nsfw! well, it's just suggestive, but i would not look at this at the office.
that's the specific cg that made me think "put those awesome boobs away". it's kinda awesome though.
marrow #19 | posted 22 january 2026
i was gonna make a brief in-artlog commentary for this game but it got unwieldy and i figured i'd split it. i think i've been a little too precious about the Quality and Length of my marrow posts maybe.
yu-no: a girl who chants love at the bound of this world is a 1996 eroge by elf with a pretty lengthy "legacy" section in wikipedia. but i'm not actually all that well read in the world of japanese vns, so i'm not gonna talk about it in any historical context or shit like that, i'm just gonna talk about my experience through the game ^_^
spoilers and explicit nsfw images will be properly marked.
yu-no is a visual novel but it's more on the point-and-click adventure side of things. even during the linear prologue (and epilogue) you're choosing from menus rather than reading straight through. it's an interesting way to go about it; routes aren't about picking the same girl at every choice, but a matter of where you are, physically, at any given moment. it's mostly straightforward (you even get a visual cue when near a bifurcation), but i did follow a guide... progression can feel kinda arbitrary at points, and there are scenes where you're just clicking everywhere you can but turns out you missed that the tap counts as a different hotspot than the water coming out of it and it's kinda annoying.
and who are you? our be-fringed mostly faceless protag is takuya arima, an 18 year old high school student (of course he is; goes without saying one of the heroines is his young stepmom etc etc) whose father, koudai, is a historian with some rather fringe ideas about time and the possibility of parallel worlds. he has been missing for months and has now been declared dead. but despite his supposed death, takuya receives a letter from his father with a Weird Device and instructions to meet him that night at a mysterious local landmark, sword cape.
what follows is a timeloop type of story. the game takes place over two days, with different threads of the mystery going on with different characters and in different places. your Weird Device, the reflector, lets you place down jewels (that you gotta find throughout the game to play the true route, since you start with three but need all eight), working as warps to specific points in the timeline. you'll be taking items from the future into the past and that sort of stuff, meaning you also have a bit of an enforced playing order.
ok but the story isn't the whole reason why i played this game. pc-98 art has its talons deep in a pocket of the internet where i in fact reside, and yu-no has a reputation for its art and music. fuck i've heard "one of the best videogame osts of all time". well it's 100% deserved: the art is beautiful and the music is incredible. this is your cue to go listen to this version of clair de lune while reading, and then go ahead and listen to the rest of the ost too.
and just fucking look at this. zoom in. bask in the dithering.
anyway yeah. that's the first impressions that you probably could get from reading the wikipedia summary. i loved the slow unfolding of the mystery across routes, and i think said routes are a very nice length (the game took me some 21 hours total, with a guide). the divergence map — the flowchart showing you how the timeline is laid out — is really fun. idk, it's a good story that looks good and sounds good and plays pretty well for the most part. but wait, aren't we missing something...
i chose a pretty tame panty shot because i think even if you're skipping nsfw images you oughta get a look at one of them. i think it can be easy to forget yu-no is an eroge when talking / reading about it, but i promise you won't while playing it. while you get just one h-scene per woman towards the end of her route, you won't go more than half an hour without some sort of pinup on your screen. usually when there's exposition — yes it made me feel like a baby getting keys jangled in front of my face. i would say put those awesome boobs away dude now isn't the time but i also think it's kinda fun... plus this is an erotic videogame, so we get the pornotopia pass [1] — what would feel like sexist bullshit in an "all ages" game gets softened by the genre.
that's the specific cg that made me think "put those awesome boobs away". it's kinda awesome though.
now when it comes to the h-scenes though... oof. they are rather poorly written let's call them that. there are 9 in total, i believe, and i think half (round that whichever way) contain the phrase "embarassing noise" to talk about wet vaginas. like — and this is a direct quote — "embarassing sounds came forth as i lapped my tongue over it". i'm not sure how much of the blame goes to the translators versus the original script, but i will say that i now feel much better about the scenes i write. the art is still lovely though (but i must say the boobs get rather inflated compared to the sprites...). the censorship style [2] is simply making the genitals invisible, and at times that's oddly elegant (i kinda like the invisible blowjobs), at times it's kinda freaky ngl (the non-pussies leave me rather nonplussed).
so yeah like how was playing a 90s cishet eroge as a lesbian whose experience with sex in videogames is almost entirely vns by itchio freak lesbians? well it was actually kinda neat, probably aided by novelty. i'm in no rush to play another elf et al game (the patient needs yuri to live), but i really really wanna make a pinup heavy eroge now. smiles.
also... it's time to make the same question that led me to the porn cinema and pornochanchada deep dive last year. are you meant to jack off while playing? because to me the answer is clearly no... it's always been kinda the image created in my mind, but unless you're like, a literal teenager, for the most part the cgs are vaguely titilating but not Arousing. i don't know man. imagine playing through all five ish hours of a route and then reaching the h-scene and being "ah fuck yes finally time to crank it". i don't knowwww. they're soo clearly emotional payoffs — not that they aren't also meant to be hot. much to think about.
oh and also, to elaborate on this section header (which i said some four hours in, i had only scratched the surface of the panty shot i guess): i get it. i think the camera angles and stuff you need to force a p-shot can add some really nice dynamism to illustrations, and it's just pretty fun to focus on something other than cleavage, but there's only so much you can contrive without making your anatomy look busted. i tried sketching some things for fun while playing but like at some point you gotta take the L. if someone has their legs crossed you just won't see their panties. that's the damn point of crossing your legs when wearing skirts. my final message.
