Not A Review: Harmony: Fall of Reverie
(Fun fact: the title of this article was almost Dumbass Discusses Deviant Dating Sim. Too bad Harmony: Fall of Reverie isn’t a dating sim.)
Every visual novel player has seen this picture before. It’s usually seen in walkthroughs or guides, giving the player a map to achieve whatever ending they want. This choice map is the skeleton of every visual novel, wrapped in the story that the game wants to tell.
So it was an interesting surprise to see someone innovate on the visual novel genre by stripping it naked, so to speak.
Harmony: Fall of Reverie sells itself on how it reinvents the visual novel genre by taking the gameplay conventionally ignored via suspension of disbelief and putting it front and center of the game and its story.
There are two systems that form the skeleton of a typical visual novel: the branching story paths, and a point-based system.
The story branches, and therefore changes, according to every choice a player makes. The consequences of every choice can be immediate, or affect the story further down the line.
Choices can also grant the player points that influence how the story branches, opening up and closing paths the player might’ve wanted to take. Together, they allow the player to unlock special events within the story, or achieve a specific ending scene out of several.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I personally spend my first playthrough of a VN playing blind, so I can fully immerse myself in the story and the choices I’m making. It’s only after that first playthrough that I look up a choice guide, when I know what other endings of the game I want to explore and don’t want to waste time achieving the endings through trial-and-error.
You can probably tell how I got along with Harmony: Fall of Reverie from here.
I didn’t like that I was playing according to points I wanted to gain or the vague, future consequences I wanted to aim for. I wanted to make decisions according to how I want the story to flow and see the conseqeunces as they come. It’s impossible to make decisions as Polly, because I have to plan ahead to unlock whatever story nodes I want to unlock.
It doesn’t help that every time a choice comes up, the game interrupts the scene to pull up the Augural so that the player can make the choice from there. How can I immerse myself in the story if every ten lines the characters pause and I’m forced to look at a star map to decide what happens next?
My issue with Harmony: Fall of Reverie can be summed up with a quote from Thomas Grip:
Once you start thinking of the game in terms of “choices that give me the best systematic outcome,” it takes a lot of focus away from the game’s narrative aspects. (4-Layers, A Narrative Design Approach)
It’s disappointing, in a way, to have bounced off this game so hard. I’m “the story guy” with my friends. I rave about storytelling in any medium every opportunity I get, and I’ve dived into my fair share of the visual novel ocean depths.
Not to mention the fact that the game is gorgeous. The concise sprite animations are full of character, accented by the emotion-dependent special effects that the Ascendants have. (My favorite is Bliss’ adorable emoticons, combined with her lively character animations.) Their voice acting is a standout too.
I’ll see if I’ll be in a better mood to finish the game later on. But for now, I’m leaving it as a DNF.
