I think quite a few people have high expectations for Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! (also known as Kakenuke★Seishun Sparking!). It’s from developer Saga Planets and is the project that followed Kinkoi: Golden Loveriche, which is very well-regarded for its high points.
While there are some similarities, Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! goes in a somewhat different direction with its tone and story. Starting with a battle between school clubs, it soon becomes a romance comedy about enjoying one’s youth.
Active VS Negative
Yuu Tono cares about money quite a bit. He has a good reason though. It’s just him and his little sister Ritsu at home, so he has to work to make ends meet. He has had a lot of bad luck, which has understandably left him with a rather negative outlook on life. While he has a few friends, you can’t say he’s really enjoying his youth.
Enter Hibiki, Yuu’s childhood friend who has just returned after moving away years ago. She’s incredibly positive to the point that she sees even negative things as good and is here to drag Yuu out of this mindset, by force if necessary. Unfortunately for Yuu, she’s not exactly reasonable or one to listen to concerns of his like having to work or needing to maintain his scholarship grades.
Her plan is to start a new school club, the Activity Collective (nicknamed AcTive), with the vague goal of enjoying youth together. But she’s not the only one who wants Yuu to join a club.
Riri is graceful, well-mannered, and far more reserved than Hibiki. She’s a friend of Yuu’s and calls him ‘Master’ as he taught her card tricks. She wants Yuu to join her club, the Volunteer Collective (nicknamed NegaTive) instead. While Riri seems polite at first, she certainly shows that she doesn’t appreciate Hibiki’s arrival or closeness to him.
While much of the common route consists of more lighthearted scenes with friends or jokes, and the rare fourth wall break, it occasionally has quieter moments. We get to see Hibiki’s motivations and hints at Yuu’s past, which links to upcoming events. The other heroines, Nagiko, Shiori, Ritsu, and occasionally Kikka all make appearances, but Hibiki and Riri are very much the main focus of this part of the story. I didn’t feel like I had gotten to know the other heroines much by the end of the common route.
Common Goal
The start of the common route is a battle between the AcTive and NegaTive, with them both recruiting the other heroines as new members and Yuu being dragged into joining their activities. Soon enough, stakes are raised, which has them needing to work together instead.
This segment of the route was a little more plot-focused. It revealed more about Yuu’s history, along with giving everyone a goal to work toward. It’s a time of change for the protagonist and I found most of the scenes interesting to read, particularly scenes that involved the Principal of the school.
One thing the common route does particularly well is setting up for future reveals for the two locked character routes (which you can read how to unlock in our guide/walkthrough). While I think it worked well in this instance, I didn’t think that Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! did a particularly good job of handling foreshadowing overall, with certain reveals not so much being hinted at as they were made made blatantly obvious through ham-fisted foreshadowing, though this isn’t exactly unusual for a visual novel.
As an important note, to play any of the routes you’ll need to install the adult patch, which is explained in our guide.
The Okay Routes
Much like Saga Planet’s Kinkoi: Golden Loveriche, I did feel like there’s quite a disparity in the quality of routes in Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! Similarly, the final one is once again the best by far.
I felt that Shiori, Nagiko, and Riri have the weakest routes. The stories were fairly minimal and it felt like hours of cute moments, funny scenes, and sweet romance without much substance. Sadly, this did feel like it began to drag on at times, especially since many of the jokes were very similar to each other. It doesn’t help that this is quite a long visual novel at about thirty-six hours long, and half the routes fall into this category.
There is some plot in these routes, but certain problems that are supposed to be big issues are over very quickly, are only mentioned a few times, or turn out to be not particularly important.
That is not to say that they’re not great heroines. I certainly enjoyed the romantic moments with Riri in particular and her loving personality, even if I wasn’t a fan of the rather crass method of Yuu only noticing she was a girl soon after a wet t-shirt incident. Shiori’s growth as a person after starting as someone who is unexpressive and always agrees with people was nice to see too. Nagiko acts rather tough but gets embarrassed easily which is always cute.
The Better Routes
I did find Ritsu’s route more interesting than the Riri, Shiori, or Nagiko routes, if just because it fills in a lot of Yuu’s past as well as spending more time in the work setting instead of school. She’s his stepsister, so there was a level of difficulty involving a forbidden relationship there too. It also helps that Ritsu is just hilarious, and had me laughing during much of her route.
Hibiki’s route is another one that expands on their past, though a different part of it than Ritsu’s. This was one of the more interesting routes by far, and not just in terms of the story, but because of the relationship as well. There’s a lot of history between these childhood friends which makes for an amusing taunting dynamic where they don’t want to give in to each other. It also has difficulties in the relationship rather than just love and support, which makes for a better story.
Finally, Kikka’s route was outright the best. It has some more serious moments than the others and a deeper plot. One of the bigger secrets was made clear before unlocking this route, but there was still a lot more to find out. This was the one route I read without taking a break as I didn’t want to put it down. It culminates in a rather emotional ending too.
On top of that, Kikka herself is just a great heroine. Mischievous, willing to trick others, and sometimes referred to as the ‘dark one’ or ‘evil woman’ by Yuu, she constantly teases him yet turns bashful when he learns to turn the tables on her. She outright references enjoying manga that seem to be parodies of Don’t Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro and Teasing Master Takagi-san (manga famous for their female leads teasing their male leads), and there may be some influence on her from their main characters who have some shared personality traits.
Adult Content
If you buy Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! on Steam instead of on a store that supports adult content like JAST USA, you may wish to install the patch as described in our guide. That said, I’d not say any of the adult content is critical to the story, so it’s perfectly playable by skipping through any adult scenes.
For the most part, the content is fairly vanilla and in all cases only involves two people in a loving relationship. It goes a little further in the unlockable After scenes. There is no mosaic censorship and the details that would have been under them have been drawn well.
Art and Sound
There is quite a lot of movement in Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! and it’s used to good effect. Sprite expressions change mid-line, hearts and other emoticons float around, and plenty of expression changes are used frequently to make the heroines come to life.
There are a few particularly striking CGs and the others look great in general. They’ve been used well to highlight some of the big moments.
While the music sounds good, I wouldn’t say it’s particularly memorable. The voices do stand out though. Each fits the character well and the energy they bring to the roles adds a lot to the humor. Kikka was distinctive, with a very particular casual way of speaking and a ‘-ssu’ tick at the end of a lot of her sentences.
Verdict
The stronger routes make Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! worth reading, and even the weaker ones still have cute heroines who I enjoyed spending time with. I did think certain aspects became too repetitive at times and there could have been more to the plot, but there was a lot to laugh at.
KAKENUKE★FORWARD TO OUR SPARKING YOUTH! IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another ero-RomCom visual novel, you might want to check out NUKITASHI 2. 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 NekoNyanSoft for a PC review code for Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth!.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
