Iwakura Aria has been praised in Japan for the rich quality of the artwork. Boasting a stunning painterly style, gorgeous character sprites and lavish backgrounds, Iwakura Aria’s art direction is certainly unique. It lends the whole story a certain seriousness which gives it a drama-like quality.

Typical to other visual novels are the stunning game CGs. These crop up in some of the game’s more poignant moments as you’d expect, and are always nothing short of picturesque. However, Iwakura Aria also deploys other art styles at key moments which serve as a perfect compliment to the game's beautiful colour CGs.

At times throughout the story, there are important moments that need to be captured with more intimacy or sensitivity which a normal CG may not so easily convey.

In Iwakura Aria, these moments are brought to life with a number of hand-drawn cut outs. Panels which focus on a particular detail or moment.

The brush of a hand, a touch of lipstick, a tender moment between Ichiko and Aria or in some cases a more sinister or unsettling scene.

These cut-aways bring real focus to these moments and often-times help bring the viewer closer to a scene and amplify the emotion of it – helping to convey passing seconds of sadness, or fear, or tenderness.

While we always enjoy the reveal of a CG in any of our visual novels, here the cut-aways deliver a punch that a ‘normal’ CG may not often achieve – which gives Iwakura Aria an edge all of its own.