Unfinished Harukanaru 3 midgame post

(I was writing this blog post for a bit but then I got really lazy and because I'm not sure I'll ever properly finish it, I'm just going to post it unfinished.)

I've been slowly playing my way through Harukanaru Toki No Naka De 3 Ultimate. I'm enjoying it a lot so far. The gameplay has got to be my second favorite of all the Neoromance games I've played thus far, right behind Tenkuu no Requiem. The turn-based battles are fairly simple and not very challenging at all once you've unlocked enough skills and attributes for the characters but the battles I think are still very visually pleasing.

I love the animated pixel sprites a lot. The animation is very smooth and they're so charming. Some of the big bosses have really cool sprites too, I won't spoil what those look like though.

One of the battles featuring the characters Benkei, Hinoe, Nozomi, and Atsumori.

So far the routes I've done are: Saku, Masaomi, Yuzuru, Kurou, Hinoe, Rizuvan, and Kagetoki. And I've done the Izayoi endings for Hinoe and Atsumori. The Izayoi endings are a bit different since they don't actually have routes, they're kind of like normal endings

I've played Haruka 6 so I already knew a bit about the world it takes place in before I started. The world that the Haruka protagonists get transported to is a world that's similar to ours except for that things like gods, onryou, and magic exists. It overall mainly follows the same history as ours but tends to differ in some of the details.

The time that Haruka 3's protagonist, Nozomi, ends up at when she gets teleported there is the Heian era. Towards the end of the Genpei war between the Genji and Heike clans. Nozomi gets to meet this world's versions of historical figures, the first ones being Minamoto no (Kurou) Yoshitsune and Musashibou Benkei. How much I would give to see Haruka 3 Touken Ranbu crossover fanart of Kurou and Benkei together with Imanotsurugi and Iwatooshi...

My favorite characters so far are probably Rizuvan, Atsumori, Hakuryuu, and of course Nozomi. Nozomi is a great protagonist. I've heard that she's very popular among fans and it's no wonder. She kind of makes me think back to the protagonist of Hakuouki, Chizuru. They're just such opposites. It's been many years so my memory of the events of Hakuouki are a bit hazy. If I remember correctly though, all Chizuru does in the game is flop over and do next to nothing as she lets the Shinsengumi protect her. Even though she's a (spoilers) and could definitely have fought on equal or even greater terms than all of the other characters if she had only trained.

Nozomi is just a regular high school girl who was suddenly shoved into this situation but she doesn't hesitate to pick up the sword and train her heart out.