Rewrite is a Japanese visual novel developed by Key, a brand of Visual Arts. It was released on June 24, 2011, for Windows PCs and is rated for all ages. Rewrite is Key's ninth game, following other titles such as Kanon, Air, and Clannad. Key released a fan disc expanding on the game's story titled Rewrite Harvest festa! on July 27, 2012, for Windows. Rewrite was ported to the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, while Harvest festa! was ported to the PlayStation Vita. An English version of Rewrite for Windows was released by Sekai Project in 2021; they will also release Harvest festa! in English. The story follows the life of Kotarou Tennouji, a high school student with superhuman abilities who investigates supernatural mysteries with five girls from his school in the fictional city of Kazamatsuri. This ultimately leads him into the middle of a conflict between familiar summoners and superhumans with the fate of the world at stake.
The gameplay in Rewrite follows an interactive branching plot line with multiple scenarios, and focuses on the player character gaining the favor of the six female main characters. There are additional minigames and quests added into the gameplay, which are necessary to complete the game. The game ranked as the best-selling PC game sold in Japan for the time of its release, and charted in the national top 50 twice more afterwards. There have been five manga adaptations based on Rewrite published by ASCII Media Works and Ichijinsha. Comic anthologies, light novels and an art book were also published, as were several music albums. A 24-episode anime television series adaptation, produced by Eight Bit and directed by Motoki Tanaka, aired between July 2016 and March 2017.
Gameplay
Rewrite is a romance visual novel in which the player assumes the role of Kotarou Tennouji. Much of its gameplay is spent on reading the story's narrative and dialogue. The text in the game is accompanied by character sprites, which represent who Kotarou is talking to, over background art. Throughout the game, the player encounters CG artwork at certain points in the story, which take the place of the background art and character sprites. When the game is completed at least once, a gallery of the viewed CGs and played background music becomes available on the game's title screen. Rewrite follows a branching plot line with multiple endings, and depending on the decisions that the player makes during the game, the plot will progress in a specific direction.
There are eight main plot lines that the player will have the chance to experience, three which are initially available and five more which can later become available. Throughout gameplay, the player is given multiple options to choose from, and text progression pauses at these points until a choice is made. Some decisions can lead the game to end prematurely, which offer an alternative ending to the plot. To view all plot lines in their entirety, the player will have to replay the game multiple times and choose different choices to further the plot to an alternate direction. When first playing the game, the scenarios for the heroines Kotori, Chihaya and Lucia are available. To access Sizuru's scenario, Kotori's must be completed first. Similarly, to access Akane's scenario, Chihaya's must be done first. After the plot lines for these five heroines have been completed, an additional scenario called Moon is made available. Upon the completion of the Moon route, another scenario called Terra is made available, which serves as the true conclusion to the story; both Moon and Terra revolve around the heroine, Kagari.
Throughout gameplay, the player encounters minigames accessed through an in-game GPS system called Mappie, which is rendered as a point and click map. In most cases, the player can choose to automatically skip accessing Mappie, but sometimes the player is required to play through the minigame to move on to the next event. When accessing Mappie, the player meets various people who become Kotarou's friends, and certain people and items encountered will lead the player to do a quest. The names of the friends and the completed quests are recorded in the Memory function, which serves as an encyclopedia of events. If the player completes all 31 quests, a bonus scenario called is made available. Oppai is a branch off Akane's scenario and serves as a comedic plot line not important to the overall story.
The gear and dial in the bottom left of the game screen is related to the Kotarou's Rewrite ability. The dial moves forward whenever this ability is used, and the outcome of certain scenes is determined by how much the dial has moved. Throughout most of the game, the text is presented in a dialog box on the lower portion of the game screen, but this is changed for the Terra scenario, where the text is overlaid across the entire screen.
In Rewrite Harvest festa!, there are six separate scenarios, one for each heroine. The player is initially given the choice to play the scenarios for Kotori, Chihaya and Lucia from a character selection screen. Once these three scenarios are completed, the routes for Sizuru and Akane become available, and after those two are completed, Kagari's scenario is made available. After the completion of Kagari's scenario, a dungeon exploration role-playing minigame called Rewrite Quest becomes available.
Plot Setting The main part of Rewrites story takes place in the fictional city of Kazamatsuri, Japan, where treeplanting and afforestation have caused the city to become overgrown with trees and vegetation. The protagonist Kotarou Tennouji and his friends in the occult research society attend a high school in Kazamatsuri, in addition to spending time together in the society's clubroom. Outside of the school, frequented locations include the forest around Kazamatsuri and Kotarou's house. Throughout the story, Kotarou encounters an alternate dimension of Kazamatsuri where everything is silent and the sky is gray. There are many entrances to this dimension, a secret world developed by the organisation Gaia, throughout the city. There, a sustainable environment exists to support life. When on the Moon, a hill where daisies grow is prominently shown amid a ruined Kazamatsuri where the night is eternal. This hill appears again later on Earth in the forest of Kazamatsuri.
