Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga (Koi Shikaru-beki ~Mayoiga kara no Tegami~) is a 2026 visual novel by NekoNeko Soft, one of the older developers in the world of visual novels. It is penned by Tomo Kataoka, famed for classic visual novels like narcissu, and published by Overlap Games. It is a tale of youth, summer, folklore, and what it means to be remembered and forgotten. As someone who enjoys a comfy small-town story with a bit of spiritual folklore, I figured it would be worth taking a look at.
Nineteen Seventy Something
Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga begins in 1970s Japan. A young boy named Naofuyu meets a girl at a strange shrine, regularly referred to as a Mayoiga (which can be loosely translated as “a pretty-but-abandoned house”), that seems to only appear during the hot months of the summer when the nearby rural mountain lake is at its lowest water level. People in this village warn of a mysterious spirit called Susu, who lives near the lake and is believed to kill anyone who wanders into her path. It turns out, however, that Susu is a young teen bound by a spiritual force to the Mayoiga. Anyone who stands too far away from her outside the shrine sees her as a monster, and worse yet, anyone who she does get close to ends up forgetting who she is when they move too far away from her or the Mayoiga. Naofuyu ends up separating from Susu and, just as everyone else seems to, ends up forgetting about her.
After a few years, an older Naofuyu ends up returning to the Mayoiga while out in the mountains with his little sister Risa. The pair end up meeting Susu once more, and Risa takes quite a liking to her after finding out that the scary spirit of the area is actually just a sweet and very formal young maiden who has been effectively trapped, left alone to neither age nor interact much with the outside world. The two siblings resolve to find a way to free her, and even informally adopt her as their own sister. Along the way, we get bits and pieces of the greater picture, such as the life of those who took the moniker of Susu before the girl currently trapped in the Mayoiga, and what this mysterious abode even is.
The Letter from Mayoiga is a relatively condensed story told in a series of short episodes. It can be quite saddening to see these scenes of characters who promise to remember only for the “curse” of the Mayoiga to lead them to forget everything. The theme of being forgotten is one that hits in a very particular way that tugs at the heartstrings differently from things like death, trauma, or romantic heartbreak. There’s a share of intrigue to watching the characters try to solve the situation; Naofuyu and Risa often have to separate from Susu and will leave as many notes as they can to try to remind and inform themselves, but this doesn’t always work for various reasons. The chapter on Susu’s backstory in particular hit in a rather gut-wrenching way that made for the highlight moment of the story emotionally.
Unfortunately, that’s about where my praise for this story ends. Because while it had immense promise, the actual execution was very insufficient.
Seeing What Sticks
The narrative structure through which Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga tells its story just feels very slipshod. The story frequently bounces around between character perspectives and from different times and eras in a way that feels incohesive, as if it were more to break up the monotony than to meaningfully spice up the story. Some of these cutaways are to scenes that offer no real benefit to the story nor interesting characterization, and many of the actually significant ones feel incredibly abrupt in how things move along. Narrative developments are often downright jarring as a result.
Speaking of monotony, while I don’t outright dislike any of the characters, it was hard not to feel like they were rather garden-variety, lacking in anything to really get behind to make me all that deeply invested in following their story. Naofuyu in particular has all of one line in the script that really hints at a greater personal motivation. The sister dynamic between Risa and Susu is cute enough, but is less gripping in practice than it really had potential for. Despite how few characters there even are, a couple of them still felt more like peripheral means to an end or otherwise simply placed oddly in the story. Surprisingly little actually happens for much of the story, given how much time it ends up spending on events of the past rather than moving forward.
Even after its ending, I had several questions that honestly didn’t get answered. Several plot points and issues go rather unresolved or feel brushed aside. The ones that get some form of closure are often quite unceremonious, like they were done so for the sake of it rather than feeling like proper or well-thought-out ends. Suffice it to say, very little of this story felt all that satisfying by the time I finished, and the parts that were left unsatisfying didn’t feel like they had a strong purpose in being so.
