– Advertisement –
My summer adventure, memories of another life is a visual novel that tells the story of a man transported into a different body after experiencing a rough patch due to a breakup with his ex. As a visual novel, the game plays out like a story book with players following along, occasionally making decisions that will impact the rest of the story. Unfortunately, this leans heavily into hoping that you have a dire love for both visual novels and the Isekai genre of anime. As someone who isn’t too deep into either of these categories, the story here was a miss for me and failed to grab my attention.
The game starts with Maksim Laas telling us the story of how his relationship ended before we are introduced to a woman named Kyoko. After coming home from a long day of work, we are given a brief explanation of who she is as well as her relationship with Maksim. She finds a note book he had been filling out and this is where the story really gets going.
With an interesting story hook, My summer Adventure, Memories of Another Life has potential to be a wonderful visual novel but unfortunately it fails to grasp your attention right away. I was shifted from Maksims perspective to Kyoko’s and then back to Maksim and while this isn’t too unusual for video games, it was hard to build any kind of initial connection to either characters. We are introduced to the two of them during a fight in which Maksim remarks about how he wishes he didn’t marry Kyoko and this was a real rough first step for our main character. He comes off as whiny and passes the blame off to Kyoko right away and while a flawed character is fun to play as, I believe we should have spent more time with the two leading up to the fight in order to build a more solid foundation for the story.
When Kyoko is reading through the notebook left behind, we are given the story about how Marksim ended up in this situation and the time that they have spent together. One day, Maksim wakes up on a train in a different body and the first thing he does is remarks on the new body he has been moved to, saying things such as having sausage fingers and the fact that his gut is too large to be hidden. When a young Kyoko checks in on him, he makes remarks about her touching his arm and how he should have a black belt in arm touching since he has touched a multitude of people and animals appendages. The writing for the character does not do a good job of painting him in a positive light and I was checked out within the first 30-45 minutes of the game due to his character.
While the story is a major part of a visual novel, it is important that the game also have visuals that capture the players attention. This is another area in which things fall apart for this game. The visuals are very bland and basic with nothing really standing out. The first few moments of the game really has the screen showing some scenery with a text box bombarding you with information. When Kyoko reads the notebook, the screen shows text popping up over a blank background. I found myself missing screenshots of certain text due to the fact there is no indicator for when the text is over with and will move on to the next string of text. While a right click will allow you to pull up a history of things that have been said, it is disheartening to know that one misclick can cause you to have to pull yourself away from the story to go reread something.
I wish that there was more that could be said about this game but as a visual novel, it is hard to describe much in regards to the gameplay. While other visual novels rely on distinct character designs and wonderful writing to carry you through the experience, these are nowhere to be found here and makes this a painful journey. Having decisions impact the story is always a welcome feature for titles in this genre but those choices can lose their impactfulness when the player is uninterested in the things going on around them.
The supernatural event that kicks off the story is an interesting one but is also a trope that has been done a multitude of times. Although we can see that Maksim has to make a tough decision between two different girls with two different personalities, I did not find any reason to be invested in his story whatsoever and by the time things started ramping up, I was ready for it to be over.
I had such high hopes for this game going into it since the story concept is decent enough to warrant a playthrough but the characters seem flat and by the time you see any development or reason to be interested in, there is a chance you will be in the same boat as myself. It misses its first step and spends the rest of the time trying to bring you along for a journey that may have lost you right away.
