Since most eroge blogs I follow seem to be pretty quiet right now, I decided that I should try to fill in the gaps.

I’ve been meaning to do this review for a long, long time. I’ve had tons of material ready for this review, but I never got around to it since I never got around to completely finishing the game. And I still haven’t. This review is basically for the material in the original Little Busters! + Saya since I never got around to playing all of the new routes. It’s been at least 6 months since I’ve played the original routes, so my description for most of them will be on the short side.

Warning: Spoilers in this review are actual massive spoilers. Do not read them if you don’t want the game potentially ruined. I don’t think the spoiler function works correctly in a feedreader, so I advise you to visit the actual site if you’re reading this on something like Google Reader and don’t want the game spoiled.

Game: リトルバスターズ！エクスタシー
Company: Key
Release date: July 25, 2008
Related links: Getchu

Such a great OP

Scenario

A group of osananajimi — Riki, Rin, Kyousuke, Masato, and Kengo — go to school together, fight each other, and generally do nothing but mess around with each other. The fearless group leader, Kyousuke, decides that they need to do something new together. His idea? Baseball. And not just baseball for fun. He wants to challenge all the leaders of the sports clubs. The name of the team? Their childhood group name, Little Busters. But they only have five people. They go around asking everyone, and Riki ends up attracting a harem a group of new female friends to the team. Pretty much nobody he recruits has any prospects, but they train for the big day and generally have fun together as friends.

Characters

Naoe Riki

He has a face AND a voice (when playing from another character’s perspective)

The protagonist of the game, Riki is your typical nice guy. Physically, he’s pretty weak. He has narcolepsy and sometimes suddenly faints. Tired of being so weak, he’s determined to get stronger, both physically and mentally. He wants to catch up to Kyousuke, who’s strong and a good leader.

Natsume Rin

Rin is the main heroine of the game, and the main story essentially evolves around her. And boy, do you have to work to get her. In order to get her true romantic ending, Key decided to make you finish her bad end, every other original characters’ endings, her second bad ending, and a friendship ending. After that, THEN you get her true ending. And it’s quite short. Oh screw you, Key. Make a Rin After instead of one for Kud. I’ll even buy two copies. Rin deserves more. I’m not biased. I swear.

Download audio file (lb1.mp3)

Rin is a cat lover, and she frequently acts like a cat when she’s mad or surprised, as demonstrated above. Now looking at the above line, you’d probably think she’s a typical tsundere or something. Honestly, I’m not even sure I can categorize her as a tsundere. Other than a brief period in the beginning, she’s pretty much always friendly with Riki. They act like what you’d expect close friends to. They help each other, they joke around with each other, they hang out together. They act like, *gasp*, pretty much normal friends that you might find in real life. She doesn’t ever really hit him or get angry with him (though that’s not the case with her other osananajimi — she’s speaking to Masato in that line). There doesn’t seem to be a forced overfriendliness and nosiness of typical osananajimi. It’s refreshing to find a group of friends that (almost) act like how you’d expect a real group of friends to act.

Download audio file (lb2.mp3)

She can be quite tsuntsun toward everyone but Riki.

Like Riki, Rin is also quite weak. But unlike Riki, she’s just socially weak. She has no friends except her osananajimi in the beginning of the game. When she meets new people, she gets extremely nervous and hides behind Riki. Her brother, Kyousuke, is worried that Rin won’t be able to survive when she gets to the real world, so he does everything he can to make her stronger. Constantly unable to cope with the new social situations Kyousuke forces onto her, Rin uses her large collection of cats as an escape. Sometimes I get the feeling she cares about her cats more than anything else.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

And there lies the main story of the game. Both Riki and Rin need to get stronger and learn the value of friendship.

Download audio file (lb3.mp3)

She says this after seeing Riki close to another girl, showing a side of him she hasn’t seen. Playing other characters’ paths is painful for me when she says stuff like this. I wanted to skip the rest of the path after she said this.

