^{Illustration by Ham | indiedynamo.artstation.com}

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is a well-regarded Playstation 2 game that finally got an English translation last November. Well, at least unofficially, thanks to the efforts of Hilltop & company.

In the game, you play as Boku, a 9 year-old city boy who’s been dropped off with his relatives in the countryside while his parents prepare for their new baby to be born. Over the whole month of August, your goal is… well, to have a nice summer. Talk to people, catch bugs and fish, explore. You know, kid stuff. With gorgeous hand-painted backgrounds and fixed camera angles, time passes whenever you cross the boundary between one screen and the next. As the month progresses, you learn more about the people around you in snippets of conversation, with some really touching emotional beats. Amazing, right?

So when Hilltop proposed playing along throughout the month of August, one day at a time, (and with a little encouragement from a friend who was playing along too) I thought, yeah. That sounds like the perfect way to experience this game.

Below you’ll find my writings and thoughts on the game as I was playing it, broken into six different parts that were written as the month progressed. Playing it at that daily pace was a real blessing, and the more I had time to sit with it and think about it, the more my appreciation for Bokunatsu 2 deepened. That pace may not be for everyone, but if you can play it that way, I highly recommend you do.

Ready to begin? Itadakimasu!

Huge thanks to everyone who was keeping up with my Bokunatsu 2 posts last month (I see you and I appreciate you). Here you can find them all collected into a single post, as well as read the super special final SIXTH entry collecting my overall thoughts on the game.

And I guess this is also to say hey, there's an RSS feed on my site too, so if you want to keep up with my writing that's the way to do it!