A review of The Expression: Amrilato (PC)

I wasn’t kidding when I wrote a while back that I had a bunch of visual novels to get through. When I wrote that post about visual novels still being a bit of a niche thing in the West, though, I wasn’t thinking of The Expression: Amrilato. No, this game beats all the rest in terms of its niche-ness: it’s a yuri romance visual novel that teaches you Esperanto.

What? Yes, this is a real thing. I first heard about Amrilato when Valve briefly refused to stock it on Steam for depicting a romance between two students, the main characters Rin and Ruka (if you didn’t know this was a yuri VN at first, the cover says everything.) They soon thought better of it and put it back up in their store. It’s an all-ages VN anyway, so I’m not sure what the fuss was to begin with — by the same logic, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet would be banned from the platform, which seems stupid enough.

In any case, this minor incident got Amrilato more press than it would have received otherwise, because it’s how I learned about the game. And after that I filed it in the back of my mind to play, and now I’ve played it. And now I’ll write what I think of it in a very long-winded way, because I have a lot to say about it.

First, an introduction: this is our protagonist, Rin. Rin is a hardworking, cheerful Japanese high school student who’s also pretty thick and often says and does things without thinking. One day, Rin buys a taiyaki (something I’ve never had myself, but I’ve heard a lot about, sounds like a kind of sweet pastry?) and eats it while on the street. Then she blacks out and wakes up on more or less the same street, only now the sky is pink and everyone’s speaking in a language she can’t understand.

Rin is understandably freaked out by this and suspects her taiyaki was drugged, and she goes to cry in a corner, where she’s approached by a girl in an impossibly frilly outfit who tries to talk to her in that mysterious language. Rin is still frustrated, but she does her best to communicate with this girl, whose name is Ruka. Fortunately, Ruka knows a little Japanese and invites Rin back to her house after establishing that she needs help.

Naturally, Rin feels like she’s in the dark at this point — her phone isn’t getting a signal, everyone’s speaking this weird language, and why the hell is the god damn sky pink, even at night? However, she manages to sort herself out in an impressively short time after trying and failing to find her parents’ house. While the city she’s currently in is very similar to her own, there are many subtle differences, and it soon becomes clear that Rin has somehow entered an alternate-universe version of her hometown. Which means no getting back to her family or friends, at least for the time being.

Yeah, yuri vibes from the very beginning

Thankfully, Rin is in Ruka’s care. She soon learns that she’s considered a vizitanto, or visitor, and Ruka takes her to a kind of combination library/government office to get a special ID from her own mentor, the librarian Rei Arbaro. Rei explains that Rin is now something like a resident foreigner, a status that comes with privileges like discounts at stores and a special allowance. Since Rin’s not the first vizitanto to accidentally fall into this dimension, the government has a system in place to care for people in her position until they can get on their feet and be productive members of society.

This is where the game really begins and where we’re introduced to the first of the two major aspects of Amrilato: the Esperanto. As a vizitanto, Rin has to learn Juliamo, the common language in this world. Aside from a few vocabulary and grammar differences and a customized alphabet thrown in to make things feel more other-dimensional, Juliamo is the same language as Esperanto. The player can switch between this fictional Juliamo alphabet and the Latin alphabet used to write the real-life language, but it seemed like a waste to not use the custom alphabet, so I stuck with that.

And naturally, since Rin is learning Juliamo, we’re learning it along with her. As the story progresses with typical dialogue and narrative stuff, Rin gets presented with language lessons that she has to complete as part of her new education. A lot of these involve one-on-one sessions with either Ruka or Rei, and you get to take quizzes and exams at the end of most of these lessons, an experience that will surely remind you of your school days if you’re past them now like I am. These exam sections can be deactivated in settings, but they’re turned on by default, and I get the impression that the developer SukeraSparo intended for the player to actually take the lessons and learn the words, expressions, and grammar rules that they teach.

