Kindred Spirits on the Roof: Full Chorus Review – A Master Plan for a Yuritopia

Liar-soft’s indie visual novel Kindred Spirits on the Roof, a title initially released in English via Mangagamer on Steam in 2016, recently got an upgrade with the DLC content Full Chorus. This DLC adds full Japanese voice-acting, new CGs, voice actor commentary, and drama CDs. This sounds like a substantial amount of content and having not played the original, I was very interested in trying out the game because, hey, I like trying out visual novels so it was kind of a no-brainer.

https://youtu.be/K5_p1CBGO04

Kindred Spirits on the Roof is about a couple of lesbian ghosts who not so subtly blackmail our high school protagonist Toomi Yuna into playing matchmaker at her all-girls school because, as a couple, they don’t know…how to take the next step in their relationship? The premise is extremely silly and comes off as an obvious excuse plot.

However, taking that at face value will do the game a disservice as the title manages to play the intro for a lot of laughs setting an extremely fun and lighthearted tone for the for the story. The plot itself is actually sweet sugar-coated fun as Toomi engages in all sorts of comedic shenanigans with the support of her friends and the ghosts, to pair up six groups of girls.

The game’s premise is actually uniquely laid out which caught my interest almost immediately. The game takes place over eight months in which players will access each story segment through Toomi’s planner. The first set of events each month are from her perspective as she engages in her role as yuri cupid, trying to ascertain which girls are potentially into each other and figuring out, with the ghost couple’s help, how she can help them make the first step. Then once you’ve figured out and enacted your master plan, you then gain the ability to watch the events from the perspective of one of girls Toomi is playing cupid for.

This new perspective is a whole lot of fun and shows off some real work that was put into the game with later months having events that include multiple groups of characters interacting with each other at once as well as multiple viewpoints. These scenes are all carefully laid out to keep characters consistent, which becomes an impressive feat when your planner starts to fill up with more and more scenes.

The pacing does feel a bit odd at times seemingly because the narrative takes place over a long period of time but has a monster of the week type formula. More specifically, a lesbian couple of the month type formula. However, that isn’t even close to a big deal in the long run as the game clocks in at around 5-6 hours and it’s pretty fun the whole way through. It takes a significant portion of the character’s months to establish a solid personality aside from a couple of tropes, which does actually make sense as you first spend the month watching through the perspective of an outsider. However, the newly added voice acting does a lot to help speed up the process and the additional audio track of voices do a lot for the immersion the game.

On the visual side of this VN, the art is amazing. The colors are light and often pastel-like, making things look extremely soft and adorable. There are quite a lot of CGs as well, which are all extremely well-drawn and very cute, including the H-scenes. Once you’ve cleared the game you’ll also unlock even more scenes that have interactions between characters who didn’t get very much spotlight during the main story and are carefully slotted between previous events. While these extras don’t generally have more CGs to go along with them, that’s fine since they feel like bonuses I unlocked, which made it feel like a nice bit of extra. They’re also other tidbits, like a small dessert after a hearty dinner as well as subtitled drama CDs you can listen to which expands on characters’ personalities with stories that couldn’t even possibly happen in the main story, a very welcome addition for more sweet sweet fun.

Kindred Spirits on the Roof: Full Chorus is an extremely cute yuri title with a solid cast, story, and an interestingly unique take on progression for a visual novel. With its solid art direction and ridiculously cute characters, I was sold even throughout the slow moments of the game. If any of those things grab your attention, I’d say it’s absolutely worth picking up the game and its DLC.