Asuka’s route focuses mostly on flying circus and I would consider it more story-centric. She is shown to be a very direct and earnest girl and her story shows how she falls in love with flying circus and how she plays it. I felt like she was a likable character and that her story was the one I enjoyed the most. I have to point out one thing I don't like regardless of Asuka's personality or the story and that is her influence on the entire game. They (the devs) desperately wanted to make Asuka the true heroine of the game, so obvious that it feels somewhat forced. IIRC, she even cried when I chose to go out with Mashiro (or Rika?), making me feel bad for her. This is a charage, every character has their own stage to shine, but Asuka just loves to get all those stages for herself in any given moment.

What a true heroine.

Misaki’s route is another that focuses on flying circus, but it takes a very different angle on it. The end goal is similar to Asuka’s route, but there is more focus on the motivations. Misaki is shown to be very competitive and to hate to lose. That said, she often avoids taking things seriously and is often known to make lewd jokes and to tease Masaya. I enjoyed her character more than I expected after completing her route.

Rika’s route felt more character-centric to me. She is Masaya’s new neighbor and they do not get off on the right foot after an incident near the start. She is shown to be a very diligent and polite girl and features less in the common route due to being from a different school. I liked her as a character but felt like her route was a bit bland in comparison to the others. 

Mashiro’s route is another which felt more character-centric to me. She is younger and follows Misaki around like an obsessive puppy at times. She does not always treat Masaya well as he is too close to Misaki. I was quite surprised by her route as I originally did not expect to like her much, but by the end of it she was my favorite character.

Each of these routes took about 4-6 hours for me to complete each. In total it took me 43 hours to complete the entire game to 100%. This was making use of saving at choices, always listening to the full audio and skipping previously seen text so it will take some people longer.

There was a very short true ending after completing all of the routes. It worked well to finish off the story and did not chose a single route as the true one.

Overall, I felt like the romance was quite weak in all of the routes except for Mashiro’s where I felt that it was done very well. It felt very suddenly pushed in without much of a build-up. Aside from that flaw, I did enjoy the story quite a lot. I found it quite difficult to stop reading at times.

The music in this game is also great, with a surprising variety for a visual novel thanks to the action tracks for the Flying Circus in conjunction with the usual slice of life OST that brings chill and relaxing tones for daily activities along with melancholic music for moments who require it.

The vocal opening of the game - Wings of Courage - lived rent free inside my head for couple of weeks straight, and it always give me a goosebump everytime I hear the crescendo of the track. Definitely one of the better OSTs I've heard in my recent memory.

In every review I do, I try to bring forth a minor detail that wouldn’t be necessary but including it is amazing, and for me, that’s the song indication that appears whenever the music switches. It shows the name of the track that is starting in the scene. For someone who has a wide variety of anime songs to listen to, knowing the name of the songs I enjoyed in a game like this makes my life so much easier and I give credit when it’s due.

Moreover, as some minor comments, the options to regulate each character’s volume is always nice and the menus are smooth to use. It would be better if the game has controller support like Sanoba Witch, but that’s more of a comment than a complaint.

For users with laptop running on battery and Windows OS.

The game eats up my GPU like crazy when minimized by clicking at the game icon at taskbar (clicking the “minimize” at the corner of window or Win + ↓ won’t trigger this). This is a RTX 3060 for Laptop platform, and having a VN eating up to 30% processing power of that GPU is just insane. Needless to say when it happens, my machine heats up and drains battery faster. I heard some of my friends who played this game on a GT 730 and even with high-resolution textures turned off, the game still stuttered a lot.

Having a VN with performance issue is just weird since those games are supposed to be playable even on a Raspberry Pi.

Localization 

This happens in many Western-oriented translated works, don’t think too much about it. Japanese people have a different way of calling each other compared to the Western's counterpart. Basically they will call you by your first name or last name based on intimacy and formality/your social rank comparing to the speaker. Ex: You can call them by their first name if you are close enough to them. In these school settings, it’s most likely the former.

But in the Western culture, people tend to call each other by their last name when reaching such status quos. Now, where were we? Oh yes, that’s what Nekonyan had in their mind when localizing the game. 

Some familiar faces when scrolling down the credit =))

It led to some confusions when I was trying to understand the VA’s in-game dialogues. I read VNs to learn Japanese as well - very effective, I’ll tell you that. Not just names, but also some food-and-drink words like juice (ジュース) was translated into soda for the Western audience. They weren’t corresponding and sometimes not appropriate at all for the Japanese setting.

But NN did a great job overall. The gimmicks above don't interrupt the flow of the story in any way since the interpretation will always be the same. At the end of the day, that's all we readers need.