I was barely familiar with Esperanto before picking up Amrilato. All I knew is that it was a constructed language, or a language created purposely and not developed naturally over thousands of years like English or Japanese. It has an interesting history — the creator, L. L. Zamenhof, was a Polish Jewish eye doctor who in the 1870s came up with the idea for an international language because he thought it would put an end to war. This unfortunately didn’t happen (a sad end to that part of the story, especially considering the fate of his family, still in Poland at the start of World War II) but Esperanto has gone on to become the world’s most widely spoken constructed language.

One of the most interesting parts of playing Amrilato was in seeing Rin’s thought process while learning Juliamo. Even though she’s the player character, her experience with the language and mine were very different. A big part of this difference has to do with the origins of Esperanto: from the basics I learned of it by playing this game, most of it’s derived from existing Romance and Germanic languages, seemingly with more of a lean towards Romance. So if you speak or you’ve studied languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Italian, a lot of this Juliamo will be familiar to you right away. Even someone who only speaks English and has no familiarity with the Romance languages will probably pick up on some of the vocabulary and grammar by instinct because of the strong historical Romance influence on English (it’s a Germanic language, but we’ve also got those Latin roots and the additions from Norman French after William the Bastard Conqueror’s invasion of England.)

Aside from its loanwords, Japanese has barely any relation to these or the other Indo-European languages that form the basis of Esperanto, and so root words and grammatical concepts that might sound natural to a westerner may not be so intuitive to a native Japanese speaker. The lesson sections of Amrilato consist largely of Rin’s thoughts about what she’s studying, and she’s often forced to try to remember her meager English knowledge that she picked up at school to help her understand Juliamo. Things as seemingly simple as the sounds “si” and “zi” are a bit hard for Rin because those sounds don’t exist in Japanese, instead becoming “shi” and “ji.” However, Rin’s stubborn, hardworking nature comes out in these sections, especially when she pushes herself to practice her Juliamo on Ruka, Rei, and strangers when she’s out buying groceries and running errands, and so she manages to push through it.

A lot of Rin’s struggles with Juliamo made me think of my own efforts at learning Japanese. I’m not immersed in the language like Rin is, but it couldn’t be more different from my native language of English, so I find myself asking some of the same types of questions Rin asks when she’s taking Juliamo lessons. Questions like “how the fuck am I supposed to tell when 人 is pronounced nin or jin in a compound kanji?” Questions that sometimes seem to have no answer other than “that’s just how it is” or “you just have to remember it.” These are aspects of language that native speakers grow up with and take for granted, but to the adult brain (or near-adult, in Rin’s case) they can’t simply be absorbed. Fortunately, with Esperanto/Juliamo being a constructed language, most of its aspects seem to have real explanations that aren’t “that’s just how it developed over time, so remember it.” My native language is notorious for shit like that. Sorry to all the ESL students out there.

Not the face you want to see when you make food for someone

This is where the language-learning aspect of Amrilato connects with its other major aspect: the yuri romance. Rin is very obviously attracted to Ruka from just about the beginning, and as the game goes on, this attraction shifts from being about Ruka’s looks and style to being about the connection that’s grown between them. Even though Ruka is younger than Rin, she takes on the role of Rin’s language tutor and legal guardian, and her mature attitude sometimes makes her seem older, creating an unusual sort of teacher-student relationship. Ruka soon tells Rin that she wants to learn more Japanese, and so each becomes a teacher to the other.

Eventually, these feelings turn romantic, though we initially only see that from Rin’s perspective. At first, the game throws in some hints that Ruka might be interested too, or that she wouldn’t at least be not interested in a romantic relationship with another girl, and even these parts play with language in interesting ways. Early on, for example, Rin buys what looks like a fashion magazine from a vendor that’s wrapped in plastic with the title “Blanka Lilia.” Rin is too thick to get it, but usually when a magazine like that is wrapped in plastic there’s a reason. And anyone who knows the origin of the Japanese term yuri that describes themes of lesbian love/desire in fictional works knows that the same word 百合 also means “lily” and can probably work out that “blanka lilia” means “white lily” and guess at the magazine’s contents.