Even after Riki, Rin, and I(by having to play all the other paths) struggled to get to the end, there wasn’t much left. After Rin and Riki became stronger and learned to support each other by going through numerous trials, there isn’t much focus on the romance between them.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

All they get is a rushed relationship. Even though they both got stronger, neither of them know how to act in a relationship. But the game doesn’t really mind. It pretty much immediately rushes toward their making out and sex right after they get together. I think events like what happened in the first bad ending should have been included in the true end. They need to learn what it means to become a couple after being friends for so long. In the first bad end, you get the feeling they’re closer to each other, but they’re still figuring out how to act around each other. One of my favorite scenes was them eating alone together and betting on/stealing each other’s food. They’re getting to be more than friends, and it’s a gradual shift that suits them. It doesn’t make any sense for them to suddenly skip all that and get straight to sex.

Natsume Kyousuke

Kyousuke is Rin’s older brother, leader of the group and a year older than everyone else in the group. He’s quite a spontaneously guy who forces the group to do whatever he thinks of. However, he’s quite dependable and often gives Riki advice. He strongly wants Riki and Rin to get stronger, and he comes up with all sorts of plans to do so.

Inohara Masato

Masato is obsessed with muscles. His only interests seem to be working out and hanging out with Riki. He’s quite stupid, but he’s a good guy who cooperates with Kyousuke to make Rin and Riki stronger. Think of him as the comic relief of the group.

Miyzawa Kengo

Kengo is the most serious person in the original Little Busters group, and if you can’t tell, he’s into kendo. He thinks many of Kyousuke’s ideas are dumb and doesn’t participate in the baseball team most of the time. Even though he has his disagreements with Kyousuke on how to help Rin and Riki, he tries in his own way to make them stronger.

Subcharacters

This might be a bit controversial, but I think all the other girls are subcharacters since they don’t contribute nearly as much to the central story as any of the osananajimi group.

Kurugaya Yuiko

Download audio file (lb4.mp3)

Yuiko is quite a straightforward person as you can tell from her above line.  Being extremely strong and deadly with a sword, she’s the most suited person in the group to play baseball. She’s also quite apathetic and emotionless about most things. She thinks she’s broken as a person since she can’t feel emotions like other people do.

Download audio file (lb5.mp3)

She’s also pretty perverted and into cute girls.

Noumi Kudryavka

Download audio file (lb6.mp3)

Her signature “Wafu~” phrase.

Kud is mostly Russian and part Japanese, and she moves to Japan after living in a foreign country with her grandfather. Because of her foreigness, everyone excepts her to know English (even though her name is clearly not English). But she’s really, really bad at it.

Download audio file (lb7.mp3)

Bad even when compared to a typical Japanese person.

As for her personality, she’s a genki and polite loli who tries really hard at everything. Nothing special. She doesn’t deserve an after story. Lolicon don’t need more encouragement. Give me more Rin.

Nishizono Mio

She’s a quiet, book-loving girl who constantly recites poetry and fantasizes about BL all the time. Unlike many other quiet types, she’s not quiet because of apathy or social issues. She stays away from others because she has something to hide, making her story slightly more interesting than other quiet types.

Saigusa Haruka

Download audio file (lb8.mp3)

If you can’t tell by her line above, she’s the genki and random type — a type of character I usually can’t stand. But surprisingly, I actually like Haruka. Her randomness is less annoying and more entertaining. She likes causing problems that’ll trouble the rule keeping committee thing at school. I don’t really know how to describe why I don’t dislike her. I think it might be because she’s doing it on purpose and isn’t naturally doing it because she’s an idiot. It’s more of a coping mechanism to deal with her family issues.

Download audio file (lb9.mp3)

Even she knows she makes no sense.

Kamikita Komari

Komari is Rin’s best female friend. She’s one of those super bubbly types, another type I hate. And unlike Haruka, she has no redeeming qualities to me. In fact, she’s the only character I didn’t have a screenshot prepared. I don’t know what else I can really say other than she’s really annoying to me and she’s obsessed with sweets.

Tokido Saya

Download audio file (lb10.mp3)

Oh the tsun. Saya is a new character added in Ecstasy, and she’s by far the tsundere of the game. And since I just completed her path, she gets more details than most other characters. Saya’s a spy looking for some treasure hidden underneath the school, and Riki accidentally stumbles on her doing so. Being a spy, she can’t let this go and she repeatedly tries to kill Riki. Obviously, she fails.

