Violets in the Sunrise

Violets in the sunrise is a short visual novel featuring three .. lovely.. girls to fall in love with! Girl on girl, regardless of what you do, you need to choose one.
It has a mix of depressing backstory and atmosphere, paired with hope for the future our protagonist does not share! It uses Persona 4 music!

It is very very rough around the edges. The dialogue is very natural and interesting in places, but then completely staged most of the time. There are a plethora of typos and the characters follow a clearly definied train of thought. A daily rhythm is hardly established, either.. you simply will not get to know any of the workings of the world.

The artwork is all free to use, and while it is not particularily impressive, it is used well for the most part, and offers wide range of scenery.
Only the everchanging outfits of our sports queen are fairly odd. As well as the archery outfit when archery or another sport is never once mentioned ..


I am now in the picture.

The story is fairly simple: for whatever gloomy reason you ended up in an academy where supposed failures can still finish their degree and go out into the world. There you meet three students, the daughter of the headmaster who is polite, heavily involved in all kinds of things you never see and two others.
A girl who apparantly used to be sleeping around and abused drugs, growing up in a violent neighborhood and thus has a rude way of addressing people and a colloquial language.
Then there is the girl looking for her dreamgirl to marry and live together forever, kissing all of them when you are not looking. That is basically all there is to her.

Now there is a couple of things to be taken note of - first of all, while they do have some backstory, you are confronted and "informed" of it right away. There is no discovery as their very identity and specialty is revealed from the very beginning. There is a story or two you may learn, but it very much falls in line with what has already been established. Our rowdy being poor and needing to work on the side, for example.
It also is quite a huge flaw that their "personality" is hardly defined at all. The huge emphasis is on their surroundings and you find out very little about who they are and what they enjoy.
What do they do in their freetime? We know one likes to go to the beach or goes for sports .. anything else?
Many scenes seem very contained in itself .. there are many hilarious lines for themselves inbetween, but interactions end up being .. stale.

Even with their backstory, what did they learn from it? Have they recovered, are they in the process of recovering, do they have concrete plans for the future? If yes, what? If no, are there struggling to, are they looking for something to do later, do they have any ideas or previous plans?
For the descriptions that are there .. as the chairman's daughter, for example, what does this character actually DO? Aside from greeting newcomers.

The dialogue itself is contained to the scene it is in. There are few natural interactions, or few interactions at all. In the story, our protagonist is completely out of the picture. Thoughts and narration can make a huge difference - how are the characers we meet perceived? What do we do throughout our day?
We meet them at school sometimes, and then we dream and sleepwalk. The descriptions are very brief and usually kept to time and place, like a meadow during sunset.

I think it shines through that this is the first visual novels and all the descriptive details of the world, of the character we see the world through are .. cut out. We do not know what the protagonist is like, aside from gloomy, and we have far too few choices to fill in much for ourselves, either. She has recurring nightmares and starts to dreamwalk, but this is just suddenly over, and never explained. There would be so much room to add! A traumatic event, a desire for love, whatever.
Said choices do not affect the game, either. As there are no routes, and the one choices towards the end allows for all three endings to happen.
However, there are also a few humorous descriptions, such as the hentai riddled flat you live in .. and while it says the previous owner left you this mess .. you never clean it up.


All you ever needed to know about a character. Two characters.

It also shows in the music selection .. Persona 4 has a magnificent soundtrack, and two very light pieces were used. One for the menu, and one for the rest.
In Persona 4, the track is used for transition between scenes, background narrations and such, and .. has very little impact. It makes for a stark contrast to the overall gloominess you are introduced in.. and seems rather misplaced, starting out.
It would have been great to utilize a few more tracks to give a transition between scenes - you falling and blacking out using the same track as happy talk makes it very difficult for such a situation to have any impact.
No sounds are used, the music stays the same at all times. Using different tracks for different characters is a common trick to use, as well as a track for unrest or something bad happening.

What it comes down to:

It is supposed to be a gathering of misfits but nobody is showing any major weaknesses in the present (beside our .. except our protagonist we know little about).
The girls may end up in a bikini for the ending scene, but none of them are really .. attractive or loveable (perhaps our headmaster daughter), and none of them you build a connection with throughout the game. The lack of active choices makes it impossible to include more intimate scenes and conversations between the protagonist and one, too. So it stays rather platonic until suddenly they move in, because, duh. That's what people do once you say you like them.
I would like to note that one ending suggest you can help another by being with her, or "fill the hole", so to speak, which I find a pretty dangerous train of thought in any dating sim - it is not the main point here, but it happens a lot, so I took notice of it.

It comes down to a brief, rough game. With a sudden ending changing everything for the better.