Guest Post: Unearthed Garbage with Firechick – One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e (48/100)

Many know the company Visual Arts/Key for their visual novels: Kanon, Air, Clannad, Little Busters, Rewrite, their kinetic novels, and so on. But while Kanon is the first VN that they produced under their Key banner, the staff that formed Key were actually part of another company before this, Tactics (Which would later come to be known as Nexton), and in 1998, they released an adult rated visual novel called One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e. It was initially never exported outside of Japan, but in its home country, it was quite popular, to the point of getting a ton of ports to different consoles and supposedly pioneering the concept of VNs having more low-key, emotional, character driven dramas that many Key fans endearingly refer to as “nakige” or “crying game.” One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e did get a fan translation and that was all it got as far as English exposure. So imagine my surprise when I found out that it suddenly got a complete, from the ground up remake out of nowhere that came out in December of 2023, and said remake getting an official English release, at that! I’m gonna keep referring to the game by its original title, One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e, because just saying the word One would just be confusing by itself. Seeing as a piece of gaming history was being released, I thought I’d give it a try and see what it’s like.

…Yeah, I regret that choice. A LOT.

Much like Key’s later works, you play as a young man, one Kouhei Orihara, who lives his mundane, day-to-day life, going to school and spending time with (translation: harassing) his childhood friend Mizuka Nagamori. His parents have been out of the picture since he was young, and after his younger sister dies, he begins to seclude himself in the Eternal World (Though it’s not referred to by name in-game), a world within his mind, an alternate space that Kouhei seemingly created out of his want for a place in which nothing ever changes. There’s no real explanation for this whole thing, and the game wants you to just go with it. He starts receding into this world about a week before disappearing, during which everyone (including the girl he loves) forgets about him, and he falls into the Eternal World completely, making it seem as if he never existed in the real world. His only hope of returning is to form a strong bond with someone prior to leaving, and to follow his guide back to the real world. You get to choose one out of six girls: The aforementioned childhood friend Mizuka, who wakes him up every morning and worries about him; Rumi Nanase, an outgoing tsundere who Kouhei is always bothering; Misaki Kawana, a polite blind girl who’s something of a jokester; Mio Kouzuki, a mute girl who’s part of the drama club; Akane Satomura, a quiet, sullen girl who spends her days standing in an empty lot before school, and Mayu Shiina, a girl who mourns her dead pet ferret. There’s even a secret route involving a male classmate, but you have to have gone through at least one other route to unlock it.

The story by itself isn’t anything special, and Key would go on to refine it a lot in their later works. I know I just mentioned the entire premise of the game, but in all honesty, the whole Eternal World stuff only takes up 10% of it at most, and 90% of the game just consists of literally going through each day individually until you get locked onto a girl’s route. Not only that, it also has Jun Maeda’s favorite storytelling tool where the first half consists of wacky comedy before shifting hard into drama later on. I’m not gonna lie, the comedy really doesn’t work here, because a lot of it just consists of Kouhei intentionally saying and doing ridiculous things that no sane person would do, most of which just feel like needless padding dragging the scene out for longer than it needs to. Hell, there’s one scene that plays out the exact same way twice in a row, complete with all of its dialogue being reused. Like…lazy much?

Actually, a good chunk of the game feels like it’s just plodding along and dragging itself out while having nothing to really hook anyone in. My playthrough of one route was just five hours without skipping, but so much of the game’s story just consists of Kouhei talking to people while nothing interesting is going on. For the first half, there’s literally no conflict, and even the slice-of-life segments just feel dull. Granted, One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e was one of the first visual novels to try out more low-key, character driven stories, and that’s fine, but in my opinion, Key’s later works managed to do them better, especially Air, Clannad, and even their later kinetic novels. Even other visual novels from other companies that came later had more going on, like Code:Realize having the main plot revolve around Cardia and her friends looking for her missing father and a cure for her poisonous body. Jack Jeanne had both the seasonal plays and Kisa trying to hide her identity. Those are longer VNs, but playing them, I never felt like they were just dragging their feet and struggling to find stuff to do like One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e does.

Since this review is about the remake and not the original PC game, there is one thing I feel the remake did improve upon, and it’s the graphics. Not that the original artwork from the PC game was bad, and it does have its own distinct look that would influence Key’s later games down the line, but the remake not only redoes everything from the ground up, one thing I appreciate is that the sprites here are actually animated. The game does give you the option to turn off sprite animation, but I think the animated sprites add to the immersion, especially with little touches like mouth movements or the way a character’s hair moves. The CGs are no slouch either, and they’re all well drawn and used whenever it’s appropriate. There are even some chibi scenes drawn in that weren’t in the original, and those are cute, too. Nexton brought Itaru Hinoue back to re-design the characters for the remake, since she worked on the original game previously, and while some might not like that the characters look more stereotypically moe and cutesy-poo compared to her original designs, what with their large eyes and small mouths, I found them to be just fine. My only gripe with the character designs is that Kouhei and Shun Hikami look way too similar to each other, to the point where I could mistake them for being twin brothers. The music is fairly good too, though I don’t like that the game doesn’t let you skip the credits sequence even after completing a route.