But hey, Riki’s amazing ability to avoid death will be useful for her mission, so she makes him her partner. Logic like this and her self-hatred mode whenever she fails — and she fails quite a lot around Riki — as seen above makes Saya great for laughs.

Download audio file (lb11.mp3)
As expected of Key, Saya has a bunch of weird… noise expressions.

Playing through Saya’s route is a bit tedious since you have to play a shooting game to get all of her endings, and you’ll be playing it a lot since her route involves playing it from Riki’s perspective and her perspective. In fact, I can’t even seem to get all of her endings despite following a walkthrough. If you can get all of her endings without a walkthrough, you’re either brilliant or extremely patient.

I frankly didn’t find Saya’s personality that interesting, mainly because there’s not much depth or development of her personality. She just pretty much goes from her self-hating tsuntsun mode to deredere. Being an entirely new character, she basically never interacts with anybody but Riki.

H-scenes

Since the original game had no sex, this is definitely not a game you play for the sex scenes. In fact, you might not get a single sex scene until your 5th character playthrough. The scenes that are in the game are nothing special. They do nothing interesting and aren’t important to the characters’ development.

Art

There are some body size consistency problems and art style inconsistencies in the game. Even at its best, the art is nothing to write home about. It’s pretty disappointing for such a high profile game.

System

Unlike every other game I’ve reviewed so far, Little Busters! actually has a system worth mentioning. There are several mini-games that run throughout the story.

Baseball/batting practice

The baseball mini-game consists of just batting practice. You hit balls around and the other characters field them and have their funny responses. Don’t hit the cats or Rin gets mad. The mini-game isn’t very deep since all you can control is Riki’s position and when to swing, but I found it entertaining enough to enable it on all my playthroughs. Whenever you play the baseball game, the characters get stat increases, which helps them in the fighting game and in the final baseball showdown.

Fighting game. Yes. Masato’s weapon is a cat. Versus a gun.

I’m not sure this qualifies as a mini-game since it’s not interactive. But it goes like this: in the beginning of a fight, each side gets a random weapon. They then battle each other with said weapons and gain skill points in those weapons, so it’s a good thing to get the same item multiple times. The winner of the match gives the loser a random weird/funny nickname.

And the fighting system leads to the ranking system.

Ranking system

Every so often, you’re given the opportunity to wander around and exchange items (which you get through the normal story mode) with the girls, get in a fight, or watch another fight. Whenever a fight happens, a potential rank change occurs.

I couldn’t get first in my game because I can’t fight Rin.

All the systems are optional, and I don’t think you lose much from disabling them, except for Saya’s shooting game, which is required to get all of her endings. I recommend the baseball game, but the fighting and ranking games get boring.

Overall

I pretty much went through the gist of the game in Rin’s overview, but for those who didn’t read all of it, this is a game about friendship and growing up. It’s about making Riki and Rin strong enough to deal with the problems they’ll encounter in real life. Romance isn’t a strong point of this game, especially in Rin’s route. The game seems to take for granted that Rin and Riki are going to be together, and they put their relationship aside to deal with other issues. To me, this game is all about Rin. All the other characters were there to support Rin and Riki. If you’re going to play this for any character but Rin, I think you’re going to be disappointed after seeing how much emphasis is put on her for the true ending.

Score

For an overview of my scoring system, look at any of my past reviews. I’m going to do something different for this and give two scores, depending on what you want from the game.

Though I wish Rin’s path had more of a focus on romance, the lack of it didn’t greatly affect my enjoyment of the main story. If you’re looking for a story largely based on friendship, growing up, and comedy that revolves around Rin, I would score it:

5/5

However, if you expect this to be more like a typical eroge, with a stronger focus on romance and all the characters, the game isn’t as great. Most of the characters’ routes, though decent, feel like something tacked onto the main story and are not memorable at all compared to the true route. The art quality doesn’t help.

4/5

I’m going to ask you again, Key. Give me Rin After.

The fan disk for the well received Hoshizora no Memoria has finally been released. I’m going to assume everyone who’s reading this review has already played the original game. Now let’s return to the group and join the club in some stargazing.

I don’t really know how to review a fan disk, but let’s give it a try.

And for people who haven’t been following my reviews, spoiler tags hide ero content. There are no significant spoilers unless I give immediate advance warning.

