Angel Present

The player takes a role of a young male assistant to the picture book writer who just went on a tour of Europe for an inspiration. You, on the other hand, desperately want to prove yourself in the area, but your inspiration is as dry as an empty well. So, you decide to take those three weeks of holidays to return to your hometown and give your best to come up with something solid or completely give up on wanting to become a picture book writer. Your hometown is a couple of hours from Tokyo by bullet train, though it is a rather rural area so it requires a switch to a more local train. Upon your arrival, you soon team up with Erina, an old friend of yours, and the two of you keep on exploring town, going places an meeting people. One night, walking alone in the woods, you get caught by the rain. Running to find a shelter, you stumble upon a small shrine. There, in front of your eyes, you see a flying silhouette which soon gets zapped by the thunder and falls down not far from where you are. Not sure what you saw really happened, you come outside and see a small fairy, down on the ground under the rain and with a wounded wing. You pick her up and tend to her wound. She quickly tests her fixed wings and flies away with a smile. As the morning comes, you look over town and has a sudden vision of an unknown place. Whatever happened to you granted you certain magical abilities you are not aware of.

The game takes place in your hometown which represents reality, and a fantasy Layer world. In either world you can freely move around the map and talk to various characters you run along the way. Your hometown is split into six districts and different events and characters can be seen at different time of the day (morning, noon, evening, or night). When in Layer world, whenever important advance is being made, a battle scene which takes action on a separate combat arena will occur. The battle itself is real-time and consists of you trying to throw objects or use attacks against the boss. During adventure mode, when entering certain area from the map, the gameplay will resemble that of a regular visual novel with static backgrounds and character stills over it, varying in poses to emphasize their disposition. As dialogues are often short, dialogue choices are not used, but occasional actions you can perform are offered depending on the time and location.

As with the less-action orientated NEC Interchannel titles, however, a translation guide is a must without knowledge of Japanese.

Credits: Written by Mike Phelan for The Dreamcast Junkyard.