Considering that this is a game from 1998, back when slice-of-life VNs weren’t the norm, stuff like character development wasn’t common for games like this, and really, it shows. A good majority of the characters are little more than one-note stereotypes: Rumi is the tsundere, Mizuka is the motherly childhood friend, Mio is the mute clumsy little sister-type girl, Mayu’s the childish crybaby, so on and so forth, and even as you get into their routes, they don’t really change much or become more three-dimensional as the game goes on. We don’t even learn about what their lives are like outside of school, for crying out loud! Key would later learn from their experiences on One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e and manage to create better, more fleshed out characters in their later games, especially Clannad. One could argue that the characters here provided the base templates for other characters in their later games. Funnily enough, as much as I usually hate the tsundere archetype, I actually like Rumi as a character, mainly because her anger towards Kouhei is completely justified and understandable considering he harasses her on a near regular basis. If I were in her position, I’d want to deck his ass, too! So good job on One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e for making me actually like a tsundere for once! Even if I’m not a huge fan of her route. Also, fun fact: The PS2 port of One actually put in a completely original route featuring a new heroine to pursue, Natsuki Shimizu, though for some reason she was left out of other ports and remakes, this one included.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned much about one particular character, Kouhei. That’s because I’ve been stalling. Well, time to stall no longer. I might as well just rip the band-aid off and go on my soapbox, because honestly, I can’t hold back any longer: I FUCKING HATE KOUHEI ORIHARA!! I’m not going to mince words here, he is the absolute worst visual novel protagonist I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing as, and for all I know there are probably worse ones out there considering this was originally an eroge. All throughout the game, no matter which route you choose, this guy acts like an unrepentant jackass who continually does stupid things and is flat-out mean to pretty much every girl he interacts with, whether it just be bullying them to stave off boredom or disrespecting their boundaries even when they tell him to stop whatever he’s doing, with him being at his absolute most reprehensible during Mizuka’s route, who is the main heroine, need I remind you. He bumps into Rumi multiple times and elbows her in the stomach? Nah, its all her fault and they’re gonna be late for school, along with constantly bothering her during class. Mizuka wakes him up every morning and makes sure he gets to school on time? He constantly repays her by pulling dumb pranks on her whether it be sleeping naked and having her see him by accident, doesn’t leave her notes when he does manage to leave early, and treating her like shit. Akane doesn’t want to talk to him? He constantly hounds her during their lunch break. Good lord, I’ve never wanted to punch a male self-insert MC so bad before now, and the few times he does try to be nice to someone, it’s immediately undercut when he does back to his usual antics yet again. I know people complain that Key’s games are emotionally manipulative, but in my opinion, I think One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e fits that bill because it really wants you to sympathize with Kouhei but does nothing to actually convince you that he’s worth caring about as a character. He never actually grows as a person, learns from his mistakes, or overcomes his flaws, and going back to Mizuka’s route, his actions are so God-awful and reprehensible that what little remorse he does show does absolutely nothing to make up for what he did.

You’re probably thinking “But don’t people like characters with flaws? If he was nice and perfect, he’d just be a boring Gary Stu!” And you’re right, if a main character in a story had no flaws or faced no adversity, we as an audience won’t care what happens because we know everything will just be hunky-dory, and if my college writing classes taught me anything, flawless MCs don’t make for good storytelling. But here’s the thing: There’s an art to giving a protagonist intentional character flaws, and if their negative traits outweigh their positive ones, or the MC doesn’t actually deal with their flaws, there’s no reason for the audience to bother caring about them or following them on their journey. The point of character development is to see how they change, learn, and grow, whether it be through their experiences or their actions having consequences for them or others around them. Just as it can be bad to have everything go perfectly and therefore having no conflict, the opposite spectrum can be just as problematic, where something can be so bleak and dark, or if a character we’re supposed to root for doesn’t change their ways at all, that you question just what the point of it is. For specific examples of flawed characters done right, here are a few: Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender; starts out as a villain, but does have morals and honor in how he tries to catch the Avatar, has several boundaries that he refuses to cross even then, faces several moral dilemmas and makes several bad decisions throughout the series, has to work hard to rectify his mistakes, and eventually becomes part of the team of heroes. Even going back to Key’s work: Tomoya from Clannad. Tomoya is nothing like Kouhei in that he’s actually nice to the people he talks to, and even when he does tease them, it’s nowhere near the downright mean-spirited levels that Kouhei does, and any flaws that Tomoya has as a character and bad decisions that he makes are not only called out in series, especially in After Story, but he actually makes a conscious effort to address them.

Wow, I haven’t gotten this angry about a character since…probably Minko from Hanasaku Iroha. But man did it feel good to let all of that out! In conclusion, you know how some remakes are just one-to-one remakes, without changing much, while some actually go to the trouble of smoothing out some mechanics or fixing some flawed story elements, or even characterization? One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e may be the former, but I feel like it’d be so much better if its remake had been the latter. There’s so much about it that not only aged like milk, but is just terrible on principle, and not even because of the time period in which it was made. I know complaining about the game is pointless since if not for this game, we wouldn’t have gotten stuff like Clannad and Little Busters. Key fans owe the game that much, and I have nothing against that. But One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e is completely bogged down by questionable writing decisions, glacial pacing, underutilized characters, a weak plot, and the absolute irredeemable shithead that is Kouhei, and what little good qualities it has just aren’t worth going through all the slog and tedium. I honestly wouldn’t recommend it to casual visual novel fans or even Key fans. If you want to buy it, you can get it off of Steam for $20 and other websites that sell it, and it’s even available on the Switch too, though for some reason the Switch version costs $70. I have no clue why, though I’ve heard its because the Switch version was done by a different publisher. But seriously, there are better visual novels out there. Planetarian is a good gateway to Key’s body of work, since its short, sweet, and doesn’t have a God-awful male protagonist. Or even stuff like Code:Realize, Jack Jeanne, Digimon Survive, Clannad, Harmonia, Lunaria: Virtualized Moonchild, the Ace Attorney series, Stella of the End, and so much more! Hell, I was more invested in Lunaria: Virtualized Moonchild and Stella of the End than I ever was in One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e! Please, play anything except this. Spare your sanity.