'The Bygones' is a drama that explores an early 90s interpersonal rock band dynamic that deals with all the classic vices of money, sex, and drugs. The stand out feature of this visual novel is the visual presentation and effects mixed with the custom original soundtrack. It's one of those visual novels that's straight up inspired by a genre of music, this time being that late 80s/early 90s transition between alternative rock into grunge and britpop. The genre staples of being anti-commercialism, drug use, and other social issues of the time, all topics that are explored in this visual novel. The sprites are full of character, even if the poses and expressions tend to not always convey the character's emotion, having the text do all of the heavy lifting in that department. The backgrounds are service-able and the broad strokes and shaky style adds to that grunge aesthetic, same with the paper/pencil text box. The CGs are really well done, marking significant points in the narrative. The narrative itself tackles tough topics such as being gay in the early 90s, drug use, and financial struggles for music artists, and the songs themselves are meant to immerse the viewer into this trip into the struggles of a guitarist trying to make it in a band. I get the feeling it's not meant to be an 'enjoyable' experience, but more so a snapshot or preserving of an era that would be foreign to today's generations. Stuff like having to make calls via landline phones, when CDs were the new tech, and stuff like social justice and mental health were barely concepts.
I think the story does it's job well enough in portraying these flawed and immature characters, and I think it's on purpose that we never really understand why some of the characters are the way that they are. I will say, that this story employs a 'magic technology' for the purpose of framing the story for the reader's benefit, where the whole story is actually a recording of a memory that the main character can view though decades into the future, though I find that this is a pretty clunky and inelegant way of trying to reach a some kind of 'character growth' for the main character. Despite the whole story being about this guy who was such a major part of the main character's life, all the character development and self-reflection seems to be done in a montage of bullet points of how well and successful he was in the time since the main story. I think that it's supposed to be representative of how much the guilt weighs on his mind about how shitty of a friend he was and never got proper closure, but it comes off more as an epilogue, rather than a falling action to the big climax of the story. Especially since there's a new character introduced very late into the story, and yet becomes almost integral to the main character's life after the fact. Overall, I can tell that there was a real passion and view point for the main bulk of the story, but just didn't quite know (or want) to stick the landing, leaving immediate character reactions ambiguous, and relying on the reader to finish the story in their own mind.