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• gamedeal user

  Dec 11, 2016

  Disclaimer: I have read the doujin JP version of Himawari. This is my first time playing the remake in either language. Himawari is a Sci-Fi VN from the mind of Goo. Originally a doujin game, it went on to achieve cult hit status and pave its way for a remake, the translation of which is offered here. Let's get the negatives out of the way first: The port. The remake was originally a PS Vita game, but was ported for the PC in Japanese in early 2016. Unfortunately, it plays like a port. The UI is lacking, making mouse-only/tablet play difficult. Essential functions are hidden behind keybinds--keybinds which are never outlined anywhere, as far as I can tell. It's the same as the JP version, but at least the JP version included a manual while this version does not. If you, like me, enjoy reading VNs on your television with a controller, you will need to prepare a new keybind setup for the unusual choices made here. Otherwise, keep a keyboard handy. Another issue, which is easily fixed, is the background music looping incorrectly. There is already a fan-patch out to fix this, and you can find it in the discussion section on Steam. Do not let the fact that this is an all-ages release for a formerly 18+ game discourage you from playing. I'm sure that as an eroge fan, you've heard this all the time, but it's especially true here: you're not missing out on anything. Really. The author, the translators, the fans, everyone who has read Himawari agrees that [i]the remake is the definitive version[/i]. Ok, time for the positives. I have to keep my review brief, but know that the positives [i]far[/i] outweigh the negatives. You are reading a visual novel. By far the most important parts are ahead: Himawari is among the best visual novels I have read, and I have read many. If you can look beyond the overdone amnesiac trope, you will quickly find that this story has much to offer in its episodes (all of which are included in this release). It is equal parts intriguing and emotional. Goo is a god, and I hope that ISLAND will handled by the same translation team. The translation here is fantastic. There are a few (very few) typos, which are to be expected with a script of this size, but the prose flows in ways other localizations could only dream of. Conversations read fluidly and are a [i]joy[/i] to experience. The Himawari translators are currently working on an exciting new project coming to Steam, and I have full faith that they will make it, too, shine in English. You should be able to judge the art from the store page photos. It's gorgeous and overflowing with cuteness. When comparing the remake to the doujin version, this is the most noticeable change. While the old version has nostalgic charm for me, the remake is undeniably more polished. The music, once patched to loop properly, is rather memorable. I'm not much of a music critic, so I'm not sure what else to say about it. Do apply the loop patch, though. You will fall in love with every character in this game, especially Aqua, and the wonderful world Goo has created. You would be doing yourself a disservice to skip this title, despite its technical limitations.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 2, 2017

  I ended up with this game in my library one night after imbibing a [i]tiny[/i] bit too much alcohol, evidently having decided that these heroines were too cute to not throw 35 bucks at, as I knew nothing else about the game. I wish all my inebrieated decisions ended this well. Do not be deceived -- Himawari may be teeming with an overwhelming amount of moe appeal, but judging it as a run of the mill moege is more criminal than all the lolis the game has to offer [i]combined.[/i] It's understandably hard to convince you otherwise, and the entirety of the first route will, sadly, do little to dispel any reasonable person's concerns regarding that. You're treated to a route consisting of a hodgepodge of anime cliches you've seen at least a hundred thousand times before, including things like amnesiac protags, amnesiac girls falling from the sky, and a harem lead so bland you oftentimes find yourself wishing you were doing anything but reading this trite dialogue. How well you can withstand the game's copious amounts of slice of life comedy scenes depends on your tolerance for cute girls doing cute things -- fortunately, I consider myself quite the connoisseur, but I can understand it might be tiring for a more socially well adjusted human being than myself. I realize that I'm sounding overly critical of a game I genuinely treasured, but I want to be upfront about the game's flaws as much as possible. It can be an uphill battle for some, especially at the beginning. But I implore those people to persevere, and I equally urge those on the fence to consider the same reckless purchase I gave this game. The reason why becomes very clear not long after the first route -- in what has been alluded to by people more eloquent than I am with words as a Muv-Luv Alternative style 180 degree turn, the game turns around so drastically once the second route begins, you quickly feel like you're reading a completely different novel that just happens to build off the shoddy foundation the original built up. It upholds this steam throughout the second route and a vast majority of the third -- and while the fourth isn't nearly as much to write home about, it certainly isn't without its positive aspects. While I could (and have) gushed endlessly about the ambitious scope of its incredibly enthralling sci-fi story, something that stole my heart away more than anything else is the story's willingness to give not-so-pretty traits to all its characters, heroes and heroines alike. Aqua, in particular, makes for an incredibly fascinating character (and makes for a fantastic drinking partner on exceptionally lonely nights.) (I should probably stop drinking so much.) I hold nothing but respect for a visual novel that can give heroines some atypical traits that might turn off some of its target audience. A profound amount of characterization is gained in forcing the reader to witness what can oftentimes be ugly truths about our characters. Romance factors heavily into the game, but it isn't quite the main focus in the grand scheme of things, becoming increasingly intertwined with a twisted storyline that reveals itself in increasing complexity as the game goes on. It understands that not everything necessarily needs to have a happy ending, and the writer, Go, gained much of his notoriety for his perverse pleasure in taking his readers on an emotional rollercoaster. I, for one, can testify I became quite the emotional wreck inside at times. I want to emphasize that, as a lifelong filthy weeb of nearly twenty-eight years, I've read more visual novels than I'm casually willing to admit to you strangers on the Internet, but little else has had me as emotionally invested as this one managed to. For characters that seemed so initially moeblob, they ended up having more characterization than I've typically come to expect from the genre. (Although, to be somewhat truthful, Aries is still pretty moeblob.) For a game that made up a ridiculous story about a Japanese astronaut landing on the moon, it was one of the most realistic depictions of the general attitude about modern day space exploration there is (but I will admit my bias as someone inordinately fascinated with space ever since I was a kid.) I understand if you are particularly adverse to these moe-types, but if you can at all stomach it, you're certain to find a dramatic and surprisingly adult and riveting story behind all the cute fluff and slice of life hijinks (and the more attuned you are to it, the more you're likely to find great fun in those, too!) I know the words of some nobody on the Internet will do little to sway you, but if you are at all indecisive, I pray that you give it a shot. Even convincing one person to play this flawed, but wonderful masterpiece feels worth it. And, hey, here's hoping we can get a translation of the sequel, Aqua After, one day, but for now, I'm incredibly thankful for the opportunity Manga Gamer presented me to play this. p.s. akira is moe
• gamedeal user

