Being forced into a situation that rips you apart from your beloved family of 3 sisters and a mother, you find yourself at the cusp of the beautifully written story of Sweet Summer. You are a young man caught up in his power hungry and controlling father’s ideal life for you being forced to work for his firm. After being forcefully separated from your family for nearly a year, your longing to reconnect has an opportunity to flourish into a reality as a trip back home presents itself.
Immediately as the game begins you’re going to notice, this title is one of those visual novels where the imagery was not at all an afterthought. Welcome to this kind of title are the beautiful scenery pieces we get that were not just thrown together as a means of breaking background blandness. Hard work and care is clearly seen in the backgrounds, but of course this doesn’t mean the characters themselves were neglected.
Each character you will see all are very unique, distinctively different and all very well crafted. From style to beauty everyone really stands out in their own way and will be a welcome dose of candy to your eyes. Whomever crafted these characters did a fantastic and very closely detailed job.
Visual novels often come equipped with choices that alter your path, which can also be found here. Not as frequent as most titles I have played seem to throw them at you, but nonetheless choices are present. With a little testing, some choices seem to end up in a similar place regardless of what you choose, but more so what will matter are other choices later on not being available to choose if your “points” don’t add up. It seems, depending on the choices you make, you will acquire some kind of hidden number with each lady that adds up.
Difficulty didn’t come very high when I was making choices. Most of the choices seemed fairly obvious when they were presented, so despite them being there, you won’t struggle much with them.
It is worth noting that all of the love interests are relative in some way to you, mostly by blood. If that type of this is a repulsive taboo to you, then you may want to avoid this one. However, if you aren’t bothered much by that, then this is actually a really great novel. I have to admit that there were times in the story I actually found myself caring, which seems rare with these types of games. So, I feel the story is very well written and enjoyable.
Game aside, the price tag on this one is pretty low. Considering the time you will spend with the story and the work that went into it, I can say it is well worth it. As a player who enjoys the visual novel titles, I do feel this one should be in your library.
