Snow: Don’t talk to me or my daughter ever again

So I finished Snow recently and I had a good time with it even though it’s really a mixed bag. Technically the plus version is what got translated and I feel like it lessened the experience than when it just had the base 4 routes and I’ll get to that later. This was made by Studio Mebius who kind of made questionable titles; they’re also under visual arts but they got so many subsidiaries that I’m not surprised at this point. Funny enough I knew two of their titles but I thought they were from a different dev that just makes titles based on other IPs.

At the start, the title had a huge Kanon vibe but eventually resembled much closer to parts of Air. So it’s more that the town and base setup reminds you of Kanon, meaning it’s kind of generic but in a wintry town. Kanata is just a guy that goes to his cousin’s hotsprings with a really menial but labor intensive task. One of the first things you’ll notice is that most of everybody is charming in some way but mainly in a comedic sense. I mean, the first scene you get is Ouka dropping boulders back onto his body when he got hit by a rockslide. Outside of the main characters that I’ll cover later, there’s Tsugumi the danger prone cousin; Seishirou the doctor that’s constantly crashing his car and leaving his patients to joke around with Kanata and Sayori, Sumino’s mom that gets clingy after a sip of alcohol. There’s also some random people but they’re mostly there to setup some of the jokes here and there. If you’re having a bad time during the first half hour, then you might as well drop it because it’s more or less constant until drama happens and then the quality takes a nosedive more often than not. Funny enough, one of the main setups is later on used again on a more current Key title that also felt too close to Air at points. And honestly, I think Snow nails it a lot better, or rather that it sticks its landing. I think the easiest way to go about explaining it is that you got to kanon-like town but the whole town is full of slightly smarter Sunoharas and Fuukos.

The art is old as hell but I still like it, but I’m also pretty old to some people at this point. The ost is mainly fine but the vocal tracks kind of hardcarry the sentimentality it’s going for. It even contends with Air on specific tracks, I think Beyond the Snow is the last track they go with and it’s really snazzy to the point that I can put it in Tekken 4 with a bit of touchup and removing the vocals. But even with that, it just can’t compete with the normal ending track called Footprints of Two.

Sumino is the main girl, too bad she’s the one I liked the least because they took the airhead trope too far. Her route is one of the two possible ones you can start with and it’s also the worst one out of the base 5. It’s used as a setup for everything else going forward and I’ll go over it in the spoilers. Technically you can say this is Sumino 1 and there’s like 2 others but she’s not the main focus in the 3rd one. One last note on her is this was during the time where you wouldn’t question the main lead spamming a certain sound or phrase in pretty much every line they get. And in this case, it sounds like she’s saying eww to the Kanata’s face all the time and that shit was unintentionally pretty funny for awhile. Eventually there’s so much of it that your brain starts ignoring it.
Asahi is a rehash of a route from Kanon. It’s done better but that’s not saying much when that was maybe the second one I disliked the most. It works fine, it feels like it’s somewhat padded but I’ll take it over the pacing from Sumino’s route. I know someone that didn’t like her in particular, but honestly she’s fine for like 70% of it and that’s kind of the same with Sumino just that Asahi’s worst part doesn’t measure up to it. She’s just kind of dumb and doesn’t have common sense but the reason why is brought up pretty early on. And that’s kind a common occurrence throughout the vn, it’s like a shounen where you know what’s going to happen but you’re going with it to see how the protagonist reaches to it.

