Sakihokoru Piano no Morishita (盛开的钢琴之森下) Review

Maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t have the stamina to push through long-ass AVGs anymore, so lately I’ve been hunting for short ones. That’s how I heard about The Piano Forest in Full Bloom — supposedly very short — and picked it up.

And yet… it still ate an entire afternoon.

Anyway, some quick thoughts. If you’re worried about spoilers, leave now.

Plot-wise it’s simple: the protagonist’s little sister has an incurable disease and will be dead in seven days. Following the guidance of a mysterious shopkeeper, he takes her to a secluded sanatorium to spend her last days…

Of course it’s not that simple. Your first playthrough forces a bad end — the sister has to die once — and only after that can you pick the maid Konohana’s END or the sister Sakuno’s True END. Though in a sense, every ending is the sister’s True END…

The first playthrough is very… serious. Or, for someone like me who’s waiting for something to actually happen… very flat. Day by day, the siblings just live out their daily life. And honestly, I hate it when a visual novel pads its runtime with slice-of-life — imagine if the first 80% of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer were Linghu Chong and Yue Lingshan doing chores and only the last 20% had any plot. You’d lose your mind.

Then it goes exactly as the synopsis says: the sister’s condition worsens as the days pass, but she keeps holding on to finishing some duet… because it’s a promise she made with her brother… blah blah. The usual developments. In the end, the moment the piece is finished, she dies in his arms, and then he marries her corpse. Yes, the corpse.

Like I said at the start, the real story only kicks in on the second playthrough — the truth that the maid Konohana is the sister from the future (the voice actress spoils it), the truth about the shopkeeper, and the sister’s True END.

The structure is too tangled to explain in prose. A diagram is probably in order…

Sakuno is the protagonist’s adopted sister. Her real name was “Onomiya Sakuno.” She apparently had some kind of incredible power, met the protagonist one day, and was hated by him — at which point she encountered the demon messenger Mephisto (Faust again… shit) and signed her first contract, trading away her power and lifespan in exchange for his affection. The price also included her name: she became Kamimori Sakuno and joined his family as his sister.

But the lifespan cost meant Kamimori Sakuno would inevitably die someday. So she signed with Mephisto a second time, sacrificing her freedom and her soul for the chance to meet him again. That’s how she became the maid Konohana, waiting in a sanatorium frozen in time and space for the protagonist and his sister — the former her — to arrive again and again, to spend those last seven days again and again, loop after loop.

The game says each time Sakuno dies, her soul replaces the current Konohana and inherits the previous Konohana’s thoughts, so Konohana gets stacked and stronger and stronger… though this idea gets quietly dropped later.

So Sakuno dies once in the prologue — probably some earlier loop — then dies again of her illness in the first playthrough. Then the second playthrough hits the turning point. On Konohana’s route, the protagonist figures out where she comes from and what she’s hiding. To be with her, he contracts with Mephisto, trading his own lifespan for a reunion. Konohana takes the place of the current sister, and the two of them keep living in the sanatorium. For about ten years, anyway…

On Sakuno’s route, the protagonist decides to sacrifice his soul and life for her, transferring her terminal illness onto himself — with his feelings for her as part of the price. When Sakuno finds out, she tries to cancel the contract, but he’s so moved by his sister’s love that he breaks it through sheer willpower (corny, right? Corny, right? I think so too). Mephisto then chooses to sacrifice the protagonist to save the sister, and at the last moment the sister takes his place instead (it’s a real fucking mess) — the long and short of it is the protagonist lives and the sister dies for him.

Even so, he’s still full of longing for her. The price was her soul in exchange for his, but since their souls have completely fused, they each retain half a soul and half a life, so she’s revived at the end and they meet again. They only get thirty more years — “but that should be enough to meet the grandchildren,” says Mephisto.

Honestly, the hardest-working guy in this game has to be Mephisto. Running back and forth signing contracts for these people’s convoluted wishes must be exhausting. Your life to me, my life back to you, your life to me again, my life back to you again…

One interesting bit: at the end Mephisto talks about the breaking of the “ring” and losing a bet. My mind went straight to the “law of cycles” and to Faust. That’s normal enough, though searching for the “law of cycles” just gets you Madoka stuff… The wager in Faust, at least, turned up some results.

Basically it’s the wager between God and the demon Mephistopheles: the demon claims he can lure humanity into the abyss, God claims He can lead them toward good. Tying it back to the game… maybe the protagonist’s feelings for his sister were the mark of goodness that broke the demon’s curse, which is why Mephisto says he lost the bet. And the one he made the bet with was probably the old shopkeeper from the beginning.

All in all the story is decent, and nicely convoluted — good for a weirdo like me. The BGM is fine. The OP is a straight 10/10, “Kono Hana Saku Koro” — go listen to it. The art is kind of rough… the characters just don’t look great… And the voice acting is also… Sakuraba Yui’s image in my head is permanently ruined… ever since I heard her sing a bunch of cutesy visual novel OPs…

One last thing: this game is 18+, with H scenes, but I skipped them all. All I’ll say is the H scenes are inserted at the worst possible times.

In the first playthrough, for instance, I honestly thought the protagonist killed his sister with his dick… yeah…