I previously reviewed a well-known freeware Japanese visual novel titled Narcissu as part of my al|together visual novel localization review project. Narcissu was written and published by Tomo Kataoka in 2005. Unlike many of the other Japanese freeware visual novel developers of the early-to-mid 2000s, Mr. Kataoka is still active. In this post, I will review a 2018 commercial visual novel written by Mr. Kataoka titled Christmas Tina in English. I will also explore the interesting story behind Christmas Tina’s development – namely that, while it was written by Mr. Kataoka, the novel was developed and published by a Chinese visual novel studio called Koraku and Nekoday, and first released in Chinese. As we will see, it is a uniquely Japanese-Chinese piece, with dialogue being delivered in both languages.
For a brief introduction before I start the review proper, Christmas Tina is set in Tokyo in 1987-88. The two principal protagonists are Kanna Sakurai, a 15-16 year old Japanese girl from the countryside who dropped out of school and moved to Tokyo to earn money to pay for a necessary surgery for her younger sister, Emi Sakurai, and Shouzen Jin, a 19-year old man from China who traveled to Japan to earn money to re-take his university entrance exams and attend university. Looking for work on the margins of Tokyo society, they unexpectedly end up both being hired for a one-person job that involved living in an abandoned train station to support a land speculation scheme.
Christmas Tina Details
See the Visual Novel Database page for Christmas Tina for full information about the various releases and cast.
As noted in the introduction, Christmas Tina was developed by Koraku and published by Nekoday, both Chinese visual novel studios/publishers based on Chengdu. The script was written by Tomo Kataoka, the well known Japanese author of Narcissu and various other freeware and commercial works. The novel features spoken dialogue in both Japanese and Chinese, with three of the five main characters speaking Japanese, one mostly speaking Chinese, and another speaking both Chinese and Japanese, depending on who he is speaking to. However, the novel was first released in Chinese (despite the fact the script was written in Japanese) – referring to the written script – on January 3, 2020 (it had been released for iOS and Android at the end of December 2019, but I am only covering the PC version). Christmas Tina was first released for PC in Japanese on May 31, 2019. Its English-language localization was released on July 29, 2021.
Christmas Tina was created with Unity, which is a general-purpose game engine not designed specifically for visual novels like some of the more common ones used for novels I review (my reviews are dominated by NScripter and ONScripter-En, KiriKiri2/KAG3, and Ren’Py). I have only previously reviewed one Unity visual novel, that being the no-longer-for-sale Kaori After Story.
The localization of Christmas Tina is published in English by Manga Gamer and was available for sale DRM-free from the Manga Gamer website (Manga Gamer published three articles about localizing Christmas Tina: Tester’s Corner 1, Tester’s Corner 2, and Tester’s Corner 3). As of the publication date of the instant article, it is only available in English on Steam and the Steam version has DRM protection, meaning that it defaults to requiring Steam to be running in the background to work.
There are currently two DLC (“downloadable content”) extra games related to Christmas Tina available on Steam. However, neither of the DLC are available in English as of the publication date of this article and thus not part of my review. A full sequel to Christmas Tina called The Last Poem is scheduled to be released in Japanese and Chinese in 2026.
Christmas Tina and its DLC are also available for the Nintendo Switch in Chinese and Japanese, but the English version is only available for Windows on Steam at this time.
Running Christmas Tina on Linux
I purchased Christmas Tina on Steam. While I run Linux on all of my computers, Christmas Tina is only built for Windows. I can happily report that Christmas Tina ran flawlessly for me on Linux with Steam’s default Proton set-up, and Steam lists it as verified as working on Steam Deck.
General Overview
Christmas Tina is a longer than most of the visual novels I have covered, although not long by the standard of visual novels. Below, I will provide a general introduction to the story which covers the first few in-game chapters, but does not go into detail on events after the set-up. This overview should give you a decent idea of the general thrust of Christmas Tina without spoiling the experience of reading it for the first time. Of course, if you are absolutely certain that you will read Christmas Tina in the future, you may consider bookmarking this section for later reading and going into the story blind.
Save for a flashback sequences, Christmas Tina is set in Japan in 1987-88, with almost all of the story taking place in Tokyo.