Then comes Legend, it more or less explains away most of anything you were wondering about the first two routes and also enough background info for the rest of the routes. Honestly it should be apparent what’s going on with just Sumino’s route but Legend is there just to reinforce your ideas.
With that out of the way, you can now enter Shigure’s route. You’ve seen her once before in the previous routes and honestly it feels like you could’ve just removed her from the plot and 90% of it would stay the same. But that actually applies to a lot of them and I’ll go through that in the spoilers. She’s mainly the shy one, she keeps trying to run away and lives in the mountains away from the village. Most of her route is kind of whatever but Kanata is still pretty funny throughout the sequences. I think the bad ending was pretty interesting and probably done better than some of the endings to the point it reminds me of cartagra where my favorite parts were two specific bad endings.
The true route centers around a good chunk of the cast but mainly Ouka. And outside of my aversion of dropping anything, she really was the main driving force for me to finish this vn. To the point that I feel like one of the extra routes should’ve been unlocked before the true route and the other one being merged into it but I’ll get to that later. Ouka constantly talks in an old fashioned manner and is the most charming in the cast. But really I think that mainly applies if you have kids or at least have younger siblings/relatives. She’s generally up to her shenanigans near the shrine either finding food or building snowmen. She’s actually the first character you see and it’s probably the worst interaction that you’ll see of her. I actually got nothing to nag about it and it was worth going through the vn just for her route. It wouldn’t surprise me if it becomes my favorite route this year or at least in the top 5.

The two extra routes are centered around Meiko and this random girl. The random girl is a mess and I don’t know what they were going for. The ending is fine but I also feel like it shouldn’t be a thing overall but I probably just missed something. Meiko’s route is actually pretty decent, it just doesn’t have the highs of Ouka and that’s to be expected since that was the base finale.

Overall

Overall I’m giving it a 7. When I finished Ouka, I was going to give it an 8 even though I felt a lot of stuff wasn’t entirely needed but it all made sense. Parts of it still felt like ass but you can see what they were going for. But the two additional routes just lessened the experience, it’s akin to scoring a goal and then dropkicking the referee and getting a red card. It doesn’t help that parts of the initial routes are really iffy and it’s mainly that they have the ideas but don’t know how to properly go through the motions to reach what they wanted. Part of it is that I didn’t like the direction they put on Sumino’s VA and it didn’t make me really care about it. Sometimes the va work can salvage some iffy writing but that’s not the case this time. If this was like a 10 hour vn where it just incorporated sections of each route and just did a beeline towards Ouka’s section, then I’d give it a 9.

Spoilers

So there’s a couple of things going on but I guess the first thing I’ll go with is that some of these routes are really just there as an option and don’t really add anything that couldn’t be merged in with the rest. And this mainly a nagging feeling because the routes themselves are fine, but I’d want better reasoning if some routes are needed to unlock the others. The easiest one to point out is Asahi. But for that, I’ll just reveal the obvious stuff because these characters are going to be showing up. Kanata, Sumino and Ouka are reincarnations of Hakuou, Kikka and the child. Whilst Shigure and Meiko are the same characters from Legend. Asahi is the rabbit from the painting and you learn the last 10% of it or so in Legend. Basically she’s sealed until someone can take it out or is inspired to leave. And Kanata was the first one. I think her ending is actually really nice but it doesn’t really add much to the overarching plot. She comes back in the true route but nothing is really done with her outside of giving Ouka an extra chore but she already had the cat.

Shigure’s route is more of a what if where she falls for Kanata just like she did for Hakuou but didn’t hold back this time around. I think her main thing is just to explain away how Kanata just randomly wakes up at the inn when he faints in different routes. Most of her route centers around Kanata possessing Hakuou and being kind of a goober. It’s pretty funny but the gist is that he doesn’t hookup with Kikka thus not causing the dragon god’s curse. Basically showing that the reincarnation understands the rules/lesson and the gods forgive him. And there was a couple ways of handling this but I don’t think they did anything. This was done in some other Key titles and also done in a different way in Iwaihime(well it does this multiple times but it was done well once). Basically there’s no time rotations, there’s really no acknowledgement of time shenanigans, the route ends and the timeline is done. So when starting the true route, the curse should still be in effect. Hakuou does ask Kanata to fix one last thing but I’m pretty sure he means saving Shigure, not the future reincarnations of his wife/kid. Another funny thing is her bad ending, where Kanata bangs her and she disappears the next day. He tries to find her and stays at the summit with the graves and the epilogue is that the cops find two more graves than what we know of, but no bodies are in there. So the dragon god got so assmad that they spirited away Kanata too as his curse, which he’s probably ok with.

