Released worldwide last year after a 13-year wait, this remake of the 1998 visual novel White Album is a pretty chill game with a bittersweet theme at its heart. It uses a daily calendar-based dating sim style structure based around brief events and conversations, but contrary to what you'd expect, the main character starts out already in a relationship with an up-and-coming idol star. As her schedule gets more hectic and your character struggles to balance school and several part-time jobs, that structure ends up effectively conveying the distance and strain growing between the two.

Those little events that you take part in every day are a mix of things, mostly quick and pleasant conversations where you just select a topic and hear some dialogue, and sometimes more defined story scenes. Not much straight-up "plot" focus, but there is a story being told through even the small stuff. I've rarely seen a game capture so specifically the feeling of just running into someone somewhere, and it's both happy and sad when that person is your character's own girlfriend that he's barely otherwise in touch with... Through these kinds of scenes some of the characters definitely grew on me and I really felt the absence of others. The story background gives certain interactions this interesting sort of guilty tension while still letting you put your foot down and stay faithful to your girlfriend if you want. Some characters were uninteresting, others were just okay, but there were juuuust enough that I liked personally.

Yet for all the time I spent with these characters, I feel like I didn't really get enough true depth out of it. I think some of that depth is in there on subsequent playthroughs, but there are seemingly some very specific, unintuitive things to do to get deeper into characters' stories. I don't mind trying again on paper, but this feels pretty thin most of the time—pleasant, sure, but replaying sounds tedious without much interesting gameplay hook. So for me it's sort of conceptually over after the first playthrough, since I'm not convinced enough that it's worth going through that from what I've seen.

Part of me still does want to dive back in with a guide to see what I can get out it, but somehow even the less conclusive normal ending that I did get almost feels... appropriately unsatisfying. I wish it had felt more complete with my normal play, but I got a nice little taste of a compelling situation with very natural-feeling highs, lows, and plain-old normal days. The presentation is pretty nice and the overall vibe is sort of relaxing in a nice way. I don't love the game and kinda wish for its ideas to get more of a focused narrative, or at least something that I'm more enticed to actually sit down for hours to play again, but it's still something I'm glad I played.