NOT RECOMMENDED
A Thousand Wasted Summers
For ten years Key has struggled to find a substitute for Jun Maeda. Rotating through “writers” like Leo Kashida, Yuto Tonikawa, and Kai, it seems that they finally found their scapegoat. Yuu Niijima is the latest victim of Key’s continued practice of removing the author’s voice from their work to fit their image. Romeo Tanaka must’ve realized this early on in Rewrite’s development, which is why the main crux of that game’s story is told in the routes following the heroine routes where we finally feel that this is the story the author originally wanted to tell. Everything before that is a biproduct of having to work for Key. Yuu Niijima has no such vision. He is simply satisfied playing the good boy here, bending his ideas to Key’s will. He worked for SAGA PLANETS (another brand of visual arts), where he had a part in the positively received Natsuyume Nagisa and solely wrote the critically acclaimed Hatsuyuki Sakura, which makes his complacency in Summer Pockets all the more devastating (especially since these were the reasons Kai, director of Summer Pockets, sought him out). He wrote the prologue, Shiroha, Kamome and ALKA routes. Meaning he wrote about half or even more of the overall story, yet at no point do we ever hear his voice. He tried so hard to be like Jun Maeda, and he succeeded. What we got was the most derivative Key game yet made by a Jun Maeda copycat. Summer Pockets is the safest work to ever come out of Key. It takes no risks, plagiarizes everything that came before it, and emphasizes Key’s diminishing interest in the visual novel market. Worst of all, it promotes complacency and applauds unoriginality.
If there is one thing Key has gotten better at these past years, it’s learning how to cheap out on production. A common complaint about Rewrite is the lack of cgs in the latter half of the game. This is mostly apparent in the Akane and Terra routes where most of the time we’re stuck reading text on the same background we entered two hours ago. Another would be the notably long common route. It took too long to get into the main story. Thankfully, Key learned from their mistake and solved this problem by completely cutting it out of Summer Pockets (which was nice of them, they aren’t even pretending that there is a story here or how they’re cutting back from it). As if the game assumes you know how this plays out and immediately sets you on the character routes without any effort. No sooner does the main character (Takahara Hairi) arrive on the island that he meets all the tropes characters (WITHIN A DAY), and already we are seeing glimpses of past Key clichés dancing around. Except this time Key decided to shake things up. Instead of one stupid friend, we have two idiotic morons thrown into the mix. Ryoichi and Tenzen are Key’s desperate attempt at adding more male characters into the story, but they forgot to give them any importance. Key has always been chasing behind the shadows left by Sunohara, Kengo, and Masato, but with every new entry they constantly set low standards for themselves and then fail to achieve them. These two are so far off from being important they make the game worse by simply existing. Their exaggerated nature is nothing new to any anime fan, but it is their designs that insult them. While other characters feel like some effort was put into their designs, Ryoichi and Tenzen look like store assets. As if they came with the engine, and they didn’t even bother touching them up. The main character has the same issue, and why shouldn’t he? Key is only interested in the appeal of its female characters. An issue most VNs suffer from. Everything is secondary next to the moe factor emitted by the love interests. This is more vital than the heroines themselves. A character’s appeal is more important than their portrayal. Summer Pockets is only interested in showing off that cuteness nothing else matters (not the characters, nor the story), but we could tell the characters were cute from their prerelease artworks, Key didn’t need to make an entire game just to expound that on us.
Instead of following in the steps of Yukito, Tomoya, and Kotarou Key decided to give us another Riki from Little Busters. Instead of giving us a character with a goal and personality they gave us another audience stand-in. Hairi is a wasted potential of a character which is saying much considering the VN is filled with characters like this. His aunt could’ve been easily replaced with a sign that said “here’s your transportation and there are cup noodles in the fridge”. Key is so obsessed with making sure the audience is happy that they are too scared to allow any differentiation or difference of opinion between them and the main character. The choices offered to us range from “good option, least good option, best option”, any sort of negative emotion seems lost on the main character, or any sort of decisions that could result in him getting in an argument with someone except for comedy purposes (at least Little Busters had the decency to have bad endings). Hairi is whatever the story wants him to be, and the story wants him to be a mary sue. It is through him that the girls find the answers to life, the universe, and everything.
