Due to work and other stuff, I hadn't had time to really get into this until recently, and with friday signaling the release of October's list of VNs, at least one of which (Deep One) will play immediately, I felt that it would be fitting to go ahead and give you my initial impression  of the game. 

My first impression, after playing through the prologue, was that, while this game is pretty old, it is also very... familiar in an odd way.  At first, I couldn't figure out where that impression was coming from... but then it struck me!

I finally figured out where Favorite stole its basic style.  It always bugged the hell out of me that Favorite was able to produce such decent to great games despite essentially being a company full of lolicons and the writer basically being an unknown who produced two mediocre games before Irotoridori.  The atmosphere of Meguri, Hitohira is almost identical to Irotoridori and AstralAir... which made the game feel pretty familiar as I delved into it. 

However, this familiarity wasn't a bad thing, because I always liked the atmosphere of those games, even if I felt nothing but contempt for the loliconism.  Say what you want about Favorite, but the atmosphere of their games is usually worth buying them for.

That said, this is a Shumon Yuu work... and Shumon Yuu is easily the best non-genre-specific writer in VNs.  I was crying inside the prologue, empathizing deeply with the protagonist, his predicament, and his hangups, despite knowing that similar protagonists in other VNs have pissed me off in the past (understand, it takes a master's hand to make the suffering and self-hatred of a sensitive young man as sweet as honey, and when it goes wrong, it generally feels like I was eating aspartame in powder form afterwards).  The fact that the game is very, very dated didn't hurt the presentation nearly as much as it does with some other old games (Ikusa Megami comes to mind, as does Tsukihime, despite my love for it). 

Since I haven't hit an ending, I don't have a conclusion for you... but even if this game were to flop on its face later (an impossibility, given the writer) it would still be worth playing.  You probably won't see my final impressions for a while, because, even though this game is engrossing and emotional, it takes actual courage get into it, since I know Shumon Yuu's habits well enough to figure out in a vague sense where he plans to go with the story (Hint: Most of Shumon Yuu's games almost border on utsuge at times, with the exception of Tenshi no Hane o Fumanaide).