YU-NO

YU-NO, short for Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO (A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World, YU-NO), is one of the early classic visual novels. Originally released in 1996 by elf for the PC 98, it remains a highly rated though somewhat dated work and has strong elements of an adventure game of the click and explore type.

The story begins with the disappearance of the protagonist Takuya’s father, known to the world as an eccentric and controversial historian. Though he is presumed dead, Takuya soon receives a package from the supposedly deceased man containing an odd set of items the purpose of which Takuya does not recognize. After wandering about a little investigating, he winds up at the local landmark Triangle Mountain, which is a large rock of unknown origin that has scholars confused.

While at Triangle Mountain, Takuya first runs across a beautiful naked woman who after kissing him suddenly drops dead and vanishes completely. Confused, Takuya is then suddenly confronted by a former friend and colleague of his father named Ryuuzouji. With him is Takuya’s young stepmother, Ayumi, who appears to have no idea what is going on. After Ryuuzouji pulls a gun on Takuya and demands the odd package he received from his father, things take a turn for the bizarre as suddenly space seems to warp and Takuya is suddenly alone at Triangle Mountain.

Takuya arrives back home and makes a startling discovery: The device his father sent him is some sort of dimensional hopping device that allows a form of pseudo time travel via alternate dimensions. After approximately 50 hours, Takuya will be looped back to the mountain at Triangle Mountain without his memories and be forced to explore yet another alternate world. On the bright side, your inventory of items is retained from previous loops, which is pretty much necessary since there are multiple items you need in one route that you can only acquire in another.

The following tropes below appear in the first half of Yu No. After this section of the story is complete, the story undergoes a shift into the True route, which is very spoilery and thus the details are listed in a section below this.

For the true route After finally reaching Triangle Mountain with all eight Jewels and the Reflector, Takuya is suddenly transported into an entirely different world. He is surrounded by a beautiful forest and soon runs across a woman who either cannot or will not speak, though she seems to understand what he says. While Takuya just wants to go home, it’s not so easy: A local knight convinces him to take up her duty to defend the area until he manages to get home. Shortly thereafter, she dies, leaving Takuya and the silent girl alone in the wilderness.

After a brief period of angst and desperation, Takuya eventually settles into his new life. He and the quiet girl, Sayless, quickly fall in love and begin living together. Unfortunately, according to the late knight, Illia, Sayless is a priestess from the Imperial Capital whose duty it is to be the vessel of God in four years’ time in order to save the land from an imminent catastrophe. Surely things cannot continue so peacefully forever? The tropes for this half of the story are listed separately below the section for the first half of the story. Be careful about which part of the page you are viewing.

