Kohei comes back to his old town for something boring like university, and instead walks straight into the kind of summer that fucks with your head for years after. It looks harmless at first. Childhood streets, cicadas screaming, cheap fans pushed to their limit, that older girl next door who used to ruffle his hair and laugh too loud. Misaki feels like she should be safe territory, familiar, almost family, this cozy fantasy of “onee-san who waited for you”. The game knows that expectation and plays with it in a way that’s honestly pretty mean. She’s still teasing, still bright on the surface, but her eyes slip away at weird moments, her smile freezes half a second too long. Small details like that. You pick a flirty choice, she laughs, leans in, you can almost smell her sweat and shampoo mix, and then some other guy’s name casually comes up and your stomach drops. It’s not subtle, and it’s not gentle.
The horny parts grow slowly, like mold in a corner you pretend not to see. At first you’re just choosing where to spend a day, which cheap cafe, whether to help her carry groceries. One scene you’re alone with Misaki in her apartment, the sun too bright through thin curtains, her in a loose tank top and shorts that ride up when she sits cross-legged. She offers you iced tea, your hand brushes her thigh when you take the glass, she goes quiet for a second. That silence is hotter than any moaning later. The game loves those tiny pauses, the routes where nothing explicit happens yet are somehow dirtier in your head than the straight-up sex scenes. Then there are the runs where you lean into the NTR sickness on purpose, like poking a bruise. Letting her reply to that late-night message. Choosing not to follow her when she “just goes to meet an old friend”. Coming back to a half-buttoned blouse, a faint smell that is not your cologne, and a CG that stings more because she is still smiling at you like she wants to protect you from what already happened. It gives you options to avoid that, sure, to keep things “pure” and romantic, but you feel the game secretly smirking when you pick them, like a producer forced to include a vanilla route to keep the sponsors calm.
What makes it interesting for me as a genre nerd is how it plays with POV shifts. One route you’re stuck inside Kohei’s head, rationalizing, pretending it’s fine, one bad choice, no big deal. On another, it flips and suddenly you’re watching scenes where you’re not supposed to be present at all, getting that ugly voyeur thrill. Sometimes you see Misaki from another guy’s eyes, the way he studies the sweat creeping along her neck, the way her body reacts even when her voice says “we shouldn’t”. That’s where the eroticism goes from simple horny to slightly cruel, because it forces you to admit that her desire is not a thing you own. And still the game offers proper romance lines, soft endings where you manage to hold on to her and build something tender out of all this mess. Those paths feel almost suspicious, like you wandered into a different title hosted on the same site by accident. But that contrast gives the sex extra charge. A slow kiss in a quiet room means one thing when you trust her; the same CG, same pose, after you saw what she did in another route, becomes loaded with paranoia, with “who touched you like this yesterday”. It is not elegant writing, not “high art”, but it understands really well how lust, jealousy, nostalgia and that stupid first-love hope all bleed into each other and make you click “next” even when you already hate the ending you know you’re walking toward.