YMMV / Kindred Spirits on the Roof

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Tsukuyo's old friend confessed to her, claimed it was a misunderstanding and later got married to a man. Did she believe in the Gay Romantic Phase, was she bisexual, or was she perhaps a closeted lesbian who only married her husband to fit in?
• Awesome Music: "A-A-Ai!", an epic love song about how time started to matter to the singer when she fell in love. Youka really hit it out of the park.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal: A common complaint among Western fans is simply that, even at approximately 30 hours with plenty of post-ending content, it ends eventually. This is largely due to the extreme scarcity of yuri works of its caliber in English.
• Base-Breaking Character: Depending on who you're talking to, any character is liable to be one of these, but some of them stand out more than others:
  • Umi's incredible clinginess towards her friends and apparent carelessness with Sasa's feelings tends to draw her a lot of ire, but many also warmed up to her after Nena verbally smacked her down, and the game was able to give proper focus to Sasa and Umi's relationship without Nena involved as a result.
  • Matsuri and Miyu both suffer from this; Matsuri's complete disregard for the rules they decided on is not often lauded, and you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't agree with Miyu for getting mad at her. Matsuri admits she was out of line, while Miyu suspects that Matsuri is trying to push her buttons. At the same time, there are those who can see where she was coming from with wanting to get physical with Miyu every now and again(since she points out that she's been holding herself back for months), and Miyu bringing Hina into an argument she had nothing to do with is not a decision oft praised. That said, the game points out that they both have valid points, but are both at fault for the state of their relationship; Megumi blames Miyu, while Sachi blames Matsuri. In the end, they both apologize to each other, as well as to Yuna and Hina for getting the latter drawn into their feud.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: When the game was first announced to be releasing on Steam, the announcement happened to mention that it was not going to be censored. Somehow many blogs took this to mean that it was an explicit porn game and that Steam was lowering their standards for some reason. This lead to the game being briefly infamous. In reality, it was felt there was no need of censorship. The love scenes in question, apart from comprising a small proportion of the actual game's playtime, contain nudity and some suggestive animation, but certainly far less explicit than can be found in several romance games on the platform.
• Broken Base: Hina's Relationship Upgrade with Yuna. Is it a sweet and logical conclusion to their relationship arc that allows the game to end on a touching note, or is it a Romantic Plot Tumor that slows the game's pace to a grueling crawl and gets in the way of the "superior" Ano/Yuna ship?
• Die for Our Ship: Ano fans tend to hugely annoy Hina fans, and vice versa, to the point that the fans of each character and pairing tend to dislike the actual character. Doubly so for Ano fans, due to the fact the Hina X Yuna ship is the canon one.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite the fact that Yuna/Hina is the canon main couple, Yuna/Ano is just as popular. Ano/Nena is also popular, thanks in part to an Almost Kiss scene in the first drama CD Playing Girlfriends.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game is extremely popular in the West, and is considered the premier Yuri title. In contrast, while well-received, it's significantly less popular in Japan.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Yuna flouts the rules by leaning against the railings on the roof, believing that if the school really wants to prevent accidents, they should make the railings higher. It later turns out that Sachi died when she fell from the roof while saving a classmate who was about to fall herself.
• Les Yay: Some moments between Ano and her friends (Yuna, Nena, and Kiri) feel like this, even though Kiri is in love with Tsukuyo, Yuna eventually gets together with Hina and Nena and Ano don't get together with anyone.
  • Exemplified in the first drama CD, which involves Ano getting Yuna, Hina, and Nena to pretend to be her girlfriend so she can shake off stalkers. She perhaps has the most success with Nena, the only other character who doesn't have a girlfriend as of the end of the game.
  • Aki gets along surprisingly well with Yuna, and has no hesitation with calling her by her first name. In "Toomi," Aki even wonders if she might have fallen for Yuna if she'd met her before Youka.
  • Kiri immediately is smitten with Hina, considering her "Hercutelean" after the latter chases her down when she's trying to get away from Tsukuyo.
  • In an extra scene, it's revealed that Kiri considers Ano second on her list of the top three cutest people in Shirojo, behind Tsukuyo(her official Love Interest) and ahead of Hina.
• Sacred Cow: To the Western Yuri fandom as a whole. Hugely well-regarded, mentioning anything negative about the game will get a very negative response.
• Scrappy Mechanic: There's no option to erase your planner data, so you want to start the game from scratch, you'll have to disable cloud saves and then manually delete your save files.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Yuna's backstory. Despite how much she valued her clubmates in the middle school cooking club, only to hear them talking about her behind her back and saying how much they resented her efforts to improve the cooking club. It's understandably traumatic for her, and goes a long way in explaining why she doesn't have many friends.
  • The last October chapter, or more accurately Megumi and Sachi finally moving on. The entire plot has been building up to it and it's a happy occasion, but it's not hard to get caught up in it. Sachi's quiet farewell is bad enough, but when Megumi starts to cry because, despite all their bickering, she really has grown attached to Yuna... it's an incredibly touching scene. Afterward when Yuna realizes she's crying and that she will miss the two of them only accentuates it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Miki and Seina apparently go on a few outings over vacation, but none of them are shown, likely because the game doesn't feature any locations besides the school, the road leading to the school, and Yuna and Hina's homes. It might have been nice to see some of those outings, even if it's only in an extra scene.
• Wangst: One of the most common criticisms of the game is that the characters tend to spend a lot of time being overly melodramatic about things that aren't actually that bad. Notably, Sachi's secret is built up to be something very dramatic, but can feel overly Narm-y due to how tame it is in comparison to how long the game spends building it up. That being said, Sachi spent 50 years without anyone to talk to about this, and was too afraid of losing her only companion for the next 30 years, so it's unsurprising that she'd end up making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to her personal issues.
• The Woobie: Quite a few characters count. Examples would be:
  • Aihara Miki because of how much of an Extreme Doormat she is. It's so bad that her fellow third-years that call themselves her "friends" call her a masochist behind her back and laugh at her for not being able to say no to others who ask for her help. Fortunately for her, Maki is there to back her up.
  • Yuna herself once you learn of her backstory and why she's so antisocial: before the events of the game, she was extremely social and worked hard until she heard her classmates, some she considered friends, talking about her behind her back and saying how she's always better than them and making them look bad in comparison despite the fact that Yuna was always grateful for their support and was going to tell them before she heard that. She even dreams about that event constantly and she says she has that dream to "punish herself constantly." The only person she remained friendly to after this event is Hina.
  • Sachi: back when she was alive, she actually used to be a shy person who couldn't tell the girl that she fell in love with her feelings. This became her regret and is the reason why she's been stuck as a ghost for 80 years. Then she met Megumi, who was the first person she could interact with normally in 50 years, and was afraid to admit that her outgoing personality was just her copying her first love in order to make Megumi not hate her for being a coward.
• Woolseyism: In the scene in which Seina attacks the upperclassmen for badmouthing Miki, Seina starts to refer to the girl she was attacking as "koitsu," an extremely rude third-person pronoun, but corrects herself to say "kono hito-tachi" ("these people"). In the English translation, the former is translated as Seina being about to call the subject a "piece of... (shit)."

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