#frontwing

Publisher Good Smile Company and developer Frontwing have announced COCORO, a new visual novel game led by ATRI: My Dear Moments writer Konno Asta. It will launch for PC via Steam, DLsite, and other storefronts in 2026 with support for English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese language options.

The game’s staff includes:

-Planning and Scenario: Konno Asta (known for ATRI: My Dear Moments)

-Character Design: Akio Watanabe (known for the anime series Monogatari)

-SD Artwork: Mai Nanaka (known for Innocent Girl and Pure Girl)

-Backgrounds: Yyish  (known for ATRI: My Dear Moments)

-Music: Matsumoto Fuminori (known for Wonderful Everyday: Diskontinuierliches Dasein)

-Voice Cast:

COCORO (voiced by Hina Youmiya)

Watch the announcement trailer below. Follow the game’s official Twitter account here.

Announce Trailer

16/04/21

I finally finished ISLAND! This is only the second visual novel I’ve ever read, but my growth in reading in Japanese has been outstanding if I do say so myself, and I’m thrilled to share my progress with you guys.

I followed a guide for the game since I wanted to get the route order correct, and cover all available reading material. The choices are not really spoiler heavy, so i didn’t mind reading through them before I started. A lot of them make sense and have a lot of variation, too, so if you want to go and read blind you can. 

The game also gives you multiple options to skip to the next choice menu so you don’t have to read through the same text over and over again. It also changes the color of the text to indicate that you’ve already read it before which was nice, because I like to keep my character count as accurate as possible. It makes the whole jumping around and going through all the endings a much easier and less tedious process. This was the best choice list in game, imo:

Before I get to the nitty-gritty details of this wonderful visual novel, here are some stats I’ve collected throughout the 87 hours and 51 minutes (within 31 days) I’ve spent reading. Hooray, graph time!: 

I personally recorded a total of 828,689 characters and a line count of 43,568 in this visual novel. These numbers may be less or more than what it actually is due to minor texthooking issues, so take it with a grain of salt. I didn’t know upwards of 1500+ words, and I have no intention learning them all just yet, because their frequencies are all over the place. Gives you some perspective on just how many basic and rare words you can encounter and learn even by reading only a single visual novel. And yes, it definitely covers a whole slew of “JLPT” frequent words, particularly from N1.

The visual data I gathered is very fascinating to look at. Prior to reading visual novels, I only have read two full length novels, a hundred or so volumes of manga, and maybe a few news articles when I can stomach the boredom, so you would expect my stamina for reading Japanese to be not too low but not too high either. 

With ATRI, I would get mentally exhausted after doing two hours of intensive reading, and doing any more than that would be pointless because my concentration, and therefore, my comprehension drops significantly. 

However with ISLAND, which in my opinion is leagues harder than ATRI, I could intensively read for a much longer period of time before feeling tired. It started at around day 13, during the first route in the game, and I’ve since then been more or less consistent with my pace of 20,000-40,000 characters a day. Time spent reading also decreased over time the more I got used to the writing style: repetition of words, tone of how the characters spoke, and the revelation of major plot points. In the end, I was averaging 9,295 characters an hour, a vast improvement from 6,062 characters in ATRI.

I developed a very nice pace with reading, and I’m really happy with the results!  Overall, this was such a good VN to read, because it had a nice balance between slice and life, romance, drama, comedy, and fantasy that made all the lore heavy stuff not too tedious to read. These are my favorite genres to get into, and just like and even better than ATRI, I really could not have gone wrong with my choice.

I can’t wait to pick this up again in the future when my reading has gotten better than it is now, and maybe realize that, “wow, this was so much easier than I remember!”.

I’m still in the process of picking out my next VN, but you’ll most likely hear what it is in my next monthly immersion update.

Discussion of major plot points, thoughts on the characters, more beautiful game CGs, and overall thoughts on every route in ISLAND. SPOILERS AHEAD. 

Bonus visual novel reading setup under the cut! Sorry it has major spoilers in it, too.

三千界 切那 (Prologue) - 19.14 hours

Oh boy, I did not expect to like 切那 as a protagonist, but underneath all the bad セクハラ jokes, he has a lot of depth, and is very interesting once you start piecing things together. His whole intro could have been a real hit or miss - the whole 記憶喪失 situation - but I love that even though he had enough personality to fill a ship, he is as much of a blank slate as a character could get, so both 切那 and you as the player are left to explore and question everything that’s happening in the world through his eyes.

I will be writing in route order going forward.

枢都 夏蓮 - 18.12 hours

The most slice of life-y route, but a decent intro route nonetheless. It made me realize how bad it would be to only read one route in a VN without checking out the others which is a common thing to do (because best girl blah blah), since her whole route, even though there were non-obvious hints scattered about, wouldn’t exactly give you enough information to piece together the bigger, more interesting plot of the VN. 

It was a nice practice route to get used to how the game mechanics worked. This one in particular (even though it doesn’t affect how the game progresses) made me think very hard for a moment! A decent example of how word choice can affect how things can come across.

Unfortunately, this is my least favorite route, because half the time I was thinking, “I could be watching this as a slice of life anime instead” or “where the heck is the time travelling stuff?”. Didn’t realize how tedious reading in Japanese could get until I began looking up words and realizing I was reading about laundry one minute and then DNA, chromosomes, and rocket science the next.  Also, not really a fan of tsundere types.

