marrow #20 | posted 02 february 2026
if you're into yuri and vns (as you should. nods sagely.) you prolly have heard about the flowers series. the first game, printemps (2014), is the second most played girl x girl only game on vndb (it loses to the nukige sono hanabira ni kuchizuke o, which i have never heard of), i've seen it recommended a fair bit. so naturally it's been on my to-play list for a while now, and i wanted a short and straightforward vn for february. so. how did i like flowers -le volume sur printemps-? well from the title you can tell: i didn't.
ok yeah first the summary. you play as suoh, a timid girl who's been homeschooled all her life and never had any friends. she decides to turn a new leaf in high school by going to a catholic all-girls boarding school because of its amitié system, which assigns each student a partner to stick around, figuring she'll have no way to not make friends. this year, they've actually changed to trios, so she has two roommates / amitié partners / love interests: serious rikka and outgoing mayuri.
now. the premise seems right up my alley, right? religious all-girls enclosed environment! all sorts of nastiness and meaness and pettiness can occur! fuck each other up for life! well. no. this is an episodic slice of life romance where nothing ever happens.
to quote my words after chapter 1: "i wouldn't call it saccharine but it sure has the mouthfeel of sponge cake so far". everything about it is just so fucking soft. starting from the art, which is definitely nice but it's all soft round brush and washed out colors and low contrast, and the music i can only describe as romantic noncommital (and the same track plays over and over again; halfway through i just muted the game and put on nine inch nails' ghosts).
the cloying sweetness is everywhere: the school is some sort of twee yuriworld where the clubs are Choir and Literature and Astronomy and instead of sports their pe class is Ballet and all the girls are super nice to each other all the time and they have Tea Parties and bake each other sweets. and there's nothing rotten underneath the surface! it really is that straightforward. our characters are in this lovely little bubble of niceness.
the characters too are all very nice to each other all the time. suoh is shy and socially inept — though the story is about her opening up, quite literally as represented by a lily on the ui — but everyone is smitten with her, the prettiest girl in class who's so tall and big chested and clever and i just wish we were friends. Fuck Off.
please may i have a crumb of conflict or mayhaps stakes.
look, i'm not saying flowers should be toxic yuri / psychological horror / a suspiria clone, but even fluffy pleasant romance needs tension. i don't read a lot of romance, but i can't help comparing it to a summer's end - hong kong 1986 (2020), where interpersonal drama is 1) extant and 2) meaningful.
printemps has a lot of choices but honestly i feel like it could have been much improved by being kinetic. i think it is (at least on paper) kinda interesting that rather frequently choices don't actually reflect in action; suoh isn't an outspoken person, so it's in character that she'd make a decision (say, to make herself known while accidentally overhearing a conversation) and then not follow through (because it'd just make things way too awkward) but like... those choices don't really meaningful for the story even though they affect the ending you get, and it's just weird.
i think this weirdness is partly a misplaced expectation. despite the cover art and synopsis and stuff, the game is coming of age much more than it is romance. still, it's a bit lame that for the most part you aren't really romancing either girl. and what i found most strange by far was how many rikka interactions there are even on mayuri's route, which is the true ending (and, also strange as fuck, the one you need to complete before rikka's is accessible? rikka's, which from what i can tell has suoh stay shy and not really self actualize? really strange). it's not that i dislike rikka or mind being around multiple characters, but it really doesn't quite feel like playing a romance at all. it took me a while to realize just how linear the game really was, i suppose.
there are more impactful choices though. once in a while the game tosses you a couple of "mystery" questions where suoh Deduces something, and failure gives you a bad ending. that sounds like a swell change of pace but the thing is they're placed so nonsensically, and the answers are also not deduceable at all. you only get an explanation of why that even is relevant after getting it right, and even then it feels super out of left field. not to mention the very first one is based on japanese wordplay — it hasn't been localized —, so it's an instant bad impression.
despite the mind numbing boredom i felt, i kept going. maybe it was just a slow start. maybe it'd become something great. and i saw glimpses of that possibility maybe some 6 hours in (that's after turning off animations and setting text speed to instant so i could skim faster, so ymmv), on chapter 7 (out of 8). before then, it really truly felt like all filler. but...
okay spoiler territory here, but also like this is where the story as it were actually begins and i feel it's important info if you're deciding whether or not you wanna play this game. skip to the end if you so prefer though.
so this is when we get into some romance territory, and we get inner monologues from rikka and mayuri. these are very brief scenes but leagues more interesting than suoh's pov, because they're much more petty and mean, whereas suoh's all "ahh i feel so embarassed but it's surely nothing lesbian... unless...". mayuri's crushing on rikka because she reminds her of her first love, and she tells that to suoh. rikka, in turn, confesses to suoh that she's in love with her and has been jealous of her friendship with mayuri. she coerces suoh into a relationship (erm. ish. this is inspired by class s) by threatening to out mayuri as a lesbian.