The two principle main characters of Christmas Tina are Kanna Sakurai (“Kanna”), a Japanese girl aged 15-16, and Shouzen Jin (“Jin”), a young man from China aged 19-20.
Both make their way separately to Tokyo in December 1987 to make money. Kanna, still recovering from a car accident which was related to her panicking when she realized that a high-paying job she signed up for involved prostitution, had dropped out of school and moved to Tokyo to look for work to help her family make and save money to pay for heart surgery for her younger sister, the 8-9 year old Emi Sakurai (“Emi”), who needed the surgery before she turned 13 and was unable to attend school in the interim. Jin was assigned to work as an apprentice chef by the Chinese government after he failed his university entrance exams, but he remained intent on attending university and had no interest in pursuing a career in the culinary arts. Jin needed money, and in 1987-88, Japan was at the peak of its bubble economy while China lagged far behind. Thus, he obtained a visa to travel to Japan to work and save money for one year so he could re-take his entrance exams and attend university in China or abroad.
Both Kanna and Jin are hired to do the same one-person job, “living” in an abandoned train station for a period of one year in furtherance of a land speculation scheme. Jin is hired by the “boss” of the project, a Chinese immigrant named Xiamao Jiang (“Jiang”) who gives Jin the job after Jin stated that he preferred a non-shady low-paying job to a shady high-paying one. Kanna was hired by a Japanese college student named Shiori Sakura (“Shiori”), who worked for Jiang and was responsible for finding someone to house sit the same abandoned train station. Neither Kanna nor Jin were willing to give up the job, so they ultimately agreed to both do the one person job and split the already-modest 400 yen per hour wage.
Kanna and Jin have difficulty adjusting to their new life as residents of an abandoned train station. The most immediate issue is the language barrier: Kanna, unsurprisingly for a 15-16 year old girl in Japan, does not understand Chinese, and Jin arrived in Japan without any meaningful knowledge of Japanese. Beyond the language barrier, each has personal problems. Kanna is young, shy, and living on her own for the first time as a 15-year old girl to earn money to support her younger sister. Jin is determined to earn money so he can go to university, but he enters Japan with a negative view of the extravagance of Japanese people and society which is grounded in his difficult experiences as a child growing up in China in the 1970s and 80s and the fact that China’s economy and quality of life metrics lagged far behind Japan’s at the time. While neither Kanna nor Jin are overtly antagonistic toward one another, they are both wary for their own reasons and are often quick to reach faulty conclusions based on their preconceptions instead of making an effort to navigate the language barrier and understand one another.
I will refrain from discussing the plot in too much detail beyond this initial set-up, which occupies the first few chapters of the story, but I will note that Kanna and Jin are joined relatively early in the story by Kanna’s sickly younger sister, Emi, whose high spirits (notwithstanding her health concerns) provide a notable contrast from her wary sister and the serious Jin. The story also explores the circumstances of Shiori and Jiang, who each play important roles in the lives of Kanna, Emi, and Jin, and have their own backstories which inform their actions.
There is also a certain black cat whose name informs the name of the game.
Christmas Tina is not a Love Story?
On first glance, Christmas Tina appears to have the hallmarks of a love story. We have a Christmas setting (Christmas Eve has become something date night in Japan), snowfall, and a young man and young woman unexpectedly finding themselves living together under one abandoned train station roof. It is perhaps because the set-up seems to scream romance that the Steam page explicitly states that there is “nothing about love.” I can confirm having read the entire novel that this is the case.
While Kanna and Jin are the two principal main characters of Christmas Tina and their relationship plays a central role in the story, it is not the story of their falling in love.
My Review of Christmas Tina
Below, I will review Christmas Tina in sections, offering my general impressions without divulging specific plot spoilers beyond what is necessary to evaluate the story in a broad sense.
Content Appropriateness
Christmas Tina is not an adult visual novel and has no “NSFW” content (which should be no surprise since I am reviewing it and this is a family-friendly website). With that being said, I will opine that it is a novel for adults, or at least older teenagers with literary sensibilities, given its length and subject matter. It touches on some adult themes, one being the already-mentioned prostitution. There are a few instances of profanity (perhaps not from the source one would expect).
