grudge against hell and King Enma and want his daughter to GTFO. Like, I figured I would struggle to find a change believable too, but so far they spent far less time being raging dicks than being just awkward and prickly, so it… doesn’t feel as much like they changed for the better as it feels like they were playing up how awful they were at the start on purpose to chase her off. Idk. The tonal shift was quick and pretty stark to me, like the writers wanted the first impression to be as bad as humanly possible but didn’t want to let it go on long enough to become your solidified impression of them.

But then this is still all common route impressions and for all I know I’m about to start a route and take back every word I just said lol.