Review of Summer Pockets
Subject | Summer Pockets |
By | Helpfulness: 11 Vote: 6.5machinesmile on 2020-11-15 |
Review | I played the original version (i.e., NOT Reflection Blue). As a disclaimer, these are just my opinions, reflecting my personal taste, your mileage may vary. I acquired this game (and had very high expectations for it), because Key's Little Busters! is one of the top-3 of my all time favourite visual novels. And in many regards this VN is excellent: graphics are really good, music and voice acting are brilliant, the island and its locations and legends are a great setting. However, to me the beef in visual novels are the characters and stories, the style and quality of writing. Unfortunately the writing in Summer Pockets is quite a mixed bag. There are some things the writing excels at. The basic set-up is great. Also the initial light-hearted slice-of-life & comedic story parts are top-notch; in them writing has perfect rhythm, content, and form. However, everything else is average at best and just plain bad at worst. The routes are on a short side. Only one of the normal routes has a coherent story and real relationship development. The dramatic/sad parts are often overly melodramatic. The last-second attempts to make the route endings happier are either completely absurd (Tsumugi, Kamome) or illogical (Ao, Shiroha's true ending in "Pocket"). Even after full completion of the game there are many things in the routes that don't make sense. Discussing these problems in more detail is not possible without major spoilers. I wrote route analyses, but they became too long-winded and I was unable to take my story editor hat off when writing them. They probably won't be very useful from a review point of view. I post them below hidden with spoiler tags just in case someone is interested in reading them. Route analyses (major spoilers): One general gripe: while I don't dislike sad or even downright depressing stories as such, the routes in this game followed the Key "crying game" formula to a fault. When it is a given that every route (even Shiroha's with the true route) will follow the same /\ shaped tragedy formula with character introduction > brief light/comic part with her to make you care > tragic twist > tear-milking > bad end > very weak attempt to somehow end the story on a brighter note, it is desensitizing and counter-productive to the story's effectiveness. I was able to become emotionally involved with the first two sad routes I played, but after that I knew what to expect and that my actions would make no difference to the outcome, so I stopped caring and was unable to be moved by the (subjectively much better and more emotionally charged) true routes. The routes in the order I played them (the parts in past tense describe my subjective experience): Shiroha's route: This is even shorter than the other routes, with initial interactions consisting of Shiroha just brushing MC off with a couple of sentences, and in August several days get skipped completely. I would have hoped for much more interactions and much better relationship development; as Shiroha initially appeared reclusive and even near-repulsed by MC, they would have been especially important in this route. On a plus side, the sparse content was well written and this had a rare happy ending... Or so it seemed. Tsumugi's route: This was horrible. Tsumugi's personality and actions consisted of saying mugyi, acting like a six-year-old, and humming a short tune. Apparently the writer(s) did realize this might not cut it for one of the main characters, so they added Shizuku as her sidekick. But as Shizuku's personality consisted entirely of liking boobies, she did not exactly help. Interactions in this route consisted mostly of never-ending and repetitive inane babbling about things to do. The "spirited away" concept was initially very promising, but in the end it made no sense neither in character nor in game context ("Tsumugi" was not Tsumugi after all, and the "spirited away" phenomenon of a living, conscious person differed from the memory-carrying butterflies lore that made up the theme and "miracle logic" of the rest of the game.) The emotional climax with the thousands of candles was well written and genuinely touching, though. However, any redeeming this route might have gained with that beautiful candle scene was promptly destroyed when in the after-scene it was revealed that the mysterious non-Tsumugi who had won over MC's heart was in fact... a teddy bear. Alrighty then. This route should have had an "Unadulterated garbage! Do you want to skip to end?" warning dialogue at the beginning. Kamome route: This had potential to be a great route. Kamome was an entertaining and likeable character, and her initial childhood adventure re-enactment plot was both heart-warming and fun. This route would have worked fine either as a welcome change of pace without a forced tragic twist, or with the tragic twist as a ghost story where Kamome would have been seen only by MC. But instead the writer(s) made a complete mess of it. First, the earlier parts prior to Kamome's sudden disappearance described how other people could also see Kamome and communicate with her, and how she was also able to affect the physical world (e.g., by doing chores at Kyoko's place, carrying tent and other travel equipment to the mine, moving her suitcase around, etc.) These parts make no sense if she only existed in the MC's head. Second, the ending was completely nonsensical, it was so ridiculous that it was insulting. The route established with certainty that Kamome "will never wake from her sleep", meaning that she is either dead or in permanent coma; MC only ever saw her ghost. However, in the end MC receives a real physical letter from Kamome, and the last image is a CG of Kamome and MC embracing. Seriously? I have never seen a more ungainly, implausible, forced, glued-on "happy end" anywhere. Ao's route: This was the best and most coherent of the four basic routes. Ao was an entertaining and likeable character; MC and Ao actually appeared to have chemistry and the relationship development felt natural; the story events throughout the drama phase made sense, and the tragic events were not cheapened into drawn-out tear-milking bawl-o-drama. The only real shortcomings were the overall length -- I would have hoped for much more interactions before the drama phase -- and the quite baffling ending. In the end both MC and Ai are going to find Ao's memory-carrying butterfly to wake her up, despite the facts that MC has no tolerance to touching the butterflies (he was about to commit suicide the very first time he did) and that touching them en masse would put both of them in coma. Earlier Ai's butterfly form recognized Ao and came to her (although she couldn't see it), so perhaps it is presumed that Ao's butterfly would do the same with Hairi and/or Ai, so random touch-method searching would not be required? This is contradicted by the fact that Ao's butterfly actively avoided Hairi when it parted from Ao, and the fact that MC speaks of possible "years or decades" of searching when he returns to the island, but it is the only way the ending would make sense. ALKA + Pockets: By the time I reached these hidden routes, my emotional involvement had already waned to the point where my reaction to any sad dramatic events was on a sardonic "well I'll be, another tragic twist" level. Also the subject focus (mother/child relationship, importance of core family) was not my cup of tea. It's a shame, because these are ambitious and expand the originally rather brief Shihora route (but in the end go overboard and add unnecessary complexity to the story with the existence of Umi's origami plane in a "wrong" timeline). Key has published an official short story that offers an explanation for that, but in my opinion any decently written game should contain all the information necessary for understanding it. |
11 points |