Want to spend a vacation with the quintuplets? The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You (Eiga Go-toubun no Hanayome ~Kimi to Sugoshita Itsutsu no Omoide~) takes you away on a short graduation trip to Okinawa with the five sisters.
It picks up from the climax of The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie, so I would highly recommend watching both seasons and the movie first (or read up to volume 13 of the manga).
Choose Your Quintuplet
The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You starts with you choosing who to confess to. Each quintuplet has her own route which, while they all follow the same basic idea, they are mostly unique.
Five months later, they’re all graduating. Each of the quintuplets will be going their own way to pursue their dreams, while Futaro will be heading to a university in Tokyo. No matter who you choose, Futaro is concerned because the relationship hasn’t developed much since he confessed. They’ve been busy, whether with exams or work. He’s never even initiated a kiss, but he wants to make some progress before the relationship becomes long-distance.
With this in mind, he suggests a graduation trip. This spirals into the quintuplets taking him and his younger sister Raiha along for a luxurious stay in Okinawa.
Relationship Worries
Each heroine’s route follows the same pattern, more or less. The group all tour a variety of places in Okinawa together. The heroine of that route will typically be acting unusually and Futaro will try to figure out why, while hoping to push the relationship forward. The other sisters will be worrying about them and interfering in some way or another.
Despite each heroine’s route seeming rather formulaic from that description, I didn’t feel like they were when reading the visual novel. None of the problems were the same, and how the characters acted changed based on the situation. On top of that, while visiting various tourist spots in Okinawa was a constant, the order of places, activities participated in, and some of the locations changed each time.
Each route has sweet moments with the chosen heroine, and seeing the relationships grow beyond the stalemate the series presented was appreciated. That said, it doesn’t just focus on the two in a relationship. All of the quintuplets are heavily featured in each route and the group dynamic is often on show. Their sibling relationship with each other and relationship with Futaro is one of the better parts of the series, so I was glad to see that it’s still on display here.
The relationship issues themselves were often interesting to explore from different angles. To give a couple of examples, Nino’s route allows us to see Futaro’s insecurity, and Yotsuba’s lets us see what happens to her supportive nature when pushed too far. Itsuki’s route had her acting out of character for a very good reason, and had one of the best reveals of why. The tone of these can be fairly different too, with Miku’s feeling more grounded and negative, compared to Ichika’s more hopeful story.
One small downside is that the good endings for the heroine routes are all almost exactly the same. The normal endings do vary slightly at least.
Beyond the heroine routes, the unlockable All Route is perhaps the best route in The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You. It defers Futaro’s decision until the trip, which shows things escalating even further than they did in the original series.
Making Choices
Unlike The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories Of A Quintessential Summer, Five Memories Spent With You is a near-enough standard visual novel in that the gameplay revolves around making choices. These then lead you to either a good or normal end for your chosen heroine.
Most choices are a simple case of choosing from three options, the bad, the normal, and the good. Each awards a certain amount of points and if you earn enough by the end, you get a good ending. If not, then the normal ending.
The only variation on this is that some choices are about which destination to go to. This is rather nice in that you can experience some extra scenes with different heroines no matter who you’ve chosen. Some CGs are hidden behind these choices though.
It isn’t too difficult to get a good or normal ending if you focus on choosing choices that sound positive or negative, but some of the unlocks and achievements are difficult to find. We have written a guide/walkthrough for The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You to help.
Localization Issues
While I’m not qualified to comment on translation accuracy, and Five Memories Spent With You reads well for the most part, there are some issues I can mention with the localization.
The most obvious issue is that there are some lines still in Japanese. It only happened a few times, but two of them were during the endings which is perhaps one of the worst places for this to happen. One line even just said ‘Untranslated’. I may have given it the benefit of the doubt if this were a pre-release review, but I’m writing this two weeks post-release and it’s not been updated since.
Some moments seem to be translated, but not ‘localized’. As just one example, the game fairly directly translated a wordplay joke between Love (愛) and Indigo (藍) (both pronounced as ‘ai’ in Japanese) without any explanation. This made it lose all meaning as a joke and it’d not be understandable to those without at least some understanding of Japanese.
Little mistakes were too common. These included moments such as referring to people who aren’t in the scene as if they’re the ones being spoken to or using the wrong name. Admittedly, I did get a chuckle out of Nino saying she’ll steal Miku away from Futaro.
Line breaks were often odd too. There would frequently be a full sentence on the first line, a few words on the second line, and then a break in the sentence to put most of it on the third line.
I should stress that it was mostly okay, but there are certainly more issues than I’d expect from a professionally localized visual novel.
Sights And Sounds Of Okinawa
The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You looks good and sounds good. Some of the CGs show off the stunning sights of Okinawa well and the sprites are all high-quality too. Some minimal animation was used to help bring things to life too.
The voice acting had all of the voice actors and actresses from the anime reassume their roles. Futaro is only partially voiced, but the rest of the cast are fully voiced.
As a bonus, some unlockable live videos showing off tourist destinations in Okinawa are included. It was a nice touch to see more of the sights that were being shown in the story.
Verdict
The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You is an interesting story of the challenges Futaro faces after choosing one of the quintuplets. It does well making each route feel different, despite the similar themes. It’s only a pity that it was marred by localization issues.
THE QUINTESSENTIAL QUINTUPLETS – FIVE MEMORIES SPENT WITH YOU IS RECOMMENDED
Walkthrough/Guide: Click Here
If you are looking for more Quintessential Quintuplets, you should check out our review of The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer. If you’re looking for another visual novel, you might enjoy Sisters: Last Day Of Summer.
Thank you to Spike Chunsoft for providing a PC review code for The Quintessential Quintuplets – Five Memories Spent With You.
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.
