HimaNatsu: Of Churches, Sunflowers, and Long Summers Game Review

		Description:

The story is set in a seaside hometown named Oboshiro Village, which the protagonist, Yosuke Ashitaba, hasn't visited in eight years, as well as the memory-filled Oboshiro Church. Yosuke will not only reunite with his childhood friends, Yomi Natsusaki, Daiya Oboshiro, and Ruka Sagitsuki, but will also encounter a curious girl named Hinazakura Nonohara. Together, they will face the impending crisis of the church's demolition and unravel an intricate fairy tale mystery. In this never-ending summer vacation, weave a tale of promises and redemption together with the Oboshiro Choir Squad.

The story is set in a seaside hometown named Oboshiro Village, which the protagonist, Yosuke Ashitaba, hasn't visited in eight years, as well as the memory-filled Oboshiro Church. Yosuke will not only reunite with his childhood friends, Yomi Natsusaki, Daiya Oboshiro, and Ruka Sagitsuki, but will also encounter a curious girl named Hinazakura Nonohara. Together, they will face the impending crisis of the church's demolition and unravel an intricate fairy tale mystery. In this never-ending summer vacation, weave a tale of promises and redemption together with the Oboshiro Choir Squad.

I decided to review HimaNatsu: Of Churches, Sunflowers and Long Summers because I wanted to practice what I preach. I've long been frustrated with how the majority of mainstream gaming outlets treat visual novels and their ilk as, at best, quirky novelties and, at worst, objects of scorn subjected to punching-down humor. With rare exception, games press and the broader industry only give visual novel-style adventure games and dating sims attention when they're a part of cynical marketing pushes for more established gaming properties or, bizarrely, promotional efforts for the KFC restaurant chain. Visual novels are some of the most enduring genres of games in the medium and, consequently, extremely influential on celebrated franchises like Persona and Fire Emblem, which lifted relationship progression mechanics in their more recent entries. I want to do my part in rectifying this bias by engaging with visual novels through the kind of critique and analysis this space commonly applies to more mainstream genres of work.

With all of that being said, I really wish HimaNatsu: Of Churches, Sunflowers and Long Summers was a better game. Originally released in 2013 and developed by celebrated visual novel studio Makura, HimaNatsu falls into the “nakige” sub-genre of visual novels and is explicitly designed to try to make players cry by eliciting strong emotional reactions in them. Released for the first time in English by localization studio Kagami Games, the majority of my criticisms and what little affection I did find for HimaNatsu stem from just how old it feels. Not only does the structure of the game feel clunky by today's standards and lacks what are now standard quality-of-life features, but the localized dialogue feels like something straight out of the 2013 anime community. While this does give the game a distinct sense of time and place, it also made me acutely aware of how far I, and the rest of the anime community, have come since I was seventeen and reading about these kinds of Japan-only releases on forums in my high school bedroom.

Like a fair amount of Japanese media that aims to tug at the viewer's heartstrings, HimaNatsu centers on an audience surrogate young man, Ashitaba Yousuke, returning to his rural hometown for a summer after several years away in the big city. When he arrives, he encounters several figures from his childhood in short order, including:

His de facto father and the hilariously violent Catholic priest, Arakawa Tenkai

The mysterious and formally sickly young woman who also spent several years away from the rural community for medical treatment, Natsusaki Yomi

The adorable orphan, Hina

The sheltered rich girl, Oboshiro Hipopo Daiya

And, last but not least, the protagonist's spiritual big sis, Sagitsuki Ruka

HimaNatsu's biggest issues present themselves pretty quickly and only build as the work goes on. The first is that, if those character descriptions didn't already give it away, the leading cast in this visual novel are pretty archetypal. I wouldn't go so far as to call them tropes, but they all fit super cleanly within the boxes we're used to seeing these kinds of characters in. For instance, with how much mystery the opening hour or so ascribes to Yomi, it doesn't really feel as surprising as it's intended to be when supernatural elements begin popping up in her storyline.

The other big issue with HimaNatsu is just how LONG it takes for its stories to go anywhere and how repetitive the dialogue is. Brevity is a virtue in all forms of writing, and I'm genuinely unsure if the characters repeating themselves so often is a consequence of the dialogue trying to seem more naturalistic or if it's intended to be comical. Regardless, it comes across as more exhausting than anything else. Supposedly this visual novel contains around 366,000 words, and it could easily lose half of them. Quite literally, one character cannot tease another character about her choice of swimsuit without repeating the point multiple times.

