The Herbalist (2014)



As a fan of visual novels, I hope people are beginning to see that they can be called video games, and that they're not always about creepily seducing half-naked cat-eared women. I still haven't played that many visual novels outside of Zero Escape and Ace Attorney, and it doesn't seem like this one would be interesting enough to warrant a playthrough, to be honest - especially if the ending is disappointing and the characters are either bland or memorable for the wrong reasons.

What I found really interesting was that although the special routes, with the exception of the ‘Super Secret Special Route II: Semyon Strikes Back”, don't end up with you actually making it out of the camp, and so aren't successful”, you actually learn a lot more of the nature of the freaky deaky stuff you got mixed up in through your failure there.

ES does however hold an edge on the others being the most unique in a couple ways, so even if it stays on the top of my somewhat short "played VN's" list, i wouldn't call it a favorite and opinions change with time. I played some scenes in the dead of night, and I got really creeped out and a little scared because of the music.

While a lot of the event CGs and sprite art is inconsistent, amateurish, and sometimes just plain bad. She is often angered because of people labelling her as a punk girl with no sense of order, but even though some of it might be true, she only does it to escape the boredom and odd looks from being at the camp.

I don't think the writing excels in the characters as much as it does in the story. And a secret character after you completed every route in the game. I think the game runs under the assumption that new players will take more time to unlock everything. But as you can see, Semyon is sooo inseeecuuuuuure Such angsty remarks are not uncommon throughout Everlasting Summer, and as much as they are unwelcome, they are more or less MST3k your only clue to his personality.

Made even more ludicrous by a disclaimer at the beginning claiming that all of the girls in the game are at least 18 years of age Except Ulyana of course, who is obviously younger than the others, but she doesn't have any sex scenes at all (although she does have a few spots of fanservice which are kind of disturbing when you think about it).

Frosty Kiss can be best summed up as an epilogue to Everlasting Summer, being a very short visual novel (I got the first ending in about ten minutes) which features the main female cast of the game (no cat girl or male characters make an appearance) and the protagonist of the previous game just celebrating in the new year.

If you haven't played it, but are interested, it's free to download on Steam. And finally, in the "Harem Ending", Semyon, after waking, meets all of the girls, at the same time, after they all came looking for him as the guy from the dreams they all had. Another developer, going by the nickname of Shippou, joined the discussion, explaining that the art they use in the game was commissioned and they were only later notified that it has been made by other people.

A lot of games start us off with amnesia, but Who Am I goes all the way with the premise. It is not so common to have effects like these for indie visual novels games, but they did it really well. It wasn't too difficult and time consuming to get through all the different route and endings.

Ultimately it doesn't matter, because the game was played once (there's a tournament with three games, and you could lose any one of them) and it was never brought up again; so much for variety. So, Everlasting Summer is a romance story that you can turn into a sorta-eroge assuming you hang around all the right (or very wrong) places on the internet.

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