While Kanon and the previous Key entries were more focused on the romance aspect of things first, Air takes things in a bit of a different direction. Intrinsically, it's still a romance: there are various routes for various girls, there were sex scenes on release, etc. But Air has the unique feature of having "Summer" and "Air," which are both unrelated to romancing a specific girl, but instead focusing on the plot/characterization. It's here where I see Air at its most interesting, when it leaves the romance to the wayside. But even then, it trips up and falls many, many times.
Misuzu
Common and Misuzu really set my expectations high for the game overall. Retrospectively, I should probably have toned them down a bit, but I was still on the Kanon high. It seemed that they had learned from Kanon greatly and introduced new elements, like humor. Okay, that's mean, but I cannot think of a single moment before this where I genuinely gave a hearty laugh. The comedy routine between the three characters and the gags are all hilarious in a way I don't think the company has tried before. Hisaya's games always opted for a more melancholic feel, where the humor was relatively light and amounted to chuckles at most. It fit the tone of the games it was for, but it almost felt like they were playing it safe. Air swaps between the two states without it ever feeling jarring, or without ruining the vibe of the game. This is in part due to the soundtrack, which from Kanon has far improved. While Kanon's soundtrack worked, it also felt too safe. Only a couple tracks were bombastic in terms of mood, most of them playing to the same school stuff we're used to. Air's leans itself into the setting more, providing a wide variety of mood tracks while still having some general ones.
But when Misuzu's route steps into its plot, it's clearly not going to go anywhere. It's quick and it ends, but it feels more like setup toward a bigger mystery rather than anything grand. It's far from self-contained, which wouldn't be a problem if the latter developments didn't make me feel so bitter. It would be an understatement to say that Misuzu's route is undermined by the others, not necessarily by their quality, but by their length, and my own boredom. 6.5/10
Kano
I have no words. Misuzu's route gave me a lot of good will moving forward, but Kano's squandered it. It has none of the comedic beats that the original trio have, instead opting for more safe approaches to comedy that don't really work and end up being too repetitive. Not only that, but the dynamics are also far from fresh, and end up getting stale quickly. The route itself, too, gets stale quickly. It does nothing new from any angle, going for an extremely traditional anime romance with no depth or flavor. It comes and goes only to waste your time. The only plus I can see to Kano's route is that it was so short I could easily forget it as I played more of the game. 3/10
Tohno
Actual abyss fiction like you've never seen, I can't believe this fucking exists. Can we just talk about this real quick? How the fuck did someone sit down and write this? Most of the fucking route is spamming through Tohno's ellipses, and not only that it's just the same boring ass slice of life scenes repeated over and over and over again. And then when it feels like it's ending, it ends at least four different times not including the, you know, real two endings. Both of which are just kind of there, and make me question why they didn't end it at any of those earlier points, since it wouldn't have made a difference. Like, an AI could have written better than this.
This route made me question my entire scoring system and all the scores I've given thus far. Hell, this makes Mizuka's route from One look good in comparison. A 1/10 for that is way too harsh. Lucid9 too is nowhere near this level of boring and offensive. The content itself isn't offensive, but I do feel the energy of a condescending writer behind the text laughing as I click away at his absolute dogshit mess. Actually, it isn't one writer, I'm pretty sure it's three of them. I'm giving this a 0. Fuck it, it deserves it, I don't know how it's not even quantifiable. There should be a public PSA on every download of this game to CTRL skip everything Tohno-related for the sake of entropy. You could burn many tonnes of carbon and it would not measure up to the damage Tohno has caused to the human race. I'm not even going to try to pretend I read all of it. Toward the end I was just clicking away like a mindless robot. 0/10
Summer
Finally, something decent. It's genuinely impressive how this game can have two separate games within it and still work. That being said, the direct connections are still relatively slim. It's more narrative, and I think it works. But even then, while Summer could have just been used for the themes, they really tried to sell us on the characters. And it works. I mean, I prefer this cast over the original in some cases. The comedy is similarly entertaining, but the plot moves along with it. It doesn't have a clear bound of separation, making the experience seamless and flowing. I won't lie, the previous two routes were primers for this, but that shouldn't take away from the quality present here. They drew up brand new CGs and made pieces exclusively for this section. It's clear that they wanted to make Summer special, and they did. That isn't to say Summer does anything new. It blends the plot, slice of life, and romance well, but that's more so a blown expectation rather than anything revolutionary. In all, Summer is still a common romp, if not helped by the aesthetic, art, and setting.
If there's one mistake I think Summer does make is not being longer. It's fine when considering that it's a part of a larger game, but that larger game doesn't really connect with Summer in a way that's satisfying. That's a mistake committed in the last route of the game more than anything, and regardless this seems to have been an issue fixed in the Vita and Switch releases of the game, where they added an extra route focusing exclusively on the Summer characters. I trust that you believe me when I say that I was going to play the Switch version, but that version mixes the two existing translations, the first of which is not very good. Thus, I stayed away from it and played the PC version everyone knows. I'll play it sometime in the future, maybe soon if I find the time. 7.5/10
Air
Air is... divisive. I went into it with high expectations, especially from hearing the opinions of others and from the quality of Summer, but I was thoroughly and fully disappointed. I seriously don't understand the hype for this. Even when it starts to get going, it stops completely and repeats the same mistakes the side heroine routes made. It throws a bunch of repetitive slice of life at you that doesn't further any sort of point, serve any sort of purpose. The relationships are deepened, sure, but it reaches a plateau. At some point you aren't making strides toward better chemistry and development, but only filling time and wasting the readers’. And it's a shame, too. Air has an amazing foundation, and they tried to touch on topics that I would have never expected from early 2000s visual novels, let alone Key. But that's all it was, an attempt. The topics aren't covered and only given the most passing glance.
Worse of all, though, is the ending. It just...ends. Much too unceremoniously, with just implications left. It's bittersweet, which is great, but far from satisfying. It might seem like I'm seetheposting here, but I felt like something was missing, some kind of key element. An ending like this may be beautiful to some, but it doesn't feel complete in the way most open endings do. It doesn't leave me wanting more. I mean, the implications are clear, and the game is sort of thematically, narratively finished. It's that the ending doesn't add to the experience. With open endings, the goal is to make the reader think about them in the context of the narrative long after they've finished. But with Air, the ending gives me nothing to think about, despite being as open as it is. Reflecting with the ending in mind, I find no deeper meaning, no grand solution. It's too expected even though I didn't expect it. 6/10
Really, I think Air, as the name of the route and the game coincide, represent each other. They both have strong beginnings, middle sections that are absolutely awful, braindead boring abyss fiction and any other insult for time wasting you can think of, and endings that work but leave nothing to the mind. It's Key trying to keep itself alive after its main writer had left the company and left the side writer all on his lonesome. And while that side writer may have been able to write something competent on his own if they had given him just a bit more time, it had already been much too long. Maeda took years from Kanon to write Air, and it still felt rushed. He improved from his past ventures, but that wasn't enough. They weren't confident in their product, so they dumped writers onto the project, crunching them, hoping to live up to their first success. Most of them seemed like they were shooting an entirely different target than intended (while still missing that other target) but at least one was a dead-on hit. It was overall still decent by their own standards, but nowhere near the product it could have been, only living as a shell of its potential. Personally, this indecisive feeling from Air is what breaks it for me. It brings me back to the days of Moon. and One, where they didn't have a foot to stand on, instead of continuing where they left off from Kanon. But at least some things never change, like Maeda disappointing while another writer shines.
