Hourglass of Summer

"From that first moment I wanted to protect you..."

- Tagline

At the end of the school year, Kotaro Makimura resolves to confess his love to his crush, Kaho Serizawa, and plans to become her boyfriend by the end of summer vacation. On the way home from school, he runs into a cloaked stranger and accidentally gets covered with a mysterious powder. When he wakes up the next morning, he is shocked to find that it is the first day of September. As he returns to school, his friends tell him that his girlfriend Kaho has died in a traffic accident. But wait! He hasn't even spoken to her yet! And why is the second trimester suddenly started up when summer break was supposedly just around the corner?

A Dating Sim released in Japan in 2002, Hourglass of Summer is unusual in that it (a) was released in America, (b) contains no hentai, and (c) can be played on a DVD player. It was later adapted into a two-episode OVA that was released exclusively in Japan. While it never received the amount of success as other visual novels like Clannad or Tsukihime, it is still fondly remembered by Western audiences as their first foray into the dating sim genre.


 * Bad Export for You: America got the DVD player version of the game, which is by no means bad, but nowhere near as visually impressive as the Japanese PlayStation 2 and PC versions.
 * Bleached Underpants: Inverted. The original release was clean, but the Japanese PC rerelease added H-scenes into it.
 * Bokukko: Mana.
 * Cassandra Truth: The girls don't believe you when you try to tell them about future tragedies you've witnessed.
 * Ear Cleaning: One of three choices of compensation for doing Ai a favor.
 * Even the Girls Want Her: Kaho.
 * Festival Episode
 * Frozen Flower: Mana is very cold on the outset, but her route shows she can be very girly and stubborn when the occasion calls for it.
 * Girlish Pigtails: Lee Jane.
 * Good Guy Bar: Paradise Cafe is about as close to this trope as you can get in a high school setting.
 * Hair Decorations: Ai and Lee Jane.
 * Hidden Depths: One of the major draws of the story, everyone has more to them than one would expect.
 * Hot Librarian: Tomomi. Kotaro constantly talks about how beautiful she is with her glasses off. Not that she doesn't look just as beautiful with them on...
 * Naked First Impression: How Kotaro is introduced to Mana.
 * Out of Focus / Demoted to Extra: Mana, in every route but her own. Especially in Tomomi's route, which can be beaten without encountering Mana at all.
 * She also has precisely zero screentime in the second OVA episode.
 * Overprotective Dad: Kaho's.
 * Physical Scars, Psychological Scars:
 * Road Cone: Generally in use throughout, but one choice is an extremely obvious fork in the road between Kaho and Ai. (Though Lee Jane's ending may also be a possibility at the time.)
 * Spell My Name with an "S": Is it Ligene or Lee Jane?
 * Stable Time Loop: Plenty of them.
 * Stalker with a Crush:
 * Time Travel Tense Trouble: Oh, yes.
 * Unlucky or Victorious Childhood Friend: Ai, depending on how you play your cards.
 * Yamato Nadeshiko: Kaho. On the surface anyway. Once you are invested in her route she shows her true self.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Or green, or orange, or purplish-brown. The only heroine with a realistic hair color is Ai, and even then, blonde hair is pretty unusual for a native Japanese girl.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Or green, or orange, or purplish-brown. The only heroine with a realistic hair color is Ai, and even then, blonde hair is pretty unusual for a native Japanese girl.