Length
I thought I had clocked in on Steam at about 8 hours and 30 minutes when I finished Christmas Tina, time which included stopping to capture somewhere in the area of 50 screenshots for this article, and a couple of breaks for making hot chocolate and responding to messages. However, when I checked before writing this review, Steam had be at 8.1 hours. While it is longer than all but one of the visual novels I have reviewed previously, it is not particularly long by visual novel standards. The story is broken into short chapters and it places a bookmark at the start of each chapter, so Christmas Tina is conducive to reading a bit and picking up later.
(Note: While everyon reads at different speeds, the estimates on Visual Novel Database seem long to me, leading me to wonder if some incorporate extra chapters from the DLCs. But in any event, I can only speak authoritatively about my own experience.)
Game-Play
Christmas Tina is an entirely kinetic visual novel, meaning that there are no interactive elements other than advancing the dialogue.
Visual Aesthetics
On the surface, Christmas Tina does not impress with its visuals. Its static backgrounds are ordinary and lacking in variety for a novel of its length (even granting most of the story takes place at an abandoned train station).
Its character designs are decent enough, but only the shady middle-aged Jiang stands out (I suppose that is no great fault though since the other four main characters are ordinary people).
Yet despite having underwhelming static backgrounds and ordinary character designs, Christmas Tina stands out for its visuals for reasons that cannot be perfectly captured in screenshots, although I did my best to put together a representative sample. Where Christmas Tina excels is in its staging and framing of scenes to give the piece a cinematographic graphic effect with mostly static images.
The first thing that jumps out in Christmas Tina’s presentation is how it uses its character portraits. Most visual novels with character portraits will have two to three on screen at one time, usually occupying the same number of pre-set positions.
See my reviews of ACE Academy and A Dream of Summer for good examples. Other novels with small casts and a single view-point character may have just one character on screen at a time. My reviews of Red Shift and A Midsummer Day’s Resonance provide good examples. Christmas Tina does something entirely different. There are no pre-set positions for character portraits. They pop in and out in different positions. Sometimes we zoom in on a character, other times the two character portraits are positioned in such a way as to show how they are interacting.
This is one case where showing is better than telling, so you can peruse my collection of screen captures for an idea of what I mean. Christmas Tina’s stage direction regarding character portraits benefits the game in two ways. Firstly, it is well done in and of itself, with the dynamically moving portraits giving conversations a sense of life and the characters a physical presence. Secondly, it compensates for the fact that Christmas Tina’s regular character portraits and backgrounds lack variety outside of Kanna going through several outfits as the story progresses.
While Christmas Tina’s regular static backgrounds are not much to look at and a bit repetitive, they are seldom stationary. While I cannot capture the effect in still screenshots, the camera tends to move slowly, giving those simple backgrounds a sense of movement. In addition the backgrounds, the novel has an impressive number of effects (e.g., plenty of snow fall and sun bursts) and CG scenes.
On the visual effects front, the novel uses an interesting film reel effect for character flashback scenes (and all of the flashbacks are significant to the story). In some scenes all we have is text and narration to go with the dialogue. In other scenes, we may have a character silhouette framing city scenes. In still other cases we may see a split-screen effect, highlighting how two characters are reacting to a particular situation. The reader never has to go too long before the novel does something interesting visually. Christmas Tina has a good collection of CG scenes featuring the characters (Kanna benefits most over the course of the piece), although some are re-used throughout the novel.
While Christmas Tina does not impress in terms of raw artistic power, it more than makes up for it with dynamic and thoughtful staging, which serves to enhance the story and keep things visually interesting for the reader. It is a true visual novel in both the visual and novel senses.
Music
Christmas Tina has 34 background music tracks, most of which are purely instrumental (a minority have humming/vocals), and opening and ending songs with vocals.
Most of the background music falls firmly into the background music category. A few of the tracks are associated with specific characters or situations. All of the tracks are inoffensive, but only three or four stood out to me in any way. (For readers who unlock the novel’s full music selection in the menu: my favorites are Track 14 “Bubble”, Track 26 “All I try”, and Track 3 “Concerto of Solitude,” which is my pick from the most commonly used tracks).
