Natsuzora no Perseus: The Backstory Is More Interesting Than the Story

I’ve got this bad habit: if a work is too famous — famous to the point where everyone talks about it, everyone says it’s a masterpiece or everyone says it’s trash — I lose all interest in touching it. After all, you pick things up by osmosis, and by then you’ve been spoiled on most of it anyway. So ef - a fairy tale of the two, eden*, all that — I can’t be bothered to play them, because I’ve already been spoiled on most of it.

Still, minori as a studio left a decent impression on me. The art and character designs looked nice, the various settings felt kinda fresh and clean. I’d never really followed their stuff, but when I heard their new game Natsuzora no Perseus (夏空的英仙座) got a translation, I figured I’d kill some time and give it a go.

Going through it: yeah, the art’s good, the girls are good, the brocon little sister is good too, the setup’s a bit cliché but still good, the music’s good too… good… good… gooood… As the slice-of-life days dragged on one after another, I started getting dizzy, because I couldn’t figure out what the plot was trying to say. Every day the protagonist plays his little flirting games with his sister while also shooting the breeze with the other girls like some housewife. The protagonist seems melancholy, every heroine seems melancholy, the sister seems melancholy too, all striking the pose of “nobody understands the protagonist but me.” The plot goes nowhere, but the mountain road always manages to take a sudden turn — until I see the sister one night, drenched head to toe in the protagonist’s white goo, and I realize something’s off about this game… And then what do I see? The protagonist is banging his sister every single day, endless banging. Suddenly the sister won’t let him bang anymore, and the protagonist is jonesing like an addict, running around everywhere, losing his temper at everything, until finally he finds his sister waiting fully naked in the flower field and they bang again, banging heaven and earth, banging all of creation, and then the protagonist takes his sister and flees the village, and the two of them go off somewhere else to bang.

The end…

Bruh! That’s it?

At this point I figured the game was just messed up, so I went and dug up its backstory, and finally understood why this thing is so low-tier, and learned the whole saga of why minori gets called the “chuuni studio.” Look it up if you’re curious — short version: an eroge company got so far up its own ass that it nearly went bankrupt and couldn’t survive, so it rushed out some half-assed nukige hoping to boost sales and get some blood back in its veins…

So Natsuzora no Perseus was minori’s emergency elixir, a full-HP health potion. And just as they hoped, it actually sold pretty well.

Selling well obviously doesn’t mean the story’s good. I gritted my teeth through every route, and the plot can be summed up in a few lines:

“Morisawa-kun, good morning!” “Morisawa-kun, eaten yet?” “Morisawa-kun, wanna go out?” “Morisawa-kun, wanna fuck?” “Morisawa-kun, was last time good?” “Morisawa-kun, round two?”

Then it’s just endless banging. But the funny thing is, the writing still tries to strike this slightly melancholy, emotionally tangled, try-hard pose, combined with the emotional swell of the music and the gorgeous visual direction. It’s like every time they bang, there’s some deep angsty reason — to save someone, to release emotions, or to relieve stress. I wanted so badly to point at this game and yell “you’re just a low-tier nukige,” but I couldn’t do it, because apart from the excessive amount of banging, everything else has this thick fresh-and-clean vibe — even a kind of intellectual feel, like some middle-aged literary lady’s story of beautiful youths caught in a swirl of emotions.

“Between fresh-and-clean and nukige” — that’s pretty much the feel.

It’s like when I watched Lust, Caution. You can say Tony Leung’s half-exposed dick is ugly, but you can’t call it a smut novel — its 9.8 on Douban will set you straight in a second. It’s a masterpiece, it just has H scenes in it. You can’t veto all the emotional writing before it just because there’s a sex scene. Strip out all the banging in Natsuzora no Perseus and it’s actually a decent countryside drama — though it’d probably only be 20 minutes long.

Some say Natsuzora no Perseus wasn’t originally this short, that minori rushed it out to pad the numbers because they were about to go under. Maybe. Maybe not. But what’s more interesting is looking at minori’s later games — like Eve in December. What do we see? The same familiar big tits, the same familiar nukige setup hidden under the fresh-and-clean surface. According to people who’ve played it, it’s the same route as Natsuzora no Perseus: high-quality art, high-quality music, high-quality direction, plus the endless banging…

I don’t know if minori’s president figured one game wasn’t enough to recover, or if the pressure to survive made him abandon his principles and decide selling these short and sweet fap-and-sleep games was actually fine. But minori being short on money doesn’t seem fake — they’re loudly selling eden* on Steam on one hand, and on the other rushing to slap their past chuuni selves in the face by opening up overseas markets. Guess in front of money, even the most chuuni person has to kneel…

Anyway, if you think the character designs in Natsuzora no Perseus are nice, then use it to fap and sleep. If you think the setup’s good and want to see what the story’s about? Then I suggest you look into minori’s dark history, because for this game, the backstory is more interesting than the story itself…