Key should start letting their cg artists look at other games rather than the ones they make for inspiration. Key seems to think that cgs are just bigger sprites, and should be restricted to feature 100% of the heroine whenever possible. How many wasted cgs to we have in Little Busters, Rewrite, and Summer Pockets that only feature a heroine drawn diagonally. Is it okay even when they’re too big for the picture or at odds with the background as long as they appear in it? If they realized how far the industry has come since their last bishoujo game, maybe they’ll learn that many other things can fit and be portrayed in there. What happened to the cg artists of AIR and CLANNAD? This is one area where the game SHOULD have used those two for inspiration. If these are the same artists, then Key is dead.
When Key released Kanon, they had Itaru Hinoue doing the character designs. She held that main position by herself for Key’s next two main titles AIR and CLANNAD. Hinoue’s sprites with Maeda’s music and writing were the earliest example of Key magic. Her look is one of the most iconic in the industry and it is as distinctive today as it was back then. Her style gave those games a unique experience that tugged at the player’s heart strings through no small part because of the empathetic and confident way her characters were drawn. She gave Key their first look. Her characters were so expressive, you couldn’t help but be drawn by the cloud of fluffy cuteness slowly enveloping you, but when the story get serious so did the characters. As if on que, the music suddenly shifts with the expressions, and the players would brace themselves. This is the main difference between Hinoue and all the artists that came after her (from Fumio to Na-Ga etc…) as their characters are never not cute. They are always showing off that moe factor even when their lives are crumbling before them. When Rin is lost in Little Busters and distraught over why no one will help her, when Tsumugi from Summer Pockets is sad that her time to leave is near but she wants to stay with Hairi and Shizuku it’s the same feeling we get from watching a crawling baby fall on its stomach not one of a woman having a life crisis as the scene tries to suggest. The emotional resonance in this game always seems to fall flat because the characters are drawn in a way that brings out sympathy rather than empathy. It’s like if an actor has an emotional moment in a movie then proceeds to look at the camera. The characters never give off the feeling of being real, or that what they’re going through is as tragic as they make it seem. A common criticism I have of the VN and anime industry is that they constantly conflate flashbacks with narrative and drama with melodrama, so what happens when a work suffers from both? Summer Pockets is the answer. This is handled especially horribly through Umi who was supposed to be the main emotional crux of the story. We went through an aching almost torturous amount of mundane daily scenes in Summer Pockets before we got to the ALKA route, and any Key fan would know by now that Key always finishes all the characters routes before going full throttle into its actual main story. Here though, what we are rewarded with after hours of learning that all the ice cream from the store taste the same, and how to build a balcony out of Pringles cans (still trying to wrap my head around this being an actual plot point) is the most agonizingly slow ASMR session that made me wish I was back building that Pringled balcony. When Misuzu in AIR is sad, which is most of the time, it is a clear difference from when she is hurt. The audience will know the latter as they will dread reading the next scene. When Ushio cried, in CLANNAD, we lost control of our emotions. When Umi cried in Summer Pockets, I muted her. Summer Pockets puts no effort into its emotional moments, relying instead on Key’s reputation and history as a Nakige maker to achieve its emotional climax. All Summer Pockets does is retread the same ground its predecessors did, from the feeling of summer to the maternal bond theme to the struggles of a single parent, and just presents those exact same ideas again! It even has the same narrative twists from CLANNAD!
During development, when deciding the original concept for their next game Jun Maeda was surprised when his idea was accepted even though he was only giving it as an example. Takahiro Baba, the president of Visual Arts, knew exactly what he was doing. This was he could get away with using Maeda’s name for advertisements and hype up interest for “the new game from the creator of CLANNAD” even though he specifically stated he wouldn’t be writing the story. Summer Pockets is too similar to past Key works, and it never breaks out to form its own identity. It presents the same ideas again, but with a more modern, sleeker, but uglier look. Its design feels like it was made by someone who admired Key and strove to be like them, and if I didn’t see their name on the product I would’ve assumed that a company was riding their coattails. But this goes way beyond that. Summer Pockets is Key showing that they are out of ideas, and have been for the past decade. They used the exact plot points from CLANNAD and Air, and even Kanon for the side routes.