To the novel’s credit, 34 tracks is sufficient given its length and it mixes up the background music enough to keep it from becoming repetitive.
While the background music was good enough, I think Christmas Tina could have benefited from a better selection. Several of the tracks struck me as generic, the type of background music I might find in any laid back, character-driven visual novel. This seems like a missed opportunity for a piece set in a definite time and place, Tokyo in 1987-88, with characters with clearly defined backstories and problems. A few of the al|together visual novels, which were English-language localizations of freeware Japanese pieces from the early-to-mid 2000s, did more with freely available background music to set a mood than did Christmas Tina (see Collage, May Sky, and The Letter for some of the best examples), even granting the generally higher quality of Christmas Tina’s tracks.
The songs for the opening and ending movies, HOME and Song of the City, have full vocals. They are very good and fit the feel of the story well.
Voice Acting
Christmas Tina is fully voice acted, but its voice acting is unique among novels I have reviewed in that it is bilingual. Kanna, Emi, and (for the most part) Shiori only speak Japanese. Jin only speaks Chinese at the start of the novel. Jiang is unique in that he is fluent in both Chinese and Japanese. The novel uses both Japanese and Chinese voice acting. While I am fluent in neither, it is not difficult to tell when, for example, Jiang is speaking Chinese to Jin or Japanese to everyone else. I will venture that someone who actually speaks both Japanese and Chinese may be able to appreciate some of the nuance in the voice acting (especially with respect to Kanna’s and Jin’s story-long struggle to communicate).
While my ability to appreciate the voice acting is somewhat constrained by the fact I do not know Chinese or Japanese, I thought all of the voices sounded solid and none were grating, with Kanna generally having the most range (although she takes some time to show it). I suspect someone with a good understanding of and ear for Japanese would be able to get more out of Jin’s dialogue in the later stages when he speaks (or tries to speak) some simple Japanese. This segues into another point.
The Localization
Because I do not know Chinese or Japanese, I can only judge the localization on how it reads in English. The novel largely read well and was easy to follow, coming off as a much more professional localization than the only prior Chinese-made visual novel I have reviewed thus far (LoveChoice). In the later stages of the game, I did note a passage here or there which was clunky, but these struck me as being more cases of middling prose than a lack of English command. Also late in the game, there were a few sequences where words were separated by commas with no spaces, which I found odd but it ultimately did not impair my reading. On the whole, the piece reads well and the story makes sense, so the final English script meets my approval.
One minor issue I had, which would have likely been very difficult to localize in a credible way, concerned Jin’s Japanese. Jin only speaks and understands Chinese at the start of the novel. Without veering into unnecessary spoilers, he picks up some Japanese as he spends time in Japan, although it is made clear that his ability to speak and understand Japanese is limited. While Chinese and Japanese are generally distinct enough that it is easy to tell when Jin is speaking stilted Japanese in lieu of his native Chinese, it is a bit difficult to discern how his Japanese sounds to Kanna, Emi, and Shiori (Shiori has limited Chinese proficiency but there is only one or two scenes where she says anything in Chinese). While the English script does enough (usually through Jin’s or Kanna’s narration) to convey that Jin’s Japanese is very much a work-in-progress, how he sounds and what he gets and misses is nuance that is lost without being able to understand the spoken dialogue.
The Script and Story
While my ability to review the localization is limited, I consider myself fully qualified to review the localized story as a veteran of many visual novel reviews and now a visual novel developer. As I noted at the top, I will avoid discussing the story in detail beyond the specifics I covered in the introduction, so this review should be safe to read for people who may be using this review to decide whether they want to give Christmas Tina a read.
Christmas Tina improves as it goes along, putting its best foot forward in the late-middle and ending stages of the novel. Kanna and Jin receive meaningful character development, and Jiang has an interesting, albeit late-to-develop story, while Emi and Shiori function largely as significant supporting characters.
