Autumn’s Journey

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Autumn’s Journey is a Visual Novel released in 2020 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game’s story follows Auralee, a young woman in training to become a knight, and who one day while on patrol discovers a pair of dragons transformed into human form: the grumpy, condescending Kerr, and the wide-eyed enthusiastic Ilmari. Across the game’s 2-3 hours of play timer (depending on your reading speed), she’ll escort Kerr to shrines he has been instructed to visit, and give Ilmari a tour of the community of the heavenkind (this game’s word for “human”).

The presentation here is okay, with some nice anime-style artwork for the characters in front of nice, detailed painterly backgrounds. There are a few moments here and there when the art style shifts into a chibi style to emphasize a goofy moment in the story, but otherwise the art style here remains consistent.

This is joined by a relaxed synthesized instrumental soundtrack and brief voice recordings for the characters that all seem poorly-acted, poorly-recorded, and distracting in the way that you often get when videogames use short sound clips that are supposed to stand in for lengthier spoken segments.

The story itself seems pretty disposable. There are choices here and there, and a few endings, but it’s kinda’ hard to get invested in any of these characters. Auralee seems like an overly-enthusiastic mindless ditz, Kerr seems like a pompous jerk, and Ilmari acts like a young child. What do I care if Auralee succeeds in becoming a knight, if Kerr finally accomplishes what he needs to in order to return to his dragon form, or if Ilmari finally does… whatever he’s come here to do?

I suppose for only $5, Autumn’s Journey might serve as a passable distraction between more substantial works, but I just could not find anything here that I found compelling, except perhaps the character art. And while that’s nice, if that was my only interest, I could easily find plenty of free art online that’s even better. I recommend you hold onto your money and find a more interesting Visual Novel to play.

tl;dr – Autumn’s Journey is a Visual Novel about a young woman training to become a knight escorting two dragons in human form to help them accomplish their own goals. While the art style here is nice, the sound is distracting and neither the story nor the characters are especially compelling. If you’re looking for a cheap $5 time-waster between more substantial works, I suppose you might find something to interest you here, but there are plenty of other Visual Novels more worthy of both your time and money.

Grade: C-

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