  Dec 16, 2016

  Himawari is likely the best, most touching visual novel on Steam, and perhaps the best I'll ever have chance to read. Make no mistake, this is no mindless, feel-good title filled with cute girls. Quite the opposite, as soon as the first chapter ends and the real story begins, wave of despair and suffering will hit you with a force of speeding truck and it will not stop any time soon, even if you think it will. But that's the point. The best way to describe Himawari is a mixture or character drama, romance, sci-fi and coming of age story. All of those are present but none of them takes the lead. It's a well-executed combination of many different elements coming together as more that just a sum of its parts. And most importantly, it's a motivational piece unlike any other you'll find it this medium. Social anxiety, depression, jealousy, obsession, fear of growing up, giving up, coping with loss, uncertanity of future - Himawari speaks of very intimate, personal themes. Your mileage may vary, I must admit, but if any of these resonate with you, Himawari will hit right where it hurts. It made me laugh, gasp in exhilaration, curse out loud, cry my eyes out and cheer for characters' happiness. Get over yourself. Your loss is somebody's win. Life is not only your story, and you won't always be in the spotlight. Doing your best and working hard does not guarantee best possible outcome, this works only in anime and real life is not so simple. Avoiding your fears does not magically make them go away. Pretending not to notice will not fix the problem. You're not some special snowflake, but it doesn't mean that you'll never be happy. You just need to keep moving forward. Youre not entitled to anything. Catgirls from Nekopara will never be real. Girls from Grisaia or Princess Evangile wouldn't necessarily fall for you. Heroines from Sakura series would all have their own relationships by the time you'd meet them. It's not a story I wanted from my escapism fantasy chinese powerpoint girlfriend simulator, but it's a story I'm genuinely grateful I had chance to read. Thank you for this.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 26, 2019

  super nice anime pc game! I realy like it! you can play it!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 11, 2020

  I'm conflicted, I really wanted to give this novel a positive review as i find that half of this VN to be masterfully written and that it has a perfectly managed atmosphere, but the rest was just boring. The protagonist is a bratty, dense idiot with mediocre voice acting, i just couldn't get attached to him in any way and the other characters were faced with the hard job of carrying the story for him, incidentally, the best part of the VN doesn't involve the protagonist at all. I could go on and on with the things i didn't like, but in the end i still read through it's entirety and still enjoyed a sizeable part of it. Probably what pushed the needle towards the "negative" review comes from the fact that this VN has a lot of similarities with another novel from the same author, Island. I absolutely LOVE Island, but unfortunately, it also shares many flaws, and in imo, the flaws are much worse here than in island. (Though to be fair, Himawari was written 9 years earlier.) Shame steam doesn't allow for proper ratings, it's difficult to rate games with only a "positive" or "negative" score, I'd give about 40% of the game a 9/10, but the remaining 60% gets a 5/10 or a 6/10 if i were to be generous.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 10, 2018

