Memento of Spring Review

OI, where’s my food! You’re 10 seconds late!

What else can a stubborn kid be but somehow be kicked out of the school’s boarding house but still be in the curriculum? In this world magic exists, those who possess it has to learn how to control it. They might not be as advanced as other worlds, but perhaps they just need one gifted individual to set them on the road. Here we have Juliane, the Princess of Calamity, as the natural prodigy in magic. However, she isn’t as agreeable as others might like, she is rather stubborn and is content with snoozing through most of the day and getting her meals. I guess you can say, those cat ears got to her more than replacing her normal ears.

With Juliane bringing her school to kick her out, she is left with living in a chapel with her caretaker Amalie (who we get a perspective of). Though really, Amalie only needs to make sure Juliane gets food at the right time and make sure the locals don’t storm their way to throwing Juliane out of another place. The teachers she gets, however, are another story as Juliane constantly drives them to drinking and making up excuses to why they can’t teach her. She might be a prodigy, but she won’t agree with anything a teacher says.

This doesn’t just take place at a chapel, but also a place where magic doesn’t exist that Juliane somehow got to. Good thing she’s finally out of her room but not as she has no idea where she is at. Here, as we don’t have Amalie, we get the counterpart Lily. A girl who recently got a job at a cafe, soon gets dumped to babysitting Juliane, and hijinks ensues. Sadly, I’ll have to stop there before I accidently go into spoiler territory. A lot of the events that happen somewhat before she gets to this new world and after will spoil the story. Every character you meet takes a major part in the story and chipping away at Juliane. No characters are introduced and dumped off, nor do you not know how each character’s personality was.

With the story having a strong hold, how is the art and the music? I’m glad to say that both are good. The art is appealing to the eye and the bright colors certainly brings out that this is going to be really lighthearted in nature. The only thing that did look weird to me was having Juliane directly facing the screen as her face did look a but too long and awkward outside of CGs. To accompany the story and the art is really nice piano music. There are also some situations where the music directly links to the text which is nice to put in. If you like a certain track, the main menu contains a section with all of them listed for you to play outside of the story.

I think there could have been more shuffling with the characters to not make some things forced. Amalie is believable as she is the only caretaker of Juliane so she does have a reason to being around her all the time. However, when the scenery changes and we get Lily, it is forced to try and have her be around Julian despite knowing she’s supposed to be working. Having to bring up excuses for Lily to not be at her job where it might have worked if we got into Julian’s mind instead. It would have surely saved bringing up excuses and letting the players understand Juliane more after knowing what other people thought of her.

There were also some areas that does seem like it may be dragging a little bit too much, with most of these areas more resulted in Juliane’s personality as she often does go in circles. The plus side though, by the end of Memento of Spring, there is no way you will not know Julian’s personality. Some of her backstory, including her ears (where did they come from??), are often left up in the air if it wasn’t already been told through Julian herself.

As of now, the way chapters are shown to be completed and going onto the next looks like the game ended. With only the game’s title fading in and out and the achievement for finishing a chapter showing that there is more. It would be helpful to put in what chapter you’re going into in the game rather than outside of it. So if you end up only having 3 hours and disappointed the game ended way too early, keep playing!

Verdict

Memento of Spring is a nice kinetic novel. If one of the selling points for you was the long length, this is not lying by a long shot. You can easily spend a couple days reading this with occasional breaks and make significant progress in either understanding characters more or getting further story-wise. Despite some aspects that could have been done better, I did enjoy the story and how lighthearted it is and is a pretty solid first entry Bright Onion put out. I certainly won’t be opposed to playing future kinetic or visual (if they ever decide to do player choices) novels from them.