In Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, the character Misaki Tobisawa gets called “Best Girl” by a whole lot of Western players. Sure, everyone knows Best is a superlative, but Western otaku are all DDs — every girl they see is Best Girl. You can just read Best Girl as waifu. Put it this way: in the Western otaku aesthetic, they lean toward girls like Misaki Tobisawa — relatively real, emotionally driven, a little fragile, and if she’s got a bit of pride buried in there too, even better. Everyone knows Sprite, the developer of Aokana, has been dead for years. Back in the day they voluntarily walked away from the Galgame market, ditched the sequel they’d been planning, and citing “the shrinking industry market” went off to do mobile and browser games. Turns out mobile didn’t work either, so they slunk back to making Galgame… merch. Yeah, after Sprite came back from the dead they didn’t exactly rush to make games again — they started selling merch, just like they were doing right before they went under. Maybe merch really does pay, because Sprite was having a grand old time with it. Right when players couldn’t take it anymore, Sprite finally announced their new title… Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue Extra 2. So after all that buildup, they made a fandisc. Of course it came bundled with plenty of merch — this shitty company clearly has selling merch down to a routine. The game came out a while back, it’s not a short read, so let’s just talk about how it is.

Honestly, I sat on this game for almost a year. It’s a bad habit of mine. Whenever everyone else is playing something, I look at their impressions, their screenshots, and I can more or less reconstruct the plot in my head. Once I’ve got that rough grasp of what a game is, well — having that grasp means that unless I’ve literally got nothing better to do or some other factor kicks in, it never gets priority. Most of the time I’d rather spend my hours breaking new ground. That’s just how it is. So I only remembered I still had this one sitting unfinished when the anime was about to air — literally, the anime was almost on — and finally started pushing through it. And because the game itself was so gripping, I took it slow, which meant that by the time I actually finished it, the anime was already two episodes in. Hm? What did I just say? The game itself was so gripping? Yes. This is a good game rich in positive energy, bright life-affirming values, and the ability to heal psychological trauma (adjusts glasses).