The novel, as I see it, has two main themes. First is communication and understanding (consider this a compound theme). The communication theme is unsurprising since the most important thematic relationship in the story, the one between Kanna and Jin, is characterized by a literal language barrier. But the novel makes clear that understanding, rather than being able to speak the same language, is more important. To the extent Kanna and Jin get off on the wrong foot, one can make a fair case their problems are due more to preconceptions they have rooted in their past experiences than their not speaking the same language. The novel further explores the importance of understanding, sometimes without the burden of Kanna’s and Jin’s language barrier in the stories of the three supporting characters (Emi, Shiori, and Jiang), albeit I cannot say much in the way of specifics in a spoiler-free format. The second main theme, which is also not amenable to deep discussion in a spoiler-free format, is finding purpose. Kanna and Jin each begins the story with a definite purpose. Kanna dropped out of school at age 15 and moved from her rural hometown to Tokyo to earn money to help her parents pay for Emi’s necessary heart surgery, notwithstanding the fact that Kanna is painfully shy, scarred from the experience that left her with a badly broken leg, and wholly lacking in life experience or skills that would make her employable. Jin arrives in Japan with a simple goal to make money so he can attend university after having failed his entrance exams in China in his first attempt. Why he is so intent on attending university is left unsaid in the early going. The other three significant characters, most prominently Emi and Jiang, all have their own interesting perspectives on finding purpose. Without going into spoilers, it suffices to say that Kanna, Jin, and to a lesser extent the rest of the class, are pressed to think about what they want and what they are willing to do to achieve it as the story progresses.
The novel begins with Kanna’s backstory in her home town, followed by Jin’s immediate backstory in China. These parallel backstories serve to explain how and why Kanna and Jin both end up in Tokyo, accepting the same shady one-person job to live in an abandoned train station. Both backstories are compelling, albeit what we see of Kanna’s in the novel’s early stages is more interesting. As I alluded to at the top, Kanna suffered a broken leg in a car accident that was caused in part by her panicking when she realized that the job she had accepted from a young man she viewed as a friend had tried to rope her into an unsavory line of work. Jin’s backstory, at least the part we see in the early going, is less dramatic, with him being unhappy at his state-assigned restaurant job after having failed his school entrance exams.
Unfortunately, the first third of Christmas Tina following the dual introductions for Kanna and Jin, can be a bit frustrating to follow at times. Kanna and Jin begrudgingly accept splitting the low proffered salary for living in an abandoned train station, with Kanna having accepted the job from Shiori and Jin having independently accepted the job (passing on “dangerous,” higher-paying “work”) from Shiori’s boss, Jiang. Kanna needed a job and had no choice but to take what she could. Jin could have forced the issue, but to his credit did not have the heart to force Kanna from the job. The pair face additional challenges beyond the language barrier. Kanna is a young teenager from the country with no meaningful life experience or skills that would prepare her for the current scenario, and that is before noting her recent traumatic experience involving a man she had trusted or her still being on crutches as a result of her car accident. Jin has a generally negative opinion of Japan and Japanese people and is only in the country to make and save money for his education, although as I noted he is not hostile toward Kanna despite making unfounded assumptions about her based on his views of Japanese women generally.
My issue with Kanna and Jin is that they both have every incentive to make some effort to understand one another, but make their lives unnecessarily difficult by refusing to do so in the early stages – such that one comes away with the feeling that they are dragging their feet for plot reasons. I will submit that were one to assign blame for the fact of many of the misunderstandings, Kanna is probably more often than not at fault, but Kanna’s quickness to jump to conclusions and general stubbornness are understandable. Jin’s refusal to pick up any basic Japanese, while consistent with his general lack of interest in Japan beyond saving a small amount of money, is a bit more difficult to understand in light of the fact that he is intelligent, a few years older and wiser than Kanna, and could make his own life easier. To be sure, the stubbornness of each reinforces the other’s stubbornness, but the novel hangs on to this crutch (pun intended, Christmas Tina readers will understand) longer than it needs to. Given that understanding people is ultimately more significant to the novel than understanding language, the script could have made the early stages less taxing on the reader’s patience without undermining the message of the piece.
Kanna’s younger sister Emi enters the stage in the middle of the beginning and shakes up the dynamic. She is friendly, unlike both Kanna and Jin, and lacks her older sister’s stubbornness. Her picking up on the fact that Jin is actually a nice guy (not without flaws, but certainly not a bad guy) gradually leads to Jin acting more rationally, which in turn gradually has an effect on Kanna. But Emi brings up another quibble I have with Christmas Tina.
