Title: ひとゆめ -Autumnal Equinox Story-
Developer: Star Link
Release Date: 27th April 2007
Age Rating: 18+
Length: 15+ Hours
Links: Official Website, VNDB
Hitoyume follows Mitake Ryuichi – a fairly average student who wishes to follow in his father's footsteps and become a famous photographer. He primarily focuses on nature photography but has been encouraged lately to work on his portraits.
On his final day of summer vacation, he's summoned to a meeting with his homeroom teacher and while there he spots a mysterious girl standing under a tree in the school yard. Thinking she would make a beautiful subject for a photo, he pulls out his camera but the girl disappears after he takes his shot.
Thinking it was but a one-off encounter, he moves on, yet it turns out that this girl (Seika) ends up transferring into his class a few days later. New meetings, friendships, and even relationships begin to blossom for Ryuichi but what will happen to him as the fateful Autumn Equinox grows closer.
Thoughts
Hitoyume is the only original title released by Star Link (though they did also develop the Green Green PS2 port), and the company is probably best known for their sister brand S.M.L that released CARNIVAL a few years prior. I personally found myself interested in this game because I enjoyed the artist for this game's (Mappiirakku) work on Purple Software's Asukimi. So was it worth going out of my way to dig up this 19-year old relic?
Central heroines are not an uncommon thing in visual novels, and usually improve the experience. Thinking back on some of the greats like Nagisa from Clannad, Touko from Kara no Shoujo, or even Sumomo from Nanatsuiro Drops, and these heroines are important narrative pieces that are also likable as characters.
Hitoyume takes this idea of a central heroine – Seika in this case – and executes it so poorly that it ruins the entire experience of the game. The main problem is that Seika fundamentally is not a likeable heroine. She's extremely rude, spoiled, and impatient to say the least.
One scene in particular that really sticks out to me is when she goes to have lunch at the school canteen on her first day and, after taking a few bites, loudly declares that the food has a lack of effort put into it and refuses to eat another bite, before making a fool of the lunch lady and leaving her in tears. Maybe it's my time spent working in customer service but holy shit what an entitled brat. I could maybe understand this scene if Seika's attitude improves throughout the game but no it doesn't. In fact there's a follow-up scene where the lunch lady puts more "heart" into her cooking and Seika deems it satisfactory for her precious palate. I think it's the general framing of Seika's rotten attitude as being "right" that did my head in.
Is being rude to lunch ladies meant to be endearing or something?
Seika being so frustrating wouldn't be such a problem if she wasn't just *so* central to the game. The game's entire timeline revolves around her, and like some sort of cancer she infects every other heroine's route in some way. The most egregious of these is Miku – Ryuichi's sweet childhood friend and next door neighbour – who has to share the majority of her route with Seika. This weird entwinement (for absolutely zero good plot reason by the way) goes so far that Miku's ending just feels like a bad ending for Seika's route, as opposed to an actual good ending for Miku. Utterly despicable writing.
You really thought you could escape Seika on Miku's route? How foolish!
The other three heroines fare slightly better, with them mainly having certain plot points tied to Seika or their route dragged out to meet her specific timeline. However, this is also where you start to get a sense of things being rushed or just half-assed.
First up is classmate Mari who is perhaps the most tsun tsundere to have ever existed – she perhaps illustrates that half of this game's problem is that everyone is just so damn angry/rude towards each other for no good reason. Moving on, and Mari does have some cute sides, – especially when looking after her younger siblings, and I enjoyed that she and Ryuichi become co-workers at local cafe Nocturne (their interactions with the cafe owner were actually enjoyable). However, the placement of the first H scene in this route was terrible & Mari's route was absolutely padded at the end for no good reason.
Mari – J-just so you know, it's not like I made this for you or anything! I just made too much, that's all.
