The Miazora/Sky Full of Stars series is one of the most wholesome and funny moege slice of life series I've ever read, the perfect type of slice of life that I personally enjoy and wish we got more of in weeb mediums.

However, if there was one flaw I had with the Miazora series before the Interstellar Focus fandisc, especially the original, was the underwhelming romance for the childhood friend routes. While the melodrama made sense, it detracted too much from and brought down the wholesome vibes that every single other route in the series nailed perfectly.

Thankfully Interstellar Focus solves my problems with the childhood friends' romance and then some. I'm generally not into polyamory/3some romances, but for the main characters Akito, Hikari, and Saya, with their history a 3some romance just made too much sense.

The main story revolves around this 3way romance and while there's some light melodrama as one might expect a guy suggesting a 3some relationship in a relatively down to earth setting, it doesn't stick too long and actually gets resolved in a pretty wholesome way (especially Akito charging up some chad energy).

Thankfully most of melodrama is resolved in the first 30 minutes and the rest of the game is almost pure fluff in the best way. It brings back the excellent interactions the 3 childhood friends have had in the original game with a romance tinge, them figuring out how to balance a 3way relationship, especially since it's all 3 of their FIRST relationships period in this timeline.

If you're worried about this becoming a nukige or sex heavy game thankfully all the H scenes are saved at the way way end and actually had proper build up in a way.

For those who read the series for the stargazing aspects there's still a decent amount of importance of that.

I also really liked how the side characters are handled. Despite their romance/development being done in other routes, most of them get just a bit more development to flesh out some of their motivations, and also seeing their funny reactions to the new odd 3some relationship.

This is especially true in the "Quiz" Minigame that gets unlocked after the main story, which I 100% recommend people do.

It has a cute side story of the 3 underclassmen making a game to get new members to join the Six Stars Club. Most of the super short Quiz Segment is seeing the funny fictional story within the game.

You have to solve some astronomy trivia questions to get 5 minute epilogues for the non-main trio, and I loved these. While very short they show segments of what many characters were up to during the main story, getting to know just a little more about them, including characters who don't even get a role in the main story like Narue, Noriko, and Orihime.

In a way, Interstellar Focus is the perfect send off for the Miazora / Sky Full of Stars series (and honestly Pulltop and Konno Asta eroge as well). It gives what I personally consider the true canon ending for the childhood friend trio, while also giving some love to the side heroines to show how important they were.

It just does everything I'd want in a moege (fandisc): wholesome slice of life writing, decent enough relationship development, great authentic character interactions, solid pacing, and pretty good humor (though they could used a bit less pervert jokes).

Unless you REALLY don't like polyamory relationships, if you've made it far in the Miazora/Sky Full of Stars series... heavily recommend checking out Interstellar Focus.

As someone who saved this visual novel until I was close to visiting Japan in real life... to say Go Go Nippon was disappointing is a HUGE understatement.

The idea of it is nice: A short visual novel that lets you learn about some Japan tourism, and with some (hopefully) likable enough girls who teach about certain things about Japan that's practical.

However I can bullet list everything I dislike about this game (which is a lot)

-The execution of the tourist explanations is WAY too shallow, its either stuff I already know, or stuff I don't care about
-At least in the 2015 version I only get to choose 3 Areas in Tokyo before the plot forces me in Kyoto than another city, hooray for lack of choice, what if I wanted to stay in Tokyo?
-While it's nice to have animated sprites, they couldn't get voice acting for TWO characters in a ~10 hour game? Literally every other Overdrive title has voice acting for all their heroines.
-The lack of voice acting also brings down the admittedly nice feature of Go Go Nippon having the rare ability to have BOTH Japanese and English text at the same time. Voice Acting could have REALLY helped learning Japanese with the Japan infodumping if that's what they were going for.
-As far as the heroines go, Makoto was OK at best. Pleasant enough to talk to, but you can tell this is an old visual novel when she has a really lame "blissfully unaware she sucks at cooking" gimmick. One of the worst anime comedy tropes from that era.
-Akira is an incredibly obnoxious unreasonable generic tsundere. They attempt to give her "depth" in her "route" but does not exclude her behavior, and makes me wonder how the MC would come to get feelings for an unlikable POS like her.
-Speaking of routes, why did they try to force in romance here? Half or more of the dialogue is just the two sisters infodumping Japan facts and the main character is a boring white foreigner. The "routes" come in way too late, and even as someone who doesnt mind "self-inserting" this felt like cheesy lame forced quickly resolved melodrama for the final "romance route" chapters at the end of a route.
-Minor, but they should've focused more on how the characters knew each other online before the MC flew in. Maybe there wouldn't have been a dumb misunderstanding of MC not realizing the two were girls for a shallow joke. And maybe the romance would have made at least a little more sense.

