Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue (海と雪のシアンブルー) Review

Galgame blurbs have gotten seriously dishonest in recent years.

Like, if a game claims it’s “pure love,” watch out. 90% chance it isn’t.

If a game tells you it’s “a very quiet, uneventful story,” be suspicious. It won’t be uneventful.

If a game tells you it’s yuri, there’s a good chance it’ll inform you the heroines are a bunch of guys’ cum dumpsters.

If a game says “Now on sale to great reviews,” it already got shredded.

Today I’m talking about a game that’s honest in every conceivable way. Seriously, in all my years of playing these things, I’ve never seen a game this honest.

Umi to Yuki no Cyan Blue (海と雪のシアンブルー), from CUBE.

Let’s start with the blurb. It hits several key points right up front: “There are no deaths in this game, no major incidents occur. There is only the meeting and parting that ought to be blessed.”

Reading that made me suspicious, actually. I’ve never seen a game come out and announce it has no deaths. At most they’ll say they’re depicting quiet everyday life. Which just made me more convinced this game had deaths and “major incidents” in it. Plus it’s CUBE, and CUBE has pulled shit before, so…

“This has to be a smokescreen from the studio!”

So I played it, and the result genuinely caught me off guard. This game…

Really does have nothing!

The plot: our protagonist, in classic fashion, has parents who remarry. In classic fashion, he gains a capable non-blood-related little sister. In classic fashion, he’s dragged at school into a classic committee making a classic graduation album, and on that classic committee sits a very serious president with a classic personality setup. The protagonist also works a classic part-time job, where he meets a classic troubled rich girl. He also has a classic inexplicable charisma that attracts a classic romanceable female teacher. In a classic library he meets a classic bookish girl. Then he classic-ly juggles all these classic heroines, and after classic day after classic day, a classic day arrives, with classic choices determining which classic route he enters. The route contents are classic too: discover the girl’s family background, classic confession, classic fucking, classic ending, and the classic game is over.

I figured this game probably had no deaths and would be a bit quieter, but… I never imagined it would be this honest.

It really has nothing. The protagonist just lives his days on a strict schedule. Chat with the sister in the morning, chat with his bro at school, hit the library and chat with the bookish girl, chat with the girl at his job, chat with the committee president at school, go home, summarize the day in his room, day over…

Every single day is like this. The last time I saw a game with this rigid a plot structure… was… Memories Off, which I played in college. The kind of very retro game where the UI shows a calendar. They don’t make those anymore. Even HOOK, a veteran studio known for that stuff, has moved on.

Did CUBE really make this thing to be “retro” and “nostalgic”? They brought in a bunch of old voice actresses too—Gotou Mai, Hitomi Nabatame, throw in Miru and you’ve got the full set. If you told me this game was from 2003 I’d believe you. The art, which keeps going off-model, also feels twenty years old. The same artist at CUBE didn’t draw this badly before—the quintuplets one looked great. And the OP melody collides with a song from The Idolmaster. It sounds literally identical. No idea if it’s plagiarism or coincidence. Not to mention the little sister’s animations look like pixel-perfect copies of CUBE’s previous game.

After playing for a while, I sort of get what CUBE was going for with this project. Maybe they figured today’s eroge are all too busy doing “bits,” most of them leaning on foreshadowing and crazy twists, so why not do the opposite—a work that fleshes out its story without relying on “bits,” aiming to move you gradually through sheer quietness. There’s a bit of an “artsy” intention there. You can see the artsy elements in the game too: the youth graduation album, characters constantly talking about wanting to “go to Tokyo,” but these elements are just repeated by the protagonist and don’t do anything.

What they overlooked is that “truth revealed in quietness” requires an extremely skilled writer. Writing a gripping twist is easy. Writing a death to make people cry is simple. Writing a quiet slice-of-life story that moves people—that’s brutally hard.

And it’s obvious that CUBE’s roster of trash writers doesn’t have that ability, so the game became a “nothing happens” glass of plain water.

Maybe Osakakurosame (クロサメちゃん) will get horny over the little sister voiced by that hack Ohara Sayaka—wait, no, whatever her name is—but then again, who doesn’t he get horny over? A guy who gets horny dozens of times a day doesn’t prove the game has anything going for it.

Even though I went in for Gotou Mai, I have to admit she’s regressed noticeably. Time has carved itself into her voice. She can’t do that Chitose-sana feeling anymore. Honestly, Gotou should stick to older-sister roles. Give the little sister to Natsuwa Koto…

But regardless, I have to praise this game. It’s clichéd as hell, quiet as hell, bland as hell, sleep-inducing as hell—but it’s got Gotou Mai’s voice work for the nostalgia, and more importantly, it’s honest. The blurb said there was nothing, and there really is nothing.

The world is full of lies. A studio willing to tell you the truth deserves a salute.