If My Heart Had Wings is the Moby Dick of visual novels.
At least that's the thought that constantly sprung to my mind as I was reading it. I'll explain why later down the road. For now let's take a look at the basic premise of the story.
You are Aoi, an average.. ah fuck it, you know the drill already. He moves back to his home town after a long absence and he is tasked by his mother to be the caretaker of the dormitory that she owns. Naturally it's an all-girls dorm. Who could have possibly seen this coming?
While having a walk outside he meets a wheel-chair bound girl, named Kotori, who is having problems with one of her tires and he helps her fix it. As they look up towards the sky they see a glider floating above them. Later, Aoi gets to meet the girl who piloted the glider, a much older upperclassman, named Amane, sole member of the Soaring Club, who kept intentionally failing year after year in order to be able to build her glider and reach an extremely rare meteorological phenomenon called morning glory. Naturally Aoi also has a childhood friend that he can reconnect with if he so desires. There's also not one, but two loli characters that pop up later in the story. And that's the gist of the main cast.
The entire plot revolves around the band trying to achieve their goal of putting together a beat up glider in order to reach an elusive cloud formation called Morning Glory, which only appears once very 25 years or so. And here is one of the main similarities that I found to Moby Dick: not only are the characters fixated on a seemingly unreachable goal, but the novel also features long segments of endless minutiae related to gliders. By the end of it the reader will have learned quite a bit about them. Now personally I didn't have an interest in gliders, and I can't say I have become a fan of them overnight either, but the writing is tight enough that I never got bored by it, not even during the many moments of never ending technical jargon.
In fact the writing in the visual novel is one of its main highlights. It is above average when it comes to moeges. The novel manages to pull you into its world and to empathize with its characters and their experiences. When they were down I was also sad. When they achieved a victory I was there cheering with them. I wanted to see these characters overcome adversity and succeed in their goal: to build a glider capable of flying up above the clouds.
But let's be real here. You're not here because you interested in gliders. You're here for the waifus. Luckily this game has you covered.
The first girl, and arguably the main star of the show, is Kotori. Whom I absolutely despised at first. Rarely had I met a more annoying character than her. "Bitch" could be the only way to describe her. She did everything in her power to make everyone around her hate her. However slowly but surely, she starts to open up, and you get to see her transform, with the help of the MC and the other girls, back to the person she used to be before her accident. See, the author didn't wax all politically correct with her disability, and it didn't make it as though it didn't even exist (see all the hack woke writers in the West). There is no way in hell that such a disability would not have a negative impact on one's life, both physically and psychologically. But with the help of those around her, she manages to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and find the joy of living again. Hers is a very powerful story which moved me deeply. What started as my most hated character, soon became my absolute favorite, and one of the best VN heroines out there. That's what I call good writing and character development! Her romance is also the most developed and believable out of all; I did her route first and afterwards the other girls, (save with the possible exception of Amane) just couldn't hold a candle to her. I kept wishing I was back on her route. Kotori is best girl and she has the best route, hands down. I'd love to see an anime version of this VN featuring her route, if only to see Twatter have a mental breakdown.
The second girl is Ageha, your childhood friend. She was also a great character.... in every route that wasn't hers. Yes, my friends, Ageha's route is the worst out of all of them. The problem, as far as I understand, is that this novel had like two authors. One of them wrote Kotori's and Amane's, and the other wrote Ageha's and the twins' routes. There is a drastic shift in quality especially when going from Kotori to Ageha. Her route basically involves you two moving from friends to lovers, as is usually the case with this archetype, but the problem is that the writer made Ageha into a schizo bitch who doesn't know what she wants. It is a jumbled, poorly written mess, that made me put the novel on hiatus for several months. It gets a bit better towards the end when she finally "becomes honest with her feelings" or some bullshit like that, but for the most part it's just a drag to read. The novel also teased her sister, Hotaru, quite a lot during her route, a much better potential love interest in my book. I would have much preferred to romance her instead of Ageha.
As I mentioned earlier this VN boasts not one, but two lolis; twins of course. They come from a rich family of exceptional geniuses, and while Yoru has inherited all the traits that is expected from such a lineage, Asa on the other hand is a mediocre individual. Whereas Yoru is good at everything right from the beginning, Asa struggles just to become average. I will say that the themes that their routes explore a interesting on the surface. It asks questions like "how can one find a place to fit in the world when one's a genius?", "how can one find a place in a family when you're the odd one out?", and "who is truly the stronger? someone who is naturally gifted, or someone who has to fight tooth and nail for their survival in life?". Sadly the novel does a poor job of answering these... The twins routes aren't BAD, they're just kinda average. In a more mediocre moege, they would have probably been one of the best though. One thing to note is their odd structure. You have to do Asa's route first, which is very short and feels like a sort of prologue for Yoru's route. Except then during Yoru's route you don't romance just Yoru, but you get to romance her together with Asa as a sort of bonus. I guess this is the VN's way of offering threesome scenes...
