The Grisaia Trilogy

Total Playtime: 71.5 Hours

Fruit of Grisaia Playtime: 67.5 Hours, finished 13 May 2026.
Intermission 1 Playtime: 4.0 Hours, finished 16 May 2026.

Playing through the series on the Switch version, which censors out the R18+ scenes and has an "official" translation, using a physical Japanese release (with native English support!) if that makes any difference. I'm trying to 100% all parts of the game - all scenes, CGs, music, etc. - since the game is mostly kinetic, this boils down to trying out both the True & Bad ends whenever there's a choice. The game doesn't have a playtime tracker, so I'm using Exophase to track my rough playtime hours - I find those to be a pretty good approximation.

For whatever it's worth, my opinions of the characters are: Yumiko >>> Amane > Sachi > Michiru >>> Makina. I wonder if that'll change through the rest of the series.

I feel like I've seen this game recommended for over 10 years at this point, so it's a wonder that I've only decided to actually play it now. This game is a very pure VN, and is almost entirely kinetic in nature except for the route-branching choices from the Common Route, and another set of choices at the end of each character's route that differentiates between the True & Bad ending paths. The plot of the game is broken up into different "Scenes" or "Chapters", each generally framed around a specific event - this is followed by the other games in the series as well. In the common route, the events are very loosely connected overall, each one being essentially a skit that helps develop the characters and relationships. Individual character routes are far more focused around a single plot line.

One of the most striking things about the game is the extreme tonal whiplash I experienced between the Common route and the individual character routes. It's not completely unexpected, as the entire purpose of Mihama Academy as an isolated school is to house people that cannot possibly adapt to life elsewhere for varying reasons, hinting that everyone is screwed up in one way or another mentally. This is no less true for Yuuji, who is some kind of government-sanctioned child soldier and assassin. That said, the first 20 to 30 hours of the game are taken up entirely by lighthearted & comedic events that draw your attention away from these underlying issues. All the characters are eccentric in different ways: Makina is childish and bratty, Michiru is acting tsundere and really dumb, Sachi is an extreme perfectionist who will do anything as ordered, Yumiko is a hostile shut-in, and Amane takes on a slutty personality with Yuuji at first sight (for some reason). A lot of these are pretty funny, some are a bit annoying, but all in all I got really tired of them by the time the route was finally over since I felt like I was treading water the entire time, with too many skits being about the same things.

With that said, the common routes were ultimately essential for really defining the relationship between all of the characters and allowing the character routes to really serve as a wake-up call. As mentioned before, all of the girls have their own unsolved issues that have been festering in the background of the happy-go-lucky story up until that point, but very little detail is actually exposed about their underlying causes before the common route is over; I felt like the common route would have felt more meaningful if hints were sprinkled more liberally throughout, but that balance is realistically very difficult to strike. Character routes also vary extremely in terms of scope and tone, making it very obvious to me that they were written by separate authors with no specific guidelines to define the severity of each thread's central conflict.

Makina's plotline is probably the most meaningful of the bunch, exposing a ton of information about Yuuji's past and his capabilities as a "super-soldier". It's also the longest by some margin, including a pretty extensive segment of additional slife-of-life events at the beginning of the route before diving into the gritty details, where it turns out that she's the legitimate heir to a massive conglomerate prone to lethal infighting. The route's quite solid all around, but my main issue is that I cannot stand her as a character, given her childish tendencies - even if they make sense for her character in context. The ending is also the craziest of the bunch, where Makina (with a disabled or dead Yuuji) land somewhere in America; I have no idea how the afterstory is supposed to handle this. From what I understand, the main scenario writer of the game handled this route, so I wonder if the original plan was to have a similarly-crazy resolution to each characters' troubles.

Amane's story isn't actually much of a story in the present tense, as it centers around an extended flashback of Amane's terrifying experience as the sole survivor of an incident where her sports team's bus ran off a cliff deep in the jungle. While Yuuji isn't involved, his older sister, Kazuki, happens to be Amane's main companion as they barely scrape through 2 weeks of dwindling supplies, hope, and sanity. This slow plunge into fear and helplessness, and eventually paranoia and barbarism felt like watching a car crash in slow motion (no pun intended). Given that she is the only known survivor, it's a given that everyone else in the camp died, but the tension of seeing how slowly and gradually things worsen, followed by a sudden series of deaths at the very end, is absolutely heartwrenching. I'd compare it to reading about Chris McCandless, or about any number of other disaster stories; there's a mysterious allure to uncovering the truth about these disasters. While the present-day events of the route are pretty trite otherwise, the shock of realizing the fate of Kazuki & the context it provides to Yuuji's own background help cement it as both a significant and interesting story. It helps that Amane is a pretty good character overall, minus how hard she comes onto Yuuji for seemingly no reason. This route also ends with a really weird fast-forward of the rest of the events in her life, basically skipping over the aftermath of the events with the crazy guy that followed them into the jungle when Amane & Yuuji decided to visit the memorial erected for the incident.

