Kotonoha Mau Natsu no Fuurin (言の葉舞い散る夏の風鈴) had a lot of buzz before release — not because of some insane premise or anything, but because of the staff. Writer Noriaki Hanno had previously done Kage no Umi no Apeiria and the rocket-building thing, and both were received pretty well. This time almost the whole original team was back (with an even stronger artist brought on), so of course people were hyped. Once the game was announced, though, it looked like there wasn’t anything special in it — at least compared to Apeiria, this one’s setup is basically plain water. But because of the writer, most people still had high expectations. And what were we all expecting, exactly? Some crazy twist? High tech? A physics textbook? Logic-puzzle quizzes? A lot of people probably figured that since the writer had done something that good before, this one should be good too — even with its very “youthful,” very “ordinary” premise, there had to be something thought-provoking underneath. Well, we were all wrong. It’s just an unbelievably simple, plain-water game. Hell, it’s not even up to plain-water standards…

Every SAGA PLANETS game follows the same formula: individual routes scatter the pieces of the main story, then a GRAND END ties all the threads together and walks you to the true ending. They’ve done this in several of their titles, from Hatsuyuki Sakura to Kisaragi GOLD STAR to Hanasaki Work Spring! and Floral Flowlove. Roughly: the character routes screw around, maybe drop a hint about the main plot at the very end, and only after you’ve cleared every route does the game unlock the entrance to the real story, the TRUE END. Honestly the structure isn’t bad. It’s kind of interesting, it builds suspense. But it doesn’t fit every kind of story, and SAGA PLANETS has tripped over this formula more than once, or at least failed to deliver the payoff it deserves. Those games tend to be slice-of-life stuff with a weak main plot, where it feels like “we made a main plot because we need a main plot.” In other words, the route lock is completely unnecessary. It’s a moe game. You don’t need to force-hide a main story and a so-called “truth” behind it. When you finally see it you don’t go “oh, mind blown” — you go “that’s it?” Reverse effect. In recent years SAGA PLANETS’ choice of premises has gotten less and less interesting. Last year’s Floral Flowlove was themed around “ojousama,” young ladies, which made it look like ENSEMBLE had possessed the company (and of course, in the end the story had nothing to do with ojousama). And when this year’s game was announced I felt the same way: it’s called Kin’iro Loveriche, and the theme is “blonde hair.” Every heroine is blonde. At first glance it looks like it exists to satisfy some specific fetish. I personally don’t like blondes, and I haven’t noticed many people who do (silver hair, I’ve seen people into that). Blond-haired men are never any good either. The whole thing felt kind of nonsensical to me — but based on my prior experience with SAGA PLANETS, this “blonde” had to be a decoy, and there’d be a GRAND END at the end, 99% unrelated to gold hair. After finishing the game, I figure I was half right and half wrong.