And last but not least Amane, who is the second best girl just after Kotori. If the Morning Glory is Moby Dick, Amane is Captain Ahab. I am exaggerating a bit of course; she isn't a yandere :^) , however, at the end of the day, she is the character around whose goal revolves the entire plot. You find out about a friend of hers named Isuka who introduced her to the Soaring Club. They become best friends and together they work on the glider in order to reach the Morning Glory. One day however, Isuka mysteriously disappears, and Amane is left alone inside the garage, obsessing about their dream and slavishly working day in and day out to make it through. Amane is an airhead genius. She is a very beautiful and very intelligent girl, however when it comes to common sense things she is completely clueless. The VN likes uses this character trait of hers to great effect for comedic purposes, especially when it comes to ecchi stuff :^) . It's great to see her turn into such a lewd woman during the romance story. Her route explores the themes of growing up, and of moving on and accepting the changes that come with life. Amane is a great waifu and her route is to be considered the true route.
The side characters are also p. decent. They're all quite tropey, but they're well written over all, and they each server a purpose in the story. Some play more of a role in one route than in others. There is also a sort of "villain", if you could call him that, which does a good job of hating him, however during Amane's route you do get to see his side of the story, which is another reason why I recommend doing her route last.
There is a fan disc called Flight Diary which lets you romance three other girls: Ageha's imouto Hotaru, a very lewd senpai from the dorm named Kanako, and I believe the school prez named Akari. I haven't read the fan disc so I can't comment any further.
Speaking of which, you may have noticed I haven't talked a lot about the MC. This is because there isn't much to say about him. He is quite generic, but in his defense, he is less of a dork than most of these MC's. One of my complaints though, is that the writing is very inconsistent when it comes to his openness to sexual acts, depending on the route you're on. For example during Amane's he gets flustered quite easily, whereas during the twins' he drinks their piss like it's tap water... Speaking of which...
There's about 3-4 H scenes per girl and come into play late into the story. While most of them are vanilla, however during the twins routes it jumps the shark and introduces some extreme fetishes such as piss drinking. WTF I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS WHEN I BOUGHT A MOE GAME! There were also no tags for this either here or on vndb. I wish games here were better tagged. Anyway it wasn't that bad I guess, still a heads up would have been good to have. The scenes are also quite lengthy, each taking up about half an hour or so on a fast-ish reading speed. The CGs also have quite a lot of variants to them, which is always nice to have. Sadly they are all censored. Fuck you, MoeNovel.
Now when it comes to the audio-visuals this is yet another aspect where this VN really shines. The artwork is stunning, be it sprites, backgrounds or CGs. They are all beautifully drawn and vividly colored which does a lot to pull the reader in. One small nitpick is that there are these scenes where they use a 3D model for a glider instead of a drawing which looks really off. I've been reading Under One Wing recently and seeing those beautifully drawn airplanes makes the glider from IMHHW look like some cheapo plastic crap.
The VA is great, as to be expected of a VN of this calibre. The music is also decent, with a couple of tracks which do stand out (Morning Glory being my favorite), but at the end of the day, when it comes to music, White Album 2 this is not.
One last thing to mention before I wrap up the whole thing is the interface. Simply put is one of the best that I have ever seen in a visual novel. Not only can you customize everything from text speed, window transparency and so on, but it also features mouse gestures as well as the ability do auto hide the cursor after a few seconds! Why this isn't a standard feature in every VN is beyond me.
That's yet again another long ass review. I swear I don't intend them to wind up this long but this is what always happens :^) . I probably had some more things to say but I think this is enough.
I'd rank both the girls and their routes as following: Kotori > Amane > Yoru > Asa > Ageha
My recommended reading order would be: Kotori -> Ageha -> Asa -> Yoru -> Amane, however if you are pressed for time then do Kotori first and then jump to Amane. You have to finish Kotori's first before you can do Amane's.
It was very hard for me to rate this novel. On the one hand Kotori and Amane are amazing characters and their routes are fantastic, on the other hand the others aren't that memorable, and Ageha's really drags this whole thing down. In the end I'll personally rate this at 4 stars, which should round the general score here to 4,5 which is the perfect rating for this VN. Not a masterpiece, but still a worthy read for those who want a high school romance story with a slight twist to it.
Total play time: 63 hours at a decently fast pace.