  Himawari’s most pressing issue is that it tries to be a story oriented visual novel while being a character driven novel. I heard many referring to the huge plot twists ending every route, especially after the epilogue for the last one, yet I feel each and every one of them fell flat for the simple reason that I had been given not enough knowledge or reason to care about the mechanics behind the world, as the plot mostly focused on characters’ interactions, which aren’t that impressive too. Each route, except maybe 2048, focused heavily on slices of life, mundane and every day content with sparse dramatic revelations and climaxes, so I was involved with the characters, I could relate to them (especially Akira, he’s my man) but as for the events I couldn’t care less or, in some cases, understand their importance. I was presented with a cast of characters having a simple, initial objective, to send a homemade rocket to fly into space, and from there it develops into a complex tale regarding the ambitions, the motives and, sometimes, the madness of the men reaching for the stars. What already made my emotional involvement with the story collapse were the inevitable comparison I unconsciously made with a comic named Planetes, which dealt with basically everything that is in Himawari only in far more depth, with better characters, a shorter more cohesive story and general better writing. I won’t make any distinct parallel between the two since it would be unfair and not say much about Himawari’s own merits. As for one last, personal digression, I hated the character of Daigo, from beginning to finish I couldn’t fathom his personality, his goals, his involvement with the story, everything he meant, did and stood for. Those who already read the novel may imagine how my impression of the story and the characters related to him was undermined by this, I won’t deny that what are often times considered to be the best parts of the game were, in fact, what had me the most groaning and rolling back my eyes for this reason. Lastly, what hammered the remaining nails in the coffin, was the lack of an aftermath in every, single route. They just end, show you some plot twists, build a circumstantial resolution but leave so much open you’d just hope the next route had the answer you sought. They don’t, never. If you have questions in the middle of the game better forget them and hope it’s something the game thinks is deserving of an explanation before the ending. Regardless, oftentimes the more you will go on with the story the bigger will be the twists presented and the more the lack of any epilogue, explanation or context will leave you with just the build up for a grander sci-fi story that is never going to be told.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 30, 2016

  all these detailed reviews here i just wanna say that i love Aqua love edit: sometimes i have lovely aqua dreams.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 18, 2016

