Summer Mission, a Japanese time-travel adventure game, will launch on Sept. 10
Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-09-09 17:04 (JST)
Translated by. Ari Clark
On September 3, Japanese solo indie developer Azami announced that their adventure game, Summer Mission, will go on sale on September 10. The game will be available for PC (via Steam), and will retail for 620 yen (about $5.65). The game will only support Japanese at launch.
Summer Mission is a third-person-perspective 3D adventure game. Players take the role of the protagonist, a boy named Towa, who journeys into the past hoping to thaw his icy relationship with his grandmother, Sayuri, who passed away while they were still on bad terms.
When Towa is given a ticket to “return to the past for just three days” by a mysterious woman, he travels through time to the summer of 1980, and meets Sayuri when she was 15 years old, the same age that he is. In an unexpected twist, Sayuri is not in love with Seiji, the boy who will become his grandfather, but with another boy named Rei.
If something isn’t done about this, Sayuri and Seiji will never marry, and the protagonist, their grandson, will never be born! The player has to go through a series of experiences involving his own ancestors.
A demo version of the game is available on the Japanese free game distribution site Freem! The full release will have three different endings, with the story branching according to which of the three primary characters’ homes you choose to stay at. In the demo version, you can play through to the ending of the story branch where you stay with your grandfather Seiji.
In the demo version, you can explore the town and go through several quests. Simple as it is, the game is set up so that it makes you really feel like you’re in the 1980s. Although there’s nothing like a formal quest system, you can check your goals in the menu at any time, and the major characters are pretty generous about giving you hints.
On the other hand, camera controls felt hard to get used to, both on mouse/keyboard and gamepad. It’s also a bit concerning that you can’t change the key bindings or the sensitivity settings. At any rate, these are just our impressions from the demo version, and they may have made some adjustments and added settings for the full release.
The game also puts a lot of effort into its cutscenes, which you can catch a glimpse of in the demo version. The cutscenes are basically fully-voiced by four voice actors, and the characters have been given lip-sync to match their dialogue, as well as changing facial expressions. The characters’ faces and hand gestures apparently make use of motion-captured data.
Conversations outside of cutscenes are text-based, and aside from the primary characters, you can enjoy conversing with 30 different residents of the town. Plus, outside of the main storyline, there are 12 sub-missions that can deepen your relationships with the people in town.
All things considered, we can’t wait to time-travel back to the 1980s when Summer Mission launches on Steam on September 10.
