Haruka Kanata (はるかかなた) Review

What is a landmine game?

It’s the kind that gives you a huge落差—looks great on the surface, but once you’re in, you realize it’s nothing like you imagined. And on top of that, it hurts you bad and doesn’t even give you a rub afterward. A total scam.

It’s like you spend ages chasing after a goddess, get ready to fuck her, and then find out she’s actually a man—and he forcefully makes you the bottom, fucks your ass raw till you bleed, then dumps you and sells you to a gay bar as a cum dumpster.

A landmine game feels different from being deceived. With deception, you’re just being played with. With a landmine game, you’re not only played with but also tied up and force-fed shit.

The first time I heard about Haruka Kanata (はるかかなた), the reviews weren’t great—they called it a landmine. But I thought, how bad can it really be? A plot that drags? Unexplained developments? Shit art? A pile of dead characters? I’ve seen the worst plots. I didn’t believe it could be that bad. My curiosity kicked in, and I wanted to see just how explosive this landmine was…

But I was wrong. Haruka Kanata is a proper landmine—it redefines the term, made me relearn what a landmine means.

This game fucked me deep and just walked away smiling.

To talk about Haruka Kanata’s landmine qualities, we shouldn’t start with the story—we should start with the installation. Usually, installing a Galgame is just extracting an archive or copying files. Haruka Kanata is the former. While extracting, I looked at the install log and noticed something unusual…

Lots of sqlite3 files being copied, and finally a bunch of json…

Wait… why the hell is this game copying all that? An included web manual?

After installation, the game folder only had a few URL shortcuts and an exe, nothing else—but the folder was 2GB. I smartly chose to show all files, and a folder named “game” appeared. I opened it and my jaw dropped.

The screen was full of sqlite3 files, plus a bunch of json marked as chapters and settings. I opened one at random…

Holy shit… the script and dialogue are all written in json.

Well, well. At the time I thought, this game is amazing—a true pioneer of the future of eroge. Web apps are the trend, right? We should encourage this innovative spirit. Way better than those studios that milk one engine for a lifetime.

So I ran the game and found that the touchscreen on my Surface Pro 3 didn’t work properly…

Based on my experience with older versions of Shadowsocks-gui, I deduced it was a HiDPI incompatibility with the web wrapper. After disabling scaling… touch worked, barely. Then I looked at the settings, tried to save, and found the OK button unclickable…

Everything else was clickable, but not OK. Fine, I’ll use the stylus—it’s not like I need to press OK often.

So I started the game. Even though it’s written as a web page, it looked decent. At the end of the first scene, with a venetian blind effect…

The game crashed…

………………

At first I thought it was my random clicking. Restarted, same place, crashed again…

Simply put, I couldn’t continue.

Then I checked the walkthrough on Seiya’s Shack (誠也の部屋), which said version 1.20 fixed all the non-running issues. Fine, I’ll download the patch. Lots of Japanese Galgame studios have weird bugs; updates fix them.

Patch size: 400MB…

Did they remake the whole game? The game itself is only 2GB.

After installing the patch, I could finally continue. But the dialogue response speed was damn slow. Whatever, as long as I can read the story.

The protagonist has a little sister, a childhood friend, school, a kouhai… then suddenly his adoptive mother tells him she picked up another little sister for him…

The protagonist can’t accept it, saying he already has a sister, where did this one come from. The mother says, “She’s your twin sister!”

The protagonist has an epiphany: “Right! She really is my twin sister!”

You forgot your own twin sister, you idiot? This narration is hilarious…

So the twin sister is named Haruka, the protagonist is Kanata. Together their names make the game title Haruka Kanata. The intent is obvious—probably a game about fucking your real sister, like Yosuga no Sora.

Haruka takes out a small notebook filled with things she wants to do, calling it her “future list.” It includes making friends, parties, sleepovers, meeting a magical girl, and other random stuff. Then the adoptive mother drops a bombshell: the original sister in the house is actually a half-sister from the same father, not a full sister. The twin is the real one. The step-sister overhears this and can’t accept it.

So the real sister becomes a step-sister? What’s new?

At this point the game seems to be heading into the OP—but instead of the OP, we get a new crash.

So I restarted the game and found that the auto-save is useless…

Meaning I forgot to save manually, and I have to redo everything… No problem, there’s skip. But skip isn’t fast at all—it’s like constantly refreshing a web page. And skip gave me a surprise: before reaching the previous crash point, the game crashed again…

Restarted, skipped, crashed even earlier. So I had to proceed step by step: skip a bit, save, skip a bit, save. I also discovered an amazing fact: the more I crashed, the more frequently it crashed. The program gets more crash-prone the more it crashes—to the point where eventually it crashed just opening the main menu…

I checked Task Manager and saw the program had many, many processes… So it leaves a process behind when it crashes? After killing a bunch of leftover processes, the game finally ran normally—at least past the OP.

The story after the OP is beyond boring—calling it boring would be a compliment. Endless slice-of-life bullshit, and painfully dull, combined with Kitami Rikka’s lowest, flattest voice, making it completely unengaging. I don’t know how many times I wanted to sleep during the game. I tried to fast-forward, but the game gave me a fancy warning:

And even if you don’t use skip, if you click a bit too fast, same warning.

