Butterfly Soup

Not everyone has hours and hours to invest in a 400 chapter visual novel, but still want that feeling of getting lost in a great story. Butterfly Soup is a wonderful yuri novel about four queer friends who begin high school together in the year 2008. While it’s not quite as fast as One Night, Hot Springs, if you’ve played this game you can expect it to flow as quickly.

The story mainly revolves around the gentle and quiet Diya, and the delinquent Min-Seo. They had a strong bond as childhood friends before a move separated them, and are now getting to know each other once again as they come back together for high school.

Restricted game play

This visual novel is a bit different in how game play is performed. In most visual novels, it’s normal for you to shape the personality of the characters through the choices that you make. In Butterfly Soup, while you have choices to make they never help determine the personality of the character. That is set in stone, and the choices you make are relatively trivial. As an example, you can’t choose whether to ignore a sick person or to ask if they are okay. Instead your choices are to ask if they are okay, or feel their forehead and share that same feeling in a different way. Although this might seem like it would ruin the game and devolve it into nothing more than turning pages in a story, the developers use these choices in a clever way, to reveal more about the character.

Diya for example, is a kind person—but doesn’t always read into a decision well. The developers use the player to prod her into making helpful decisions, showing that she needs that prod. If it weren’t for the exceptional writing in the game, these decisions would feel meaningless, but thanks to careful script it provides a nice accent to the game.

Some plot threads left

Its hard to talk more about the plot without revealing spoilers, but in short the visual novel focuses on Diya and Min-Seo to the expense of the other characters in the game. The other two characters are just as well thought out and deep as Diya and Min-Seo, yet their own personal storyline is neglected. This is likely in part to keep the novel short, and because of the limits on actions you can take, but it would still augment the game to have their storyline tied up once and for all.

Abrupt ending

At the end of the story, the four characters talk directly to the player, with their own thoughts on the story. This feels redundant, since their feelings come across very well in the story line. It’s not necessary to repeat it.

Pros

• Very cute story line
• Quick read
• Heartwarming queer romance

Cons

• Abrupt ending
• Plot threads not tied up