Title: カミング・ハミング
Developer: Saga Planets
Release Date: 27th June 2008
Age Rating: 18+
Length: 15+ Hours
Links: Official Website, VNDB
Spring.
The season of new encounters and perfect for falling in love…
Kirigaya Haruto lives a peaceful life in a rural town, although this spring starts a bit differently. One evening, he sees a strange girl called Yoshino-hime in his dreams and ever since then he’s had girls appear around him:
Suzuka, his childhood friend with a cold demeanour.
Ayane, his older childhood friend that treats him like a younger brother.
Miu, a stylish girl who moved from the city and transferred to his class.
Hinata, Miu’s cheerful younger sister who works in an antique shop.
Yuzuki, the class president with a connection to the local shrine.
Shiori, his homeroom teacher who is clumsy but kind.
With Haruto and the girls coming together to help prepare for the town’s annual Spring festival, just what will this season bring for him?
My Thoughts
When people talk about the Saga Planets “Four Seasons Series” they tend to rave about Hatsuyuki Sakura and Natsuyume Nagisa (both of which are indeed great games) but I never really hear anyone talk about Coming x Humming which is why I decided to see for myself if it was worth taking a look at or if it should be kept in the shadows.
Before I talk about the contents of the game, I need to discuss the actual programming/how to play it. This game runs on the old RealLive engine which is “region locked” – something I completely forgot about until I saw the game folder. Upon launching the game you get the following error message:
Clicking “Ok” closes the game so I was in a panic thinking about how I was going to play this stupid thing BUT I discovered on accident that if you click cancel on the error message the game just runs anyways lmao (or at least it did on my Windows 10 device). This also worked for Natsuyume Nagisa so I’m not sure if they partially fixed the region lock in the download editions or I got lucky? I won’t complain though.
Moving onto the game itself and it uses the same map-based choice system that is present in the other four seasons games I’ve played. Surprisingly, all 6 heroine routes are available to read from the start and by completing routes you unlock extra H scenes available via the main menu.
As for the common route, it felt fairly generic but I did enjoy the relaxing small town setting. The character interactions here were generally okay – nothing stands out either way.
I’ve found in the other Saga Planets games I’ve played that they do a pretty good job of making each heroine feel distinct/unique and having her own quirks. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’d quite mastered this in CxH and so the majority of the heroines feel a little one-dimensional.
I’ll begin with Yuzuki, who is the kind and hardworking class president/shrine maiden that shares a body with Yoshino-hime so the pair switching consciousness is the primary source of humour in her route. Honestly, Yoshino was more entertaining. I originally assumed Yuzuki to be the game’s true route but there’s very little actual plot in this game so don’t expect much.
Being a blonde twin-tailed tsundere, Miu immediately piqued my interest. The different sides of her personality were quite funny (kind to classmates, harsh to Haruto) and it was slightly refreshing to see a transfer student who isn’t exactly happy to move. As much as I liked Miu’s personality early in the game, her route was incredibly frustrating to read. Once again, it was caused entirely by a lack of communication between her and Haruto, which is a plot device I personally really don’t enjoy. Overall good heroine, poor route.
Suzuka’s family own the inn that Haruto currently stays in (his father works overseas so he rents a room) and she also happens to be one of his childhood friends. She tends to be a little stoic, if not cold towards others but of course she has a dere side deep down. Her route actually wasn’t terrible – the drama was focused on something relatively believable and involved Haruto working together with Suzuka to solve a problem – it may be eroge basics but surprisingly few manage to even do this right.
Ayane is Haruto’s other childhood friend and is a year older than him, leading to her acting like the teasing older sister type of character. She’s also the student council president and is the leader of the comittee tasked with preparing for the festival. My main take-away from Ayane’s route was that it felt more focused on the ecchi scenes than anything else.
Unlike her sister, Hinata is kind to everyone and is the typical adorable kouhai. She first meets Haruto when he walks into her grandfather’s antique shop, which she works part-time at. Hinata’s route is easily the best in the game, being the only one with some sort of good plot. I would recommend you read it after Miu’s route despite there being no enforced route order. Hinata was also my favourite heroine – she was too cute!
Finally we have Shiori, and the absolute mess that is her route. In order to explain what I didn’t enjoy, I do have to spoil her route so please skip to below the next picture if you’d like to avoid these!
Shiori’s route involves a timeslip whereby her past self somehow travels to the present day and ends up meeting Haruto. Ignoring all the logistics of this, the problem for me with her route lies within the H Scene. Young Shiori has an argument with Haruto and runs off into the woods and is sexually assaulted (attempted rape) by a random man – the protagonist finds her and stops her attacker before it progressed all the way but there was a very uncomfortable scene involving foreplay with the attacker. After saving her, we as readers are meant to believe that Shiori is happy enough to initiate sex with Haruto and the pair have H in the woods literally minutes after she endured a trauma.
Now I’m not one to judge the realism of eroge but this whole series of events for me just felt disgusting – to the extent that I wanted to close the game and delete it immediately. There was no need for her assault to be that explicit – she literally could’ve been nanpa’d and it would have had the same effect plot-wise. It was clearly only done for fan service and to give the protagonist (& readers?) some sort of hero complex which honestly just made me feel really uncomfy. Especially brushing off this traumatising experience and putting her H scene directly after this was in incredibly poor taste imo.
Side characters were pretty few – Ririko was popular amongst players but she wasn’t one of my favourites. As mentioned though Yoshino-hime probably should’ve had a seperate route or ending.
Whilst I did enjoy the opening song by Monet, the rest of the game’s music is not particularly memorable.
The artwork was decent enough for the time period – definitely inconsistent at times but there were multiple artists working on this title so that makes sense. I like the style and find it to be quite cute/moe. There was, however, a lack of non-H CGs for the heroines.
Final Thoughts
My Score: 5/10
Whilst Hinata’s route may be the game’s bright spot, the overall story of Coming x Humming is pretty weak in my opinion, especially when compared to some of the other games in the four seasons series(Natsunagi, Hatsusaku). It primarily reads like a very average moege for the time and isn’t really anything special for the most point. Adding in the fact that I really did not enjoy Shiori’s route and I wasn’t the biggest fan of CxH. Hinata is still cute though~
Sadly I was disappointed by this but I do still intend to finish the four seasons series. I have recently played Natsunagi, which I will review at some point (& is a game I would highly recommend) so all I have left to play is the autumn entry – Kisaragi Gold Star. I’d also like to play some of Saga Planets’ other games so if anyone has recommendations please let me know!
Thanks for reading~
Zettai Renai! 