Disclaimer: I received a copy of A Winter's Daydream on Nintendo Switch from developer Ebie-Hime and publisher Sometimes You for Xinthus' #IndieXmas. The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience shared through social media channels. All of the words unless otherwise noted are my own and all screenshots were taken during my own playthrough and are from my own experience.
First off, I have never played through a graphic novel before. I felt that I understood the concept, but what I ended up playing was a lot simpler in execution that what I was expecting. Going into A Winter's Daydream, I thought that there would be some points that would come up where I could direct conversation, picking dialogue options, or deciding the order that certain events happened. All of the events would happen, but the order that these happened would have been up to me. Instead, what happened was more like an ebook with pictures and accompanying music.
One other expectation I had was that there would be images for all of the characters involved, kind of like how in games like Fire Emblem Three Houses and Final Fantasy Tactics there is a character icon that pops up for whomever is talking. With the game starting out with the main character Yuu with exposition being delivered, I expected further characters and what I got was a little disappointing.
During the conversation that Yuu has with his family (Mom, Sister, and Father), there is only one character illustration for Otoko. I thought maybe there would be illustrations for the parents as the conversation continued, or that Yuu's illustration would come back, but it stayed on his sister for the entirety of the scene. I started to wonder if Yuu was weirdly staring at his sister, but no, there were not any more character illustrations. Later, the room changed, but then Otoko came back and it was just her again. Throughout the whole game, there were only five character illustrations for about a dozen in-game characters, two of which had only a handful of lines compared to the Mother's dialogue which had so much more. Again, maybe because the game was independently developed and published there was not a lot of time and money spent to create characters for each person in the book, but from a player's standpoint, it felt lacking.
Because the game is released on the Switch, I only played in handheld mode and for the first half-hour or so, I played with the Joy-Cons, pressing the A-button to continue the dialogue. I was very thankful that I could use the touchscreen functionality to tap the screen so that I could hold the switch in one hand without the Joy-Con attached (so that there wasn't additional strain on where the Joy-Con connects to the screen) and drink coffee with the other. It is just a convenience thing that I appreciated.
Now that the mechanics and gameplay are out of the way, I guess the remainder of the article could fall into the realm of Book Report. I do not want to write a book report, but I will summarize* to the point that I am giving away some story spoilers, which is kind of what book reports are all about right?
So, the story involves the character of Yuu who goes to university in Tokyo and is returning home to his town which is a fourish-hour train ride north of Tokyo. Yuu's sister Otoko is 15 or 16 and still lives at home with their parents. She's portrayed as the annoying sister who loves to rag on Yuu at every chance she gets. The parents are supportive for the most part of both kids, but there is obvious favoritism that the father has for Otoko. During the New Years' break, Yuu decides to go visit his grandmother Umeko who lives alone in a smaller village, which is another two-hour bus trip away, presumably in the opposite direction of Tokyo, just to be further away from a metropolitan city. Once he reaches his grandmothers there's some introspection on the part of Yuu about his lack of interest as a kid when visiting his grandparents; the grandfather passed away some years before this story starts.
During their initial talk, it is revealed that Umeko cannot make it to a local shrine because of ailing health and reminisces about being a young girl again and when she first met her late husband at the shrine. If you can guess where this story is going, then you are about on par with me. Cue shooting star, cue both going to bed in their respective rooms, cue Yuu waking up to find a young woman in his grandmother's clothes cooking breakfast in the kitchen. Yes, during the night, Umeko transformed mysteriously into her younger self, 70ish years younger. She decides that she is now well enough to go to the shrine for New Years, but needs to buy a better-looking kimono than the one she last wore when her husband was still alive. So Yuu and Umeko head to Yuu's home town via the rickety bus.
The rest of the story is a combination of awkward instances where Yuu is made uncomfortable as various people imply that him and his grandmother Umeko are dating (compounded by the Umeko joking to the bus driver that they are in fact dating); to other people, she is a cousin from out of town; and telling Otoko that she is a friend who's just a girl visiting from Tokyo when they run into her in a semi-modern cafe that's deemed too old and not flashy enough for Otoko and her friend's liking.
After returning back to Umeko's village, Yuu and Umeko go to the shrine only to find it dilapidated and in poor condition after years of neglect. Umeko does end up running into the ghost of her dead husband who is also looking as young as she, they have a sentimental moment before he vanishes and Yuu and Umeko head back to her home. There they talk about what happened, then go to sleep in their respective beds. In the morning, Umeko has returned to her normal form, Yuu returns to his home town where he gives Otoko a present he bought her the day before and they all go off to a New Years festival. I thought that this was a decent end, and end it was as the credits rolled.
But that was not the end.
There was an epilogue of sorts that caught me off guard. This epilogue ended up being another conversation between Yuu and Otoko that to me felt like it carried on too long. About 23 minutes too long, but that was just how the story went.
After finishing-finishing the story, I read the "making off" letter that the developer had written with how they came up with the story. The nugget of the story had to do with a series of consensual incest stories that took place in Japan involving grandparents and their grandchildren, but that they wanted to adapt this format so it was significantly less creepy. I just think it might be hard for the player/reader to get into that headspace with this theme as an undertone even if there really was no actual incest perpetuated between Yuu and Umeko. I mean, sure, okay.
Now, I am not sure how indicative A Winter's Daydream is of all visual novels, not in tone or story but in function, that all the player does is press a button to progress dialogue or essentially, turn the page. If this is indeed how this genre typically plays out, I can say that I am not really on board, which makes me a little sad, but that just means that it is not for me. I am not going to say that it was a poorly written story or that it is a bad game just because the story nor the format of the visual novel did not stick with me, just that this particular format is not what I would typically look for while browsing a digital marketplace.
But that is just me, and it may be the perfect avenue for someone else, and that is perfectly okay.
~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
*P.S. Believe it or not, this was the best I could do to summarize this story. There were many elements and beats that I left out to not tell everything that went on, just what I felt were the most important parts, and even then I left some out.
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| Yoikes!! |
P.P.S. I also apologize to Ebi-Hime if I got wrong any of the finer or broader story points. I wrote this article a few days after finishing the game and only looked back through the videos and screen shots I took for information I was unclear about.
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