Kanade is a short all-ages visual novel developed by Frontwing and Good Smile Company. It features a scenario penned by Asou Ei (euphoria, Lilja and Natsuka: Painting Lies) alongside several Frontwing veterans such as Kazuya, Yusano, and Matsumoto Fuminori (GINKA, ATRI -My Dear Moments-) who did direction, primary character design, and music respectively. This story is set in a sci-fi-esque city where everything is covered in plant overgrowth, and it follows the tale of a boy and a girl in a love story about saving the world with song.
Building a Bridge
Our main two characters throughout the story are Yuuto and Kanade, a pair who by sheer happenstance became penpals after Kanade helped one of Yuuto’s wounded carrier pigeons. After exchanging a series of letters, Kanade tells Yuuto that she wants to meet with him, all for one very particular purpose: she needs to fall in love.
Kanade is something of a mysterious and sheltered girl who claims her destiny is to save the world. To do that, she needs to sing a great love song from the heart, for which she needs to fall in love to make it happen. The pair have some level of connection and attachment already, so they decide to give becoming a couple a try and develop those feelings of love over time.
The world they live in is a fairly peculiar one, as years prior a massive overgrowth covered the world in plants to the point of wrecking most of the world’s technological infrastructure. While technology still exists in limited capacity, and the plants have changed parts of the world for the better, it presents no shortage of challenges. What lends credibility to Kanade’s claim of having the power to save the world is that her song has the ability to affect the plants, as she is able to soothe and manipulate the plants with her voice. Of course, Kanade’s singing is naturally quite charming already, and she quickly becomes a boon to the settlement Yuuto lives in with her ability.
Omochikaeri
As the title character, Kanade is the focal figure of this story. While there are pieces of sci-fi and environmentalism here and there in the story, whether you enjoy Kanade the visual novel will ultimately hinge on how you feel about Kanade the character.
Kanade herself may just be the sweetest creature ever put into fiction. Good lord do they make her as cute as possible. She’s not an especially deep or flawed character and any real drama with her is fairly scarce, but I feel like she’s the type a lot of visual novel fans will fall in love with almost immediately. As a half-alien girl raised under peculiar circumstances, she has a certain airheadedness to her that is just plain adorable and leads to several genuinely funny little exchanges. A lot of what makes her endearing is a result of her voice actress, Yuko Natsuyoshi, who plays the character with such a pleasant liveliness throughout. Even the options menu has her humming and singing along during her voice lines in the settings, which is just adorable.
There really isn’t much sense of there being heavy drama to unfold between her and Yuuto, as they both are clearly very attached from the outset. As such, much of the romantic development between them comes in the form of them trying to navigate the specific nature of their relationship and determine how genuine their feelings truly are, given the circumstances put a bit of odd pressure on them despite neither fully understanding what love is.
Comfort Food
Despite something of an apocalyptic backdrop, I feel like Kanade is better viewed as borderline iyashikei (i.e. soothing, healing story), given that it’s very low tension for most of its narrative. If you’re reading it to get anything deeper than a cutesy love story with a ridiculously sweet heroine set to some pretty music (and it is quite pretty music indeed) in a story powered more by vibes than deep narrative themes, there’s not gonna be a lot for you here.
There isn’t nothing of that sort, mind. While there are some interesting bits of seeing how the characters live despite their challenging circumstances, there is still some need to save the world guiding the story. Alas, a lot of narrative developments are rather predictable, and the few bits of suspense or tension don’t really feel particularly convincing that anything particularly consequential is going to eventuate from them. Attempts to have a story with any emotional weight beyond its exterior feel fairly shallow, almost like they’re there because they had to be and not because they were a part of any greater plan of a story to tell or message to convey.
That said, there are a few threads here and there still of something deeper. There is something of an environmentalism angle, although it isn’t very deeply explored within the narrative. There are some neat worldbuilding elements, like the technologies that are still there and tiny glimpses into how the people in this world live, though this visual novel is short (about 4 to 5 hours) to the point it doesn’t really dwell on anything like that. The couple moments that I did feel some semblance of emotional connection to were a few of the more sentimental aspects of Kanade’s backstory explored fairly late in the story. There are spots here and there of something more substantial and nuanced, though not much beyond that.
Verdict
For a pretty modest price point, Kanade is ultimately a sweet and short visual novel, and how much you enjoy it will depend on what you’re looking for and how you feel about the bubbly main character. It’s very cute, at times endearingly funny, and has just a pinch of sentimentality to spice things up. There’s not a lot of depth to its characters even with its small cast, and its attempts at theming feel like they only scratch the surface of what they maybe could have with an otherwise rather interesting concept for a setting, which left me a bit wanting for more of substance. Still, I enjoyed my few hours with Kanade for what they were.
KANADE IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for more visual novels, you might want to check out our review of AIKAGI. We’ve also got coverage of a variety of visual novel titles that you may be interested in taking a look at.
Thank you to Frontwing for providing a Steam review code for KANADE.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
