Amazing Grace -What Color is Your Attribute?- – Review

Amazing Grace -What Color is Your Attribute?- follows Shuu in a time-travel mystery adventure. Developed by Cabbage Soft, the developer behind Amairo Chocolate and Sakura no Kumo * Scarlet no Koi, this visual novel takes place in a mysterious sealed-off town, where art is everything.

Bad Santa’s Town…

Shuu’s story opens with him waking up in this unusual town with no memory of how he got there and only vague memories of the world. While not exactly an unusual start to a visual novel, Amazing Grace handles this in a far more interesting way… eventually.

At first, it’s more about introducing this unusual town and its friendly residents. The feature that stands out most is that education is purely based on art. Students learn painting, drawing, sculpting, film, and more, but none of the more common subjects like math. It’s all based around Renaissance art, with many pieces on display at the town museum to study.

You might ask why there’s nothing more modern. The residents think that everything outside has been destroyed. Shuu is soon discovered to be an outsider and living evidence that there is a world outside of the town. The entire town is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier, but Shuu must have passed through it somehow. Yet surprisingly, most of them are curious but don’t even consider looking to leave to explore what’s out there. Even thinking about the outside world is taboo.

This town seems like a pleasant place at first, but hints of darkness under the surface soon come to light. Shuu discovers the strictness around certain topics, talk of disappearances, and other unusual events. Other odd discrepancies come up too, such as having technology like biometric locks, while being a religious society with transport no more advanced than horse-drawn carriages. It drops these in carefully between happier events and moments spent with new friends, carefully building tension in a way that kept me reading to find out what happened next. As I continued, I kept finding new questions about what was happening to add to my list.

Time and Time Again

Exploring the town further shows just how much emphasis is placed on art. There are quite a few segments where the meaning behind certain famous art pieces, complete with actual CGs of them, are discussed. Even as someone with no knowledge of art history, it was quite interesting at times.

Aside from the unsettling feeling that something is wrong, life is pleasant between taking art lessons, trying to regain memories, and hanging out with friends. That is until something goes wrong. Disaster strikes, but through a miraculous event, Shuu is given the chance to go back in time and repeat events leading up to Christmas Day again and again.

It does this by breaking into several routes, where you focus on a certain character and try to determine their guilt or innocence and to find clues about how to stop the disaster. More on the details of how this works in our guide, but in short, if you make the right choices, you can spend time with almost all of the characters, including the heroines, male friends, and adults.

Amazing Grace -What Color is Your Attribute?- uses this time loop mechanic extremely well, unlike certain other titles. Despite the days being the same, it quickly skips through anything similar to previous loops, making each one feel unique, along with throwing the occasional unexpected spanner in the works. Beyond that, each loop revealed new pieces of the puzzle, though some more than others.

The loops did a brilliant job of building on each other too. Learning about something in an earlier loop had Shuu sometimes use it elsewhere or directly influenced later events. New things sometimes come to light that then put events from previous loops into perspective.

Detective Shuu

Whilst I’d like to say the mystery writing is amazing, it isn’t consistently so, though it does have some great elements. It hints towards the answer in a subtle way, lays false trails that successfully convinced me other people might be the culprit, and does a great job of laying out clues while incorporating the time-travel power.

Unfortunately, the mystery in Amazing Grace does require a certain level of suspension of disbelief. It was a rollercoaster, with exciting twists and surprises along the way, but some of them had characters behaving in extremely unusual ways for it to make sense. While some of the situations can be explained as being due to a desperate situation, I was less convinced by other elements of the mystery, particularly near the end where it felt like it was unraveling. On top of that, the reasoning behind certain other parts that seemed hard to believe wasn’t even explained or had a very thin explanation, one of these being a major key to the main mystery.

Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The build-up kept me engaged the whole time, and it messed with my expectations, keeping me guessing constantly.

Lighthearted Moments with Friends

It’s not all searching for clues and avoiding destruction. Even with a threat looming in the background, much of my 23-hour playtime of Amazing Grace was spent in lighter moments with the heroines and other new friends. Between silly moments where the group poked fun at each other, events like pulling pranks, and the occasional standard visual novel accusations about Shuu being a pervert (despite one character being a serial stripper and more than one dirty-minded heroine), there were a lot of laughs along the way. The humor can get a little lewd at times, such as a visual joke with a ball gag or comments about Sakuya’s absurdly large chest.

Whilst the group dynamic was fun, I liked that each character, including the friends, had a route where we primarily spend time with them, though for the side characters these were fairly short. This worked well to get to know them, as well as unveiling the clues. It’s a rarity in titles like this that the protagonist gets to spend any significant one-on-one time with non-romanceable side characters.

