I am going to review a good number of visual novels in December. Most (but not all) of the reviews will be part of my ongoing al|together review project.  My first December visual novel review will be Until We Meet Again, which is Sore Jaa, Mata ne or Soremata for the Japanese version.  This is only my second review from the al|together 2005 festival.  Until We Meet Again looks like one of the most visually creative al|together visual novels.  However, I discovered that installing it was an unexpected pain.  Before I list the steps below, bear in mind that while Soremata is a Windows game, I am running it on Linux.

  1. I discovered that I was missing the Soremata .exe.  I downloaded the torrent.  Fortunately, I obtained the .exe from the torrent within 2-3 minutes.
  2. My first thought was to extract the contents of the Soremata .exe into a new directory and run it locally using ONScripter-EN.  However, I forgot to check what Soremata is written in.  It is written in KiriKiri, like Summer, Cicadas, and the Girl and Return to Shironagasu Island.
  3. I used Lutris to create a WINE sandbox for Soremata.
  4. During the install process, I discovered that Soremata, like Summer, Cicadas, and the Girl and Midsummer Haze, requires a Japanese language environment.  After it was installed, I used the Lutris GUI to change the environment for it from English to Japanese.
  5. I tried launching it, but Lutris had chosen the uninstall executable instead of the executable to run it.  I pointed Lutris to the collect executable.
  6. I launched it, but it launched at a weird, distorted resolution with no window borders and a very messed up menu.
  7. I tried changing the version of WINE in Lutris and launching again.  It was a little less distorted, but it still did not work.
  8. Returning to Lutris, I enabled the option to run Soremata in a virtual desktop and I set the resolution to the virtual desktop to 640×480, which is the proper resolution for Soremata.
  9. Everything worked perfectly.

I now have high expectations for Soremata because of all the hoops I had to jump through to make it run properly.

(Dec. 16, 2022 Update:  See my full review of Soremata here.)