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• Accidental Pervert: Takuya accidentally walks in on Kanna in the shower. However, the point of the scene is that she doesn’t actually care.
• Aloof Ally: Eriko is perfectly trustworthy and has compatible goals with Takuya, but she doesn’t involve herself with him or tell him much of anything.
• Amusing Injuries: See Blatant Lies.
• Apocalyptic Log: After becoming trapped beneath Triangle Mountain until she grew too weak to escape after figuring out how, Professor Imagawa simply set about recording her last days. Her last entry states that instead of waiting to starve to death she’s going to impale herself on a spike that’s sticking out of the wall as a more ‘dignified’ way to die.
• Arc Number: 400 years.
• Amulet of Dependency: Kanna will die without her amulet. When it’s lost, you get her bad ending unless you’ve gone through the Kaori branch and acquired the Hypersense Stone from the lab.
• Attempted Rape: Houjou when under mind control tries to rape Kanna. Much as Takuya hates Houjou, he knows that the man isn’t the kind of person who could normally do that.
• Bad Liar: Yuuki, and it’s not played for laughs.
• Bat Deduction: Parodied in Kanna’s route when seeing through Eriko’s flimsy disguise again. ‘attractive woman with cigarettes’ and goes through about a dozen steps before Eriko finally yells at him for making an absurd chain of deductions. See Overly Long Gag for the full chain.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Takuya/Mio.
• Big Bad: Ryuuzouji, though he has little presence in Mio or Ayumi’s routes.
• Big Eater: Takuya
• Bittersweet Ending: Mio, Kanna and Ayumi’s endings since he gets whisked back into to the beginning. They get actual endings once you’ve completed the whole story though.
• Blackmail Is Such an Ugly Word
• Blatant Lies: If you keep clicking on certain background characters Takuya will hit them and claim they had a mosquito on their face or something, at which point they will thank him while noting he chipped a tooth or caused a compound fracture.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Takuya will yell at you if you insist on certain actions. He’ll also note that it would be rather mean to make you also press the answer button on the phone after picking it up.
• Brilliant but Lazy: Takuya appears to be doing so poorly simply because he doesn’t care enough about school.
• Bromantic Foil: Yuuki
• Cake Eater: Takuya, according to Mio. Considering his attitude towards Ayumi, she has a point.
• Cassandra Truth: Ayumi won’t believe a thing Takuya says without proof.
• Character Tic: Takuya’s first reaction to finding things is often to smell them. And no, you don’t really get any useful information out of doing so.
• Chick Magnet: Takuya. Mio and Mitsuki are after him from the start, Ayumi is in love with him and trying to hide it, about a day’s worth of interaction wins over Kanna. Mio also alludes to how he had a lot of fangirls when he was taking classes seriously and in the kendo club.
• Chivalrous Pervert: To Kanna’s mild confusion, Takuya isn’t as sex crazed as he acts.
• Christmas Cake: Ayumi is sort of maybe married with Koudai’s status in doubt, but she worries that she’s too old to be attractive at 28.
• Comforting the Widow: Toyotomi. He’s not a very nice guy.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Ryuuzouji has been dead for a month. The fake made up the curse to explain Ryuuzouji’s attempts to get assistance before finally dismembering him and hiding his limbs and head.
• Disappeared Dad: The search for him in fact makes up the majority of Takuya’s motives.
• Distant Finale: The endings that are unlocked after completing the True Route all take place after a timeskip of several years.
• The Ditz: Ayumi is not unintelligent, but she’s a bit of an airhead.
• Downer Ending: Mitsuki dies in her ending. Actually, she apparently dies in all of them. We don’t see what happens in Ayumi or Kanna’s routes, but she’s pierced by lightning in Mio’s route and shot in her own at which point Eriko says that she was destined to die at this time no matter what.
• Driven to Suicide: Ayumi in her bad end after ignoring Takuya’s pleas about the true nature of Toyotomi.
• Dying as Yourself: Apart from bad endings, Mitsuki breaks out of the mind control before dying.
• Fourth Date Marriage: Kanna was just a classmate until suddenly they were basically engaged after two days. At least Takuya had known Ayumi for some time!
• The Gadfly: Takuya likes to pick on Mio just to see her get mad.
• Good People Have Good Sex
