Memories Off 2nd – Suzuna Takano

June 16, 2011 by awesomecurry 1 Comment

Beware of spoilers. LOOOOOTS of spoilers.

The next girl I went for is Suzuna Takano. Suzuna is the last name, Takano is the first name (even though it sounds more normal the other way around). She didn’t seem all that important so I went for her next.

So Takano is Ken’s classmate. She’s beautiful, good at sports, gets good grades, but hates guys so they all have trouble approaching her. She’s the type that is hostile to dudes but extremely kind to girls and is popular with female underclassmen. One day Ken is walking home from school when he sees a bunch of dudes ganging up on one girl with glasses. Ken butts in to save her, but the dudes punch him and Takano comes in to save the day.

I guess Takano is MemOff 2nd’s kuu/tsundere character or something, since she’s cold towards dudes and usually ignores or treats Ken coldly. She yells at Ken for not minding his own business, when he tried to save her underclassman, and then quietly says thank you like how all tsundere/kuudere girls do. She’s also the school’s swim team’s ace and is really good at swimming, good enough to get into university just for her swimming skills. However, she reveals that she isn’t going to uni and is gonna quit swimming club.

Anyways, nothing happens for the first 10 days of the game or so, unlike Tsubame’s route where some things actually got me a bit interested. All we know is that Takano is some pro swimmer who doesn’t want to do it anymore, and she clearly treats girls 100x better than dudes. She doesn’t even care about Ken, but is kind to Hotaru, his girlfriend. So after some days, Ken feels that he is being stared at by someone in the classroom. That person is…Suzuna Takano. What. A. Surprise. When Shouta asks Takano why she’s staring at her, she simply responds with the much-expected “It’s just your imagination, I have no interest in you two.”

Ken is going home on the train alone, and starts thinking about how Hotaru and him spend much less time together now that she’s practicing for the piano competition. He then starts wondering about whether Hotaru really likes him or not, since he has no special qualities. He has no reason to worry IMO, since he’s a galge protagonist.

Ahem. Back to the game. Ken goes on a walk with his bro Shin, who can tell that Ken is stressed about Hotaru. He then goes on to tell his back story about how he love a girl but then got dumped and she has a boyfriend yada yada. The next day, Ken goes on a date with Hotaru, but starts wondering if Ken likes someone else. Ken also spends time thinking about Takano and why she isn’t going to uni.

Hotaru is sick and Shouta is absent, so Ken is alone at school the next day. He sees Takano at school, looking at the swimming club with a sad face. He tries asking her about it, but gets the “it’s your imagination, it no longer has anything to do with me” treatment. At home, he gets a call from Hotaru who sounds really depressed and asks him out tomorrow. Ken gets the idiot ball and stood her up the next day by oversleeping -_____-  He rushes to the date spot but she is no longer there. He waits for two hours but she’s not there so he goes to her house. She’s not home, so he goes back to the date spot and sees Hotaru…together with Shouta. While looking for Hotaru at school, he is approached by Takano. He asks her about Hotaru and Shouta, but she doesn’t know anything either. He tries to call them but they never picked up, so Ken invites Takano out to eat. Since food is the way to anyone’s heart, Takano is more dere while eating, and eats a lot. The food also cost a huge portion of Ken’s allowance, so Ken basically has to live like a hobo for a month just because he treated a girl that’s not even his girlfriend to dinner.

When walking Ken is walking Takano home, she tells him that she actually saw Hotaru and Shouta together. The next day, Hotaru and Shouta are absent again so Ken goes out to eat dinner with Takano. Ken tells Takano about his problems with Hotaru, and she tells him why she isn’t going to university. Basically her parents disappeared when she was young so she lives with her relatives who are poor and their family business sucks, and university is expensive even if they don’t need to pay the tuition so she decided to just help out at their store after graduation. Ken convinces her to talk it over with her relatives instead of just deciding on her own because being a protagonist gives you all sorts of presuasive powers. Takano becomes more dere, which causes Ken to temporarily forget about Hotaru. Takano hates guys (except for Ken) because her father was a dick and left her when she was a loli. Yeah. Ken quits his part time job and decides to put his energy into studying. OTL maybe if I become like that then I wouldn’t have any teenage angst lol.

The next day Ken sees Hotaru and Shouta at school but they run away and disappear. Ken is forever alone and walking on the streets when he sees Takano and Kana. He and Takano go out for dinner, and see a drowning girl while taking a stroll at night. At this point you’d expect Takano to jump in and save her since she’s pro at swimming, but she doesn’t move. Ken jumps in and saves the girl instead. He turns back to Takano to see that she’s standing in the ocean and then collapsed. While trying to get her back to the shore, her necklace falls off. He walks her back home and gives her the necklace back (which is obviously importnat).

