Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain (Karenai Sekai to Owari Hana or KareSeka) is a 2016 eroge visual novel by Sweet & Tea, brought to English-speaking audiences courtesy of Shiravune. Despite looking like a cute little moege title set in a cafe, the story predominately deals with themes of death, loss, and abandonment, making for quite a contrast between presentation and narrative motif.
The Tea Party At the End of the World
We take the perspective of Sho, a traveling man arriving at a colorful little town together with his companion Ren. The two have been journeying as vagabonds for a while, and shortly upon arriving in town they meet a trio of sisters named Haru, Kotose, and Yukina who run a cafe named Famille. Given the two have a need for food and shelter, Sho and Ren quickly end up taking jobs at Famille in exchange for being allowed to sleep in the upstairs bedroom of the building. They can both tell there’s more to this town and these sisters at the center of it all, however.
After some time, Sho comes across Haru at a hill near a massive tree and colorful flower fields and watches as a young child in her arms disappears and turns into a flower. This is the “curse” plaguing each of the three sisters: they have been given divine, angelic power which forces them to effectively take the lives of individuals fated to be taken by the “god” of the world they live in.
Waning Flowers of a World Eternal is not a particularly happy story in tone, going more in the direction of a nakige (tearjerker game). Several characters you come across are set to meet their end, and it’s pretty clear that this unwanted obligation to take the lives of others weighs heavily on the sister trio. Sho also has some history with the three, and it leads him to see it as something of a duty to try to help them with their lives as things get more and more dire.
Building a Garden
Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain follows a linear structure, with effectively one single route. Along the way, each of the sisters gets a section of the story to themselves. This covers their personality, their past, their emotions, a bit of their aspirations, and the most “broken” part of them, so to speak. Choices are few in number, with you basically getting one option for each sister in their respective sections for whether or not you want their romance and H scenes, as outlined in our guide/walkthrough.
The story has times where it can lead you to ponder genuine questions relating to life and loss, as it’s clear the sisters have been somewhat numbed to the emotional burdens of what their role is doing to those around them. There are themes around abandonment, as several characters are orphans who came together out of a combination of compassion and necessity, and we see how particularly hard it is for characters who’ve found something only to end up losing it again. It delves into the fear that comes with having lost something and how shaky it can be to trust people when you feel abandoned. This is a cast composed of several people who’ve been dealt a pretty bad hand in life and are just trying to get by and make the most of it without completely breaking down. Heavy stuff.
Vamping
This sounds all well and good, but I can’t help but feel like Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain only really scratches at the surface of what it’s capable of. The story itself plays out in a rather dull and one-note way, with each of the three main “chapters” following almost the exact same structure of how Sho tries to help each of the girls. Several side characters are introduced as being fated to die in their chapters, and while I think they bring about a bit of depth and flavor to the scenarios around each sister, the characters themselves don’t really get a lot of room in the story. They feel more like narrative devices than their own characters at times, moreso being there to move the story along and make the player and characters sadder.
The main heroines don’t do much for me, and much of the drama doesn’t really hit the way it should. The heroines don’t really get a proper route, and the narrative structure is largely agnostic of your choices. Perhaps most glaring is how little it feels like the sisters interact with one another during the dramatic points of their respective chapters despite how much each one says that the other two are what motivate them to keep going. It almost feels like each of their arcs were written and created separately from one another and stitched together for the end product. It’s not like this is a folly of performance either. Each of the heroines are voiced by established veteran voice actresses who fill their roles well, the character art is expressive, and the music and visuals around them fit the tone of the story, but the narrative structure and character writing just don’t really help them to blossom into what they could be.
Instead, it’s up to our main man to push the story forward, which poses its own problems. Sho comes off as an incredibly messianic protagonist, and it ends up to the detriment of the story given his answers to the story’s problems are straightforward and uninteresting. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t really offer much depth himself. Everything culminates in a remarkably weak climactic scene, which is made worse by how he comes off as a major hypocrite in a way that hurts the story overall. It makes the resolution feel especially hollow and lacking in the weight it should have.
The setting of a cafe also feels almost extraneous at times, as it does little to really build the actual story and feels separate from anything important to the main plot. However, it does at least provide an opportunity to see the cast acting like regular people for a while, even offering a fair bit of levity.
In fact, I found these scenes to be the surprising highlight of the story. They made me care far more about Waning Flowers’s characters than the vast majority of its dramatic scenes by allowing me to see how these characters are in their day-to-day. It gives them a bit more room for personality. This is where you see stuff like Haru being an oversleeper causing her to come off as something of an airhead given how she sometimes walks around in a groggy, half-awake daze. It’s also where the vast majority of the best scenes involving Ren are, as she’s fairly vague during the dramatic scenes, but is absolutely adorable in these more upbeat scenes and makes me wish she was more active in the story. Even Sho gets some personality here with his somewhat playful banter with his coworkers.
She Loves Me
Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain is of course an eroge, meaning you’ll get your share of sexytimes. Provided, of course, you’re reading with the 18+ patch, which you can read our guide about how to obtain and install.
It’s a somewhat short visual novel, around 8–10 hours long, so there aren’t a ton of H scenes, and most of the ones there are happen rather late. Mosaics are kept intact, and most of the acts are pretty vanilla, although the fact that there aren’t a ton of scenes is “made up for” by just how, ahem, rigorous they can be. If you aren’t an H scene skipper, I recommend turning sound effects off for these, as the choice for certain sounds is questionable to say the least.
If you don’t end up picking any of the main three sisters, you’ll get a scene with Ren. While there is more to the character than initially appears, she nonetheless has a rather young appearance and personality compared to the rest of the cast—something brought up in the text on many occasions—which can be disconcerting.
Most of the script reads fine enough. The setting doesn’t really lend itself to endemic pop culture references and the like to translate, and there’s not a lot of obvious disconnect as far as I can tell. There are a few typos here and there, but rarely anything that mucks up a scene entirely. The lack of honorifics in the script does periodically make for awkward dialogue (e.g. “You’re Sho[-san in the voiceover], right?” “Yes, just call me Sho.”) but this is infrequent.
Verdict
Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain feels like it’s trying to say something, but often can’t really get the right words out. It sets up for plenty of drama, but a lot of it doesn’t land. It has a handful of salient and thought-provoking parts, and the brief bits of levity are actually pretty sweet, but they’re somewhat in the shadow of a rather repetitious story and often unremarkable cast of characters that don’t do enough to make it truly earn its emotional punches. Waning Flowers is an okay but rather flawed nakige that doesn’t really excel or stand out in any particular area.
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Guide/Walkthrough: Click Here
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy A Sex-obsessed Brother in the Country, and his Traditional, Sickly Sister (Country Siblings). We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Thank you to Shiravune for providing a PC review code for Waning Flowers of a World Eternal – The Rainbow Appears After Flowering Rain.
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.