• Green-Eyed Monster: Yuuki spills Mio’s confidential family information to the school and pretends Takuya did it out of jealousy.
• Guide Dang It: Good luck figuring out how to get 100% completion without one.
• He Knows Too Much: In Mitsuki’s route, Ryuuzouji’s mother is killed for knowing he was replaced.
• Hopeless Suitor: Yuuki has no chance at Mio. So he tries to make one.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Ayumi puts an absurd amount of trust in Toyotomi of all people despite his obvious sliminess.
• Hot Mom: Takuya is frequently rather uncomfortable around Ayumi, who he largely accepts as his mother despite only having met about six months prior.
• Hypnotic Eyes: People with Nairb syndrome can be hypnotized by looking into Ryuuzouji’s eyes.
• Idiot Plot: Ayumi route.
• Ill Girl: Kanna is prone to getting feverish and collapsing.
• Immortal Immaturity: Kanna looked the same fifty years ago as she does now, but just acts like a rather withdrawn teenager.
• Immortality: It’s mentioned offhandedly that the potential inherent in the Reflector and new approach to history could even lead to this. Takuya’s mother was immortal for some reason and Kanna might be as well.
• Inferred Holocaust: Ayumi’s route strongly implies that Mio was trapped beneath Triangle Mountain just like in her own route. By the apparent mechanics of the Reflector and alternate dimensions, this means that Mio probably dies beneath Triangle Mountain in every route apart from her own.But hey, Mio does technically have an escape route so long as she doesn’t give up… right?
• Interrupted Suicide: In Ayumi’s good ending, Takuya stops her from slitting her wrists. You can’t reach this ending until after you’ve seen her do it successfully.
• I See London: The story begins with a conversation about Eriko’s panties.
• Jerkass: Toyotomi.
• Karma Houdini: Toyotomi’s plans to sell out the company he works for in order to get a better job fail, but he still gets to take Ayumi’s position.
• Lemony Narrator: Takuya has some interesting things to say if you keep checking things out or try doing weird stuff.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Takuya is known as the Walking Libido.
• Love Triangle
  • Yuuki likes Mio, who likes Takuya. Takuya’s response depends on the route.
  • Ayumi route: The end of Ayumi’s route has Takuya attempt to cut one short by proposing to Ayumi.
    • On the other hand, during the Kaori branch of the Kanna route the above triangle is subverted in favor of Ayumi knowing that her husband still loves Takuya’s mother and is determined to undo her death in some manner. The implication is that Ayumi was just a friend and a tool.
  • Also, Mitsuki still likes Takuya and Mio gets jealous of her and feels like they’re competing.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places
• The Matchmaker: Eriko likes pushing Takuya towards Mio. Takuya pushes Yuuki towards Mio, but Takuya doesn’t seem to really care and doesn’t expect it to go well.
• Mind Control Eyes: Mitsuki, as revealed in Mio’s route, though she probably had them the other times she turned out to be a pawn as well.
• Multiple Endings: There are four main heroines, each of which has several endings, both good and bad apart from Mitsuki, who only gets bad endings as well as a true route and epilogues. In order to get the good endings, you generally need to have seen the bad endings first and to go rather out of your way.
• Mysterious Waif: Kanna
• New Game+: After achieving 100% completion you gain the ability to start with all your items, which is a mercy to players who want to see the extended heroine endings.
• Not Now, Kiddo: Nobody ever listens. Especially Ayumi.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: In Mio’s route, it’s clear that Yuuki is the one who told everyone about the corruption of Mio’s father right from the start and when you see the two speaking along with Mio apparently oblivious you can see his composure go out the window when she says that thanks to this incident she’ll be moving away and thanks him for his support. But it’s actually a subversion. This is the conversation where she figured out for sure that Yuuki was really the one who had done it and presumably just didn’t want to hurt him by pointing it out directly.
• The Ojou: Much to Mio’s irritation, Takuya delights in pointing this out.
• Older Than They Look: Kanna is about fifty.
• One Hundred Percent Completion: It’ll take you awhile to get it, though. Once you do, you unlock the music room and a special scene at the school.
• Overly Long Gag: Takuya’s Bat Deduction in Kanna’s route. Eriko even yells at him for it.

