ATRI -My Dear Moments- Review

A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them.

An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool.

Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

Everyone knows this, but with the uncertainty of how the world’s going, the “apocalypse” theme keeps getting dragged back out anyway. I’ve thought about how the end might come plenty of times myself. Could be war, could be natural disaster… I’ve also imagined the Earth getting wiped out in a matter of days. Could be hackers, could be nukes.

Who could’ve guessed a virus would spread across the globe this fast in 2020?

Maybe in the near future the world really will end in an instant. Maybe we really should prepare, figure out how to greet the coming “apocalypse.” No idea when that day arrives, but when it does, humanity will split into two camps: the stay-behinds and the runaways.

The stay-behinds stick around to protect the Earth and rebuild civilization. The runaways flee the planet and look for a new home.

Of course, I can’t even begin to evaluate the ones who just take the Earth with them.

Recently Sony, big Japanese company that it is, spearheaded the creation of a label called ANIPLEX.exe, dedicated to making porn games… oh, sorry, “text adventure games.” Among the first batch of products was one apocalypse-type game, and that’s the one I’m talking about here: ATRI -My Dear Moments-.

The story of ATRI -My Dear Moments- is actually pretty simple. In the future, global warming has flooded the Earth. The male lead, disabled and having lost his mother, has also lost his genius-level conviction, gives up his chance to study at a higher institute, and goes back to his hometown to wallow. By chance he fishes up ATRI, an “assistant robot” that belonged to his mother, and with her help recovers his grandmother’s research legacy, recovers his own conviction, and decides to go back to school and save the Earth.

This story structure looks really familiar. I kept feeling like I’d seen this male lead setup somewhere before. Then I checked and the game’s “supervisor” is SCA-Ji, which explains a lot. The setup feels like a “heavily modified, condensed version” of Sakura no Uta. Though according to some rumor on ErogameScape, this game was originally supposed to be written by SCA-Ji, but his script was apparently too “unhinged” or whatever and didn’t pass the budget review, so they ended up bringing in Konno Asta to write it, which is how the game got approved. Which tells you the SCA-Ji version must have been seriously unhinged. SCA-Ji still has the “supervisor” title, so maybe he still got to decide the overall framework.

Let’s talk about the game itself. It was funded by daddy Sony’s ANIPLEX.exe, produced by Frontwing together with Makura. But no matter how I look at it… it feels like a Frontwing and Pulltop joint production. Aside from SCA-Ji doing color design and some of the coloring, I honestly can’t spot anything Makura about it. Sure, the music arranger Matsumoto Aki has always worked with Makura, but he’s always worked with Frontwing too. The engine is Frontwing’s, the free multi-language switching is Frontwing’s work. The writer Konno Asta may have been absorbed into Frontwing, but the way the game presents itself is way too close to a Pulltop game, especially that “popup” dialogue style, which is pure Pulltop flavor. Aside from the game’s “grand framework” feeling like something SCA-Ji wrote, the artist Ki4 may be an artist, but the coloring looks very Frontwing, with zero Makura flavor. Oh right, I remember Konno Asta also worked with Makura on Himawari no Kyoukai to Nagai Natsuyasumi, so with this production lineup I have to suspect they just slapped SCA-Ji’s name on it to boost sales, billed it as “Frontwing X Makura,” when it’s really a “Frontwing X Pulltop” game no matter how you look at it.

Of course, for players, the game’s own quality is what matters. Which studio actually made it doesn’t really matter. On the whole, ATRI -My Dear Moments- is a pretty high-quality game. It throws out the boring “conquer multiple heroines” routes of standard galgames and goes back to fundamentally “telling a story,” raising the main storyline to a fairly high level. The main line is the emotional bond between the male lead and the robot ATRI, but that main line is actually supported by a bunch of underlying threads: the male lead’s romance with ATRI, the male lead’s past of losing his confidence after being discriminated against, the male lead’s own redemption, the relationship between the male lead’s mother and ATRI, the past ATRI witnessed and her inner changes from the male lead’s mother to the male lead, ATRI’s developers’ views of her and how those views shift, the male lead’s grandmother’s construction of the artificial sea island “Eden,” the male lead’s father’s obsession with launching a rocket, the male lead trying to build a generator again in the “sunken school,” ATRI choosing to sacrifice herself to help the male lead achieve his dream of saving the Earth. These scattered threads get woven together by the script, so while you play you gradually get pulled into the story at the script’s pace, and by the time you hit the True End you’re moved.

The final ending isn’t a Happy End in the usual galgame sense. The male lead doesn’t end up with ATRI, and he never truly falls in love with his poor backup-wife heroine either. Instead, after he’s done what he needed to do, he gets one last chance to see ATRI again before he dies. Honestly I think that ending is good. Life is memorable precisely because it has its regrets.

ATRI -My Dear Moments- isn’t a normal galgame. It throws out a lot of the toxic elements of galgames. It doesn’t force a tacked-on route for Minamo, doesn’t give the blonde twintails an IF conquest chapter, doesn’t force a Happy End where the male lead and ATRI have kids together, doesn’t pad the slice-of-life with filler or shove in a bunch of skits unrelated to the main plot. The everyday stuff that does come up is more or less tied to the main line (nuclear power generation, undersea salvage, etc.). The game isn’t long, and it’s easy to just enjoy what a visual novel can do. This, I have to say, is what we imagined a “galgame” should be.

But maybe Konno Asta has just written too many porn games, because in the “romance” scenes you can still spot where the HCGs are supposed to go… you know what I mean.

Playing this game left me with a lot of feelings. If most galgames took this production approach, going for short and tight, then ported to as many platforms as possible, I figure people wouldn’t be constantly sighing about “the market shrinking.” Though I doubt most galgame companies can afford to do this. Only Sony would dare put money into it like this.

Anyway, ATRI -My Dear Moments- is a game with “no obvious weaknesses in any area.” It’s an apocalypse-flavored romance between a human and a robot, and besides the emotional moments you’ll also find the heroine “moe.” The story is tight with little padding. The difference between it and that Nekopara trash is, maybe, that it doesn’t have porn.

If there’s a galgame that could break out of the niche and be accepted by most ordinary players, I hope it’s the ATRI type.

P.S. The game’s English translation is even more fun than the Chinese, or even the original Japanese.