this, of course, makes little sense. again, thinking of class s, the thing is that rikka and suoh being together is a normal intimate friendship that will be grown out of while mayuri is an actual dyed in the wool pervert or whatever. but it's still so strange and contrived. but at least it makes the trio into a mess and gives us the first actual real drama of the whole vn, so i can ignore that.
but the thing is it's just too little too late. given the episodic nature of the game, it all resolves pretty quickly and easily, like everything else. it's a real shame, this was the closest i got to understanding the game's popularity.
not sure how else to bring these things up but here's some other stuff i'd like to talk about.
okay this character's first name is kind of a spoiler since it's the answer to a riddle. but also i think she might be an umineko reference? not to sound like boss baby guy, i promise it's founded. regardless, she's such an odd character. like. she doesn't really go to any classes and she doesn't have an amitié partner. what is she even doing in the school at all. what is her deal. i almost want to read été just because she's the protag. but i shan't.
yeah okay so remember from the spoiler section the thing about mayuri's lesbianism? (this isn't the spoiler. given it's an yuri vn).
so what i haven't talked about yet is suoh's "secret" / trauma. long story short for a while she had a stepmother who was a pianist and taught her piano. but as she improved — and got better than her stepbrother — their relationship soured, with her becoming harsh and implicitly abusive. so now suoh can't play the piano without getting panic attacks and stuff. and if you remember one of the clubs is choir and look. it's a whole thing. but suoh is made to play the piano once and everyone's like "damnnn you play so well!" but she doesn't tell anyone it's a trigger.
so suoh has this secret which is that she can't stand playing the piano. which is all fine and good to hide such a thing. whatever. but mayuri also has a secret, which is that she's a lesbian for real. and okay how to articulate this. there's a point where mayuri is like "dude i'm really glad you treat me normal after learning i'm a lesbian and we still take baths together and shit like normal instead of you treating me like i'm diseased" and it's treated like that's equivalent to suoh's piano trauma and it's just like. man.
because here's the thing. what's suoh afraid of here. not that trauma is rational!! but i just can't help thinking how much more interesting the vn would be if mayuri was the protagonist or something. because the story never really grapples with sexuality through suoh, it's just coy "what's this feeling... i just don't know..." shit. while mayuri is deeply aware of her attraction to women and that she can't very well be an out lesbian in catholic 2014 boarding school. except she can because this is yuriworld and nothing bad can ever happen.
except it kinda does and the vn has a sad ending that's like. not quite bury your gays adjacent but does remind me of it. whatever. i don't think there's a full game summary out there but basically:
suoh and mayuri start dating and it's initially a secret but it goes out really fast. then there's an amitié check-in type thing with the students and sister daliah (the only adult we see who seems to wear way too many hats at the school) tells suoh "hey girl... like we tolerate your homo relationship and all but the thing is you're dating someone in your amitié trio, so that kinda sucks for the third wheel. if you keep it up we'll have to split your group up and restructure it". so suoh is like fuckkkk this sucks what do i do. i gotta break up with mayuri. and i'll do it on our hiking date.
then the day of the date comes and she wakes up late and can't find either mayuri or rikka, and their room seems kinda empty. so she goes to the meeting place at this gazebo and mayuri isn't there either. but rikka and sister daliah appear and say mayuri has left the school. and then the game ends.
so, flowers' developer is an eroge studio, this series being their only all-ages title. their other games all seem to be mystery and/or horror, just overall darker. so the choice to make a fluffy romance just rather baffles me. they could have made a non-ero yuri vn that's still dark. but more importantly i think it also explains why the game tries to shoehorn in some mysteries for no reason. and idk i think it explains why it's so nothing? it's like they overcorrected when trying to make a squeaky clean game they could put on the psp. i don't knowwwww.
i tried extensively to give printemps the benefit of the doubt. i could see this being a wish fulfilment escapist delight for a teen girl. lots of people enjoy sweet low stakes romance. it's fine!!, i say, the vn is fine, it's perfectly fine and cute, it's all a matter of taste. i kept saying "look i know i'm being a bitch but don't get me wrong i'm not hating the game haha" but i (and others) realized pretty quickly that was untrue. the game's simply mediocre and boring, and i find that inexcusable. i found it inexcusable that i was hatereading yuri.
it drives me nuts that this vn manages to be talked about at all instead of relegated to a cultural oubliette. it makes me think that maybe there are just so few good yuri visual novels (outside of niche stuff on itch) that flowers is merely good by comparison. and that's so fucking depressing. i'll read seabed (2015) too and that'll be the yuri big 3 (third one of course being the aforementioned a summer's end, which at least is very very good) and if it sucks i fear i will become the joker.