Harmonia

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Harmonia is a Visual Novel released on PC in 2016, with a port to Nintendo Switch in 2022. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Harmonia follows the story of a boy who wakes up in a factory for humanoid robots called phiroids, and seeing that one of his own hands has the skin torn off to reveal a robotic skeleton underneath, it doesn’t take him long to put two and two together and realize what he must be.

Resolving to head out into the world and find people, the game’s protagonist sets out into the ruined world to find people to help, and to try to learn about emotions to become more like a human himself. Eventually, he finds himself in a small town where Shiona, the kind woman who discovered him, names him Rei. Rei quickly learns that Shiona uses colors and other nebulous words to refer to emotions, and gets to know a few of the other townsfolk, endeavoring to try to bring happiness to all of them.

While I like the concept this story presents, I feel like it could have been done better. Rei isn’t very convincing as a robot, and even before he decides to learn about emotions it seems like he’s perfectly capable of them. It doesn’t make much sense that he feels compelled to hide his robotic arm for fear of being discovered, either – we’re not given any reason to think that this revelation will upset anyone. Indeed, it’s made clear that one of the townsfolk, Madd, is a phiroid, and no one seems to think less of him for it.

It also doesn’t help that the townsfolk Rei meets all seem pretty one-note, seemingly summed up by Shiona’s color-coded descriptions of them: Shinoa is “orange”, seemingly endlessly kind and liked by nearly everyone. Madd is “red” and always acts… well, mad. And Tipi is “blue”, acting constantly sad and depressed. There’s more going on in the story here, but without revealing the ending, I’ll say that the shallow nature of these characters made them difficult to become invested in.

As Visual Novel games go, Harmonia is extremely linear, what developer Key calls a “Kinetic Novel”, with no actual choices to make. The game taking an estimated 5-6 hours, depending on your reading speed.

While I’m not super-thrilled with the story, the rest of the presentation is nice, though uneven in odd ways. The game’s anime-style character art is excellent, though lopsided in favor of the female characters, who look impossibly pretty for people living in a world covered in layers of some sort of post-apocalyptic dust. By comparison, the two male characters look fairly plain. The static art for these characters is depicted in front of some nicely-detailed backgrounds, with layers of dust constantly falling over external environments.

All of this is joined by full Japanese-language voice acting that seems decent enough, and backed by a gentle soundtrack designed to emphasize the emotion of the scenes and characters. it all works quite well, I just wish it had better material to highlight.

To be clear, I don’t dislike Harmonia, and I would say the mostly nice presentation even makes this a better-than-average Visual Novel, but the story and characters just don’t seem well thought-out enough to live up to the premise, leading to a game that feels somewhat hollow, leaning too heavily on its appealing female character designs and voice acting to make up for other flaws. I don’t think Visual Novel fans will necessarily hate this game, but with an absolute wealth of other options on the platform, I do think you have far too many better options to waste time and money on this one.

tl;dr – Harmonia is a linear Visual Novel with no player choice set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where players follow the story of a boy who wakes up in an android factory and soon finds himself in a small town trying to bring happiness to the townsfolk. While I like this game’s premise, I think the story and characters leave something to be desired. And the presentation, while not bad, feels a bit lopsided. This is overall a better-than-average Visual Novel, but you have far too many excellent choices on Nintendo Switch to settle for “better-than-average”.

Grade: C+

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