Luke Plunkett
Hello. I am here to apologise. For years, dating back to the first time I wrote about it on the Old Site (in 2014!), I have been describing the Boku no Natsuyasumi series as variations of "relaxing", and even "chill". If you have ever played the games based on those recommendations, I would like to apologise for doing you dirty.
Sure, the games look chill. Their back-of-the-box summary certainly fits the bill. In each you play a kid on summer vacation, free to roam the countryside doing all kinds of fun kid stuff. Maybe you do some fishing, maybe you go for a swim, maybe you battle some bugs–you're a kid, you don't have a care in the world! Video games couldn't be any more relaxing!
WRONG. As I have found after finally playing one to completion instead of just wildly dabbling, this is a series defined by tension. No matter what you want to do, how leisurely your pursuits may appear, you are never really free to "chill" in Boku no Natsuyasumi. You are simply performing tasks inside the brief window between one school year and the next, and all the while the latter is hurtling toward you as grimly and inevitably as Terminus in Majora's Mask.
There is no Boku no Natsuyasumi without a calendar, and the way you're methodically marched through it, one pastime to the next, one day at a time. It doesn't matter how hard you relax, or even what you do with the time given to you, because once you arrive at your summer home and the game begins, you've got 30 days. After that, it's all over.
This broad structure leads, as Tim has covered so well in his sprawling series on the game, to an urge to optimise your vacation. When the first game provides multiple endings based on the choices you make, and some activities open up only if you've performed certain actions at certain times, the stage is set for players to try to earn the "best" version of a holiday, one that creates the most lasting and consequential memories possible.
That's not really a holiday, is it? Or even relaxing. It's just more work. You get up in the morning, you get dressed, do some stuff on a schedule, get rewards for it then go to bed. Rise and shine, rinse and repeat, do it all over again. Please note I'm not criticising the games here; this is the most relatable thing about them! We all know as we get older that a weekend isn't really a full weekend, and a vacation isn't really a whole vacation, because for every day of recreation there's an equal and opposite reaction: a day of dread.
A weekend isn't 2.5 days of fun. It's a Friday night, a whole day on Saturday to do stuff then a whole other day of laundry, washing dishes, recovering from Saturday and just generally wincing at the realisation that you're closer to going back to work than you are to Friday night. Same goes for vacations, and that's how I end up playing Boku no Natsuyasumi, and I hate it.
In the spirit of Boku no Natsuyasumi's childhood reminiscence, I remember being a kid and feeling the same way about summer holidays. The first week or two would pass in a blur of delirium, freedom and escape, but as the heat dragged on and the days on the calendar whirred by, things would take on a different shape. Parties and beach trips gave way to trips to buy new school shoes, and whenever a holiday season passed its midway point I'd start to feel the weight of the upcoming school year resting a little heavier on my shoulders each day.
Maybe if Boku no Natsuyasumi were some sprawling sandbox, one taking place in a land free of day or date, it'd feel different. But it very much does take note of day and date, that's the whole point of the series. Your vacation is for a strictly limited time, so make the most of it!
I'll allow that some of this dread might be down to me, someone who can only enjoy a vacation for a certain amount of time before the threat of future work outmuscles my enjoyment of the present. But I also think much of it is intentional, for both game design and cultural reasons, and that as a result a series renowned as being "chill" actually has one of the most foreboding and inescapable boss fights of all time: going back to school.
