Quick Thoughts: Adventure of a Lifetime

Visual Novels are a funny thing, as typically they are basically center around a male protagonist with a couple of love interests set in an slice of life anime world, some are more explicit than others while others have thought and substance to them. Adventure of a Lifetime (developed and published by MoeNovel) leans towards the later in this regard. 

The focus of this particular game is on Hiro, a young man heading to an island to help at a cafe being run by his grandmother, and he encounters Emily, a runaway who is a bit of a spoiled brat, and Chisa, his longtime friend whose a bit of a tomboy. Over the course of the game, these three are intertwined as Hiro and Chisa reconnect and Emily's intentions for running away from home are revealed, there is romance, comedy and a bit of drama here and there all of which are pretty standard fare.

So with an incredibly basic and typical premise, what makes Adventure of a Lifetime stand out, well for one it has a great soundtrack, and with the exception of Hiro who is the player, ever other character as voice-work done.... yes it's all in Japanese, but the game by default is in English as it relates to menus and text. plus with a little fudging with the settings you can basically set the game to auto-advance in time with the voice overs. Because of the voice work, Adventure of a Lifetime can push to be a 3-4 hour long experience if you're not looking to go through it as quickly as possible, but make sure you save on a regular basis as it did crash on me about half way through and there wasn't an auto-save feature. 

The art work is above average as well, with the usual set of character images and variants on a scene if locations are being revisited, with some chibi style scenes as well to push the more comedic elements.There is also a very well done animated video that you see about half-way through the game, which in many respects shows what Adventure of a Lifetime would look like if it was a fully-funded anime.

With two romance interests there are two positive endings with Hiro ending up with Emily or Chisa, so two complete play-through are in order, since there are choices to be made at key points to a) keep Hiro in good standing with both of them and b) making sure you pick one or the other. Of the two endings, one certainly works better than other in my opinion, but I'm not going to say which one because that would be spoiling it.

Following all that, I say if you are a casual fan of Visual Novels and are looking to get an easy set of Steam achievements, check out Adventure of a Lifetime.