Farther than the Blue Sky – Review | Beautiful As The Stars

Do you dream of reaching the stars? The ladies of Byakko do. Farther than the Blue Sky by ChuableSoft and MangaGamer follows the protagonist as he helps them to achieve their dream – to send a rocket into space.

Rocket School

Farther than the Blue Sky is set at a school meant to raise the next generation of rocket engineers; most of the students there are learning about rocketry and are in clubs to build them. These are no model rockets either – they’re heavily funded and aiming to compete with professionals.

Except Byakko isn’t heavily funded. While there are dozens of clubs to build rockets and Byakko is one of them, they’re in trouble. Funding is based on members and achievements – Byakko is low on both of them. In fact, they’ve done so poorly that they’re about to be disbanded.

The protagonist isn’t too interested in rockets and certainly has no interest in joining a club. Despite this, he joins to help them, if not exactly by his own choice. Then they work together to find enough members to survive. Still, this only stalls the disbandment. Without any achievements, this remains a constant threat.

While the club disbandment idea is certainly nothing new in anime or visual novels, I did like that they added a new dimension to it in Farther than the Blue Sky. Just getting new members isn’t enough and the need for achievements motivates them throughout. One member of the club in particular has a personal reason to try and save Byakko that I felt was explored well in her route and made me care much more than other times that this trope is used.

Join the Team

Arisa is the one who asks us to join the team. She’s a bit of a tsundere – quick to anger, but obviously very caring. Beyond that, Arisa is seen to be incredibly passionate about Byakko and about launching a rocket generally. She says she’ll launch or die trying.

Nazuna felt a bit shallow to me. She acts rather cutely, with most people unable to understand her. While not believing that rockets are alive, she talks as if they are and she’s oblivious to many things. She’s basically the airhead character, despite knowing her area of rocketry well. Her two main points seem to be that she likes fire too much and her (often referenced) giant tits.

Kaho is my personal favorite. She speaks in very short sentences and without much emotion, while still caring – she’s a kuudere. Initially acting against Byakko, she still wishes us luck. Kaho also had what felt like the most interesting personal problem to overcome and history.

Honaka was a lot of fun. She’s the enthusiastic childhood friend of the protagonist and obviously in love with him from the start. Constantly making sex jokes, she’s behind a lot of comedic scenes in Farther than the Blue Sky. Even her love confession was hilarious, with cascading misunderstandings all around.

Beyond that, there were a number of interesting side characters making an appearance; Mostly members of other clubs sometimes acting as friends and sometimes as rivals. The rival club president was one I wish we saw more of – he mostly popped up as an antagonist and someone to defeat.

Underwear and Undressed

Farther than the Blue Sky sets the tone early when it comes to the lewd content. The main character manages to accidentally see heroines in their underwear more than once even before joining the club. The 18+ content itself is generally vanilla and contains no mosaics with each character getting several scenes on their route and at least one in an after story scene. Beyond that, it never seems to miss a chance for a panty shot.

More than once accidental nudity or sex is either used as or related to a plot point. It can lead to some funny situations though – a line from the protagonist about not being able to afford child support after walking in on someone had me laughing. Still, while there’s a lot of sex-related jokes, I never felt that it goes overboard with them.

Underachiever

One of the plot points is that the protagonist is not intelligent – though by the end it seems less so. This allows for a lot of explanation about rockets – or to put it less kindly, info-dumping. As he has to help build rockets along with some other plot reasons, he needs to learn.

While info-dumping is often a negative, I did feel that it was interesting here. Depending on who was explaining the information, it was done in very different ways. For example, Kaho discussed the topic and asked questions, while Nazuna told made-up stories as if the components were alive. In all cases, it uses a good number of diagram CGs to help explain. While I’m certainly no rocket scientist, I did note that at least some of the information mentioned is true. It also includes a glossary that notes where something is only in the visual novel and not real.

Repeated Routes

One of the major weaknesses of Farther than the Blue Sky is that many of the routes are repetitive. Arisa really feels like the main heroine here, because she’s mostly an exception to this.

The way that the story structure tends to work is that after the common route, you go onto a character route based on a choice. The protagonist needs to help one of the heroines with their aspect of building a rocket. With Honaka, Nazuna, and Kaho the structure is very similar. To try to avoid spoiling things, I’ll keep it general – there’s a problem, an amusing solution from an unlikely source, a more personal type of problem, and a solution. Then the same final event happens, with a slight variation each time.

The personal problems are the only part of these that are significantly different. Of these, I felt like Kaho’s was touching and Honaka’s was handled well. Nazuna’s felt unimportant in comparison, though this was perhaps partly due to her airheaded personality.

I suggest completing Arisa’s route last as it mentions several events from the other routes. While it covers the same timeline, more of the events felt unique.

After the other routes, there’s a final ‘LiftOff’ route. This covers the events after the other routes in a world where the protagonist helped everyone instead of one person and never got a girlfriend. It was a great end to the story, where it brought everything together – though again it felt like Arisa was central.

Graphics and Sound

Farther than the Blue Sky contains over 100 CGs – though each heroine only has about 20 each. The rest are of rockets and diagrams for the science. I felt there was a good variety and certainly a good amount. Sprites were good too, with several poses and nude variants.

In terms of audio, there are 28 pieces of music. It’s no masterpiece of a soundtrack, but some of it stands out for really fitting the story and helping to build up the excitement of appropriate scenes.

All of the characters are voiced. The heroines in particular had acting that conveyed their personalities well. Even the protagonist is voiced which is a rarity, though this is only in a few scenes where we see things from someone else’s viewpoint. In all other situations, everyone except the protagonist is voiced.

Options and Issues

The options in Farther than the Blue Sky are fairly comprehensive. It includes options for things like autoplay speed, window transparency, and individual voice volume. It even includes key remapping, which is a rarity. One nice extra touch is that each main character’s text is colored slightly differently.

A glossary is included which can be revisited later – though I did find a few things missing. At least one of the missing terms I confirmed I saw in the story, so I expect this is a technical issue. Having gone through all routes and choices, I should have them all anyway.

Unfortunately, I did come across occasional typos. Overall editing seemed good, but it’s a pity that these haven’t been found and patched out so long after release.

Verdict

I enjoyed Farther than the Blue Sky. It certainly had its weaknesses and didn’t really break new ground. That said, it was an exciting adventure when first experienced and had some great character moments through many of the routes.

FARTHER THAN THE BLUE SKY IS RECOMMENDED

If you are looking for another more comedic visual novel, you may enjoy Renai Karichaimashita: Koikari – Love For Hire or Harem Kingdom. 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 the publisher MangaGamer for a PC review code for this title.