Oh! The side routes! Imagine someone sees you throwing out trash only for them to dig through your garbage can, knock on your door, and ask “Do you want this?”. Key has been in a rut for years, and Jun Maeda knew that. He claimed that if their next title couldn’t make players cry that it would be the end for Key. He was hospitalized after Summer Pockets’s development began, so I wonder what he thought of it after the full product released. They played it completely safe using only material from their past stories that could guarantee a tear or two. For what felt like an eternity doing side-missions just to be allowed to witness a rip-off of AIR, the side heroines should’ve never left the writing room (if Key even has such a thing though it would explain a lot if this entire story had no editors). The themes of CLANNAD include family, growing up, constant change, the relationship between a town and its residents. These are all dealt with in different ways in that game’s routes. Yukine and her brother, the Sunohara siblings, Ryou and Kyou, Kotomi and her parents, Tomoyo and her dream etc… all of CLANNAD’s routes expand on these themes and add more context to the main scenario. They are also interesting and careful in the way they are written making sure that the player never feels like they are playing filler. The same for AIR and its heroines. The maternal bond is prevalent through most of that game’s story all while providing the feeling of the summer vacation that Summer Pockets wishes it had. It is this gradual build up that rewards the players. The shift between the everyday mundane scenes to the hopelessly tragic is a roller-coaster of emotions that garbs hold of us and dares us to continue. A good writer doesn’t spare the audiences’ feelings. Summer Pockets has no such regards. Its heroine routes only have the slightest semblance of connection to the game themes that you’d be hard-pressed to find that connection. Not to mention the literal absence of the heroines during their own routes! All the side-routes have the same issues even though they’re written by different people. Key’s technique is old, the director wanted it to feel like a Key game so much that he forgot to remember they were writing a new story. It follows the three part act that Key never grew out of from the 2000s to a redundant extent (Meet a girl with overly cheery attitude –> tragic backstory where she melodramatically blames herself for something she obviously isn’t at fault for –> Deus ex Key Magic and she ends up with the main character). Summer Pockets is a Key game first, and a Nakige second. The side-routes all rely on Key Magic to resolve their climaxes and feature less and less of their heroines as they go on. Ao spends nearly half of her route asleep, Tsumugi disappears more and more as her story goes on, and Kamome spends her route ripping off Ayu from Kanon. Why should we care what happens to the heroines or their stories if we have the Key Magic seal of guarantee in every route?
We are pointed towards the dangers of continuously touching the Shichieichou, but when Ao does it and falls into a deep coma the story wakes her up moments later (a length of time passes by in the game but to us it happened not ten minutes ago) somehow (the game literally skips the explanation). It skips it in Tsumugi’s route as well where the game has been preparing us for her disappearance only to bring her back like nothing happened. One route using Key magic is already hard to accept, but three times destroys any suspension of disbelief we had left. The girls could very well have died and if the main character believed hard enough he could bring them back to freaking life. Magic needs to be handled carefully. Jun Maeda realized that in AIR and CLANNAD and knew how much to supply it in each route. Kai and Yuu Niijima threw caution to the wind and creativity in the trash bin. They could kill off the entire MC’s family and we wouldn’t bat an eye as going by the established rules of the story, they would either come back to life moments later or this would’ve turned out to be a dream. I wish Summer Pockets was a dream. It feels like one most of the time. A horrifying nightmare. I never talked about Shiroha, the main heroine, because I have already talked at lengths about the similarities of this game to past Key works I don’t feel the need to go over why Shiroha is just the derivative version of Haruko, Misuzu’s aunt from AIR. There is never a point in the story where anything surprising ever happens, everything is ridiculously predictable going just off your knowledge of past key games alone with the additional layer of lazy writing. The rules of magic are as arbitrary as the plot. Why can Luffy stretch his arms? He ate a devil fruit. Why can Kotarou Rewrite his body? He has borrowed powers from Kagari. Why can people time travel, become butterflies, and send versions of themselves through time and space? Summer Pocket’s answer to this is “because I said so”. Was there no editor or someone to proofread the script before unleashing this terror onto the world? No one to tell the writers that boob jokes have been outdated since the 2000s? No one to tell them that characters being cute isn’t enough to make them interesting, or no one to point out that most of the conversations with the female characters paint a picture of a group of men who have never touched grass before? CLANNAD and AIR earn our tears, Summer Pockets expects them.
It’s sad to see how far down Key has gone. Ever since they went multimedia their focus hasn’t been on putting out exemplary visual novels. They are chasing after the best money-making strategy and pulling out when it doesn’t work out. They are tying their VNs to anime (Angel Beats, Rewrite, Prima Doll) and only going after the ones that guarantee returns while spending minimal effort on their primary bishoujo games and kinetic novels. Someone had the bright idea to relegate Jun Maeda, their main writer, to work on anime, a medium that thrives on cutting corners, destroying pacing, and killing inspiration. But that idea is only second to their next one where after the anime adaptations they put him to work on a gacha live service game. Summer Pockets might be signaling the end of Key. When they said that this game is themed around nostalgia, they were right. It is banking on the nostalgia of players’ past Key games memories. It’s been fifteen years since CLANNAD, yet Key still has nothing new to say.