Questionable Production
As a story told through the visual novel medium, Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga is shockingly poor in its actual presentation. It’s fully voiced (even Naofuyu), and there are some pretty esteemed voice actors here (Susu in particular), but it’s incredibly uneven. Some characters sound very stilted and obvious that they’re reading from a script at times. The volume mixing together with the music and sound effects is wildly inconsistent, with characters sounding far too loud in some scenes and far too quiet in others, even with the same volume settings. Several characters sound incredibly compressed, the sort of voice recording quality you might hear in a visual novel from the early 2000s rather than 2026.
The music is handled by the experienced sound team, project lights, and the music they bring is serviceable, even including some neat little leitmotifs into the mix to tie things together. However, several tracks don’t really loop, which can be jarring if you let the music play out. It’s not usually too noticeable since things move fast enough that the music changes rather often, but it’s still somewhat of a demerit to something that should have been at least a silver lining.
Visual presentation carries its own pile of issues. The difference in art style between some character designs is pretty noticeable. Sometimes characters will have their lips move while talking, other times their mouths are still, with no discernible reason why. On a couple of occasions, character portraits will straight up look wrong, like a part of their body is missing, or the above example where Susu’s mouth is in front of her fingertips. Sometimes a CG will be a tiny fraction of the center of the window rather than the whole screen with a strange box around it. The one thing I did note was that characters have darker portraits at nighttime, which is at least a nice touch.
I can handle budget issues and limitations on production as long as things are smooth and consistent. With The Letter from Mayoiga, however, it gets downright distracting. All of this is before really even getting into the text, which is an outright dud.
Even More Questionable Style
The nicest thing I can say about the text in Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga is that there are very few misspelled words in this English localization, and most of the grammar is generally fine. Everything else in its text is very off, and the editing is just plain poor across the board.
Sentence separators like commas, em-dashes, and two different kinds of ellipses (one at the bottom of the line height and one at median height) were thrown into just about every single text box with seemingly reckless abandon. How wide each section of a sentence was in the text box felt random, with some having two line breaks for a single sentence while others use the entire width of the box and the line below for a single sentence. It’s also not uncommon for sentence fragments to show unresolved the first time you start a new text box and then finish when you click/press enter to show the next sentence fragment, where this is usually supposed to be separate sentences per click/enter press. Even the simple process of advancing text, the one bit of interactivity you really have in this visual novel (given there are no choices or alternate endings), is needlessly strange and distracting to actually experience. It made the whole thing feel like work to even keep up with, which is a pretty damning thing to say about a kinetic visual novel.
Honorifics have absolutely zero consistency whatsoever. You might get “Risa-chan” and “Little Risa” by the same character in the same chapter even when the voiceover just uses -chan. Risa might call Susu “Onee-chan” and the text will just say “Susu Big Sister”, which is about the oddest way that could be written. An older woman early on in the story calls Naofuyu “Nao-kun” often, but half the time in the text the honorific will be there and the other half it will be missing, even when it’s there in the voiceover.
There are also just regular old errors that populate just about every episode of this story. One character has their surname stylized in five different ways (Kokanji, Koukanji, Kо̄kanji, Kо̄kan-ji, and Kokanshi). At one point, the story says “it’s the late ‘70’s” even when the scene is set in 1982. It all makes the text annoying to read at a fundamental level, which is a massive problem in a medium that is entirely driven by reading. This is all after a few patches; even earlier pre-release builds misspelled the Settings button as “Settngs” and had volume dials range from “small to large” instead of “low to high”. I’m not going to hold the errors of earlier builds against the current one, but throughout the entire process of reading The Letter from Mayoiga, the whole experience has felt so slapdash and rushed in development and localization that it really prevented me from ever being able to be engrossed in the story.
Verdict
There is something to the heart of the story of Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga. Its theme of what it means to be remembered and how saddening it is to be forgotten is a compelling emotional core that could have made for something so, so much better than what I got. Instead, it’s a poorly structured and even more poorly edited visual novel that got in its own way of trying to tell that story at every turn, one which I have next to no positives to speak of that don’t carry at least some form of caveat. It makes for an experience I expect I will very soon forget, and I most certainly will not miss my time with.
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If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy Schrödinger’s Call. We have covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Thank you to Overlap Games for providing a PC review code for Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
