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At present, Summer Pockets it the latest visual novel from Key/Visual Arts. It's highly likely that you're familiar with their works. Everyone knows about Clannad and Angel Beats, but they have plenty of other good stories like Little Busters, Kanon, and Rewrite. They are a visual novel studio that and their work often gets adapted into anime and even manga. Some of which I watch the anime adaptation first. Currently, Summer Pockets does not have an adaptation. Since I already liked their older works, both their anime and visual novels, I figured I would check this out.
The main character of Summer Pockets is Haira Takahara who had recently been suspended from school. He ended up going to an island after an invitation from his aunt Kyouko to go through his deceased grandmother's belongings. Another relative, Umi was invited over and it's not specified how she's related to the main character. At least, not right away. To his surprise, his aunt doesn't have him help right away and tells him to go explore the island. Most days, Kyouko just ends up doing the work herself, continuing to tell Hairi to just to whatever he wants. After the first few days, where he meets everyone, the player will have to choose where they'd like to go on the island. A character is displayed in the locations where you can interact with them. There are only four characters that have routes: Shiroha Naruse, Ao Sorakado, Tsumugi Wenders, and Kamome Kushime. Hairi and Shiroha start off on the wrong foot. It really doesn't help that they met at a pool at night while she was in her underwear. Then there's Ao, who happens to be really perverted and will read into anything that anyone says. Then there's the two innocent characters Tsumugi and Kamome. Tsumugi is a calm and honest girl who is searching for something she wants to do and Kamome is a mysterious girl always dragging a suitcase around with her. There are a couple other girls that cannot be dated: Shizuku Mizuori and Miki Nomura, Nomiki for short. Shizuku is always hanging around Tsumugi and she has some weird obsession with boobs. Nomiki is one of the island's Public Order Executives, protecting the island's morals daily. She dislikes seeing anyone in public shirtless. There does happen to be a guy on the island who likes to not wear a shirt: Ryouichi Mitani. He likes to take it off regardless of where he is. The other main male character is Tenzen Kanou, who has an unhealthy obsession with Table Tennis. While there are four main routes, there are some extras. When you're first introduced to Tenzen, you have the option of playing Table Tennis with him. You can choose to play more of it when you get further in the visual novel. There's also a Pokemon parody where you find monsters around the island and have them battle each other. Just some nice extra distractions. Overall, it's an okay amount of content right here, but you really only have to do the four main routes to unlock the true route. Key's other visual novels took me a lot longer so I don't feel like the game's current price tag is entirely justified. In a lot of their visual novels, once you complete the main routes, you unlock some kind of "after story" which functions as the game's true route which leads to the real ending. Their first visual novel, Kanon didn't have that. This only really became the norm when they released Clannad. It seems that they've continued to do so. This game has not one, but two true routes. You unlock the alka route when you complete the scenarios for Shiroha, Ao, Tsumugi, and Kamome. It shouldn't really be a spoiler to say that Shiroha is the true/canon ship since Key's visual novels usually make it clear which one is. As you go through this route, certain things start to become more clear, like why the game is called Summer Pockets and what some of the characters have been hiding from everyone. When you get to the true routes, the game turns into a kinetic visual novel. In other words, your choices don't matter. I'm not the biggest fan of those visual novels, but here I'm fine with it since the true routes are rewards for completing the main game. The alka route has choices to make, but the second true route, the pockets route doesn't have any choices at all. When it comes to Key's visual novels, they usually start off with a normal concept but as you get far enough, you'll find plenty of supernatural elemenents. Most of their visual novels have a route or two without from what I've seen. However, pretty much all of them have something supernatural about them. Then in the true route, there's usually some big secret, always something not possible in our world. So much happened in these routes and then this visual novel managed to do something that none of their others had done before. A lot of people that are familiar with their works know them to be sad, but I managed to make it through most of them without crying, I shed more than a few tears on the true routes in Summer Pockets. I try not to think about what happened because I don't want to start back up again. Even with all the sad endings, there's usually some kind of happy ending. However, Key isn't always the best at these. There's usually something that isn't clear or just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In the case of Summer Pockets, it was just way too abrupt. I would've preferred that it keep going a bit longer and have a bit more detail on what happened with the characters at the end. Overall, it was a good story, even if it did steal elements from a lot of their past works: moving in with aunt like in Kanon, the family themes from Clannad, the setting from Air, the "this girl was in a coma the whole time" thing that BOTH Clannad and Kanon have done, etc. Even if they did steal from themselves, it still was a solid story and one of their saddest so far. It wasn't perfect though. While it did have plenty of well-written moments full of comedy or sadness, there were plenty of awkward moments as well. The story may have been good, but I do feel a bit cheated. I felt like Summer Pockets had less to offer in comparison to their other visual novels like Clannad and Little Busters. It wouldn't bother me so much if the game's price tag wasn't as high as it is so I'm glad I got it while it was on sale. I was a little disappointed that there were only four datable characters. Even their first visual novel, Kanon had more than that. It turns out there's an expansion that adds four more routes, so you can spend more time with Shizuku, Nomiki, an all new girl, and Umi. I expect Umi's to not be a romance route for more than one reason. The expansion was announced one year after the original came out in Japan... while the original was in the middle of getting localized. I really hope we can get the new stuff as DLC instead of having to buy it seperately, but we're just not going to know until it comes out. It HAS been confirmed that Key plans on bringing that version to Steam though and considering most of their stuff on Steam has been released in English, we can probably expect the expansion to be in English as well. Despite feeling it was somewhat lacking in content (to be honest, the price tag is to blame for that), I enjoyed my time quite a bit with this visual novel. Now that I've completed the main story, I feel pretty sad that it's over. I do have the extra content to take care of, so I could get on that. I also look forward to whenever the expansion gets released in the west. There are plenty of things I liked about this visual novel: the sprite work was great and some of the girls were pretty adorable. The soundtrack has some of their most memorable songs, so lately I'm often hearing them in my head. There was some nice attention to detail too. Whenever you complete a girl's route, she disappears from the title screen. In the end, Summer Pockets was a great read and I'm hoping that this will get an anime adaptation at some point. After reading through, I can tell it would be a challenge to adapt but considering Little Busters happened, I wouldn't say it's impossible. If you're a fan of Key's stuff or love visual novels, I highly recommend checking this out, but you should probably wait for a price drop or get the expansion when and if that gets localized.
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