Michiru's story has nowhere near the same amount of bite as the other two; I feel like all that was really revealed was that her "dumb" personality was her original personality, yet she somehow inherited a second personality after a transplant for her weak heart, donated by a girl killed in a car crash. Over the course of the route, Yuuji starts to see more of this second side of her, eventually finding a way to help both of them reconcile and somehow communicate and live peacefully together in Michiru's body. That said, this conflict is almost entirely internal so it doesn't really feel like it has the same stakes as most of the others. While there are some impactful moments (such as the unfortunate fate of Rommel the cat), it feels like a route pulled out of many other slice-of-life VNs with a bit more mental illness added to it.

Sachi's story takes another angle on a personal tragedy & internal conflict. Of all the characters, Sachi's main personality trait is very prominent throughout the entire common route, and this thread of the story does an interesting job of exploring how she got to that point. In a sequence of disastrously unfortunate coincidences, Sachi loses almost everything she cared about as a child at once - first learning that Yuuji would move away on her birthday, thus losing the only friend she had, then losing both of her parents to a freak car crash when they came to look for her. All of this stemmed from a growing frustration at the lack of attention from her parents, whose busy lives robbed her of anything resembling a proper family. I feel like this route did a much better job of exploring Sachi's extreme trauma, and the way her broken spirit turned her into a maid who could not refuse any request; though I doubt it's "realistic" from an actual psychological standpoint, it helped contextualize her eccentricity and made me really appreciate her character all the more. While bittersweet, I loved the way the ending brought closure to her and washed away the anxieties that had held her hostage for so long, and seeing the way she slowly recovered and started to move on left a very hopeful tone at the end. IMO, Sachi's route kind of makes many of the themes of Michiru's route obsolete.

Finally, Yumiko's route is not great from any real standpoint. It's really a classic tale of a young couple eloping, though it starts out more as a bodyguard situation to defend Yumiko from increasingly rough goons hired by her own father to rough her up to get her in line (somehow). As things come to a head and Yumiko gives herself up to go back to a soulless life as a successor to the railway business, Yuuji decides to snatch her away and the two live as fugitives for a while; somehow, they're not caught and nobody gets suspicious for a while until Yumiko's helplessness has her surrender to her father again. This triggers a final showdown, where Yuuji and his network of contacts (including the other girls at Mihama, and several members of the railway corporation's board) all collude to strip her father of his position, bringing down his empire and rendering his plans for Yumiko moot. The plot is every bit as stupid as it sounds, but the time spent developing their relationship is my favorite among all the routes; although Yumiko's completely incompetence with basic household chores is primarily used to emphasize how helpless she is, I liked how the route focused quite heavily on little things like that to develop their relationship. It helped to really sell the idea that they were trying to build a proper life together, and their final visit to the amusement park together before the final confrontation really just cemented that. Funnily enough, this is also the only route that doesn't have a definitively "Bad" end, only a "True" and "Normal" one. No matter what, Yuuji and Yumiko stick together and have a child to start their family, with the biggest differences in the True ending being that they become rich & successful and begin to reconcile with Yumiko's father, who is having trouble moving on after losing his purpose for living. Ultimately, despite the mediocre quality of the conflict, I absolutely love the dynamic between Yuuji & Yumiko here.

My overall ranking of the routes, from favorite to least favorite: Amane >> Sachi > Yumiko > Michiru > Makina. This is very heavily affected by my personal biases; Yumiko's route is pretty terrible but I love Yumiko herself, while Makina's route is very solid but bogged down by hours of Makina's annoying antics. Sachi & Michiru both have solid routes and are decent characters - I ended up giving Sachi an edge because of her personal history with Yuuji, and because it nailed a bittersweet, yet heartwarming tone in its ending. Amane's route is really far and away my favorite because of the extended flashback, and she's a fun character besides.

Overall, I'd say FoG lives up to its reputation - I can see why it's been constantly recommended for pretty much the entire time that I've been interested in VNs. (Take that with a grain of salt though; VNs do not come and go in popularity like other games, and are probably closer to proper novels or comics in that regard.) While I didn't expect how disjointed the different routes would feel, and am still not the biggest fan of the massive break between common & character routes, I still think the characters are memorable and I'm quite interested to see how their individual stories pan out (in their epilogues) and where their merged, "canon" Grand Route takes them in the sequels.