As I noted in the introduction, the author of Christmas Tina’s script, Tomo Kataoka, also wrote Narcissu more than a decade earlier. Narcissu was about the road trip of two terminally ill young adults. While Narcissu largely deserves its good reputation, I had numerous quibbles with the script. One relatively small one was that certain aspects of how the terminal illnesses of the characters were presented was not realistic (that one was small since the point of Narcissu was not to be medically accurate). While I will submit broadly that some of the excesses in Narcissu are not present in Christmas Tina (most fortunately Narcissu’s reliance on making every character outside of the main pair irrationally callous), I must call foul on Emi’s illness. On one hand we are told that Emi, who generally appears to be happy and behave like a normal, energetic little girl, cannot attend school until she has heart surgery, which her family cannot yet afford (which in turn is why Kanna is spending her 15th and 16th years on Earth participating in a land speculation scheme instead of attending school). On the other hand, Emi is somehow able to stay at home alone or travel to Tokyo by herself to stay with her sister without her parents. This treatment of Emi (pun unintended) does not ultimately affect the core themes of Christmas Tina. Emi’s significance comes in how she gives Kanna purpose and her own understanding of her situation and feelings about it, not in a scientific description of her heart condition. But granting that, I will confess to having a headache trying to understand how Emi could do X, Y, and Z, but could not attend school for a few hours a day where she would presumably be watched over by teachers and have access to medical care if needed.
I would add that I have some questions about the decision-making of Kanna’s and Emi’s parents, who are never seen on-screen, but I digress. Let us return to more important matters.
Christmas Tina’s early stages are not bad despite the occasional insistence on making both Kanna and Jin irrationally stubborn. There are a few stand-out scenes (including an early one between Kanna and Jin, but most of the early stand-out scenes involve Kanna and Jin individually with someone else), but things fortunately pick up quickly and in a positive way in the middle third of the novel. Emi (my concerns about her health aside) has a positive effect on both Kanna and Jin, and Mr. Kataoka did well in writing her as a credible young girl. Emi is more articulate than one would ordinarily expect for a girl of her age, but no more than necessary for her to fulfill her role in the story. She is, on the whole, written appropriately for a girl her age and without being at all irritating. The middle stages also benefit from Shiori, Jin’s and Kanna’s nominal supervisor, playing a greater role. While I will opine that Shiori individually is less interesting than Kanna, Jin, and Jiang, she is effective insofar as she naturally plays the role of encouraging Kanna and Jin to communicate and work together without becoming a plot device (Shiori’s story, which is revealed later, is not bad in any sense, just not as interesting as the rest of the cast, with the qualified exception of Emi whose story is unsurprisingly straight-forward). Without veering into spoilers, the middle part of the novel gives Kanna, Jin, and unexpectedly Shiori, a goal and something to work toward together beyond tolerating each other’s presences in what was supposed to be a one-person house-sitting job.
Things generally go well in the middle part of Christmas Tina, but no one with any familiarity with Mr. Kataoka would expect him to allow the cast to cruise to a happy ending that easily. The final third of Christmas Tina introduces several hardships which bring the cast, or specifically certain members of the cast, crashing back down to Earth (while I will not say what the dramatic turns are, at least one is not hard to predict from the set-up). The final third of Christmas Tina is where finding purpose and comes to the fore. Kanna and Jin announce their goals at the start of the novel. The final third challenges both Kanna and Jin in different ways. While I will not say what those challenges are or how they are resolved in a spoiler free format, I will submit that both are forced to reassess what they are willing to do, what they are willing to give up, and in at least one case, whether the things they thought were most important are still most important.