So you have to obediently read the white-water plot. The protagonist helps his sister complete the few measly items on her list, then saves a little bird, names it Hisui, and the bird dies anyway. The story then uses a “whole family died” gloomy atmosphere to force grief, which left me bewildered.

Honestly, the OP was so cool I kept expecting a twist like “the world of the protagonist and sister is fake” or something, but it never came. The two just pussyfoot around—the sister doesn’t cling to the protagonist, the protagonist doesn’t cling to her, and they keep emphasizing they’re siblings, family, kazoku. I endured all the crashes from chapter 3 to chapter 16, their relationship didn’t progress at all. Finally, one night on the rooftop, the protagonist loses control and kisses his sister…

ｷﾀ━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━ｯ!! kita！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！

Finally! But after the kiss, they just go home and get scolded by the adoptive mother…

Then back to daily life, the same white-water slice-of-life…

You know that feeling of being turned on and then left hanging? After two more chapters of daily life, the protagonist discovers his sister masturbating in the bathroom at night. More daily life, then one day they finally have sex…

Yes, very suddenly they have sex. The sister comes to the brother, says “it’s okay,” and then it’s okay.

Right before the sex scene, the game crashed again… and the BGM never came back.

“I have one month left. After one month, I’ll leave everyone.” The sister keeps emphasizing this. Why? At first I thought she was a time traveler who would disappear. But the story continued, and suddenly the sister collapsed one day. At the hospital, they said she had a terminal illness and would die.

“Mom had a terminal illness, so I have one too. The doctor said I have two months to live. So while I still felt okay right after treatment, I made a list—a future list—writing down what I wanted to do, and asked the doctor to let me go home, see my brother, and do these things together, so I could leave in peace.”

The angry protagonist asks his adoptive mother if she knew. She says yes…

The protagonist is furious. I’m furious too—not just because the game crashed twice more during this, but because of this sudden, melodramatic plot.

There was no foreshadowing, not a single hint that the sister was sick. She was jumping around playing outdoor creampie with the protagonist, and you tell me she’s terminal?

After some thought, the protagonist decides to spend the remaining days peacefully with his sister. But soon, she becomes paralyzed, bedridden, and then can’t even open her eyes—completely comatose…

The protagonist and the sister’s friends come to visit, talking to her even though they know she won’t open her eyes.

Then, sad music plays… the sister opens her eyes, smiles, says “arigatou,” and closes her eyes and dies…

What’s with this Chinese war drama “won’t die” feeling???

Then the sister really dies, gone, game ends.

“Your mom exploded, scenario writer!” I couldn’t help saying to the ED, and then the program crashed again.

“Your whole family exploded, programmer!” I added angrily.

Although the game has several other routes, according to the walkthrough, the ending is probably like this. Seiya’s Shack says there’s another ending, but doesn’t say if it’s a happy end. You need to load from Save1, around chapter 6, and do a second playthrough. Yeah right—skip crashes endlessly, you want me to do a second playthrough?

Eat shit!!

I checked the game’s official site with interest and found the patch is up to 3.0.1, recently updated, still fixing bugs…

This game has been fixing bugs for half a year… I downloaded and installed it. The latest 3.0.1 seems to bundle its own Chrome, replacing the original wrapper for stability. And in reality? Still bullshit. Lag and crashes remain, just much better than the earliest 1.10.

Oh, and here’s someone else’s review of the game:

So how should you play this game?

1. Right-click properties, disable UI scaling.
2. Upgrade to the latest 3.0.1. Remember to upgrade step by step; jumping straight to 3.0.1 causes more errors.
3. Don’t click too fast when playing.
4. If the game crashes, open Task Manager and check for leftover processes—kill them.
5. Wash your face, build some luck.

The above can somewhat save the game’s programming, but the story is beyond saving. White water, white water, white water to this degree, combined with endless crashes, traps you in an infinite loop of skipping through white water.

Also worth mentioning: the game has very few CGs—just a few backgrounds recycled over and over. SD CGs are counted in the total, not as extras. The long, tedious sister route has only 9 CGs, two of which are reused. The game emphasizes the twin siblings’ feathers from the OP to the end, but in the story the feathers do nothing except get exchanged. Forced symbolism to look deep. Not to mention the plot overlaps way too much with Yosuga no Sora, and Ono Ryouko’s voice performance is far inferior to Taguchi Hiroko’s—it doesn’t make you feel much for the sister, more like she’s just expressionless.

So after going through this game, I finally understood what a “landmine” is.

A true landmine isn’t about disgusting you with the plot, killing off a heroine, introducing an ugly character, or throwing in shocking elements—those things will always excite someone and actually leave an impression.

A true landmine is a game with a story that has no redeeming qualities, flat as water, so boring you want to skip, but the programming won’t let you skip.

It tortures your body through the program and wears down your soul through the story—a double torture. That’s a true landmine.

For Haruka Kanata, its beautiful OP and art are like a clear spring, drawing you in.

But who would have known that after you get close, it suddenly explodes and covers you in shit?