Takuya: When you think of cigarettes, you think of smoke… when you think of smoke, you think of something drifting about… when you think of something drifting about, you think of a jellyfish… When you think of a jellyfish, you think of the ocean… when you think of the ocean, you think of blue… when you think of blue, you think of the sky… when you think of the sky, you think of clouds… when you think of clouds, you think of white… when you think of white, you think of a white coat… when you think of a white coat, you think of a school doctor… when you think of a school doctor, Eriko: A-are you stupid!? How do you even dream up a deduction like that!?

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Eriko’s getup when she’s out searching. Apparently, the extremely revealing clothing she’s wearing is meant to help her blend in, much to Takuya’s disbelief.
• Parental Incest: Ayumi and Takuya, though they’re not actually related and haven’t known each other for that long.
• Plot Induced Stupidity: During the Ayumi route Takuya acts like an idiot when there are rather glaring warning signs everywhere.
• Posthumous Character
  • Arima Koudai’s status is pretty questionable throughout the story, though he’s considered dead in universe and alive by Takuya. After the true route you can say he’s really not dead or alive since he’s moved himself outside of the dimensional axis in some manner in order to observe creation. He makes no direct appearances.
  • Professor Imagawa, the third researcher, also died beneath Triangle Mountain some months prior.
• Princess Curls: Mio
• Purple Is the New Black: Takuya says that Kanna’s clearly blue hair is black.
• Replacement Goldfish: Ayumi has been trying really hard with mixed success not to treat Takuya like this.
• Sarcasm Blind: Yuuki
• Sarcastic Confession: During Kanna’s route and unintentionally. ”Well, then you might as well say she’s a several hundred year old witch from another dimension!” Eriko then confirms the statement. Technically untrue though.
• Selective Obliviousness
  • During the early parts of the Mitsuki route it’s implied that Takuya is going out of his way not to interpret Mio’s tsundere behavior correctly. Mio’s route has him really going out of his way not to think about it too much.
  • Ayumi wasn’t really as dense about Takuya’s feelings as she acted.
• Sex Equals Love: Despite being The Tease, Takuya will generally refuse to have much to do with a woman that he is not in love with. If in an emotionally vulnerable state such as after the ‘death’ of his father or after Ayumi is ruined it’s a different story, though.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Kanna is completely unconcerned with being seen naked.
• Shaming the Mob: Ayumi route.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Eriko goes from unkempt and scraggly with a very generous figure to quite stunning when she puts on a dress and moves her hair out of her eyes.
• Smug Snake: Toyotomi.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Even before deciding his father is still alive, Takuya is still quite prone to badmouthing his old man.
• Strange Girl: Kanna.
• Stripperiffic: Kaori doesn’t wear a bra and leaves her shirt unbuttoned to the extent that underboob shows. You’d think people would comment more on a famous reporter dressing like that.
• Student Teacher Romance: Mitsuki and Takuya had a fling about a month before the story started. Their dialogue tends to be pretty laden with innuendo.
• Talk to Everyone
• Taking the Bullet: Mitsuki takes a bullet for Takuya.
• Temporal Paradox: Discussed and dismissed. When you go back in time, you don’t go to your own past. You go to one exactly like it.
• The Tease: Takuya, but only towards Mio and Eriko. He doesn’t know Kanna well enough, Ayumi wouldn’t take it well and he and Mitsuki already had a previous relationship. Push come to shove, he’s not nearly as bold as he pretends.
• Third Person Person: Ayumi on occasion. She does it so Takuya won’t look at her as a woman so much.
• Tsundere: Mio. Lampshaded quite early on. In her route, Takuya largely acts as a tsundere to her as well.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Eriko, especially since there's no actual route for her.
• When She Smiles: Takuya loves seeing Mio and Kanna smile or laugh.
• Wild Card: Kaori works for Ryuuzouji and just seems to be in it for the money, but she’s also willing to make deals with Takuya that you can’t progress through the game without accepting as well as consoling him, both euphemistically and otherwise, after the confrontation with Toyotomi goes wrong. In Kanna’s route she blatantly sets you Takuya up to take the fall for her when stealing from Geotechnics.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Certain events are destined to happen and while others can be averted, if you used time travel to do it then you’ve just created another parallel world because you can’t really change the past.
• You Don't Want to Die a Virgin, Do You?: After lengthy Belligerent Sexual Tension all throughout the route, when Mio appears to have given up on escaping from beneath Triangle Mountain she propositions Takuya. Takuya lets her know he hates death thoughts like that but they go ahead anyway.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Kaori’s hair is green, Kanna’s is blue and Eriko’s bright red, but somehow a blond is clearly identifiable as being a foreigner.

