SeaBed is the best adult romance visual novel

[dirkncloak]

I had stopped reading visual novels for a long time now, but they were a massive guilty pleasure of mine. The medium is jam-packed with anime and visual novel tropes I absolutely despise, but it’s where I’ve found a lot of titles with so many different styles of storytelling and presentation that I absolutely enjoy (the bag of milk series, christmas tina, mhakna gramura and fairy bell, eliza, stella of the end, 428 shibuya scramble, fata morgana, umineko, jiangshi x daoshi). I respect the variety, creativity and ambition that goes on to make fantastic visual novels and whoever runs VNDB is an absolute genius in categorisation, cataloguing and organisation.

I stumbled upon SeaBed during Steam's summer sales and it instantly appealed to me, not that I’m gay/lesbian or into yuri, but because of how real and sensible it was. There’s no silly moments and barely any explicit drama moments, and when there are, they are resolved quickly and spontaneously. Most conversations don’t contribute to a grand plot, but develop the depth of and relationships between the characters and the characters act stoically, keep their problems to themselves and reminisce a lot about the past to forget what ails them at the moment. The story is extremely well-written, the middle-aged cast and long-established romance was very refreshing. I appreciated the contemporary down-to-earth setting and the writing style which was descriptive but straight to the point. I’m very glad that it’s not a traditional “mystery” which would require a guide or actively solve it to get the answer, basically additional workload I can’t be arsed to do. The mystery’s just a basic framework and I pretty much understand all of what was going on by the end. The visual novel presentation is also my favourite, there’s no sexual content (massive plus) and the NVL+kinetic novel style is a much more comfortable reading experience than ADV+choices.

I still have very fond memories of SeaBed because it is an incredibly strong, emotionally gripping and unique piece of fiction and it’s by large margin my favourite visual novel. As someone in his mid-20s and working full-time, the story is very sincere and relatable to me. I could only find a select few titles that gave me a similar “real” feel and themes like the movies (Paterson, Before Sunset), anime (Tsuki ga Kirei) and the French graphic novel (Days of Sand), but even though they were really good, their format is way too short a scope and SeaBed was manifold a stronger and more heartfelt personal story to me. I even tried getting into “real” novels to find something like it (In Search of Lost Time, Capital, Convenience Store Woman, Granta 127: Japan and 20+ novels I dropped by the first chapter) that fell under the theme of “mundane realistic slice of life” but all left me disappointed either due to lack of relatability, poor writing, too verbose and slow/awkward pacing in spite of supposedly being the superior medium.

 

Edited April 8 by dirkncloak