Rakujitsu - 落日

Short doujin VN focused around the struggles of facing the exams to enter university. The protagonist doesn’t have any dreams about what he wants to do with his life but since everyone says going to college and getting a job is the most likely way to achieve happiness in life, he’s determined to follow that path. Close to his house there’s a rooftop where he goes on Sundays at sunset (hence the game’s name), where he regularly meets two girls that seem the polar opposite of each other, Manami and Ren, both of them are also in his last year of school with the exams coming up soon.

The best route is Manami’s since she offers a good contrast to the protagonist, he’s charmed by her since she has a dream and something to achieve but she’s failing in the way to get there. Manami also likes him since despite not having a dream he’s still determined to reach his goal, both of them kind of support each other where they lack. The route is pretty well paced and it leaves with a pretty good taste in general. It doesn’t do anything fancy and it’s just mostly some feel good romance route but it does the joob fairly alright.

Ren’s route is the opposite, in difference to Manami she’s a tsundere very diligent that spends all her time studying and working hard in school since she loves it. The entire route is basically Ren tutoring the protagonist on the rooftop, she gradually gets more dere when he works hard and does his homework, if you add to that some lecturing about how important studying is you have the entire route basically, I found it pretty boring and it feels like it drags more than it should but it’s not my kind of thing to begin with.

There is also a third hidden route from his childhood friend Aya, but the route is basically 30 minutes long where the protagonist decides to give up on university but somehow he ends up passing the exams and going anyway, I completly fail to see the point of this route.

After finising each route you get a “side story” as the game calls from the POV of the heroines, it is mostly a flashback that fills what they think about their situation and some backstory, they link pretty well to the climax of the routes, especially Manami’s was surprisingly good and probably the best thing about the game. It’s a pretty good idea from the author to not introduce them within the route itself, leaving them as an extra after finishing the routes actually make them more striking. If you play the game definetly don’t miss them. I also found funny that the route branch is based on the mock exam that you have to pick the answers, If you pick right everything yo go to Ren’s route, if you fail all you go to Aya’s, and inbetween is Manami’s.

The most impressive thing about the game is probably that they got Shimotsuki Haruka and Katakiri Rekka to do the opening and ending song, it’s not their best song of course but they are good. The art is also pretty cute, since most of the story takes place at the same place it reuses the same CGs and doesn’t have many assets but what they use is good. The game system is fairly good for a doujin game it pretty much has every feature from a 2005 VN with a nice interface, the only main drawback is that the sound mix in is completly fucked and you need to lower the bgm and se sound to the minimum to even heard the voices play. I imagine the reason is that the game wasn’t originally voiced but it got a voice release a few months later, so they didn’t really put much effort into make the voice patch good. Also fun fact I did originally buy the voiced version but it came with the unvoiced one, dunno if surugaya labeled it wrong or that the actual voice disk version doesn’t exist. At the end of the day is not a big deal since the voice patch is still distributed for free on the game’s website so you can download it.

It’s not the most ambitious doujin game out there but if you like the theme and want something relaxing it’s fairly alright, at least I enjoyed Manami’s route, can’t really recommend the other two though.