The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer – Review

Combining schedule management gameplay with visual novel choices, The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer (Go-toubun no Hanayome ∬ ~Natsu no Omoide mo Go-toubun~) lets you spend two weeks of summer with the quintuplets, along with a few special moments with your favorite.

Memories of a Quintessential Summer assumes the player is already familiar with The Quintessential Quintuplets. It takes place in a vague timeframe around the end of season 2 of the anime (Volume 10 of the manga) but before The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie. This review avoids spoilers (both for the game and original manga/anime) but assumes reader familiarity with the series.

Island Life

The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer has quite a simple story. The quintuplets invite Futaro and Raiha (our protagonist and his sister) to stay in their family villa on a private island for a few days. A sudden storm causes the water to be too choppy to send a boat through, forcing them to survive there for two weeks. Luckily they have some supplies, and sources of food and water are soon found on the island.

Of course, Futaro being himself turns this into an opportunity to tutor the quintuplets with a final test at the end. They agree to put him in charge of their schedule, balancing study, survival, and rest.

The premise is pretty thin. It never gets into the details of how these sheltered rich girls are hunting down meat or why it takes so long for the sea to calm down, despite seemingly amazing summer weather. It seems to just be an excuse to get them alone for an extended time.

Summer Lovin’

The way that The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer is structured is a common route with a mix of visual novel storytelling and schedule management gameplay. This is followed by seven routes which are purely visual novel gameplay.

There are a few set events in the common route, but quite a lot appear based on which quintuplet you spend more time helping. For example, Nino might be the one to wake you up the most often, or you might run into Itsuki at night and have a conversation with her. Quite a lot of these scenes take place when tutoring too, so you get to discuss topics like English translation with Ichika or History with Miku.

Throughout most of this visual novel, there’s no real drama. While there are occasional disagreements between sisters, they never last long. The experience is more about those little moments that you might not see elsewhere. We see things like Nino and Raiha bonding over cooking or Miku going off into silly fantasies, like Futaro having to suck snake venom out if she gets bitten. Most of these scenes aren’t anything special, but there are a few little moments that gave interesting insights into their characters that I hadn’t thought of before, like how there are certain similarities between Yotsuba and Raiha, instead of just focusing on how they get along well.

Five Heroines and a Sister

Of the seven routes, there’s one for each quintuplet, one harem route, and a (thankfully non-romantic) Raiha route. That said, I’d barely call most of the quintuplet routes romantic either. Unlike most visual novels, a large chunk of most routes still have you spend time with the other heroines as a group compared to just the individual, and their sisterly bond is often on display more than their affection for Futaro.

Most of the routes are fairly similar to each other and are quite short. They typically involve spending some time lightheartedly playing on the island before a personal problem that needs to be overcome, sometimes linking to events from the anime.

As is typical for an anime tie-in, it doesn’t add any significant new lore or make any changes that would persist after the story of the visual novel. This does feel like it’s to its detriment at times, as relationships never change and the stories told feel unimportant. Still, there were some points where I began to like characters more due to having some dedicated time with them, or felt like I understood them a little more afterward.

On that topic, the Yotsuba route stands out to me personally, both in terms of the story and her character, as I wasn’t overly fond of her until her route. It’s also the only one that feels eventful.

There are fourteen endings to see in The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer. If you want to find out how to get them all, we have written a guide and walkthrough for you. That said, all endings are quite short and many of them are very similar to each other.

Scheduling and Surviving

The gameplay of The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer feels like it has a lot of elements at first, but it’s actually fairly simple. It essentially boils down to increasing the quintuplets’ scores, getting enough food and cooking it, and making the right choices to increase intimacy.

There are six parts to each day: three parts where you can assign study, rest, or food gathering to each quintuplet and three where you can assign one to cook. Futaro can help one quintuplet study or gather food each time which boosts their intimacy.

There are some more details (both covered in the extensive tutorials and added to by our guide), but it’s generally a simple matter of keeping an eye on stats and resources as they increase and decrease. I found it overly easy, as I had everyone’s academic scores in at least the 80s on my first try, which is enough for the highest route unlock requirement. It’s possible to have quintuplets collapse from exhaustion or fail, but I had to actively try to make this happen.

Unfortunately, I found the gameplay somewhat tedious. It was just something to do to unlock the story and to experiment with to find new scenes, rather than something fun in itself.

Localization

While I’ll generally not comment on translation accuracy, I did notice a few oddities around the localization.

For the most part, it reads well. That said, I did notice several awkwardly phrased sentences and grammar mistakes. There were occasional lines that seemed out of character, such as characters who typically speak formally suddenly being very informal. One repeated joke was translated poorly, which made the follow-up line not make sense. There were also a handful of translated but unlocalized lines that only make sense if you know the Japanese language or reference that it’s referring to.

Sometimes the line breaks were 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.

Quality Sprites and Star VAs

Graphically, The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer is reasonably good. I feel a bit more mixed about the CGs, but the sprites look great. They have minimal animation with blinking eyes and occasional pose changes, movement, and effects surrounding them. The mouth movement is synced to the speech, which is always a nice touch.

The voice acting is only in Japanese, with the same great cast as the anime. Futaro is only partially voiced, but everyone else is fully voiced.

Verdict

The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer is very much only for fans of the series, and even then it isn’t an amazing experience. Still, it’s a nice way to spend more time with the quintuplets and there are certainly moments worth experiencing here.

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If you are looking for another visual novel, you might want to check out Mashiroiro Symphony HD -Love is Pure White-. 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 Spike Chunsoft for a PC review code for The Quintessential Quintuplets – Memories of a Quintessential Summer.