I only visited areas that Akira showed me around which got me onto her route. So suffice to say did not have a good time talking with her most of the time. I don't care enough about Makoto or the areas she shows around to do her route.

When the only things I like are some of the CGs, the moving sprites, and BGM mostly being taken straight from Edelweiss, Kira Kira, and DEARDROPS (which is also half a flaw), that's not a good sign.

Go Go Nippon is both a disappointment as a Japan tourist game, and as a romance moege.

While the core totally-not-inspired-by-SmashBros gameplay is technically there's and playable-ish and fun-ish, there's just so many design issues both from the original beta, and now with the May 2024 Full Release that make these game overall not good to me.

Notable Points:

-The Free to Play Aspect. There's technically content and with rotating characters. However, there's a FORCED GRIND to unlock characters and even paying real life money doesn't guarantee just getting all the characters right now.

-The lack of available features on launch. In the Open Beta it was JUST online available iwth little to no single player. In May 2024 there's kinda a single player mode with things to do but little to no online PvP play variety.

-The game being designed and balanced around 2v2. While May 2024 tried to allow more 1v1 scenarios the remnants of the pseudo-foced 2v2 gameplay from the OPen Beta are still here. Felt like they tried to mix Smash Bros style competition with team based PvP like Overwatch/League of Legends, but I find it doesn't work. It's funny they removed "Support" class since who would wanna play a pure support character in a platform fighting game?

-The overall battle system and movesets are... fine? Functional? Characters have at least 10-15 attacks, some chargable but the game in general feels clunky and slow, and the lack of BLOCKING and instead your defensive options being limited to dodges is kinda boring.

-The roster is also fine. Lots of fun western movie and TV show characters from popular series. However, being unable to practice with all the characters easily is rough. And the upcoming "DLC" characters being limited to free to play unlocking is annoying as platformer fighting game fan.

-The "Rifts" do have fun excuses to fight enemies/bosses with objectives to get more points. However the random mini games like break the targets, cannon shooting, select the cards, etc just feel weirdly forced and tacked on. At least the potential customization buffs are... kinda sorta fun?

Overall despite the game being fun-ish in the moment and has some nice WB representation and voice acting, there's just too many bad design choices. From the annoying grind free to play to get anything, people getting burnt out from the open beta, clunky ripoff of Smash Bros that psuedo-forces 2v2, lack of good defense options, and just releasing a clearly unfinished rushed game in terms of (un)available content.

One of the most mixed I've been on a visual novel in a long time, especially for a slice of life heavy romance moege I was fairly interested in.

The main draw for me was the setting being in the countryside, something we rarely see. Outside a few details, I feel like the countryside setting wasn't taken advantage of as much as I'd like, with the characters usually sticking to a cafe, school, or occasionally the beach.

Amanatsu was trying to be a good mix of pure relaxing wholesome slice of life (think toneworks like Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai), with some recurring goofy over the top humor (like SMEE's Making Lovers or Fureraba). There are some legitimately great wholesome moments, and some pretty funny moments. However some of the attempted wholesome and comedic moments are ruined by some quite frankly very lame and unfunny characters, which I'll explain more about later.

Hayase Yuu, the scenario writer, has previously written slice of life stories with mostly/only adult age characters like Making Lovers, HaremKingdom, and Chihiro Himukai Always Walks Away so it was kinda disappointing for him to go back to the high school setting you see in 95+% of romance visual novels. Thankfully, he did a pretty good job writing some legit believable awkwardness that would come with a first time high school couple getting together.

The main mixed/disappointing thoughts I have about Amanatsu heavily relate to the characters themselves.

I'm mostly OK with with the main protagonist Haruto. He has some legit interesting issues how he's lonely due to forced to not having a social life due to being forced to study all the time. As this is a slice of life title it's not covered too much but it was enough to explain some of his personality. He can be pretty funny times with goofy outbursts. However any humor around him failing at small tasks or making the occasional sexual harassment joke was lame.

Kagone was easily my favorite character and honestly if it weren't for her I would have dropped the visual novel during the common route. She's energetic, talkative, has great jokes and quirky banter, and is a very openly sweet girl that's easy to get along with. I thought the whole thing of clinging to Haruto's arm all the time would get annoying but it stayed endearing all the way to the end. She actually had surprisingly interesting character depth. It didn't get too deep as this is a "wholesome slice of life romance" story, but it was covered enough to satisfy me. In a way she was a much better version of Reina from Making Lovers, having a similar energetic assertive vibe, but replacing Reina's selfish brattiness with wholesome selfless quirkiness instead. Her romance felt the most natural, so along with me liking her most, she was the only heroine route I ended up actually doing.