okay. you have completed the routes: eriko & mitsuki, ayumi, mio, kaori and kanna. you hope you never hear about embarassing noises again (you will be disappointed). you have added kanna to the list of fictional women you'll kill for. you have collected all eight jewels. time to head to sword cape with the reflector all blinged up and see what happens. and as you may have noticed, the name yu-no hasn't even come up yet. who the fuck is this girl chanting at the bound of the world. the main game answers a few questions but it asks just as many: you're mostly learning what the mystery even is.
the yu-no epilogue / true end is kinda weird. i've seen people say the game was rushed and this part was meant to be longer (not that it's short; it even fits three h-scenes), but idk. it does feel like it could have used a little more exposition, it is paced a little strange, but i didn't find it insatisfactory, for the most part, even as i can see a world where it is a solid third or half of the game with the same branching paths style. in short, i get it being divisive, and that's even before getting into... a specific part of the story.
this is your soft spoiler warning. you can deduce that this stuff is coming. jump to the final thoughts.
okay so once you start the game with all eight jewels in the reflector, the mountain opens. you go through this new doorway and pass out. and when you wake up you're not in kansas anymore.
like the prologue, this part is linear and not point-and-click. that made me think it was gonna be much shorter than it really was lol. regardless, you're in a fantasy world now, where you meet a pointy eared woman called sayless, who doesn't speak. which is really really lame. the women in this game are no masterclasses of feminst writing, but the banter with takuya gives them more dimension and personality. sayless only communicates through body language, and she's this demure empty thing who's there just to be an elven tradwife to takuya. she doesn't even have an h-scene, which is genuinely crazy to me, it makes me feel like surely i'm misremembering it (despite checking the cg gallery).
well. no matter. takuya has lost the reflector (that's why the game turns linear btw) so he's just stuck in this isekailand (yes i know isekai already means 'another world'. we are playing and having fun right now), which is apparently nearing some sort of cyclical catastrophe (hmm much like takuya's father believes great events come in cycles... surely unrelated). worse than that, there's just nothing he can do because he's near the border, in bumfuck nowhere, and you'd have to cross a desert to even get anywhere else.
THIS IS YOUR HARD SPOILER WARNING. like about the ending and stuff. jump to the final thoughts.
so naturally he goes and has a daughter with elven tradwife sayless. and her name issss......... yu-no. oh yeah babey.
yu-no grows fast as fuck because that's how celestials (that's what these people are called) work. they grow up super fast and then plateau at adulthood. and this is where the game gets pretty weird..... like...
uh yeah, i don't intend to summarize all of the epilogue, just read the wikipedia synopsis if you want that. but it's like. okay they're making this character that suddenly metamorphoses into an adult at age four. gets me kinda grumpy already but sure fine go the fuck ahead. but then the incest foreshadowing starts creeping up and you're reading that like ok surely surely we won't go there. see, takuya says he doesn't want to go there. we won't :).
and then yeah the last h-scene in the game is with yu-no. yes she's calling takuya papa the whole time.
it just sours the game dog. the stepmom fauxcest gets its pass because she's known takuya for like a year, it's porn game, it's tasteless but whatever it's within the bounds. the retroactive "oh shit kanna's his daughter" gets the time travel story pass. but the yu-no stuff is just... man come on... they could literally have just made sayless fulfill all of yu-no's roles actually? she'd get to speak then :)
anyway rant over. i just really needed that out my system okay.
i found that the epilogue tied up most threads. sure we don't really find out whadda hell happened to takuya's father, or how the fuck ayumi ended up in dela grante a year before takuya (meaning that's an entirely different ayumi than the one we interact with for the most of the game) but i feel it's for the best. i don't know, i think it could have made things way too convoluted... it does make me a bit of a game-was-rushed truther though.
because i also do wish we had more eriko explanations. i'm an eriko enjoyer. i thought the extra (eririn's private lesson) was gonna be more related to that, but it was just three nonograms and an ass cg... and nonograms without the right click to mark empty cells are so annoying -_-. anyway she's an interesting character! she always knew too much, which i love for her.
and like. this cg drives me crazyyy. zoom into her legs and see how many colors went into that. the shading is top tier.
okay yeah i guess those are my thoughts on the epilogue / true end / whatever. let's wrap it up.
so yeah how was yu-no? it's a cool game. i'm glad i played it, i'll definitely be thinking about it in the future too. and man they really just don't make pixel art like this anymore... well, nuance. i'll play dating of the future (2025) as soon as i can. but you know what i mean...
all in all, worth checking out if you're curious about eroge. i found the windows version buggy as hell under linux, using neko project and the pc-98 version was much much better. though i have not played it, goes without saying the remake is a no-no. why'd you remake an eroge without the sex. and more importantly: mitsuki's redesign counts as terrorism in my book. they took out her power suit. they made her into a lesser ayumi. come the fuck on.
and yeah i think this ends my post on baby's first heterosexual porn game lol everybody clap.
[1]: it also helps that the game has little humorous and fourth wall breaking moments, so it for the most part also follows my Good Ecchi Guidelines: the woman functioning as our fanserver has to be in on the joke. which is why i loved re: cutie honey (2004). it's just more pleasant to read if she gets to have fun... further reading that's kinda tangential: to-love ru is a boobiful masterpiece. i'm specifically thinking about the part around the 41 minute mark about yui kotegawa losing her panties.
[2]: distribution of "obscene materials" is illegal in japan, which is why you just don't really see unobscured genitals (or pubic hair... kicks a rock...) even in porn. the specific methods artists use vary a fair bit, as i learned through kimi rito's the history of hentai manga. i've always found it curious that the result is straightforward porn without clear dick and pussy, instead of a turn towards softcore / poses and stuff that goes around the need to censor entirely, but i think it also makes sense to do things this way. idk, it depends and i'm not knowledgeable enough because there isn't a ton of research in english or portuguese about it.