Sumino’s route or rather what it entails is kind of cool but the drama itself was ass. She gets dementia in like 2 days and remembers nothing. She’s always hungry even after she ate and goes on temper tantrums. But the route itself doesn’t really matter outside of like the last two or three days. He knows she prayed 100 times and that involves going all the way up to the shrine each time and thinks that’s what saved him. So he does that, uses rocks as counter but the blizzard fucks it up and he eventually faints. He wakes up in the inn and he doesn’t know if it worked or not. She’s completely fine again but dies the next day. You can think of it like he really did fuck up so she died. You can also consider that the last two days was him freezing to death after fainting and none of it actually happens. But Shigure’s part explains the random fainting/getting lost but still finding his way back. Legend explains what was actually going on and it’s mainly that the curse is fate and no matter what you do, it’s going to happen. So sure, the dementia was cured, well fuck you and now x happens and if you cure that, well now here’s y.

So it’s either that Shigure’s route fixes the curse indefinitely and it’s not well done. Or it’s about Ouka being around and I missed the reasoning behind it. Also one last thing about Sumino/Kikka, she also had dementia in Legend and she forgot she was pregnant. So there was a scene where she got a stick and started hitting her stomach thinking she got fat. And it’s meant to be a dramatic scene but I kind of started laughing at the concept that she thought that hitting herself with a stick would somehow remove the fat.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Meiko’s route, it’s just unlucky that it came after Ouka’s route. I don’t really see any reason for it to be locked behind Ouka either. It’d work perfectly fine after Shigure. I was kind of waiting for her route to show up because I was interested on what her book holds. Because every ending has her book showing the cgs of the specific route you were doing. But it was just her diary, I thought it would be something grander than that but it works well and probably the right call.
Then comes the last route and it’s all kind of crap. It’s obvious what’s happening and who she is but also feels like a whole different feel from the rest of the vn and should’ve been axed off. The epilogue section was fine and could have been part of Ouka’s route to begin with but I guess it would’ve lessen the impact and importance of Ouka. So before going forward with it, it’s just about a curse on this doll; the curse originates from one of the bandits that Hakuo killed off. Technically he just sliced off the bandit’s hands off but the dude most likely died from blood loss. Anyway, Ouka’s cat grabs the doll and runs off only to be found slashed up and the doll missing. So now Kanata and Ouka are getting summoned into this dreamscape by the mysterious girl and both have to run and fend off this girl until they wake up. They eventually find and purify the doll but the keep getting pulled into the dreamscape. Nothing else in this vn is remotely similar to this, it kills off the vibe. In the end, it was the cat being possessed by the curse, apparently the cat Ouka’s guardian. This was never a thing in Legend or anywhere else in the base vn from what I remember, it’s randomly shoehorned in here. She offs herself and hopes to be reincarnated to spend time and play with Ouka. She becomes her little sister in the end. The epilogue is actually fine, it doesn’t hit the same beats as Asahi but it’s well done. It’s just that I don’t see a reason for the route to exist.

And that’s the crux of the issues I have with it, a lot of it felt unnecessary and my thoughts on it became a mixed bag. If they combined Asahi as part of Sumino’s route, keep legend. And then add a good chunk of it all under Ouka’s route and keep it around 10~15 hours, I’d give it an 9. Because at that point, it’d feel like Kanata would know everyone, instead of him seeking for help randomly and getting mad at people who are kind of strangers to him.
Also, I went through the first couple of routes to see if they added anything extra and that isn’t the case. I did find the base bad ending though, where Kanata goes back with Sumino running behind the bus. So I don’t know when this gets unlocked because it’d actually spoil parts of Sumino’s/Ouka’s route. It’s not huge but it’s something that only gets brought up in Ouka’s route. So it’d be pretty funny if this part only shows up after Ouka’s route as well. Maybe it was unlocked from the start but I tried failing both before and got placed into Asahi, so it was either locked or Asahi has a really small amount of flags to get into her route.