![]() Sometimes, you can visit particular side characters during these moments and see optional story scenes involving them. At specific points, you’re given control of Miho and have limited time to traverse various areas of Wellington. You scroll through lines of text and dialogue until you reach a decision point that can impact future story routes. Given that Please Be Happy is a more-or-less traditional VN, the setup is familiar to those used to the genre. Indeed, the amount of content in the game is impressive! Each route clocks in at around fifteen or so hours. You may want to utilize those features if you’re going for multiple playthroughs, as this is a reasonably long VN. It also allows for multiple saves and saving at any time. There’s no actual story map to speak of in Please Be Happy, though the game has an autoplay feature to get through already-seen text quicker. Much care and polish went into the presentation of Please Be Happy, and it shows! The UI is simple yet charming, utilizing comic-style bubbles to indicate dialogue and plain text appearing below the characters for descriptive narrative. I love the little music notes at the top of the screen whenever a specific theme plays as a nice visual cue to pay attention to the soundtrack’s tone. ![]() The game’s near-constant voice acting is phenomenal, helping to carry emotional scenes further, and the soundtrack is similarly dynamic. Wellington feels lush and alive, populated by equally vivid characters. Please Be Happy is gorgeous, with stellar character designs and amazing CG scenes during essential story points. The VN makes for a poignantly memorable story of growth buoyed by solid friendships, two of which can potentially evolve into lifelong romances. The plot has its share of sadness and hardships as those are just parts of life, but Miho comes to understand over time in Wellington that holding close to those moments along with the more positive ones is vitally important. Seeing her grow throughout the VN through her developing rapport with the vampire librarian Juliet and the human barista-and-writer Aspen, and eventually even other characters in the cast, is a heartfelt treat. Please Be Happy is a wonderfully written tale about Miho learning to live for her own sake and how to love herself. Miho embarks on a journey of love and self-acceptance. The love stories that can develop between Miho, Aspen, and Juliet later on are also treated as any romance tale should be, and I appreciate the care placed into conveying them. It’s an open and inviting world for all who wish to participate, and I grew to love the accepting undertone that permeates the entire narrative. No one bats an eye at the strange magic that causes someone to forget Miho after only a day or the fact that she and Juliet have lived for centuries. Please Be Happy compellingly mixes the fantastical with the everyday in a way similar to the game Coffee Talk or the anime/manga series Someday’s Dreamers. These creatures are known collectively as Fabled in the game’s setting. The VN’s Wellington is a truly magical place in many respects, similar to our own, save that creatures such as fox spirits, vampires, swan hybrids, and dryads live side by side with regular, run-of-the-mill humans. Please Be Happy is a romantic-tinged visual novel with a magical slice-of-life plotline. Can Miho accept their extended friendship and find a way to live for herself truly? Can she find more waiting for her than she ever thought possible in Wellington? When the gumiho arrives in Wellington, New Zealand, and calls herself Miho, her quest hits an unexpected roadblock: two women who show her kindness and can somehow remember who she is. However, her solitary journey is a harsh struggle of survival as people constantly forget her and lonely decades bleed into one another. The fox spirit travels all over the globe, determined to find that benevolent person again. It serves as the basis for her transformation into a gumiho: a nine-tailed mythical fox spirit who takes on a more human or fox-like appearance at will. Though their time together is all too brief, the human’s warmth leaves a lasting impression on the woodland creature. In Please Be Happy ‘s historical Korea, an understandably wary fox living in a forest has a series of unexpected encounters with a kindly human stranger.
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