Highway Blossoms is a visual novel. The aesthetics are clean and all the dialogue is voiced in English. The story follows Amber, who is driving a RV in the desert when she chances upon Marina. Marina’s car had broken down and she was stranded, with Amber being the only person kind-hearted enough to stop and see if she needed help. The pair travels to the nearest gas station where Amber learns about the currently popularity of this area given the hype about buried treasure.
Amber doesn’t believe that the buried treasure exists but through several coincidences, she ends up teaming with Marina to find the treasure. They have a publicised journal that provides the clues for them to search out the places that each piece of the treasure was hidden. Bear in mind that this was hidden over a hundred years ago, and the visual novel is only a few hours long, so naturally things move at a quick pace, to the point of the treasures being way too easy to find, given that hundreds if not thousands of people are looking for it without success too.
The whole game is a road-trip scenario with the treasure an as excuse for the pair to have a common motivation. As alluded to from the title, and also from the genre this game is in, this is also a romance story, with Amber and Marina slowly falling for each other. Despite the inevitability of their mutual attraction and the speed at which it happens, it’s done in a sweet way. Like Amber, you slowly grow to love Marina and see her upbeat cheerful personality in a good light. The pair has natural chemistry and complements each other well.
As the pair only just met each other, they slowly reveal their pasts as well. Amber comes from a troubled background, having just recently experienced loss. While Marina has family issues too although she’s quite carefree. For Amber, her past is kind of a touch subject and a source of some of the friction between the pair. It adds some light drama into the story but the best thing is how well the writing wraps the building of their relationships with the treasure hunting aspect. It just gives them natural opportunities to get to know each other and makes their relationship more convincing.
If the story was only about Amber and Marina, it might have been a bit boring. So, in addition to the hundreds of other faceless people aiming for the treasure, they have a personal rivalry with another team,. Initially, the rivals are annoying but slowly grows on you. By around the halfway point, they’re pretty neat and some of the scenarios in which the two teams clash is funny and interesting.
As the treasure hunting gets resolved, the focus then turns onto the pair’s relationship. Amber still has a lot of guilt for personal reasons, and that keeps affecting her. It’s somewhat weird at first, like the overwhelming sense of guilt and sadness just comes out of nowhere, and the explanation given doesn’t hold up. Eventually, as it is explained better, you can see the signs. That said, the awkward yet innocent exchanges between Amber and Marina are both the best and worst bits of the game.
The story does capture Amber and Marina’s affection for each other really well, and frames it as a sort of first crush turned serious affair. Due to the short length of the game though, they progress really fast, too fast in certain sections whereby allowing more time to flesh out their accrued affection for each other would have been better. Given how the story was written, the game also reuses a lot of assets and backgrounds, even the CGs that you would normally expect to be unique to that particular earlier scene.
The last part of the game can feel cheesy and melodramatic. Amber seems unstable and her reacts quite over the top. Then it becomes cheesy and then ultimately, a sweet scene that highlights the pure nature of Amber and Marina’s relationship. It’s quite a nice and fitting ending, and helps resolves the biggest thing guilting Amber. Plus, Marina’s voice actress captures the character perfectly, in fact, the voice acting in this game is better than you would expect.
The game doesn’t feature any choices or alternate endings, so once you’re done with the story in around three to five hours (depending on your reading speed), that’s it for the content. This “remastered” version had improved upon the original game, and cut a few things out. So for extras, there was a removed scene, and there’s a goofball mode. This mode is actually quite funny and amusing, as it breaks the fourth wall and is an “abridged” version of the story. Although there is one version of it where it’s annoying in that there is a timer that counts down in real time so that you get to experience the game with time passing at the rate that it should, so… you end up quitting and not going further with it.
Overall, Highway Blossoms is a surprisingly good visual novel. It starts off quite rough, what with the awkward treasure hunting scenario to draw the characters together, some clumsy writing, and questionable character choices. However, that leads to a sweet romance that isn’t perfect, there are ups and downs, arguments to be had, and characters realizing their true feelings. What this results in are characters that engages you with their actions. The ending feels like the natural conclusion, and it’s good enough that you can overlook the flaws of the story.
-------------------------------------------------