Game:  星空のメモリア Eternal Heart
Developer: FAVORITE
Release date: January 29, 2010
Related links: Getchu

OP

Let’s start with the game system since it’s a fan disk.

Only Yume and Mare have significant routes in the game. All the other heroines have very short paths that are essentially epilogues to their own path in the original game. You must play through either Yume or Mare’s path before you can play the other heroines’ paths.

Download audio file (eh1.mp3)

And using the conventions of my previous review, Kogasaki You will be known as Kogayou.

Yume

Yume’s path fills in the details between her ending and her epilogue of the original game. After Mare is sent back, Kogayou and Yume must search for her meteorite to meet her again. Of course, they have no idea where it landed, making it a ridiculously difficult task.

To alleviate the boredom of their task, Yume and Kogayou do it like rabbits. That is, like rabbits that have sex three times during the span of a year or so.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Of course, you already know the outcome of their search, so it’s not all that exciting. Unless you’re one of those people who get anxious about which side will win in a World War 2 movie or something. Then this is just the thing for you.

Yume molesting a pillow. I liked the SD art in the original game more.

Mare S. Ephemeral

Even though this is technically Mare’s path, it’s more about Ima than anything. Ima shows up and tries to attack pretty much everybody. She lost her memories so they need to get them back and reunite her with her family.

Download audio file (eh3.mp3)

Some bad influence from Isuzu, eh?

Of course the danger to Mare’s life isn’t enough to prevent them from GETTING IT ON. And going on dates and cosplaying and stuff. Mare turns way too deredere in her path for my tastes. She goes down a ranking or two compared to the original.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Asuka Ima

Ima is Asuka Mirai’s brother, and she was sent by the same people as Setsuna. Her job is to send Kosame back, but she discovers Mare and Ren during her job, and she decides she has to deal with them too.

Ima is one of those serious about their job types. You could call her a weaker version of Setsuna.

Hisakaki Komomo

Download audio file (eh6.mp3)

Kogayou really is an uncurable lolicon.
(By the way, people need to learn how to pronounce loli. It’s not “law-lee”. Come on, look at the English word it came from.)

Komomo’s path is just about her and Kogayou gradually being able to say each other’s first name. Yeah, that’s it. Luckily, her deredere mode isn’t as extreme as the others.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

The rest of the characters

Since all the characters except Mare and Yume only get new CGs from sex scenes, I’ll just go over their short paths quickly.

Kosame’s path is basically a rehash of her original route, which deals with her anxiety about her existence, requiring Kogayou to reassure her.

Isuzu’s path is about her wanting to work and help Kogayou.

Asuho’s path is about her and Kogayou’s future plans.

Chinami’s path is about her visiting her parents’ graves.

And yes. Chinami is still as annoying as ever. Even with a new voice, which doesn’t seem that different to me.

You can see for yourself by listening to some her annoying catchphrases.

Download audio file (eh7.mp3)

Download audio file (eh8.mp3)

Summary

I’m not sure what to think. Neither Yume nor Mare’s paths were very good compared to the original game, but this is a fan disk. It’s not meant to be that story focused. It  was nice being able to revisit the characters, but I think I liked all of the characters less after playing through this game. They all turn very deredere, and in some cases, way too much for my tastes.

The side stories are very shallow, as you can see in my summaries. They’re basically there to add a sex scene and allow the players to spend a short time with their favorite characters. I can’t help but feel like there should have been a bit more in each of them. Maybe I expected too much since I don’t usually play fan disks, but I was able to rush through some of those side stories in like 30 minutes by skipping the sex scenes and voices.

The two main paths were good, but not great. This was probably due to the fact that the ending for Yume’s path is already known and Mare’s path isn’t really about her.

By then again, if you love these characters, more can only be a good thing, right? You get to spend some more time with them, do some sexing, and learn some more about their backgrounds and the background of the town.

So big fans of the characters should give this a go. If you didn’t care too much about the characters, you can probably give this a pass.

It’s also not really worth full price. It should have been like 5000-6000 yen MSRP.

Since this is a fan disk, I have no idea how to apply my scoring system to this, so a score will be omitted.