My other big complaint about HimaNatsu's is just how “early-2010s anime scene” it feels in both concept and execution. I understand that this is a game where you play as an awkward young man going on misadventures with women from his childhood who can't stop fawning over him and his mediocrity, and that I should meet it in that premise, but the game feels so bland for not iterating on this template at all. I'm not saying that every visual novel/dating sim needs to be as subversive as Doki Doki Literature Club or as metatextual as Date Everything, but any elements that break it out of the stereotypical dating sim mold would be appreciated. Also, I can't believe that I experienced a piece of media that ironically uses online weeb phrases like “flat is justice” in 2026! If nothing else, HimaNatsu is clearly for anime old heads who appreciate these kinds of titles, and is steeped in cultural signifiers that will be impactful to only them.

Though no amount of nostalgia can make up for HimaNatsu's limited features and lopsided design. There's no story route map in this game, so if you want to explore a particular girl's narrative, you just have to guess and reset your choices until you get the one you want. The choices that put you on these different routes are also super frontloaded and only meaningfully appear at the beginning of the game. The story is very on rails and passive after this opening act. The choices you make also feel weird and inconsequential, with half of them being more internal reactions to story beats than a choice that meaningfully changes the protagonist's relationship, or even interaction, with another character. Even if the game does use the affordances of the gaming medium to hilarious effect in some instances, such as character sprites zooming across the screen to depict a character running or jump cuts to different backgrounds to embellish a gag, HimaNatsu feels a lot closer to a novel than it does a visual novel.

Speaking of visuals, the artistic direction of HimaNatsu is somewhat limited. The main cast all look like generic anime girls of the era and, while the casual gothic-lolita costuming does give the game some sense of aesthetic direction, it also works against making the leads feel more distinct, as they don't wear clothes that reinforce their personalities. There's a story beat in HimaNatsu where the Choir Squad (the in-universe name for the main cast) start a maid cafe and the protagonist lecherously comments on seeing the girls in maid costumes, which I found funny as Yomi, Daiya, and Ruka already dress like stylized maids in my eyes.

While not in the base game available on Steam, there's a freely available 18+ patch for HimaNatsu that can be downloaded from their website. I played the game with this patch installed, and I would strongly recommend doing so, as many of the storylines in this game are punctuated by steamy moments and build to sexual crescendos. That being said, the material in these h-scenes isn't anything too groundbreaking. The most risque of these focus on exhibitionism and anal sex, which isn't bad inherently, but it is a little disappointing that these scenes are so grounded considering the supernatural shenanigans occurring in other parts of this work. Another issue is that all of the female leads in this game could be characterized as some degree of innocent or even virginal, which makes the various moments of intimacy in each route feel fairly similar to the other routes. This is a shame and maybe the biggest example of the male power fantasy wish fulfillment that HimaNatsu treads in, getting in the way of more interesting scenarios where the other characters are further distinguished by their unique sexual proclivities.

I should also note that, and this is technically a spoiler for this game, that Hina's story route does feature a time skip where an older version of the protagonist can marry and have sex with what's functionally his adoptive sister/daughter. It also wasn't totally clear to me if she was still in high school or just out of high school as this storyline played out, but regardless, the way the game cuts between moments of growing romance between the protagonist and Hina and moments between them when he was an adult and she was a young child is pretty uncomfortable. I wouldn't go so far as to label this storyline in HimaNatsu as an instance of grooming, but I really don't like that the work even inspires that analysis.

Even if I look past the clunky ways in which HimaNatsu: Of Churches, Sunflowers, and Long Summers has aged, I still think it fails at living up to its core promise as a nakige. This game tries too hard to pander to a presumably straight, cishet male audience and, as such, the only emotion it was able to inspire within me was frustration and, occasionally, bemusement. Longtime visual novel fans might find this title interesting as a historical artifact, but I can't recommend that people engage with it under any other circumstances.

Overall : C-

Graphics : C+

Sound/Music : B

Gameplay : D

Presentation : C+

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