As Amazing Grace doesn’t use a standard route system, there is no way to skip heroines, at least not fully. Fortunately, they’re all very likable and each one has their part to play in the overall plot.

Yune

Yune is extremely kind to Shuu, perhaps overly so at times. After waking up, she helps to take care of him and introduces him to the town. In many ways, she’s his biggest supporter. She’s also rather naive, particularly around adult topics.

Whilst all of the characters are important to the plot, she’s particularly so. We don’t see much in the way of romance with her until near the end though. I did enjoy how they handled some of her later moments but felt the hinting was too obvious, so Shuu not picking up on it made him feel a little too dense, whilst he’s otherwise reasonably intelligent.

Sakuya

Sakuya is quiet and somewhat reserved, but does like to tease Shuu and call him a pervert. She has quite a few moments showing how sweet she can be, like making clothes for Shuu or sharing quiet moments with him where her feelings become clear.

Her parts of the story were my favorite, with her loop feeling the most romantic and having some particularly interesting parts elsewhere too.

Kirie

Kirie is just pure fun, at least in her route. She’s high energy and far more outgoing than the others. Her art is film, so she’s always roping Shuu and the others into acting in her absurd movies with far too many explosions. Her expertise here nicely links into the story in some surprising ways.

As well as directing her films, she’s an accomplished actor. Seeing the disparity between how she acted at times was one of my favorite things in her parts. On top of that, she’s one of the few with a strong curiosity about what’s outside.

Kotoha

Kotoha is a little more difficult to pin down at first. She seems like the kind of slightly older reliable heroine who takes care of everyone, and this isn’t exactly wrong. She’s just also not above a little trickery and manipulation to get what she wants, whether that’s getting Shuu to model for her or something else.

As well as time spent with Shuu, she’s very close with Kirie. I always appreciate it when characters have their own relationships outside of the one with the protagonist, and it’s true of all the characters, but more evident here.

After Stories

Each heroine has an after story with unlock conditions. Unlike many visual novels, in Amazing Grace, they do contain actual stories as well as adult scenes, though some more than others.

Each of them focuses on the events after the end of each heroine’s route. Two routes end very abruptly, essentially being jump-off points before a ‘real end’. This makes up for that weakness, at least somewhat, by following up on what happened after that.

Two of these do share some of the plot and slice of life scenes, so they’re not entirely unique. It was a pity that it didn’t use the opportunity to resolve some of the unexplained parts. Still, it was a nice way to wrap up events and it was a chance to add in some romance for character where it was fairly limited in favor of more plot.

Adult Content

On the topic of the adult content, as normal with Shiravune titles, it’s included via a patch and retains mosaic censorship.

Each character has 4 scenes, for a total of 16. For two of the characters, these are entirely in the After Story section. It doesn’t rush to the events, instead making sure that characters get closer first.

For the most part, the adult scenes in Amazing Grace are relatively vanilla. Cosplay comes up a couple of times, which stood out as it’s the first time I’ve seen a sentai suit used in this way.

Graphics and Sound

There are 80 regular CGs, not counting variations, CGs of items, or the many pieces of real artwork that are shown in Amazing Grace. Some highlight the dramatic reveals of clues well, while others are more standard. Little moments like seeing ‘Kotozilla’ or Kirie drunk were certainly added to through them.

22 pieces of background music are used throughout the story. Fittingly enough considering the time of year this takes place, three of them are instrumental versions of well-known Christmas songs. And yes, a vocal version of Amazing Grace itself does appear. They certainly worked well to fit the mood of the scenes, but otherwise didn’t overly stand out.

I certainly liked the voices, though felt like only Kirie’s and a side character’s stood out due to their energy and confidence. In addition, Kirie has some great moments where she changes her voice to put on another character. Sakuya’s voice was particularly pleasant with her soft and relaxed tone, but her soft-spoken nature extended to the very low volume of her voice. Despite turning the music down and voices up in options, it was still sometimes a little difficult to understand.

Verdict

Amazing Grace -What Color is Your Attribute?- is an enjoyable mystery adventure, with some pleasant romance mixed in along the way. While there are certainly some issues with the mystery requiring suspension of disbelief that will bother some more than others, it worked well with hinting at events, throwing in unexpected twists, and building up to the big reveals.

AMAZING GRACE -WHAT COLOR IS YOUR ATTRIBUTE?- IS RECOMMENDED

Want to check out more visual novels? Why not check out our review of Destiny Star Girlfriend? We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.

Many thanks go to Shiravune for a PC review code for this title.