Introduction
Come one, come all! You are currently reading a preview blessed by angels and everything heavenly! Today we are looking at Angelic Waves, a visual novel being created by Bus Arrow Studios. This preview is based on the demo currently available. You can help to propel the official release by supporting their Kickstarter if you so desire.
When considering the aspects of dating in visual novels, a game with a reference to angels on the title brings a degree of curiosity on just how different angels are and how they relate to humans. Sora no Otoshimono, for example, is a light novel/manga/anime that brings forward the difference in how Angels and Humans perceive the world and how opposite their lives should be. Does Angelic Waves grace us with the beauty of God’s gift or does it fail to take flight? Let’s find out!
Story and Characters
The story revolves around our protagonist Maxwell Cross, a fairly average guy with a bit of anxiety. He lives a normal life, other than a lack of experience with love. He brings this up himself directly at the start of the game.
Maxwell’s life revolves around his part-time job and going to meet the two most important people in his life. These are Benny Laws, his best friend, and Benny’s wife Jenny Laws. They hang out, have dinner, watch a film, etc. before Max goes back to his small apartment.
This usual routine is broken one day when he notices someone moving into the building with a ton of boxes. There he meets Geline, Roya, and Anabelle, a trio of friends who move into the luxury room on the fourth floor.
Slowly but surely you get to know them, Geline being the cute and mild-mannered one, Roya being the serious but fun one and Anabelle is the active and straight to the point one. After helping them with the move and heading home, you get a letter on your apartment from the girls for a party tomorrow night to meet all the neighbors, and the bells of anxiety ring on.
On the next day, you find them in the supermarket and help each of them to find utensils for the party while being asked personal questions out of the blue. This doesn’t help your anxiety much. Along with that, you meet Nathan on your way to the party at night, a friend of yours who heard of the fun from a friend of his.
How will it go? Which of the girls will you spend the evening with? What connection do these girls have to angels? I shall let you find out the answers. It’s a simple premise really and all of this was just barely the halfway point of the demo, which is a good and bad thing at the same time. It’s a refreshing thing to see longer demos with more story aspects jammed into them but on the other side of the coin, it felt like the story was rushed, jumping too much in time to try and cram a lot of small interactions with the girls into the demo, which I found weird. I thought the demo would’ve ended twice while playing, and then you see it quickly end off afterward.
The gameplay part is good. There were three points in the demo where you can choose different routes to go through. I liked that certain choices didn’t railroad you into only focusing on a particular girl. There were still chances to get to know the rest of the characters, unlike some other visual novels.
Art and Sound
I feel that writing of Angelic Waves is good aside from the occasional typo here and there. I did feel though that there is some disconnection between the voice acting and the text, with some words being missing on the text compared to what was said. Speaking of voice acting, this demo has partial voice acting, meaning a majority of it is voiced but some parts used common noises. I thought that all of the voice actors did a good job, but I do think the volume of the spoken lines was a bit high, so that may need some minor adjustment.
The soundtrack is quite nice and works well for doing the job it needs to so that’s a check in my book.
The art in this game was quite nice to see and the design for the girls is cute. The background is quite well made, if a bit generic but thanks to the averageness of our protagonist being a theme for him to deal with, it feels appropriate. There are CGs in the demo, some with a different style than others. I didn’t particularly like the big change in art styles for each due to preferring one or another but from an objective view, it’s an amazing effort to have all of it in a demo.
One particular nitpick I do have is with the art is with the character models. I thought I was crazy at first, but after stopping to check it, the models to move very slightly, which threw me off a bit. I do think either there should be a focus on fully moving models or they should all be stationary.
Verdict
Overall, Angelic Waves is currently only a Kickstarter demo so you can’t fully judge the end product based on it. With that said, I do think the demo can be used in order to realize some flaws and work on them. The connection between angels and humans without the fusion of the two worlds is a good theme that just needs a bit of adjusting for it to work quite well. I hope that my write up helps with developing the full version for it to be improved. If nothing else because I want to see more of Jenny.
If this sounds interesting to you, they are asking for only £6 to pledge on Kickstarter and receive a copy of the game. The demo is publicly available for you to try it for yourself and see what you think too.
If you would like to read a complete visual novel featuring angels, we have reviewed Bokuten – Why I Became An Angel which is highly recommended.
Nick has been gaming for quite a while, a decade now! His first console was the DS but the first one played extensively was the Nintendo 64. He loves a huge variety of games, favourite genres include RPG, platforming, metroidvanias and visual novels. No longer a member of the NookGaming team, but still here in spirit. Follow him on @NickMendz.