What I did appreciate was the realism this route brought into an otherwise fantasy plot. Remember all the セクハラ jokes I was talking about? Yep, there’s prison for people involved in them in this one! It’s very rare to see a character, the protagonist moreover, to actually go serve time for their crimes. I was very wary of all the NSFW VNs out there that throws around the sexualization of girls like it was nothing. I’m very glad this VN actually went ahead and addressed that issue somewhat. Makes the entire existence of 播守 太郎 more relevant to the plot outside the extra comedy he provides when he accosts 切那.

伽藍堂 紗羅 - 17.46 hours

One of the hardest characters to understand, because her entire route is mostly lore heavy. She’s also a bit batshit crazy which made the routes that involved her, especially the bad ends, quite shocking at times. This made her very interesting though, cause it was like she was holding the secrets to the universe even though she didn’t.

My reading really slowed down whenever she was talking, because there was a lot of information to take in. It was pure word vomit in Japanese, and I can’t say it wasn’t tedious to read. Not gonna lie, I also fell into the trap of thinking 切那 was her dad, because c’mon, even he thought so. Thank goodness he wasn’t, because that’s a big yikes moment.

Remember fellas, T-pose to assert dominance.

御原 凛音 - 12.99 hours

Her whole personality and background was super interesting, and I loved reading when she was on screen. It was hyper dramatic, and gave me Titanic level of sadness the entire time. It was also a little confusing towards the end when her personality keeps shifting, but my goodness, the voice acting for her role was amazing.

My top tier favorite scene in this entire game. I thought 紗羅 was batshit crazy, but this entire scenario with the voice acting and the freaky CG was borderline chilling. Talk about “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.

Best girl…#2. Surprisingly so.

The entire time I was reading, I kept thinking gotta get to 凛音’s route, because clearly she was made to be best girl. Like, why do I have to go through two other people’s routes if she isn’t, right? Oh boy, was I wrong…

Never Island & Re: - 20.14 hours

This is my favorite route in game hands down. You can tell because pretty much the last few days of reading was dedicated to these routes. While reading, I thought that the lore in this seemingly side story was borderline more interesting than the whole legend that was repeatedly pushed in ISLAND. This is where セツナ’s personality shines the most, too, because he has finally enough information to piece things together, even though he starts off in a 記憶喪失 situation again.

Also, best girl #1 exists in this timeline! Protect リンネ at all costs. She’s actually the most precious character in game. Every time she sings her little world saving theme song, I just cry a little.

I initially thought that the whole future plot was pointless since I was being fed a lot of lore again, and for what purpose? To go back to the past again because it actually sucks to be alive during that time, so maybe change some stuff up, essentially making the lore useless? 

The whole Re: timeline really cleared that up though and so much more, ‘cause I wasn’t expecting it to actually be the past instead. It made so much sense, too, with the whole witch burning, plague-like disease, and generally bad life people were living. 

御原 玖音’s whole personality and knowledge suddenly made a lot of sense, too, since she was OG リンネ all along. ♡ But also not and they’re all the same person, plus potential incest, because it seems like a different person in weird timelines what??? 

My goodness I really couldn’t wish for a better, well thought out ending, that just closes up all matters really well. The few final CGs was so full of hope, too, for the both(?) of them. AH, my feelings!

BONUS: Visual Novel Reading Setup

Some of you might be interested in how I was reading, AND looking up words, AND counting them all, AND mining from it too, so here you go! I’m not really a tech person, but a quick Youtube search will show you tons of tutorials on how to get a similar setup. I did a lot of trial and error in the beginning and ended up with this, and I love it!

From L-R: windowed mode of your VN, texthooking page (with clipboard inserter extension), & Yomichan (with a million J-J dictionaries, a couple of J-Es, and my go-to frequency lists).

Vital background apps: Textractor (to copy VN text to the texthooker page so you can Yomichan), ShareX (to take screenshots, OCR unhookable text, and record audio among other things I haven’t fully explored and utilized), Anki (with the AnkiConnect addon so I can mine words with a click of a button)

It’s a lot of little things combined to make the ease of reading and sentence mining from visual novels so much easier than before, most especially for beginners who need to look up a ton of words. I have never touched a visual novel prior to learning Japanese, and it is an arguably complicated way to start, but I’m in it for the long haul with this setup!

This has been a very long post, and if you read through the spoilers, and got to the end, thank you and I hope you continue reading and supporting my blog!

ISLAND Launches August 24th on Steam

ISLAND will launch on Steam this month on August 24th, Frontwing USA confirmed on social media.

ISLAND was originally released in Japan on April 28, 2016. The game’s anime adaptation is currently being simulcast on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Relevant Links:

Official Site

Steam Page

Synopsis:

Urashima is a small island, far from mainland Japan. It's a true utopia, blessed with rich natural beauty. But the island harbors a difficult past, and it's about to be erased, silently, from history.

Soot blight syndrome, an endemic disease, has brought about a rift between the island and the mainland. An offshore platform intended for marine research has long been left abandoned; five years ago, three separate incidents brought the once influential Three Families of Urashima to near ruin. Rumors about children being spirited away have become part of the local folklore, alongside another legend, one that has been repeated on the island since time immemorial...

"Let me tell you the legend of this island: it's a story of tragic love..."

The key to saving the island lies with three girls, each of whom belongs to one of the Three Families. These girls aren't able to change the fate of the island by themselves, but might they succeed with the help of the young man who's just washed ashore? Claiming that he's traveled back in time, the man immediately sets out on a lonely path, challenging the longstanding traditions of the island, and seeking to change the future. But those aren't his only goals...