Summer’s almost over.
It’s a bittersweet moment to grapple with. For me, it’s usually when I reconcile all the hopes and plans I made at the outset of the season. How was my summer? Did I get to do most of the stuff I wanted to do? What did I miss out on? Maybe next year, I say.

All throughout the month, I’m happy that I’ve been able to keep up playing Bokunatsu 2 nearly every day. It’s been a gift, playing a game that lets me check in for a bit, do my rounds, and then stops. Unlike Animal Crossing, where you can keep running around all day tending to your town, the days in Bokunatsu 2 eventually come to an end. Characters don’t have anything else to say. There’s nothing left to do. I appreciate that.
So what’s happened so far?
(Spoilers ahead for events and storylines in the game. If you’d rather experience it for yourself, feel free to ignore this. But if you’re curious, feel free to read on!)

All in all, it’s been an eventful month for Boku. From my first entry, I wasn’t able to gleam much more about who he is outside of the player avatar. The sparse moments where a bit of personality pop through are more there to remind you that he’s a kid. He intrudes and pesters (not with any ill will, mind you) because that’s just what kids do when they’re stuck in environments with lots of adults. It’s a nice bit of authenticity, the innocence and naïveté, even when you think, “Well surely you could figure this one out, Boku!”
But nope. He does his signature “pivot to the camera and head tilt” whenever there’s a major reveal. As if he’s unsure how to react and he’s looking to us for guidance. “Huh? What do you think she meant by that?” he seems to ask.

Now, I had already watched through nearly 2/3rds of Dia and Em’s playthrough of the game before starting it myself so I knew the Yoh x Yasuko, Ghost Wife, Estranged Mom, and Yoshika Undercover stories were coming. Those seem to be the major narrative beats in the game. And from what I can tell so far, the last one feels like the biggest of them all. In fact, it’s interesting to see the ways they breadcrumb it all the way through.
When you first meet Yashiko, she’s a little unclear on who she is and where she comes from, even telling something contradictory to Simon. If you talk to him enough, you get a sense that he knows something is off with Yashiko. He sees it in her eyes and often playfully teases her in the evenings about it. She has the newspapers in her room with the robbery story, there’s talk about it during mealtime one day, and Yashiko often talks about waiting for something or someone to appear (cue Boku in his confused thinking pose). It’s nice to see so much narrative design space in the game being used purposefully, building up towards something instead of merely providing flavour.

I’m still unsure how this beat is going to end or what impact these events will have in Boku’s life. It’s definitely meant to be the most exciting, action-packed event to happen on this little island in a while.
(I was talking to @cooltimesonline about it and we’re just hoping he doesn’t end up becoming a cop at the end of the game. Like… please, Boku. My son. You could do so much better.)
My favourite beat so far though is Hikari and Yasuko’s mom, Shizue, visiting. She’s a really interesting character in her own right, as a parent who set out on a career to help other kids even when she recognizes the irony that she messed up with her own and can’t reconcile things. Everything else in this game feels like YA drama, but this is something that feels comparatively adult. How do you manage the pull you feel to return to a place that’s not totally welcoming, or one that stirs up bad memories in the process? What do you do when you recognize that you’re not cut out for raising kids? Will your kids ever be able to understand you or forgive you? Should they? Her departure from the island is quiet and bittersweet, and I wonder if there was anything else I could have done to help. Or maybe that’s something even a simple Boku can’t fix.
I’ll do one last wrap-up post at the end of the month. Regardless of what happens next, more than finding a lunchbox full of gold bars, beating Takeshi’s ultimate weapon, or giving a ghost a massage, it’ll be Shizue’s visit and conflict that will stay with me long after this game (and month) is over.


