Genre: Adventure, Indie, RPG
Developer: Harmorise
Publisher: Sol Press
Release Date: Feb 28, 2019
Edited by KnightAvenger
Under One Wing shows the player a world where airplanes are common enough that even students have a personal one. In this world, fairy fights, or mock dogfights are a popular sport.
This is a visual novel by Harmonise and published by Sol Press. The copy of this game I’m reviewing is on Steam. The game includes adult content, which can be revealed by downloading a free 18+ patch from pantypress.com, as seems to be the case with several of Sol Press’ visual novels.
While the game does have adult content, it is fairly minimal in the common route. There are some adult topics and comedy thrown in, but the story, as a whole, is the focus in this game.
In short, to avoid major spoilers, the main character ends up with his grandmother’s airplane and lives at a run-down dorm that she owns. His grandmother was known as a famous fairy fighter with a particularly unique airplane, so this gains him quite a lot of attention. As is often the case with this scenario, it turns out that all the other tenants are women.
The main part of the story is character-driven, as is common with visual novels. The main character spends his time at the dorm, at school and in flights with the other characters. The interactions between characters are particularly good.
As the story proceeds, the main character gets drawn into the world of fairy fights and becomes part of the dorm’s team. This culminates in a tournament which wraps up the story.
I, particularly, enjoyed the common route of the game. It introduced and let you get to know each character and built up the image of the world well. It explained why the world changed in the way it did in a way that lets the reader suspend disbelief and enjoy the story.
You have four main heroines in this story: the student council president who can do anything, a walking encyclopedia of airplane knowledge, an airheaded former fairy fighter, and a mysterious girl. Each girl has her own unique backstory and route. All of these are pilots whom you team up with. There are also a number of other characters but only these four have routes.
Several of the characters seemed like they borrowed aspects from popular stereotypes, but never really fell into them. They all came across as multi-faceted, which was a relief, as they could have taken the easy route and had rather one-dimensional characters.
Approximately 4.5 hours into the game, it directly asked me to choose a route from the five main heroines. There were a few choices before that but all routes were available regardless of the choices I made. I estimate that each of the heroine’s routes would take about 1.5 – 2 hours to complete. All reading times are based on reading carefully and listening to the voices.
In each character route, H-scenes soon appeared. Some of these seemed like a natural progression of the story and some did not at all. Each character had quite a few H-scenes throughout their route, but it did show a focus on building the relationship between the main character and heroine outside of them, too. The number of H-scenes makes me think that each character route would be significantly shorter without the 18+ patch.
The graphics and sound are generally great, although I felt like the body proportions were odd in some of the CGs. Other than that, the art is all high quality and the background music is fitting and varied. The voice acting is all done well. All characters, other than the main character, are voiced, including the side characters.
The game has all of the basic options and some nice extras, but nothing which stands out too much. Sound levels can be adjusted overall and individual character voices can be turned on and off. There are options around skipping text and such, too.
The game has the occasional typo which I noticed, but they are fairly minor. Generally, the quality of the writing is quite high.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Under One Wing. It added an interesting twist to a regular school and dorm life story and the characters were all interesting. It had some good comedy moments thrown in but kept the focus on the story well.
Pros:
- A well-told story with comedy keeping things light.
- All the characters were likable.
- Some character routes were particularly good.
- Graphics and sound are all well done.
Cons:
- Minor spelling issues.
- Some character routes were not bad, but not up to the same standard as others.
- Some CGs had odd proportions.
Eden gives Under One Wing a score of 7.5 out of 10 (75) Moe Blobs.
Under One Wing is available on Steam for $29.99 (USD).
