Some initial thoughts on Moonstone's latest work,
Clear, after 1/5 paths...
Spoiler for story setup/general spoilers:
It definitely draws on some of the themes of Gift (especially the magical premise, and returning to town after years away), but mixes them up a fair bit. There's a lot going on behind the scenes, and in a lot of ways that can be even more important than the romance aspect. The (IMO excellent) OP tells you in advance that the blue sky hides a story of tragic fate. That's reflected in the characters too, I think -- all five leads are almost too cute, but then you find there's more beneath the surface in the game world. The main character, Kouichi, has some weird quirks that are, obviously, important to the story -- most notably, he can see ghosts, and has a very unusual reaction to blood... There are also some oddities about the other heroines of course too, but it seems those will be mostly revealed deep into the various paths. It seems like the sort of story where you can only fully understand everything if you play all the different paths.
I should probably also mention that it's really more like 5 inter-connected kinetic novels, because there really aren't that many choices to make, and they're all bunched up right near the beginning. They don't waste much time setting you down the various story paths either, so they almost could have just asked you which heroine's story you wanted to see. I was sort of expecting more "common path" stuff (normal school life, etc.), but it sort of works out for the best given the amount of ground they have to cover. Even though you go down a character's route early on, that's not even 25% into the story in terms of length.
So, I guess I'd sum it up by saying that Clear surprised me a bit by the unusual backstory. I was expecting a more usual summer-romance sort of tale, but that seems to be taking a back seat. I think I'll have to play more paths before I fully understand what's going on. I think it would make an interesting anime, though, so hopefully Imagica, OLM and all are already on it.
P.S. By the way, have you ever noticed how, in seemingly every story, there's one English loan word that's sort of the buzzword of the game? Whatever that word is (in Clear's case it was "shy"), the first time another character hears the word, they have to respond with that word as a question ("Shy?"), as if they're not 100% sure what the word means and/or they're not used to hearing it. And then, invariably, they'll use that word later on in proper context. You could practically make some sort of Buzzword Bingo out of it. Anyway, just a little something I've noticed...
