Fishing for the Moon by the Night Sea Review

Fishing for the Moon by the Night Sea is the tenth entry in the Towelket series, released on May 22, 2012.

The story begins with Mocha, our protagonist, whose gender we can choose at the start of the game. In the middle of a stormy sea, they are rescued by a certain mermaid and taken in by an innkeeper named Miss Green Tea and her daughters. Meanwhile, a local fisherman named Moochasu rescues a mysterious fairy who decides to take him to another world as a reward for his good deed.

If you've been keeping up with the games, some parts of this story might sound a little familiar. At first glance, this game might seem like a remake or reimagining of the creator's previous work, Towelket 4 Ocean. And although it shares some of the characters and even certain plot points, Night Sea is very much its own thing. This is most evident in the game's method of storytelling. Instead of focusing on exploration like Towelket 4, Night Sea is more of a dating simulator than anything else.

Similar to the previous entry, Laughing Warawau, Night Sea's story is not very straightforward. In order to uncover all that this story has to offer, the player is encouraged to go through each route to really see the full picture. This approach to storytelling is something that is completely unique to this game, and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort that went into making it work. The only other game that really tried anything close to this was Towelket Fury, which allowed you to choose between two girls at the beginning of the game. But despite the choice, the paths were almost identical, except for some slightly different dialogue. Night Sea, on the other hand, has a total of 11 routes, each with unique characters and events.

Despite being created in RPGmaker, Night Sea is more like a visual novel than anything else. Combat is virtually non-existent except to advance the story, so you'll spend most of your time walking from place to place to meet the character of your choice and choosing from dialogue options. The choices in this game aren't as consequential as other more traditional visual novels, often just giving you an alternate response from the character you're talking to or very obvious route pickers. However, it is possible to lock yourself out of certain routes based on a choice you made much earlier in the game.

The story itself is rather intriguing, and while it borrows some of its concepts from Towelket 4, it manages to take those ideas and create something completely new and unique. Again, it's really hard to talk about it without spoiling parts of it, but the execution is sufficient enough. By the time you finish all the routes, you should have a good understanding of what's really going on. While there are some conclusions you may have to draw on your own, there's a lot more conclusive information given here than in something like Laughing Warawau, so if the vagueness in that game wasn't really to your taste, you might have a better time with Night Sea.

Personally though, my feelings towards this game are a little more mixed. While I enjoyed the story itself, the whole Dating Sim aspect left something to be desired. Getting to know the story and world better through the different paths you can take is a very neat idea, but I can't help but feel that this system wasn't used to its fullest potential.

I went into this game expecting that each one would give you a new piece of information that you could later put together and sort of put the whole story together like a puzzle. But that ended up not really being the case. While some routes contribute to the overall lore of the game, others consist mostly of just hanging out with the girl of your choice, skipping through the repetitive plot-relevant scenes, and getting the standard ending. For a short time, I couldn't help but wonder if this was the intention, to make the player do every single route. But since there's no real way to tell which character route might provide some new information, I guess it was just the expectation to go through all of them.

That's not to say that some routes aren't worth doing if they don't add anything to the story. They're entertaining enough on their own, and they all have their own little storylines going on. But admittedly, the quality varies from route to route. And this leads to my other problem with the Dating Sim aspect of this game. The characters available to date are just... not very interesting. Funny? Sure. But for the most part, I just couldn't get attached to any of them. They are objectively very static characters. They all have their specific gag, and that pretty much makes up their entire personality. And while there is some conflict within their own storylines, it very rarely leads to any development.

To be clear, I don't think the characters in this game are bad. In fact, most of them are similar to their counterparts from previous games, but when you take away the active plot and just go through the motions of their everyday lives, what you have left are very simple characters that are fun to watch, but I didn't really feel the attachment that this game probably wanted me to have by the end of their route.

But to be fair, not every single character in the game is like that. In fact, there are a lot of characters in this game that I really like. It even introduces one of my favorite portrayals of a certain antagonist group. It's just that the characters I really liked were either cursed with much shorter routes or no route at all. And for what it's worth, there were only two routes that I actually thought were bad. The reason being they just felt like they existed for the sake of having more options, without much thought being put into the content of the route itself.

And of course a lot of this is just me. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who will find hanging out with the girl of their choice intriguing enough on its own. But I personally wanted a little more than that, and it's very hard to pretend that it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the game.

For what it is, I think this method of storytelling works just fine for this game. It’s not confusing or anything and as I said, by the time you complete every route you’ll likely have a good understanding of everything that’s going on. However I just think it could have been done a lot better and that the story this game is trying to tell deserves as much. Because the parts of the story that actively move the plot along are genuinely compelling. There's so much this setting has to offer and it really feels "alive" in a sense. While I was satisified with what I knew by the end of the story, I felt myself still wanting to know more, wanting to see more. Not because the information that was given to me was insufficent, but because I felt a certain attachment to the setting itself.

Fishing for the Moon by the Night Sea is a game that is clearly full of ambition and I think it accomplishes what it set out to do quite well, despite some of my issues with it. Maybe it didn't live up to its fullest potential and probably could have been a lot better with some extra thought put into it, but it still manages to convey what it wants to convey and it's entertaining as well. It's no surprise that this game is also quite popular within the Towelket community. I think most fans of Towelket will find something to appreciate in this game, and I think it's accessible enough to easily recommend to those who might enjoy indie Visual Novels in general.

I rate this game 3.5/5 Towels