The next day, Ken takes a break from school, and gets a call telling him to go to the bridge in town. He goes there, and sees Hotaru and Shouta on a date. He leaves and goes to school, where he finds out that he got called to the bridge by Kana, who wants him and Takano to hook up so she wants him to break up with Hotaru. Takano is absent today, so Ken calls her out at night to ask her why she was absent. Unfortunately for him, she isn’t dere anymore and says “it has nothign to do with you.” He says it does and basically confesses to her, but then she gets pissed because Ken already has Hotaru and this is why men suck lol.

Ken sits on the beach forever alone when Shin comes over to give him advice jsut like a bro would do. The next day, he visits swimming club and sees Takano not swimming he apologizes and she goes home, and Kana tells him that she looks like she’s scared of water recently. Then Ken gets a text from Hotaru saying that she’ll be at his house tonight. At night, Hotaru breaks up with him because he doesn’t love her. She was just consulting Shouta on what to do, and finally figured out that Ken doesn’t love her because he never called her while she was away. WTF HE HAD BEEN CALLING THEM EVERY DAY AND THAT’S WHAT SHE SAYS!??? *facepalm* (I don’t understand girls…*sigh* even if I’m a girl, I still don’t understand) Like in Tsubame’s route, Hotaru goes to Australia.

The next day, Takano is not at the pool. Ken is walking home when he nearly gets run over by a car, and the driver comes out to yell at him. The driver suddenly mentions a daughter that he hasn’t seen in many years and he has a pretty necklace that seems familiar to Ken. Geez, I wonder where else was a necklace mentioned? Ken sees Takano and chases after her, but then the same car that nearly ran him over stops next to her and the guy comes out to talk.

He tries to force Takano in his car, but Ken runs over and finds out that his guy is her dad and he’s trying to take her back. He decides to leave today, but will come back on September 3rd (Takano’s birthday) to ask once again.

The next day Ken goes to the pool again and doesn’t see Takano there. Kana tells him that she went to the public pool, so he goes there to find her. She is sitting next to the pool crying. She decides to go with her dad so that her uncle’s financial problems will be solved, and compares herself with Kaguya-hime who had to go back to the moon eventually. Ken tells her that the problem is not that the soldiers couldn’t prevent her from being taken back to the moon, but that Kaguya didn’t do anything herself (Of course Kaguya did something! She became immortal and went to Gensokyo with Eirin–oh wait, not the same story here).

The next day, Ken waits for Takano at the pool for the whole day, but she doesn’t show up until 1 hour before closing. She tells him that on the day where the little girl was drowning, she remembered that she nearly drowned when she was little, never got saved by her mom, and ended up in the hospital, her mother disappearing on her and she became forever alone. Her father and mother divorced, so she got taken in by her uncle and aunt. She’s there angsting and yelling at him, so Ken jumps into the deep end of the pool and tries to drown himself. Wut.

Then after Takano saves our idiot protagonist, he tells her that he got left alone by his mom when he was little too. So he got assigned some position at the athetic festival, but he fell and fractured his bone so he got replaced. On the day of the athletic festival, he pushed down the guy who replaced him and his mother said, “Who is that child? I don’t know him.” 10 years later, his mom apologized because it was on her mind the whole time. Ehh basically Ken is trying to say that her mom probably has somethign to do and didn’t notice her drowning, not because she’s a bitch and didn’t save her on purpose.

The next day, they go see Takano’s mother. In reality, her mom tried to save her when she was drowning, but then she became mentally unstable so her uncle and aunt took her away. Her mother found another man and left her dad, and her dad was too hobo to raise her so gave her to her uncle. Basically, her hatred of men was a misunderstanding because of all this. Aiya…

Takano sees her mom with her new daughter, but her mom doesn’t remember her. The new daughter is also named Takano lol.

In the epilogue, Takano refuses to go with her father, because she wants to stay with Ken. She fails her university exam, so she continues to practice swimming with a coach. Ken took up soccer again, but failed his university exam so he studies with a home tutor…who is Takano.

—

Ehhh…Tsubame’s route was folds more interesting. I actually felt something in that route. Takano’s tsun side is boring as hell. I usually complain about how tsunderes go dere too fast, but in Takano’s case the pacing was perfect since her dere side is more entertaining. The plot is forgettable.