Rewrite (visual novel)

Rewrite is a romance visual novel in which the player assumes the role of Kotarou Tennouji. Much of its gameplay is spent on reading the story's narrative and dialogue. The text in the game is accompanied by character sprites, which represent who Kotarou is talking to, over background art. Throughout the game, the player encounters CG artwork at certain points in the story, which take the place of the background art and character sprites.

When the game is completed at least once, a gallery of the viewed CGs and played background music becomes available on the game's title screen. Rewrite follows a branching plot line with multiple endings, and depending on the decisions that the player makes during the game, the plot will progress in a specific direction.

The main part of Rewrite's story takes place in the fictional city of Kazamatsuri, Japan, where treeplanting and afforestation have caused the city to become overgrown with trees and vegetation. The protagonist Kotarou Tennouji and his friends in the occult research society attend a high school in Kazamatsuri, in addition to spending time together in the society's clubroom. Outside of the school, frequented locations include the forest around Kazamatsuri and Kotarou's house. Throughout the story, Kotarou encounters an alternate dimension of Kazamatsuri where everything is silent and the sky is gray.

There are many entrances to this dimension, a secret world developed by the organisation Gaia, throughout the city. There, a sustainable environment exists to support life. When on the Moon, a hill where daisies grow is prominently shown amid a ruined Kazamatsuri where the night is eternal. This hill appears again later on Earth in the forest of Kazamatsuri.

Rewrite is Key's ninth game, and is the first of Key's visual novels to feature a 16:9 image aspect ratio instead of the previously used 4:3 aspect ratio. Rewrite is also the first Key game to be developed on VisualArt's' game engine Siglus. The project's planning was headed by Itaru Hinoue, who is also the art director and character designer for Rewrite. During the time when Key was developing their fifth game Tomoyo After: It's a Wonderful Life in 2005, Hinoue had more free time since she was just helping Fumio with the character design, and that is when Hinoue got the initial idea for Rewrite. Hinoue wrote a proposal for the basis of Rewrite's premise and passed it on to Takahiro Baba, the president of VisualArt's.

After the project was accepted, Hinoue consulted Key's former main scenario writer Jun Maeda on various game scenario writers to employ for Rewrite. However, the one writer Hinoue wanted on the project was Romeo Tanaka, who she had become a fan of after she played FlyingShine's 2003 visual novel Cross Channel, written by Tanaka. While he did not initially accept the offer, Tanaka decided to take the project when he was given the time he needed to do the job. When he accepted it, Tanaka was still unaware that Maeda had stepped down as Key's main scenario writer, and he became more interested when he was told that he would write Rewrite's overall story.

In 2011, Rewrite ranked five times in the top ten in national PC game pre-orders in Japan. The rankings were at No. 9 in January, No. 4 in February, No.

3 in March, and twice at No. 1 in April and May. Rewrite ranked first in terms of national sales of PC games in Japan in June 2011. Rewrite would rank twice more in the top 50 highest selling PC games in Japan, at No.