Kazamatsuri is the setting for a secret war being waged by two main groups: Gaia and Guardian. Gaia, an organization under the auspices of the environmental conservation group Martel, is populated by nihilistic and misanthropic people able to contract with familiars, which manifest as constructs fueled by the summoner's life force. Martel itself used to be a church and contains within it a holy maiden group of girls with developmental disabilities trained to be choral singers of a song of destruction, aiming to drive out and force the Earth's collapse. Guardian is dedicated to the destruction of familiars and is composed almost entirely of humans who possess special powers. Gaia and Guardian came to Kazamatsuri in the pursuit of the Earth's familiar named Kagari, who manifests as a young, high school age-looking girl. Kagari, the heroine of Rewrite, has the power to initiate a period of re-evolution, which restarts the process of evolving another means of intelligent life. However, this is done with the use of the Earth's energy, and by the time the events of Rewrite occur, there is no more energy left to do another re-evolution. Gaia wants to capture Kagari to ensure the destruction of humanity, but Guardian wishes to seek out Kagari to kill her, ensuring that human life continues.
Principal characters + Cast Role Voice actorKotarou TennoujiMasakazu MoritaKotori KanbeChiwa SaitōChihaya OhtoriSaya ShinomiyaAkane SenriEri KitamuraSizuru NakatsuKeiko SuzukiLucia KonohanaRisa AsakiKagariKana HanazawaSakuya OhtoriKatsuyuki KonishiSougen Esaka Hiroki Tōchi
The player assumes the role of Kotarou Tennouji, the protagonist of Rewrite. He is a second-year high school student who has a bright personality and is sociable to others. Kotarou is a superhuman with two powers called Rewrite and Aurora. Rewrite enables him to permanently restructure and modify any part of his body, including his blood, so as to increase his physical skills. Every time Kotarou uses his Rewrite ability, he uses up some of his life-force and becomes closer to being a full familiar. Aurora manipulates his energy to form weapons like a sword or claw. He is invited into his school's occult research society by the club president Akane Senri, who is a third-year student and is referred to as the "School Witch" by other students because of her mysterious nature. Akane, a heroine in the game, is unenthusiastic towards Kotarou's pursuit of the supernatural, which she initially claims she does not believe in, but is later shown to be a figure of authority in Gaia. Akane also invites into the club Chihaya Ohtori, a second-year transfer student in Kotarou's class who is very strong, but clumsy. Chihaya, who is also a heroine and in Gaia, has led a sheltered life and now lives with her butler Sakuya Ohtori, who poses as her brother at school despite actually being a familiar Chihaya contracts with to protect herself.
Kotarou invites three other girls into the occult research society who are also heroines in the game. One is Kotori Kanbe, Kotarou's childhood friend in his class who has few friends and starts attending school regularly after joining the club. She has a playful personality and has an extremely strong pet dog named Chibi-Moth, which is actually a familiar created by Kotori from the body of her dead pet dog Pero. However, she is not affiliated with Gaia or Guardian, and instead follows in the path of an ancient sect of summoners called Druids who revered nature and protected Kagari with familiars until Kagari was ready to make a decision to initiate re-evolution. Due to Kotori contracting her powers and Druid identity from a magical mistletoe imbued with the powers of a Druid, as well as finding a power spot that emits life energy in the forest, she can create familiars without using up her life force. Another heroine is first-year student Sizuru Nakatsu, a shy girl on the public ethics committee who has excellent hearing, eyesight and can read lips. She has heterochromia, though wears an eyepatch over her golden-colored right eye as she is very self-conscious about it; her left eye is blue. Sizuru is a member of Guardian who has the ability to produce various chemicals inside her body which can be used to heal herself and others, paralyze and cause amnesia. Sizuru joins the club with her close friend Lucia Konohana, another heroine and the class representative of Kotarou's class. Lucia is easily agitated by the antics of boys (especially Kotarou), is obsessed with cleanliness and thus always wears gloves. Like Sizuru, Lucia is a member of Guardian and has the ability to produces poisonous miasma and pus as a result of an experiment by Guardian, which she takes medication for to suppress. She can also create vibrations within the objects she touches and break glass at a distance. Both Lucia and Sizuru have superhuman speed, agility, and reflexes in addition to their other abilities.
Story