Look, I'm a simple woman – I see an ojou-sama with blonde twintails and you immediately have my attention. Aline starts off incredibly – the refined president of the tea ceremony club who also secretly rides a motorbike in her spare time?! Sign me up! Sadly they literally forget the bike-riding badass part of her personality once you get onto her route. The romance in her route is poor with yet another badly placed first H scene. You know when it gets to the point of unknown side characters essentially forcing the relationship into existence that the authors were being lazy. Since I played this route first I didn't find the overall story too bad but since all
Can you believe they did NOTHING with her bike riding after the common route *sob*
The final heroine is Mizuki, a miko at the local shrine and a girl who tends to be found more often resting in the nurse's office than in the classroom. She's a cute oddball but again there was potential here that was completely squandered by the weird adherence to Seika's schedule. Though I will say this is the least annoying example since there is some mild lore reasons for Mizuki to be involved with Seika. More than Miku that's for damn sure. The game introduces a bunch of supernatural stuff in this route that is never fully explained/elaborated on further also but were they actually expecting people to still be playing at this point?
There's actually quite a lot of side characters, pretty much all of the recurring ones having character sprites which was nice. Hikaru & Touko provide much of the "comedic relief" of the game which, while hit-or-miss, does mean less time spent on you-know-who so that's a plus. I will fully admit that I did not vibe with a lot of the humor in this game but it spent a ridiculous amount of time on weirdly out of place shounen anime-esque battles between the two teacher characters. These were just tedious, especially since they were a weekly occurrence in-game.
The final character to talk about is of course our protagonist Ryuichi. He's a bit of a dick towards Miku especially and also participates in the game's problem of being weirdly angry all the time. However, the one thing I want to bring up is the particularly poor way his trauma around fire is handled. Ryuichi was involved in an accident involving fire when he was child and has such been left with essentially PTSD – whenever he sees any sort of flame he goes into a blind panic.
This gave him an interesting hook, which as a reader made me want to learn about what caused his trauma, how he could overcome it etc. In half of the routes his trauma is forgotten, in the other half he gets over this debilitating condition in the most underwhelming, fast-tracked way. Man spends like 5 minutes daydreaming about what happened to him and is completely fine afterwards. Why do I expect any better at this point lol?
I need to move on from the "plot" decisions of this game and luckily one of the only things I can say that I genuinely liked was the artwork by Mappiirakku. The coloring was quite a bit simpler than that in Asukimi but I still enjoy his artstyle. It's just a shame that he only illustrated a couple of games, though it seems to be that animation is his actual interest given his work on School Days & Sisters.
The music was also decent, with a nice enough opening song by Hashimoto Miyuki (and they even have an animated opening movie). The ending & insert songs (WHY is there an insert song in the least exciting game of all time) are also fine. Voice acting was generally pretty good, with Aoyama Yukari as Aline being my personal favourite. I did begin to find Mari's voice a bit grating though.
I suppose I should also mention because it's so old but the download version of the game worked relatively fine on Windows 11 for me. I did have a couple of crashes due to image display errors randomly (it didn't seem to be any one specific sprite/BG as far as I could tell) so if you for some ungodly reason want to play this then make sure to save often.
There is also a weird bug where it doesn't always display CGs in the gallery when I clicked on them but resetting the game back to the title & trying again seemed to work? I can't really fault the game for any of these minor issues though because it technically only supports up to Windows Vista lmao.
Conclusion
My Score: 3/10
On one hand I can say that I'm glad I finally got to play this game that has sat on my backlog for a long time, on the other this was absolutely not worth the time or money spent on it. I can understand why this is the only game Star Link made.
Don't do it. Just don't. Hitoyume falls in the unfortunate area where it's bad, but not bad enough to be funny or worth playing ironically. It's just a sad example of a rushed game with really poor heroine writing. Seika is unironically once of the worst heroines I've seen in a galge so I guess the game has that going for it?
Will this stop me from playing niche/forgotten games from the 00's? Absolutely not. I love galge from all eras, though I will say I have a soft spot for mid 00's – early 10's due to nostalgia. Considering I played Suzunone Seven straight after this I think I'll survive (Sumire is love, Sumire is life).
Thanks for reading~
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