When Ruka accidentally gets a look at those contents, she gets red in the face, which suggests a lot more than just indifference. After this episode, there are a few others that are also suggestive, and a lot of Amrilato consists of Rin wondering how Ruka feels about being with another girl, and specifically about being with her, and agonizing over whether she should say anything. The language gap between the pair makes things more difficult, and when Rin finally confesses her love to Ruka, she uses a Juliamo phrase that Rei taught her and that translates into something like “I’m thirsty for you” with some unintended lewd/embarrassing implications. Rei also likes to tease the two students and knows exactly what’s going on even before they do, so her addition into the mix as a kind of older sister/mentor makes things easier in some ways and more complicated in others.

Complicating things even further is the character of Rin herself. She’s stubborn and hardworking, but she also totally lacks self-confidence. By acting before she thinks, Rin ends up getting herself into awkward social situations, but then she gets carried away thinking of what a grave mistake she’s committed and imagines outcomes that are a thousand times worse than what could realistically occur. She also constantly thinks poorly of her own intellect, looks, and general desirability as a partner. In reality she’s a little thick but not at all stupid and perfectly capable, and her looks are just fine. She keeps thinking of herself as out of shape, but the character art doesn’t give me that impression at all. Maybe it’s the effect of that soft anime art style the game uses, but I prefer to think this is just Rin being unnecessarily down on herself, which would fit with her character.

I can see how Rin’s awkwardness, her yelling in surprise at inappropriate times, and her constant second-guessing of herself could get on a player’s nerves and make her a grating character, but most of these traits just made me feel bad for her. I find her lack of self-confidence to be relatable, in fact, which is a pretty shitty thing to deal with. It can be dealt with, but Rin doesn’t seem experienced enough with life at this point to have figured that out, which leads to a lot of emotional turmoil in the game — up until the player gets the few massively important choices near the end of the game that have serious relationship and ending implications. And there are a few different endings available, two of them pretty sad. But even if you give Rin lousy directions, you won’t have to backtrack very much to see the other endings. There’s only one route in Amrilato, and that’s the Ruka route.

And of course, Rin and Ruka do cement their relationship, because it wouldn’t be much of a yuri VN without some yuri. It’s all very PG-rated, hence people wondering why the hell Valve had a problem with it — yuri doesn’t necessarily have to involve anything explicitly sexual. Though there is definitely a physical element to their attraction, the emphasis in Amrilato is on emotion, and on the ability to show one’s emotion through using one’s expressions. This sort of romantic stuff can be easily screwed up and turned to total cheese if it’s not done well. However, Amrilato builds up the relationship between Rin and Ruka to the point that when they finally break through those language and emotional barriers, it feels nice to see. It’s earned. As for the endings — well, you’ll have to play the game to see those, because I won’t spoil them here. If you want a real deep dive, go check out Pete Davison’s post series about Amrilato on MoeGamer.

This is about as close to R-rated as Amrilato gets. I still find it funny that publisher MangaGamer offered this game free to schools because of its educational content. We never had a scene like this in Oregon Trail unless I really missed out on something.

So was I satisfied with The Expression: Amrilato? You can probably guess by now that the answer is yes. It was a nice experience, something new and unexpected, and it worked for me. I still have no interest in learning Esperanto, but I can see Amrilato getting at least a few players hooked on the language, and I think promoting an international language is a commendable goal in any case, so I give SukeraSparo credit for that.

As for the lesbian aspect of the game, it isn’t even played up that much as an issue in the way you might expect. All of Rin’s agonizing is really just over whether Ruka would go for her — the game doesn’t give the impression that either one is even necessarily exclusively into girls; the issue is more about how Rin and Ruka fit together. In that sense, I think this game is the same vein as VA-11 HALL-A: it’s progressive but in quite a natural way. What matters is the purity of the love and the expressions used to convey it.

Or something. I don’t know. I’m not a god damn romantic. But I did like The Expression: Amrilato, for what it’s worth. Now I’ve had enough cute romance for a while. I’ll probably play GTA for a change of pace. 𒀭

• esperanto
• game reviews
• games
• language
• romance
• the expression amrilato
• video games
• visual novels
• yuri