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• Always Save the Girl: Takuya is determined to rescue Yu-No despite the world apparently depending on her sacrifice.
• Androcles' Lion: Takuya takes in a nogard, raises it and protects it at the quarry. In return, when it is fully grown it rescues him from the collapsing quarry.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: Takuya captures a woman who instantly accuses him of being a pervert and rapist. Considering she’s naked and he ties her up she kind of has a point, but then she seems kind of annoyed when he declares he has no intention of doing anything like that to her. In fact, she seems to want him to do it.
• Big Bad: The fake Ryuuzouji.
• Bittersweet Ending: Only Earth is saved. Dela Grante crashed into Earth eight thousand years ago and no real trace of it remains apart from a single electrocution tower.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Takuya will yell at you if you insist on certain actions.
• Cheerful Child: Yu-No
• Chick Magnet: Takuya still. Sayless falls in love at first sight, Sala instantly wants to bone him, his daughter seems to have the hots for him and he wins over rebel leader Amanda in short order as well. Clearly, his powers are not to be underestimated.
• Cute Mute: Sayless. On the other hand, he can read her mind occasionally and she speaks right before dying.
• Daddy's Girl: Yu-No. Sayless never seems to feel left out or anything, but her daughter does indeed develop an attraction for her father. She also felt like she was competing with her mother.
• Dead Person Impersonation: The man called Ryuuzouji is not actually Ryuuzouji. He’s an imposter.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Takuya is quite unhappy with the morals he has to live with in the true route.
• Determinator: Takuya, but it doesn’t always work out to his advantage. He’s so incredibly stubborn that he manages to really screw himself over a few times.
• Dropped a Bridge On Her: Amanda is rather unceremoniously disposed of near the end. In a mild subversion, she was actually Kanna’s mother and lived through it.
• Fantastic Racism: Even relatively good people like Amanda treat nogards as animals despite being aware that they’re intelligent.
• Flat Earth Atheist: Takuya. Thing is, he’s both right and wrong.
• For the Evulz: The fake Ryuuzouji has no clearly defined motives. He just seems to be enjoying himself.
• Fourth Date Marriage: Takuya knows Sayless for all of a week before they’re basically married.
• Gainax Ending: The true route whisks Takuya off to an alternate world where he starts living with some mute girl and goes on an adventure. The ending itself has Takuya and Yu-No as apparently the original Adam and Eve.
• Go Mad From the Isolation: The being that is puppeteering Ryuuzouji, most likely. It doesn’t remember its origins or its name or anything, only that it’s alive.
• Good All Along: The God Emperor is Ayumi.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Kun Kun dies to get Takuya and Amanda to the capital.
• Human Sacrifice: Though not necessarily fatal, the priestesses are treated as such.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Humans in Dela Grante eat nogards, which are known to be intelligent.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: God Empress Ayumi after being stabbed.
• Immortality Begins At Twenty: In appearance, that is. It actually only takes them a few years to reach that age in appearance at which point they stay like that for a few decades. This also means that most likely Kanna is not actually immortal. In fact, by fridge logic, she may not even have that much longer to live.
• Is It Something You Eat?: In the epilogue Yu-No has no idea what friends are despite being physically around fifteen or so. Takuya has been worrying that she might be too isolated from human society.
• Lemony Narrator: Takuya has some interesting things to say if you keep checking things out or try doing weird stuff.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places
• Older Than They Look: Residents of Dela Grante look the same age for decades. It’s thus more or less impossible to say how old anyone is if they look like an adult.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The fake Ryuuzouji is hoping to wipe out both Earth and Dela Grante. Wiping worlds out of existence because it just seems to be what he likes to do.
• Ore Onna: Amanda
• Parental Incest: Takuya has sex with Yu-No at her request near the end. Unlike all the other sex scenes, this one gets a discretion shot before any penetration occurs. A bit of thought about the story will also reveal to the reader that Amanda is Kanna’s mother, making Kanna another example in hindsight.
• Punny Name: Sayless, the mute.
• Save Both Worlds: Half successful. It’s noted that due to the cyclic nature of the universe Dela Grante may be successfully saved one day, but it wasn’t this time.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Nogard is dragon backward, but they’re basically large lizards that eventually metamorphose into winged humanoids rather than actual dragons.
• Surprise Incest: It’s never stated outright but Amanda being flung fifty years into the past and having a daughter is a pretty clear indication that she had a daughter, Kanna, and that the father was most likely Takuya. The two of them never learn that, apparently, but the reader will figure it out.
• Third Person Person: Ayumi isn’t around, but Yu-No takes up the torch on this one. When Ayumi does reappear, she’s no longer attempting to distance herself and drops the third person speech until her final moments.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Considered but abandoned as a stupid idea.
• Tsundere: Amanda is a fairly subdued version.
• Winged Humanoid: Nogards.
• Younger Than They Look: Yu-No by the end is only about four or five but with a physical age of around twenty and the mental age of perhaps a teenager.