Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds is an otome visual novel, one where the target market is young females. The is the first in a two part story, with the second part being Edo Blossoms. While you can name the female protagonist to anything you’d want, the default is Chizuru. The game takes place in historical Japan where samurai was commonplace. Chizuru arrived in Kyoto from Edo in search for her father, a doctor, who had gone missing. However, she soon discovers that Kyoto is as dangerous as she had heard and being a female definitely puts her at a disadvantage.
When Chizuru is attacked by ronin (disgraced samurai), she is, by chance, saved by the samurai of Shinsengumi. As she had witnessed something she wants supposed to, she ends up being taken and forced to stay with them. She quickly ends up becoming a core member of the Shinsengumi. While they are still reserved and places many restrictions on Chizuru, she easily worms her way into their hearts.
The first part of the story is more focused on how Chizuru eventually integrates herself as part of the Shinsengumi. The Shinsengumi is responsible for helping keep Kyoto safe but they are placed on the backburner and lacks respect by official governmental forces. That doesn’t stop them from significant good though. Although the plot thread of Chizuru finding her father ultimately takes a backseat, there are a lot that her father was involved in that Chizuru will find out over time. She learns about her heritage during her stay over the next few years. Some things are dubious, which causes Chizuru to seriously think about specific things and how she should react to them.
The visual novel can be confusing at first because there are twelve romance options. As the story introduces several of them in one hit, it is hard to keep track of who is who. It doesn’t help that their names aren’t that easy to remember and we don’t learn any unique traits or personalities of their characters until much later on. On a similar note, due to the period that this game takes place in, it uses a lot of Japanese terms which will be unfamiliar to most western audiences. Due to that, it can be hard to get settled into the story.
In typical visual novel fashion, there are dialogue choices throughout the story which will dictate the affection of the romance options and ultimately the ending. This game has all the quality of life options of the genre. These include a text skip option, glossary for those unfamiliar Japanese terms, and text speed. The game only has Japanese voice-overs. There will be frequent CG artworks as you plod along, and they are beautifully drawn, although more variations in the posing would be nice.
Routes are fairly short at only three to four hours long depending on your reading speed. Since the game focuses on quantity rather than quality, this does mean that the romantic aspect is not as well developed, at least not enough for the player to build a bond and make it feel realistic. The story skips over major events like battles, which are done in a quick summary, and action sequences are basically just blacked screens with some flashing effects to reflect the clashing swords. Once you’ve finished one ending, getting the other characters’ endings are much quicker as you can skip through 70% to 80% of the text. Only the text after specific choices, and the endings, are unique, which means roughly 1.5 hours for each additional ending assuming you are interested in the story. Most of the major events stay the same; it’s just from whose perspective you are experiencing it from.
The different routes will mean that they will focus a bit more on that one character, so you get to understand them a lot more. Other routes may have had a passing remark about things that happened to them but will get fleshed out in their own route. It’s pretty neat as you start slotting the various pieces together to get a grander understanding of everything that has happened.
When you get to the endings, this is where this game being the first in a two-part story becomes really obvious. This is because nothing is resolved and the protagonist will end up with a scene with one of the romantic options as they look onto Edo. It’s quite disappointing and abrupt. It makes the whole game feel incomplete as it only serves to set up half the story and then forcing you to buy and play the next game to get a proper conclusion. It’s worse when you go through each of the various character endings and know that every single one of them will end at a point where they will be heading towards Edo.
Unfortunately, you do feel that the game focuses on quantity rather than quality. The story is short in order to accommodate all the various routes which share too many of the same events. By the time you’ve completed six playthroughs, it is already tedious when you’re watching the same thing happen again and again and take one of two templates in its ending. This is made more egregious since it is handicapped by the sequel so all routes had to go towards the same destination.
Overall, Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds is a very average visual novel. It actually starts off fairly strong and novel, given that it takes place in historical Japan and manages to stay that way for the first playthrough. Unfortunately, that is when the game shows off its repetitive nature as the story is really short and truncated. Forcing you to repeat it more than ten times to get all the routes with barely any new content is quite tedious, with the “new content” mostly being just a slightly different version of the same time, this massively drags the whole game down.
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