Alright today’s game and I have a rather lengthy history. When I first came to Japan I was quite a bit disappointed that no shops in my whole mid-size city sell PC B-Games. (Theres a store with DVD Player games, but I don’t like those). So I went to the closest major city, Kyoto, to see what I could find. After a long day of sightseeing I spotted a bright orange building called “The Pitt: TV and PC games” from my bus window. So I got off the at the next stop to take a look.
The store had 1 floor of videogames, 5 floors of live action porn, and 1 tiny corner of B-Games. The selection was rather slim. But they had a copy of this game, it was cheap had a nice cover and came with an artbook. So it was the obivious winner. Its been over 6 months since that day and I’ve finally finished it.
Ok first I must say that this game’s title is silly, I can kind of understand the “Footprints in the Sand” part, but H2O? This game has nothing to do with water. This game was made by “The Pillow” a new division of Makura Soft. Its a fully voiced digital novel style game. Being a first game from a new team, it has both ups and downs.
Art:
This game’s art is beautiful, simply stunning. We get great designs and some really nice CGs. Also the game has a “Blindess Mode” this puts an almost black and white filter over the artwork and gives it a very stylish, almost dream like appearance. This effect can be turned on and off at will so you can still enjoy everything in full vibrant color whenever you whish.
Blindess CG:
Normal CG:
Characters:
The game features 3 main girls.
Hayami: The outcast of the school, the other students all refer to her as the “cockroach” I don’t want to ruin the plot so thats all I will say.
Hinata: The very typical rich girl whose absurdly polite and is torn between Hayami and the rest of the students.
Otoba: She is not human, only the main character has the ability to see her. She refers to you as the “Promised Person.”
Plot:
Ok the basic setup of the game is that your mother is dead, due to your unstable emotional crisis, your father moved way out into the country and naturally you now have a new school. Our hero is the kind of guy that wants to befriend everyone, but theres quite a rift between the rich and the poor. As the story unfolds you’ll learn the motivations for all sides of the conflict, and do what you think is right.
Most of the game is a flashback to the hero’s school days, then at the end we get to the present where he finally falls in love with one of the girls and has a nice happy ending.
The story is sadly, really really bland. The author had some good ideas, but due to a total lack of direction and extremely slow pace it just falls apart. (Theres a good reason it took me 6 months to finish this one.) The story is supposed to be a serious drama, but it just isn’t written well enough to really make you care.
A big problem is that the author employs way too many flashbacks. About 98% of the game is a flashback, OK thats fine. However in this big flashback, you will whitness about 50 smaller flashbacks from your past, and the girls’. Now this would be fine if it was worth having them, but you’ll see the exact same flashback of the hero’s mother about 10 times and its always the exact same 20min dialog sequence. It just bores you to tears after awhile. Once I actually fell asleep with the game on auto mode, and I never went back to see what I missed cause I just didn’t care to.
What really kills it though, is the pace. H2O is a slow game, were talking snail speed here. And the game only has 1 choice for the player to make, yes only 1. This determines which girl’s path you go down. However they have to be played in order, so your first play has absolutely no player interaction at all. Really just a spoken book with nice pictures and nothing else.
To top it off, many of the boring slow flashbacks for one girl are exactly the same scenes with the others, and their unskippable. So you get to see the exact same boring scenes on every path.
This is a total shame though, because the characters are quite nice. I wanted to care about them, but the game made it extremely difficult for me too.
The author did try to break up the sloth racing pace with humor. When it wants to be, H2O is hilarious, drop-dead funny. The author has a very warped mind and scenes like this:
kept me comming back. The problem though is that the humor has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. It feels very tacked on and many times out of place. It needs to be there, but it just doesn’t fit.
Oddly enough, the best part of the game takes place after the endings. Each girl has an extra “ATO-Story” these show the ultimate fate between the guy and his chosen girl. These serve as both a nice wrap-up for the characters, and also contain about 95% of the sex. Strangely these mini-tales were much better written then the actual game and so I was able to end it with a smile on my face.
So what we have is a very long game with great art and a lot of wasted potential. Its not bad, but with smarter editing it could have been so much more. In the end I enjoyed it in very small doses. More then an hour at a time was simply too much. It does have a nice a package though, all copies come with both an artbook and a music cd.
PS. The game has an “Emergency” button for the Japanese highschoolers afraid of their mothers walking in. What it does is shows a random piece of “artwork.” The makers put a lot of effort into this as there are about 100 different CGs here. However they are some of the weirdest, most bizzare things I’ve ever seen. Here’s one of the tamer ones:
Odd Photo
[ 04-26-2007, 03:39 PM: Message edited by: SuperDeadite ]
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