One character I have said little about is Jiang. Jiang is Jin’s contact in Japan and is ultimately responsible for the land speculation scheme and writing Kanna’s and Jin’s checks (he is also Shiori’s employer). Jiang does not hide the fact that he is a shady character with obvious links to organized crime – our first introduction to him involves him trying to convince Jin to accept high-paying “dangerous” work. In the early stages, we only see Jiang have meaningful interactions with Jin, and those interactions provide the first sign that Christmas Tina is interested in challenging its cast to think critically about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Jiang’s role grows significantly in the final third of the novel in ways I cannot discuss without spoilers. Jiang himself has a backstory which explains his path from arriving in Japan from Maoist China as a young man to making money through many questionable endeavors. To the novel’s credit, it gives an account of Jiang without sugar-coating him (or to Jiang’s qualified credit, I suppose). Jiang plays an active role in the latter stages, and some decisions, which are cleverly linked to Jiang’s backstory, play a key role in how the principal main characters decide important matters in their lives.
Having noted at the top that Christmas Tina has additional DLC stories which I cannot play due to the lack of English localizations, the main story concludes in a neat and satisfactory way and does not feel incomplete. Both Kanna and Jin are faced with challenges and dilemmas in the final stage and, thanks in part to their efforts throughout the story, including their efforts to understand one another, they reach certain conclusions that make for a thematically effective ending which also does well to give Emi, Shiori, and Jiang meaningful roles.
UI and Chapter Structure Notes
Christmas Tina has the standard collection of visual novel menu options, covering volume settings (including per-character volume settings), skip mode, and even UI transparency settings.
It also offers 60 save slots, which is more than anyone should need. But what if I told you that Christmas Tina, which is not a short story, does not really need save slots at all?
Christmas Tina is broken into chapters, all of which are fairly short. Upon completing a chapter, the reader is taken to a chapter select screen. From here, the reader can either proceed to the next chapter or re-read any previous chapters. This system has two great effects. Firstly, it effectively frees the reader from needing to create saves at all since the beginning of every chapter is an automatic “save” point of sorts. Secondly, it is easy to go back and forward to re-read anything, good for seeing a key passage again or refreshing one’s memory after some time away from Christmas Tina. To be sure, this sort of system will only work perfectly in a novel with a definite story free of player input, but I would highly encourage other kinetic visual novels to adopt something similar.
Extras
Christmas Tina does not come with much in the way of extras. It has a gallery and music room, which one would expect from this type of visual novel. There is one comedic side-story which is unlocked in the middle of the game and is entirely forgettable. Readers are greeted with a new title screen upon completing the novel.
Extra Note
There is a short epilogue (tacked on to the main story as an extra chapter) which becomes available after the reader watches the ending credits. Nothing on the post-game time screen alerts the player to the presence of this extra chapter, so consider this a PSA. The epilogue chapter serves more to fill in some of the blanks of how the resolution of the main story came to be, but it is well-done and one of the more aesthetically striking sequences of Christmas Tina, so make sure to read it if you happen to purchase and complete Christmas Tina.
Conclusion
While not without its flaws, Christmas Tina is among the better and more thematically interesting visual novels I have covered here on The New Leaf Journal, and it earns my relatively unqualified recommendation for anyone who does not mind visual novels/games with no choices or player input (it is $14.99 on Steam as of publication time, but I recall having purchased it on sale when it was 50% off). It also comes with a high recommendation for fans of cats in visual novels.
Christmas Tina presents a very down-to-Earth and mature story that can appeal to a broad audience. Its cinematic presentation is impressive and more than makes up for some of its low-to-mid budget visual short comings in the area of static backgrounds. The multi-lingual voice acting is a definite plus (especially, I imagine, if you are fluent in Japanese and/or Chinese). While I think the visuals and music could have done a little bit more to give the novel a distinct time and place feel, it does provide an interesting story grounded in a specific time and place, here being late 1980s bubble Japan, partially seen through the perspective of a person coming from China. Despite some grating tendencies in the early going and some issues (a few surrounding Emi) that require some suspension of belief, Christmas Tina becomes more interesting as it goes along, has a good drama curve, and rewards readers with a credible, interesting, and ultimately on-point conclusion. Insofar as Kataoka works go, I would rate its script more highly than that of the free and more famous Narcissu, but a bit below the absolute best freeware novels I have covered for my al|together and Insani review projects.
Other Christmas Tina Reviews
I came across a few other Christmas Tina reviews while putting together my own. For those interested in reading some other perspectives on the novel, I recommend Pyre Kavanagh’s review at Noisy Pixel and user vario’s review on VNDB.
