Amazing Grace -What color is your attribute?- Steam Charts & Stats

GOTY 2024

Yune-chan kawaii!

Amazing Grace squanders a fairly decent premise with an ending so awful and drawn-out that it makes Kazuki Fumi seem short-winded. The story begins with protagonist Shuu, with a foggy mind, seeing glimpses of a girl singing near a lake. He then awakes in late November in a dorm room with two girls (one of whom is the girl from the lake), having lost all his memories. They introduce him to the new environment he finds himself in, a European-style town surrounded by a wall called the Aurora that is said to have protected the town from the Apocalypse 101 years ago, and which Shuu seemingly crossed. Shuu enrolls in the town's only high school, St. Aria Academy, which has a unique curriculum focused only on the arts, and gradually befriends other students and learns how the town differs from the world he may have come from. Although I said Amazing Grace has a decent premise, this early section of the story is certainly not without faults. It has many of the same annoying comedy tropes that almost every moege or moege-adjacent VN has, such as accidentally perverted moments, other characters calling the protagonist a pervert for seemingly no reason, and characters with absurdly exaggerated personality traits. From what I've seen, something like Kirie's diaper secret prank revenge sequence is at least unique, but it was so painfully unfunny that its uniqueness didn't really mean much. After that, we unfortunately get into spoiler territory, but these events make up the meat of the story. [spoiler]On Christmas Day (on which the school's cultural festival also occurs), massive explosions go off at the school, the town market, and the town's communal Christmas tree, causing fires with enough strength to destroy the whole town. During these explosions, Shuu, with his friends Yune and Youji, hurriedly searches the town for his other friends. When it seems like all hope is lost, Yune makes a prayer to save everyone, and, miraculously, because she and Shuu ate magical apples on December 2, they travel to a realm in which Yune can send Shuu back in time to the 2nd, while he retains his memories and she does not. Most of the story, then, is Shuu using this power to investigate culprits.[/spoiler] Shuu is sometimes so bad at working towards his main goal, though, that it seems like the only way he could possibly be so stupid is that the authors needed him to miss obvious things in order to save them for that aforementioned drawn-out ending. [spoiler]For example, that Shuu focuses more on the romanceable heroines than any other characters seems to be the case only to check the moege/galge boxes rather than it making the most sense for the story. In fact, because Shuu spends almost no time with the non-heroine characters, he misses obvious suspects behind the Christmas explosions.[/spoiler] [spoiler]Do the authors really think they can look me in the face and act like Sister Lily disappearing right before the explosions start, when she previously said she was going to meet Shuu, is not suspicious? Why does Gidou get all of half a dozen scenes before his side route ends? The only possible explanation is that his route needed to be like that to conceal the fact that he was the culprit; if Shuu spent more than five fucking hours with him, it would have been too obvious to ignore. Why does Shuu take so long to investigate the graffiti that appears at the same time each loop? How does it take Shuu so fucking long to realize that there's no writing anywhere in town? I think it would be pretty striking to see a place with absolutely NO writing![/spoiler] Well, it's because the authors had to save that for the big reveal during the finale, what else?! In the end, while I found the moment-to-moment events of the character routes interesting, especially the longer heroine routes that have some bigger reveals, the foundation of Amazing Grace's mystery is not built on concrete, but toothpicks. And that's not to mention the fucking god-awful ending sequence. It was two hours of suffering. There's asspull after asspull after asspull to, in the clumsiest way possible, explain the information about the truth behind the mystery—information that, if Shuu wasn't fucking incompetent, he could have found much, much earlier. There's a prattling monologue from Every. Single. Character. explaining their motivations, how the culprit needs to get over themself, and their actions behind the scenes that somehow Shuu never discovered and/or the characters never revealed to him even when he explained that he knew about the situation they were in. And, to top it all off, there's a cloying final confession of love between Shuu and one of the heroines, and a sudden final conflict that is almost immediately resolved and only serves to segue into more backstory, just in case the ending wasn't long enough already. Overall, the biggest praise I can give to Amazing Grace is that, if nothing else, it has the honor of being the most frustrating visual novel I've ever read. I know I've been highly, highly critical of it for most of my review, but I really did enjoy most of my time with it, and was hovering around a 7/10 for most of its runtime. It was only the ending that destroyed all of the goodwill I had for it, as the house of cards that the authors had erected up to that point came crashing down. 4/10 EDIT: I was thinking about this VN more and can't believe I forgot to mention how it handles art and the nature of the town. [spoiler]Shuu and the story itself never stop to question the undoubtedly fascist (especially since it was conceptualized by a Japanese person, a German, and an Italian in the 1940s) ideology behind the town, what with the creating an illiterate, isolated society in order to promote the creation of classical art. The whole idea has "Retvrn to Tradition" written all over it. In fact, the story even seems to tacitly accept that the town is a fundamentally good idea, just with major flaws. Shuu goes on immersion-breaking, out-of-character rants throwing out the same tired criticisms of modern art when the topic is brought up.[/spoiler] It's especially surprising since the story also suggests that it's wrong that Yune's singing is not as accepted as more tangible forms of art, so why draw the line there? Why can't a bench be art? Sure, it's not one-of-a-kind and seems fairly ordinary, but someone did have to come up with initial concept, blueprints, and design. How is that not an artistic endeavor? There is intention, for example, in choosing to use wood over metal, the color of the bench, any possible engravings that serve an artistic purpose rather than a functional one, and the overall shape and form of the bench. To some people, Amazing Grace's focus on art seems to be a selling point of the VN, but I think it has a fundamentally conservative and intellectually incurious view on it.