Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! is a moege visual novel that is relatively low drama, has a decent amount of comedy, and a good deal of cute moments. I would recommend this to any moege fan. It has some high points in my opinion, and unfortunately one route felt like it dragged out a bit, but overall it is a very solid read and was an enjoyable experience.

The common route does a good job of introducing all the characters and the setting while injecting some comedy. It makes it relatively easy to choose which character(s) you want to pursue first without giving any of them the short end of the stick. One big positive regarding the common route is at the end of it route selection is as simple as choosing which heroine you wish to pursue rather than choices present throughout the story. I personally really enjoy this as it feels a bit more focused on the individual routes and feels a bit less harem-ey than with choices throughout the common leading to different routes.

Systems are pretty standard for the visual novel genre. There's a large number of CGs and backgrounds in this title, which I appreciated. There's 24 about average for the genre H-scenes for your enjoyment. I will call out the OST in this which I found to be particularly great - the main ED being a particularly great song.

To avoid spoilers regarding the routes I'm going to go into just some general thoughts.

The routes are fairly well written with very little drama present outside of the true route. I did feel like Hibiki's route got the most attention and had the best backstory of them, which makes sense as she is arguably presented as the "main" heroine of the game. Nagiko's route I enjoyed quite a bit as it provided her some needed character development and showed the MC as more of a support character which was a nice change of pace. Riri's route was full of so many cute moments it was almost overwhelming. Shiori's route felt like it dragged at points and from my timing was the longest route as well, which was unfortunate. Ritsu's route was also cute and surprisingly beefy for a sub-heroine route. Kikka's (true) route was surprisingly well-written in regards to how it built off the information you had from completing the other routes before it (it's locked behind the main 4 heroine's routes), and got me emotional at multiple moments. There are some plot holes you'll have to overlook a bit, but they don't detract too much from the story, but they may bother you like they did me and it did make me downgrade my rating a bit.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Kakenuke★Forward to Our Sparking Youth! and if you're a fan of moege, I think you will too. There's nothing too far outside the norm here compared to a Yuzusoft visual novel for instance, but that doesn't reflect poorly on this title. Even if it makes it a bit vanilla, vanilla is still a pretty good flavor and one I enjoy quite a bit. So give this a shot if you're interested in moege.

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