Expressiveness is the quality that defines roleplaying games: they’re judged by how freely players can assert themselves in a reactive space. Players want to convey their personality and make choices, but while these are the obvious core concepts of the genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven to me that they’re not what makes an RPG great. Having the capacity to make decisions is certainly a necessity, but decisions only matter when players care about the outcomes. Choices surround us in every moment of our lives, but most vanish from our minds within seconds for that very reason; they’re so emotionally inconsequential as to be hardly worthy of notice. So, more fundamental than allowing for choice is providing a real adventure in which to make those choices, and defining a journey which has players encountering challenges, learning, changing, and overcoming. This is the critical component which Baldur’s Gate fails to establish, most glaringly from its narrative structure.

(Minor spoilers through act 2)
In the opening cutscene, your character has a mindflayer tadpole inserted into their head, so your call to adventure is getting it out. This is fine in itself, but the game is quick to tell you that there’s no urgency to this task, relieving you of the burden of care. Every quest you receive to accomplish this goal, across the first ~22 hours of gameplay, results in failure where your party just sorta gives up. It takes another ten hours before the main villains are established, a stale group of evil zealots of evil gods who just love being evil, pursuing an agenda which players can't feel meaningfully aligned against. The simplicity of the central narrative gives the impression it’s just supposed to be a foundation for a character-driven story, but the interpersonal aspect is similarly lacking. In what feels like a symptom of the game's long stay in early-access, your companions put their love and trust in you in act 1, before anyone’s had the chance to organically develop relationships or encounter life-changing struggles. Characters don’t have the time and space to have an arc, and you don’t get the chance to express yourself alongside them, you simply skip to the end for an immediate and vacuous payoff. There’s no journey here, you’re simply being presented with scenes from an adventure without actually going on one.

The same can be said for the mechanics, even when they’re lifted from the tabletop game, thanks to a design philosophy where every playstyle is thoroughly accommodated. This seems like a good strategy in a genre where players want to assert themselves, but the refusal to challenge players leaves unique approaches feeling irrelevant. Even with a party led by a Githyanki barbarian, with very little in the way of charisma, intelligence, or skill, there was never a time I couldn’t overcome a situation in an optimal way. I could pick whatever locks I wanted, disarm whatever traps I wanted, circumvent any barrier I wanted; the game never asked me to think ahead or prepare. I didn’t have to be ready with certain spells or proficiencies, it never demanded more than following a clear path. Even if it did, the cheap respecs mean that you’re a maximum of 400 gold away from having a team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and even if you don’t end up using that option, knowing that your choices are so impermanent is a detriment to any feeling of growth.

That’s the key here: growth. My characters leveled up, but I don't feel like they grew. I traveled, but I don’t feel like I went on a journey. I made choices, but I don’t feel like I went in new directions. After a fifty-hour playthrough, all I remember was that I chilled out, ran around some nice maps, and managed my inventory. I spent all that time relaxing well enough, but I didn’t overcome challenge, feel much, or learn anything. All I could confidently state that the game did for me is live up to its basic selling point, of being an adventure I could take at home, a journey where I go nowhere.

Beyond their obvious visual splendor, what really struck me about Boku Natsu 2’s fixed camera angles was how they create a unique relationship with time. In similar Japanese adventure games about mundane day-to-day life – your Shenmues or your Chulips – the clock is always running independent of you and this often creates situations where you simply have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the next scheduled event to happen. As top Backloggd scholars have pointed out, this can be oddly immersive in a way, as you scroll through your real-life phone or do something else around the house while you wait for the time to pass in-game. I’m not fully sold on these kinds of “time-wasting” systems but there’s certainly a lot of charm in how they represent boredom and alienation felt within the hustle and bustle of the city.

Boku No Natsuyasumi 2 is set in the rural countryside though, and as such its understanding of time is quite different from those games about city slickers. While there’s still a day/night cycle and a finite number of days before the game ends, time only advances when you move from one pre-rendered background to the next. Constructing the game this way, you still feel the pressure to spend your time wisely and traverse the world as efficiently as you can, but each screen is also its own pocket dimension where you can linger as long as you’d like. This is the real difference here: In Chulip, passive play is something forced onto you and an excuse for the player to stop paying attention to the game for a couple minutes. Sometimes you just miss a train and have nothing better to do but sit around waiting for the next one. In Boku Natsu 2 however, passive play is turned into an active choice. A conscious decision, as significant as any other, to do absolutely fucking nothing but drink in the sunset until that fireball finally goes out for good. At one point a character playing the guitar remarks that she feels like she’s been sitting in the same spot strumming the same song for 1000 years. And maybe she has been. These beautiful, fleeting moments can last forever if you’d like them to.

Like most of my favorite game narratives, Boku Natsu 2 is quite thin on actual plot and is instead a game about talking to loads of different people and slowly forming an understanding of character relationships and the world around you. And there’s a satisfyingly predictable rhythm to how it all unfolds; each character will have exactly two new things to say to you each time you see them, the many subplots of this game being fed to you a couple breadcrumbs at a time. Through it all, there’s an understanding that seeing and doing everything is completely infeasible. Minigames are too time-consuming and characters are spaced too far apart for you to realistically see half of what this game has to offer on a first playthrough. So despite the game’s large number of collectibles and sidequests, play rarely becomes something stressful or compulsive. As the in-game month of August wore on and subplots continued to pile up, I did start to feel less like a child on summer vacation and more like an errand boy for all the grown-ups around me. Though the game smartly chooses to wrap up its major character arcs a few days before the ending, which gives you a chance to decompress and play aimlessly for just a little bit longer.

Boku Natsu 2 is an unrelentingly pleasant game about nature, romance, and new life, but it never becomes too saccharine as there’s always the specter of industry, divorce, and death creeping in around the edges. The writing itself is wonderfully terse, full of frequently beautiful reflections on life and the world that feel achingly true to conversations between children and adults. Even when the story suddenly escalates during the final third and the player starts piecing together a larger picture that our 9 year old main character has no ability to process, Boku Natsu 2 always puts that 9 year old’s perspective front and center. Because at the end of the day, that perspective and innocence is why he’s able to mend the hearts and soothe the souls of everyone around him.

“Listen, doesn’t sitting on the swing make you feel like you can be a poet?”