Sadly the MC and Kogane were the only characters I cared for consistently.

Kazuha was just an unfortunate mix of traits I don't like. She was a "modern" tsundere, aka very short-tempered and most prone to verbal insults, especially since the main character is clumsy and/or gets into lots of early "perverted accidents". Amanatsu going with very boring shallow ways to rile up a tsundere for the masochistic tsundere fans is lame. Thankfully Kazuha mostly isn't the physically abusive tsundere type and is a nice caring person so I didn't dislike her too much but I was disappointed in how mostly generic she was. The fact she's the MC's blood related cousin and no one seemed to care was the final straw of me deciding not to do her route.

Yashiro was a character I thought I would like since I tend to like "quirky weird" girls. However, she was the type of quirky weird I tend to not care for: one who's just weird for the sake of being weird. My favorite types of weird girls are the ones not afraid to be themselves. Yashiro just felt like a bunch of random "filler jokes" nothing particularly funny or unfunny, just random stuff thrown out there. Thankfully Yashiro is a nice enough person so I didn't mind her. The main reason I didn't do her route... apparently the developer Azarashisoft loves designing at least one girl with boobs much bigger than their head. There's a point where big boobs goes from hot to just stupid looking, and Yashiro's design was definitely on the stupid looking side. Oh and her phallic head owl "god" was lame. Ultimately decided not to her route, though I considered it.

However, what was EASILY the worst aspect of Amanatsu was the side male characters. Usually these shouldn't be problem, and in fact male/female group interactions can potentially make a great VN even greater (Majikoi, Edelweiss, Nukitashi, Little Busters, etc). However I HATED the male side characters for how lame and/or stereotypical they were. When someone who tends to like group interactions DREAD any time a potential group slice of life scene happens, that's when you know something is wrong. It got to the point I actually MUTED their voice acting, which is something I almost never do in visual novel.

Mitsuru is a bad overweight otaku stereotype constantly yelling unfunny 2D jokes and occasionally forcing the group to act out his otaku whims. Iori was a camp gay man stereotype from 2000s media, making constant remarks about being a "maiden at heart", comments about being gay, and occasionally wanting to "get physical" with the main character as a "joke". Kou was the least bad, just being a stoic musclehead, usually not the type to start bad jokes on his own. However he will more likely make bad jokes worse, e.g. make a random comment how he's into older married women or making up stories about Haruto's supposed ex-girlfriend.

I get side males are a common trope to make the male main character "look better" but they did NOT need to go this far in making them so lame, unfunny, and stereotypical, especially with how often you see them.

Thankfully once the heroine route starts you start to mostly have one and one time with the main girl and those interactions (in my case with just Kogane) are great in terms of comedy and wholesomeness. However in a slice of life heavy title where I dread having to read... almost half the slice of life, is not a title I can wholeheartedly recommend unless you just REALLY think these side characters are funny (for some reason).

Final Note:

I'm usually not the type to overly complain about translation/localization choices but one thing I have against Amanatsu specifically is the inconsistent choices compared to other Shiravune-translated titles. They for once just kept "Senpai" in the text as is, which is interesting. But then proceeded to have weird localization choices like onii-chan -> bro-bro or Aniki-> King. While some Shiravune localization choices in previous titles are weird, at least they were consistent. If you're gonna only keep "Senpai" but not anything else that just looks wrong to me. Go all in either way, imo.

Normally I'd do a typical "long essay" review... but I literally got this game (actually read through Johren) just to read quirky maid Ange's route and I got what I wanted. Ange is easily the best character in the game and carries the slice of life scenes with her wholesome helpful nice personality and funny unpredictable antics.

Ange's route was definitely weird as I'd expected, having an actual master/maid romantic relationship was certainly something unique and interesting. That said this game REALLY overly plays up the "first time H scene magic" to the point of going almost an hour of just building up to it. Thankfully Ange's development around being a maid was decent enough otherwise.

As for the rest of the game... common route was fairly short, making a classic tsundere (Airi) relatively tolerable, but not enough for me to care to do her route. Sakuno is fine but I don't care for step sibling romance so I passed. Miu is decent mature senpai... but then I'd have to deal with Sana who's easily my least favorite character. I don't care if she's supposedly the most popular, I hate extreme gap moe tsundere, no amount of supposedly good character development can make me forgive obnoxious repetitive misandry comments.

TLDR only get this game if there's a particular character archetype you like (especially for weirdos like Ange or tsunderes like Airi/Sana) and don't mind very slow build up romance + H scene.