Shiny Days Route Order

The most well known online walkthrough of Shiny Days, that is also used by people playing through the Game on YouTube and Lexa$! Video Essays on it, advise people to play the Inori Route branch first.

I hate this.

Shiny Days is a remake of an earlier game originally titled Summer Days.

The Inori Branch is 100% new to Shiny Days, the Setsuna Branch seems to have some new content but it all feels like it fits in with the original Summer Days material just fine.  

The Inori route may be narratively an alternate timeline but it’s metatextuality a sequel.

As someone who feels like they’re very Savvy to this kind of thing, certain events and plot elements in the Inori storyline feel like specifically events Summer Days players are used to playing out differently.  They are Subverting Expectations.

And the only thing I’d really call a Twist in the Game is definitely treated like a shocking reveal far more when it happens in the Summer Days routes.  In the Inori storyline it’s treated with much more dramatic irony. 

So when I see people on YouTube play through the game being shocked and surprised by this reveal while watching the Inori story and then playing Summer Days making fun of how they already know it, it definitely feels to me like they’ve gotten the intended experience inverted.

The Game’s own internal Route Map does place the Inori Branch up top and the Summer Days Branch on the bottom and I think that’s largely what caused this.  The original Japanese developers of the Game may not have considered how many people will wind up playing only this release of the Game.  But in fact for us Westerners this is the only release we officially have in English at all.

The way unlocked H Scenes are organized on the menu for watching them however confirms that Summer Days does still come first.

The Inori route is also kind of overall more Wholesome and so maybe some people felt that should be a Normie’s first impression.  But no one is playing the Infamous Sequel to the Infamous School Days because they are looking for Wholesomeness.  If you don’t download the Deconseoring Patch you won’t get the most problematic content.

Which of these two branches you wind up on is decided by the first choice Makoto is given.  I’m not gonna say any other choices are more correct after that, such would defeat the point of this genre. I just want people to play Summer Days first.

So the first choice is Otome asking Makoto what he’s thinking about doing for Summer Break.  Select the top choice “I want to make lots of Memories” to get on the correct Summer Days path.

I do like the story being told in the Inori route, the only detail I dislike is the reveal that Setsuna’s grandmother Kagura is dead.  She was born in 1958 at the earliest in my needless overthinking of this insane universe’s timeline, so dying by 2005 is way too young.