Visual Novels

Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday in English) was released by Frontwing in 2017 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It was released on Steam and JAST.

With one catch: the Steam release only includes the first chapter of seven.

In my experience, it takes about 6 hours to play the first chapter, and the other 6 chapters take another 54 hours to complete. Essentially, 90% of the game is missing. The reason the game was released on Steam in this incomplete state is due to the adult content present in the other chapters. Certain adult content is not allowed on Steam. Not that chapter 1 is free of adult content anyway...

So, Frontwing offers the other 90% of the game as a patch you need to manually apply to the Steam game. You need to find out about this patch's existence from this vague Steam announcement (the store page doesn't mention this at all). If you play through all the routes in chapter 1, there's nothing to suggest you haven't just played the entire game. You get a pretty end credits scene and you're kicked back to the title screen. Because every chapter has its own ending theme.

This announcement links to their Kickstarter Updates page. Because there are 58 updates on the page, you need to click "Load More" 3 times to find this page. It tells you that you then need to go to this special page to download the patch from JAST. If you clicked the link, you'll notice that it doesn't work anymore.

That's because the link was changed a year or so ago and doesn't redirect. The patch is now offered on this page. I did not discover this from any of Frontwing's announcements. I found this out from the comments section of a community guide on the Steam forums.

The instructions on the JAST page are wrong, too. It tells you to "Extract the patch files from the archive and run ".exe" file to install the patch." What you actually need to do is go to the game's Steam folder and replace all the .arc files with the ones from the patch folder.

I wouldn't say this is easy to find. Some people can't find it. It's scary to imagine how many people don't know this patch exists at all...

If you want to play Subahibi (it's a great game, seriously, play it), it makes sense to just buy it from JAST instead. They give you the entire game and it just works, no patching required. Though, fair warning that these releases are only in English (no Japanese option), and there's a lot of disturbing sexual content. The second chapter in particular has various kinds of disturbing sexual content. So much that I can't enumerate it all... The game is also very dark. But hey, it's a kamige, and I thought it was a good read...mostly in spite of that stuff.

This is easily the worst experience I've ever had on Steam. Are there other strange Steam releases like this where you need to scour the web for the rest of the game? I want to know! Or, conversely, has a Steam release actually been better than a GOG/JAST/MangaGamer store release?