In honor of the massive amounts of Yuri Visual Novels on yesterday’s YNN report, and because everyone likes to feel good about the world, I can think of no better thing to review today than Little Viktoria’s A Beautiful Ride to Carlisle which is described on the site as a “kinetic visual novel.”

To begin with, the story is a straightforward girl-meets-girl plot. Dana is taking a train to spend her vacation volunteering on an organic farm. On the train she meets another woman, Sharon, and the ride becomes something much more than a 5 hour lacuna in her life.

This is not a novel, per se, but there is a nice, long short story’s worth of content. I quite liked that this was written as a piece of writing, with supplementary illustrations that have some motion, rather than presuming the art as a full stand-in for description and narrative. In fact, this is the first VN so far that I have encountered that 1) acted like a story, i.e., didn’t pretend to have game elements and 2) was written in 3rd person. I really liked both those things. It let me release any expectation that the art had any other purpose than illustration. That gave the kinetic aspect a boost up for me.

The art is pretty and the character designs simple and appealing. I would read a manga with this kind of art with no complaint. It’s not the kind of hyper-realistic background art I have come to expect from VNs (and so much other non-film media.) Instead, we are given the feel of being on a train and the narrative fills in most of the rest, and yes, of course that appeals to me. I read books for the narrative, not for the illustrations. I mean, creative teams spend so much time on the art and it’s…a school hallway. Those lockers don’t need to be that detailed.

Which brings me to the characters. I would have both Dana and Sharon over for lunch any day. ^_^ We spend only a short time with them, but they are lovely.

Ratings: 

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 6
Service – 0 (okay, maybe .5)

Overall – 8

As a nice little “Story A” confection, A Beautiful Ride to Carlise lived up to its name. 

Many thanks to Viktoria for the review copy. I’ll definitely be interested to see what she’s working on next.