Aquadine is a story about friendship, family, finding hope in the hard times, and most of all, the secrets we keep and the manifold chaos they sometimes bring on us if we don't reveal them to the right people, or if we don't have said people in our lives. The store page description tells you that at least the main character of the story is hiding a big secret, but beware! He's far from being the only person in this town with secrets! This VN is mostly billed as a comedy, but it really brings a roller coaster of emotions. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will probably gasp at multiple points. Aquadine is also a kinetic novel of sorts, which honestly is usually a turn-off for me because it usually means that you, the player, have no control over the direction and outcome of the story, and you are placing yourself solely in the hands of the writers and hanging on for the ride. This is probably also the reason why the game has no achievements, and why it has been so unjustly overlooked. But let me say a few things about why I think that was a good move for this game, and why I think that makes it better than the average VN. First, you won't have to spend a long time with this game re-doing old parts of the story trying new decisions to try to get different endings. You just read through all the routes and you're done. Second, you just read that right. Even though it's a kinetic novel, there are still multiple routes! Once you finish the opening common route of the story, you will reach a character select screen that presents you with 4 routes, each of which focuses on the given character and imagines how things might go if Robin were to enter into a closer relationship with that character. Only one of these routes is canon (you'll see), but they all serve to give you a lot of background info on those characters, and are where most of the world-building happens. And when you finish all 4, a new option will appear on the main menu, which is the final route to the true ending. Third, the ability to focus on telling the story the way they wanted to in each route, while not having to allow for different combinations of decisions, allowed this developer to create a story that was more consistently high quality than any of the indie VNs I have played before. So you won't have to worry about parts of the story being given less attention or not being paced well. During my time with Aquadine, I went from seeing it's potential but being skeptical, to seeing it come closer to my expectations, to having every expectation far surpassed in every way, to even being left speechless by the quality of parts of the story. I know you won't be disappointed either. Actually, there is one thing I was disappointed by, and it's the fact that I have some unanswered questions after the true ending. Maybe they're leaving the door open for a sequel? I can only hope so.

I would now like to talk about 3 aspects of this game in more detail, and show you how the few small nitpicky flaws this game has are far outweighed by the positives.


Other than the well-written story, this to me is where Aquadine shines brightest. It's also the main reason why I spent so much time on the game. I kept wanting to just stop and look at the art. The VNs that I've read in the past have all had CG images that I've wanted to take screenshots of, but this is the first one to have several regular background pictures that were almost as beautiful as the CGs, and not just screenshot worthy, but wallpaper worthy. I've never wanted to take anywhere near this number of screenshots from a game before. The character sprites are also well-done. Every character (except for the one set of twins) is unique, just as vibrant as the background art, and has a good assortment of expressions to suit their personality and any situation they are in. The only tiny flaw here is in the animations. The rather low-tech way that some of the sprites shake or jump can be kind of off-putting at times, but since this is the debut of an indie dev, I consider that problem to be pretty much insignificant.


I'll say this right up front. If you're going to buy Aquadine, and you like listening to video game soundtracks outside of the actual games at all, get the bundle with the soundtrack. It's not as epic as Ori, but most of it is just as great in its own way. It is possibly the most addictive part of the game. In-game, there are enough tracks that whatever music is playing at the moment is quite appropriate for the scene and brings the right feeling to match. I also really like the lyrics to the main theme song. It's my favorite one of any VN that I've seen on Steam, and is one of the main things that made me see a lot of potential in this game. In general, I find no clear flaws with the soundtrack at all.


Quality wise, voices are generally well done. I read from the dev that they used professional voice actors with plenty of experience in VNs or anime. I very much enjoyed having the voices in this game, even if it was only partial voicing, because being able to hear the voices added a lot of extra personality to the characters, and helped immerse me into the story. I also especially want to say that I appreciate the English dub. People who have played a lot of traditional VNs might be used to hearing Japanese voices, but I don't know enough Japanese to understand a full sentence, and it throws me off to hear a language I don't know while trying to read one that I do. So if the voices hadn't been in English, I would have had to turn them off, and the overall experience wouldn't have been nearly as good. The only thing more I could have asked for was full voicing rather than partial, but again, it's an indie dev with a small budget, so I'm fine with it.


There is only one thing I really don't like about the game, and that is the part of the story that one character describes as a "mandatory beach episode." The irony of that is, that line was supposed to be funny, making fun of other VNs, so many of which feature such scenes. But in reality, that was exactly what it felt like: mandatory, forced in when it wasn't entirely necessary. But the worst part is that during that scene, the main character (Robin) in my opinion acts completely out of character twice. And both times, it makes him seem like not nearly as good of a guy as he was the rest of the time. Of course, all that is not as bad as I probably make it sound, it's just that everything else in the story was so good that it stands out. Other noticeable flaws include the many typos in the game, and one huge plot hole at the end of Elisabeth's character route. I don't really count those, though, because 1: every VN I've read has had lots of typos, and the general meaning always comes through, and 2: Elisabeth's route isn't canon anyway.


1: Just FYI, this game contains some infrequent language in the PG to PG13 range.
2: When you get to the part where you choose the character routes, you can pretty much read them in whatever order you want and be just fine. But one word of caution: if I were you, I would at least go through either Diana's or Cameron's route before going to Elisabeth's route. If you don't, there will be a character who will show up right at the end of Elisabeth's route, in the very last scene, and you won't really know who she is if you haven't done either Diana's or Cameron's route first.
3: I love the sound of Anya's laugh. It's musical.
4: I would give just about anything to have an IRL friend like Cameron, whether that's all we were or not.


I can't give this game a 10, because there are some flaws I can't ignore, however minor they are. But I consider this one of the strongest 9.5 ratings of any game I've ever played.