  [h1]TL;DR: the best visual novel on steam[/h1] [url=https://np.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/5ictcw/what_are_you_reading_dec_14/db74xhl/]Note: this review is a modified version of my review post on r/visualnovels' December 14th "What Are You Reading" discussion thread[/url] I had a variety of expectations going into Himawari built up from all the posts I’d read beforehand (I lurk the english-speaking visual novel community fora and ircs a lot). In some ways Himawari met these, in others it didn’t, but blew me away where it really mattered. If you’re only looking for an adequate sci-fi plot, it delivers well enough. If you’re looking for characters, have no fear. The cast of this game is great to say the absolute least. Something I also expected from having read those posts were some gut wrenching water works from me. I did cry reading this game, but I can’t say it’s the same kind of visceral tears you get from some super sad game or anime like Clannad. The last broad sweeping expectation of mine was that the game had some beautiful thematic work. I won’t deny a bias here. My favorite fictional media rest almost entirely on the complex thematic-emotional spectrum, anime such as NGE, movies like Inside-Out and Gattaca, and the entire bibliography of Inio Asano (fantastic mangaka if you’ve never heard of his works). The combination of the previous character and emotional notes with this promise of themes was what made me really want to get into Himawari. And Himawari just does it. It does so so so much. Those characters and plot are good enough on their own to form a readable story, but it doesn’t capture you into reading just on their significant appeal. It keeps a conversation going with you using those from nearly the very beginning. The first route keeps that game on simple terms. Who are you? What makes you you? What makes your world yours? What in your world is precious to you? What do you want out of this world? Why? Through routes these questions evolve. They get specific. Present you with a scenario in three or four different ways, give you the same question three or six times. The characters give their answers to these situations, but what is your answer to these questions? Why is it your answer? Did your answer change from last time? If so, it silently asks you why again. It never gets your answer. It doesn’t tell you what answers are right or wrong. It only acknowledges the validity of them. All the while you have to see why these people in Himawari came to their answers. Their motivations and their goals. Sometimes these characters can’t ever actually figure out their uncertain questions no matter how sure they are of the rest. But they’re still whole. Because you don’t need to know everything about yourself to be yourself. We’re all growing living people finding more and more about ourselves each and everyday to become a new version of ourselves. Himawari is a story that wants you to to be you. To want to be you. Mistakes and scars and all. It knows you can soar to close to the sun and plummet into the ocean and that perhaps you never flapped your wings even once as you fell off the cliff. Yet it still wants to pull you up to the stars anyway to see where those wings can take you. Home or the other side of the ocean. To friends, family, or purposeful solitude. To where you want to go. Because even if you never make it there, you still flew. Witnessed by all the other people who are looking forward and up, just like you. Aaaaaand that’s my attempt at summing up how Himawari feels to read. It’s hard to describe the intimate experience that it is without sounding rambly or nonsensical (my initial attempt to write something after finishing the second route looks like the ravings of a madman). I mentioned earlier in this post about how Himawari managed to make me cry. It happened a couple times from plot being plot. Others it was when it managed to hit the right question. Something happening to bring me to my answer in relation to its own. It’s an odd sort of emotional-thematic catharsis I can’t say I’ve experienced in anything other than the surrealness of the Komm Susser Todd sequence in End of Evangelion. It’s an experience I can’t help but hope more of you can share with me. I realize I’ve handwaved away a lot of the actual plot in that, but I think the work serves you better blind. It’s hard to talk about the way things work to make these characters and their struggles so meaningfully great without taking away from the elements that make Himawari so special an experience for yourself. I want to talk about it anyway so I’ll just shove it behind a spoiler tag in a comment below so I don’t have to feel like I’m holding something back. I guess I can say that Aqua is amazing though. Like seriously. Aqua is an unbelievably amazing character. The last things I have to cover are basically shallow notes of whatever. Art is serviceable. There are some standout CGs even though the anatomy is almost always questionable, but at least it’s bright and pretty. Music is almost entirely incidental with very few prominent tracks to add to a playlist. The comedy is usually one-liners and banter in which the characters Aqua and Ginga dominate scenes by producing absurdism after witticism until you’re giggling uncontrollably. Unfortunately that’s only “usually”, some scenes with and all scenes without those two have a lot of misses in this regard. Other cast members Youichi (the protagonist), Asuka, and Aries sit in their blobs of “straight man narrator”, “semi-tsundere childhood friend” and “ditzy cute girl” for most of these routines which gets old rather quickly. Additionally, Himawari is a regrettable fan of what I call “the anime gay joke” where the entire joke is “something is gay [i]laughtrack[/i]” but thankfully doesn’t repeat it too often, and ultimately I was more bothered by the number of times sexual harassment was played for laughs but that's just me being SJW about my media. The final comment on that aspect is that the moment to moment dialogue remains charming and fun even if it isn’t the best of what “anime” comedy has to offer. As for overall quality of the game, the strengths are almost entire lopsided to the middle two routes. Not to say that the beginning and end are bad at all, but the first is just kinda good while the fourth is just way less of an an actively engaging story compared to the middle two. That said I do think that last route is kind of a perfect way for the story to end. So yeah. I don’t really have anything more to say after that. Himawari is one of the best works of anything I’ve read, watched, or played.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 20, 2016

  Himawari is one of the most heart-wrenching yet beautiful stories you will ever read. It tells a tale about characters trying to overcome the shackles of their pasts and finally putting their lives back in motion. Once it gets going, the story is amazing at hooking you in with its cool sci-fi concepts and brilliant character drama. [h1]“You said there was a meaning behind chasing after one’s dreams. But if the dream one had been aiming for vanished into nothingness… what is one to do then?.”[/h1] Each individual’s memories are both a powerful blessing and an unrelenting curse, making it all too tempting to live on trapped by regret and past happiness rather than search for a new goal. Every single person is far from perfect, and you’ll even end up shocked by the pure selfishness of their actions at times. Still, they are so painfully realistic and well-developed that you can’t help but cheer for them. [h1]“We desperately rushed towards our happy endings… but failed to grasp them.”[/h1] Himawari is not your typical anime story. Himawari is not your typical visual novel story. No magical good end is going to wrap up all the loose ends. No one can control what happens to them in their lives, and even trying their best far from guarantees a favorable outcome. Some of the events in the game will leave you sitting in shock, cursing the injustice of the world. Yet ultimately, the characters still continue to struggle desperately to find their own source of happiness, marching forward on an unknown path where the smallest mistake can leave them plummeting back into an abyss of despair. Even though you may be scared, even though everything ahead may be wrapped in darkness, there is still merit in moving onwards. In the end, Himawari sends a wonderful message through a heartbreaking story. Keep going even if the first route may seem shallow and uneventful at first (the comedy is still hilarious however). The 2nd and 3rd routes combine to create an extremely immersive and profound experience. No matter what your preconceptions about visual novels, anime or cute underaged girls randomly ending up living with a parentless protagonist may be, just throw them out the window and give Himawari a shot. At the cost of sounding like a broken record, Himawari really is a unique and mature story. Oh, and I almost forgot. SUNFLOWERS