Summary: >

It was Kotaro's Junior year in school with only a week left. Once again Kotaro passed an angel in the hallway of the school. Her name was Kaho. Kaho is beautiful elegant and an almost perfect girl. In fact she received love letters all the time (even from girls). Kotarao finally made up his mind that day that he would ask Kaho out and see her during the summer. But was such a thing even possible? At least he would introduce himself and prove to her that he existed.

That night while walking home, Kotaro is fallowed by a mysterious figure. Kotaro wasn't sure whether to run or confront the person but in the end it didn't matter. Once the confrontation happened, sparks flew. Actually it wasn't sparks but some mysterious powder that ended up covering Kotaro. The person got away and he had nothing to do but go home and go to bed. The next day things weren't right. When he got to school people were mysteriously absent. Even when he got to his class there was no one there. Eventually he found his friend Takashi who took him to the school hall for the annual introduction speech... for the FIRST day of school. It was a joke that was too big for an entire school to pull off. He really had skipped the entire summer somehow.

Kotaro did find some things out however. Not only had he met Kaho over the summer, they had fallen in love. And it was only yesterday that somehow Kaho had met a tragic death. It was at this point where Kotaro began to experience what he called "day dropping". He then skipped into a random day in the middle of the summer. And even more surprising was that he was to meet up with Kaho. But why? For the rest of the summer Kotaro would skip to random days out of order, often paying the consequences for things he hadn't even done yet while not doing things that cause even more problems - because he didn't know he as supposed to do them. Kotaro also met a mysterious time traveler was responsible for this mess in the first place. But it seems like no matter what he does he can't really seem to change her fate. But as he gets deeper into the summer, Kotaro also begins to realize that Kaho needs to be saved not only from her death, but from her repressed life under her overbearing father.

Thoughts: >

So the first thing I'll point out is that this isn't really an "anime" per say since it's not really animated. It is however a DVD and it has... well anime characters so I figured it would fit fine into my anime review section. Hourglass of Summer is sometimes called a "date sim" although I think "interactive DVD" might be more appropriate (maybe I'm wrong though). This is sort of a lot like a choose your own adventure book. You make decisions at certain points which changes the outcome of the story. There isn't any animation, its basically a bunch of 'stills' accompanied by voice acting. Guess that makes it an audio/visual choose your own adventure story.

Anyway, no animation aside I'd have to say Hourglass of summer is almost perfect. The story is great, voice acting is superb, and the designs are top notch. The title really thoroughly had me hooked from beginning to "end". I was expecting to simply sit by and just let the story happen, but eventually found my self SO into it that I was really sad when Kotaro didn't end up with Kaho (one of the bad endings). Then I thought to myself "wow this really must be good for me to get that into it" - which is very true. But I was still intersted because I know there are a lot of endings I haven't found. The drawback of course is that it can take a while to find.

So what are the bad points to this title? Well it's really hard to criticize it because an interactive DVD is a novel concept to me so I'm going to be far more forgiving about much of this. Some of the interface options are sort of ... clunky. I've heard people complain that there is no "password" that you can enter to jump to the point where you left off. The version I have does have a password so that must have been a revision. The other complaint is that it's long. Not only is it long, but it's LOOOooooong - expect to watch it for days. But that's okay with me, because I couldn't get enough of this title, so I guess that depends on your perspective ^^. On a technical note you might want to keep in mind that this title has documented issues with some computer DVD players, so you might want to use a real DVD player. It worked flawlessly on my PlayStation 2.

So if you like subtitled Japanese dialog, and want to see a romance with a fantastic storyline, then Hourglass of Summer is something you will not want to miss.

Screen Caps: >