I would normally put a short blurb here about how I found this game and why I was interested, but quite honestly, it was all chance. I happened upon the opening song on Osu! one day while waiting for another VN to come out and picked myself up a copy so I would have something to do in the meantime. I didn’t even bother to look up what it was about, I just kind of got it and started playing. Unbeknownst to me at the time, however, I had just picked up what was probably the best VN to come out that whole year.
Summary: Most of the story is built off of 2 concepts: Anti Gravity Shoes and Flying Circus. Anti Gravity Shoes is a simple enough concept: low level, they basically just let you fly; high level there are all sorts of different brands and tweaks and whatnot that you can do to get exactly the experience you want with them. Flying Circus, or FC for short, is quite a bit more complicated and is basically the whole reason I’m doing this style of summary, since basically nothing would make sense unless you understand how it works.
Long story short, there are 4 floating buoys placed 300m apart from each other in a square. There are 2 ways to score points; the first is effectively a race: whoever gets to the next buoy before the other is awarded with a point. The other way to earn points is more like a dogfight; if you are able to touch your competitor’s back then you are awarded with a point and they receive a bit of recoil. If you’re good enough you can chain a few of these together before they have time to react. At the end of 10 minutes whoever has the most points wins. Sounds simple enough, right? well there’s a lot more. Next level up, each competitor is placed into one of 3 roles based on how they play: Speeder, Fighter, and All-Rounder.
Speeders are extremely fast, but are really only effective in a straight line. Their goal is to get points from buoys and to avoid dogfights as much as possible, since they are the least agile. Because the antigravity forces in their shoes repel the antigravity forces keeping the buoys in place, they can effectively “jump” off of the last buoy and conserve momentum as they start toward the next one.
Fighters may be slow in a straight line race, but their acceleration and control are unparalleled by the other classes. They use this to help them score points by dogfighting, but since they are the slowest they will usually try to avoid touching buoys. When paired up with a faster opponent, the fighter will usually ignore the first buoy and cut the corner in order to get ahead of their opponent; thus blocking their path and trying to force them into a dogfight.
All-Rounders are just like they sound: a balance between the other two. Not quite as fast as Speeders or as agile as Fighters, but they are able to use both styles fairly strongly. This allows them to react their strategy based on how the opponent is playing. All-Rounders are some of the most interesting players to watch, since they always keep you guessing as to what they’ll do next. I’ll also add parenthetically that since this class allows for the most diversity in how they play, most(not all) of the top players are All-Rounders.
The players aren’t the only part of FC though; each player is outfitted with a mini headset which allows them to communicate with their coaches in real time. This is a lot of what keeps matches competitive; as a coach will direct their player on what maneuvers to do and when, as well as the location of their opponent and various other little tips throughout the duration of the match. This is actually where the protagonist comes in, not as a player but as a coach. Due to various circumstances in his past he does not compete in FC himself anymore, but that doesn’t stop him from helping others get better at it!
General Thoughts: AoKana manages to keep a near perfect balance between being interesting, fun, and inspirational. Literally every single match of FC shown had me on the edge of my seat craving the next line. In some cases I even caught myself cheering for my favorite characters, which is something I almost never do, even when watching actual sports. The world the authors created here is amazingly easy to get lost in, but at the same time just being there is enough to make you smile and feel content. If I had to pick a single best aspect about the game, I would probably have to go with the pacing. There’s a lot here that probably goes unnoticed by most people, but put simply each “action period” should be followed by a sizable “rest period” that allows readers to recover their emotions before the next action scene, and AoKana hit that nail right on the head. The biggest problem I have with the game is that they haven’t released the official soundtrack yet. Seriously. I want that soundtrack.
Story: The story is set up in an episodic structure, with a preview for the next episode at the end of the last. While I’m not normally a fan of this style in VNs, it’s used extremely well here, so I think it was overall a good choice. The main focus of the story is FC and how the sport changes over the course of the game, but there’s also a lot of interesting content with the protagonist’s history with the sport. It does tend to get a little cheesy at times and in some cases was even pretty predictable, but that didn’t make it any less fun to read. There was a lot of cool stuff that was done with the sport in relation to the story and as a whole it was pretty good, so no real complaints here.
Characters: The cast does everything that should be done by a good set of characters and then some. All of the main characters are well thought out and unique, while each of the secondary characters does a great job of filling any gaps that the main cast doesn’t quite fit into. They even went so far as to give all of the tertiary characters sprites and voices, which really adds to the immersion factor. Even in some of the scenes that might normally be considered dull or boring, just watching the interactions between all of the characters would make it pretty fun.
Art: The art feels a bit sketchy up close, but since it’s consistent it works perfectly fine. All of the sprites are really animated(in the sense that they show emotions really well) and the color palette they used adds a ton of life to both the characters and the background. One of the small things done with the art that I really liked was the inclusion of unnamed characters in the background of nearly every scene; it did wonders to make the world feel more populated. I know a lot of people consider the art one of the selling points for this game, and I can’t really find much of a reason to disagree.
Music: I already mentioned that I want the soundtrack for this game, so it goes without saying that I think it was good. I personally think the music played a huge factor in making the game flow so well. A lot of the songs did such a great job of setting the atmosphere that the instant it switched I would perk up in interest and be that much more attentive to what’s going on. Normal day to day songs are both calm and/or fitting, general flying songs are inspiring and motivational, and then competition songs range from fast but friendly all the way to mind blowing levels of intensity(I’m not joking here; some of these songs are sure to give you an adrenaline rush).
System: Unfortunately, I would consider the system to be one of the weaker points in AoKana. It does what needs to be done, albeit at a bare minimum level, but there are so many cases where they could have been much more efficient if they had put more work into the system. A lot of the competition scenes are stored as backgrounds, rather than CGs, which isn’t much of a problem until you consider that you can’t look at backgrounds with the extra menu, so for a lot of scenes you might want to have another look at you would have to keep a save there. Also on that note, there is no music area either; you have to keep a save if you want to go listen to one particular song too(I have a whole page of saves dedicated to this). Honestly, this is one of the only areas that could probably use some improvement, but it’s not so bad as to bring the game down.
Concluding Thoughts: If you took the time to look at my VNDB list at some point, you may have noticed that I rated it as a 10/10, and I do not give that rating lightly. Almost every day I played AoKana I would wake up a couple hours early just so I would have time to read a bit before my usual day started; and not once during that whole time did I ever start a day off in a poor mood. Changing my sleeping schedule and mood was just the start though; largely because of one particular scene, AoKana completely changed the way I view competition and the competitive environment. That may not seem like a lot to everyone, but I spend a good portion of my spare time in a competitive or semi-competitive environment, and for one single game to make ALL of that time both more fun and more positive is a nothing short of a colossal accomplishment.
While it’s probably not on a life changing level to most people, AoKana is still an absolutely amazing game that I could recommend to just about anyone. It’s also worth noting that an anime adaptation was announced before the game was even released, so if you can’t experience the VN for whatever reason that will be an option once it comes out.
Bonus CG:
Visual Novel Musings 