Stealth announcement: This site will be going into hibernation mode. That means updates will come much less often — only when I really really want to make a post. It’s been about 6 months since I started this blog and I’ve gotten tired of writing it. Also, the amount of time spent updating the site is too great to justify the amount of visitors. To the few people who’ve stuck around for most of this site’s existence, thank you.

Until I can find some more motivation to update, farewell.

Yes, finally. Another review. The game this time will be Pulltop’s Te to Te Try On!.  Technically, this isn’t a full review because I skipped one path, but I played the majority of the game so I think I have a good enough idea of the game. One format change with this review is that NSFW images are now hidden in spoiler tags. There will not be any story spoilers without advance warning, so feel free to click away.

I was also too lazy to do an unboxing, but the first edition comes with a ~15 page full color art book with character art from other artists and the soundtrack.

Game: てとてトライオン!
Developer: PULLTOP
Release date: August 29, 2008
Related links: Galge, Getchu, Walkthrough

OP

Scenario

Washizuka Shinichirou wakes up one day with his father gone. He finds a note from his father that says he’s going to be gone for a while and that he enrolled Shinichirou in a new school. Upon arriving at the new school, he finds nothing but a park with nobody around. He walks around and sees someone in the distance and follows them and finds this.

Orihama Natsumi was changing (though I don’t know where the pantsu comes into play). She doesn’t really seem to mind, and some things happen and she agrees to show him the school. They go back to the park and Shinichirou still doesn’t understand where the school is. After a while, the ground shakes and buildings come out of the ground. It’s the school!

After some more things happen, it seems like Shinichirou has some special ability to control the school’s computer systems, so he’s summoned to the student council, who with a few other people, are in charge of maintaining the school. The student council and maintenance team also happen to be comprised of all girls.

They discover that Shinichirou’s neckband from his father has some special power over the school’s system whenever he’s holding hands with some specific girls, so he’s made to join the student council to help them with their recent problems with the school’s system.

Yes, the game is about maintenance workers. Exciting, no?

Characters

Washizuka Shinichirou

The protagonist of the game, Shinichirou has lived with his traveling father all his life. His father is a researcher, yet he also likes living in the wilderness, allowing Shinichirou to develop survival skills and a strong body. And he’s going to need it with what the student council wants him to do, which is running around. A lot.

Since he’s been living with his father and wandering around all his life, Shinicihirou has never settled down for long and hasn’t gone to school for a while, making him unaccustomed to girls. This makes him the target of frequent teasing by the girls in the story. However, he’s a pretty good guy and dedicated to helping the school. But he’s not particularly interesting or anything. He’s your typical nice guy with girls falling all over him.

Orihama Natsumi

Natsumi is the main heroine of the story. She loves swimming and is often said to be like a fish. Being a carefree girl, she thinks being chased by robots and stuff is fun. I think she’s missing some stuff upstairs. Being a really cheerful and loud girl, she grabs onto Shinichirou pretty much whenever she seems him. In other words, too genki.

Her path reveals the most about the background of the school, and for some reason, the maintenance team suddenly compare her and Shinichirou to Orihime and Hikoboshi — the characters in Tanabata. There’s really no reason for it leading up to that point, so it struck me as odd and forced.

Hasumi Ichino

Ichino is the student council president, and she acts like a dignified and slightly conceited president in front of most people. But put her in front of her roommate Serina, and her act breaks down and she acts like a kid. When Serina is around, Ichino will whine and pout when things don’t go the way she wants. Though I said she’s a dignified president, she’s in no way one of those uptight quiet people. She still fools around a lot while doing her job.

Her pouting.

She loves the school and really tries her best to do the best for the school, and she’s good at inspiring others to do the same, making her a good and respected student council president. Of course she also tries really hard to create and maintain that image.

However, in her path, when Shinichirou finds out about her undignified side, her reaction is soooo cute. Eventually, she’ll stop putting up her act in front of Shinichirou, leading to events like this:

She hates green peas.

In addition, she really loves teasing Shinichirou, but whenever he responds to her sexual teases seriously, she gets nervous and flustered. The way she reacts is really cute. You gotta play it to understand.

Since she’s so close to Serina, people think there’s something going on between them. It doesn’t help Ichino seems to like fostering the misunderstanding.

Maybe it’s true.

Ichino’s path is just more about fixing the school and about Shinichirou finding out what she did in the past that she regrets. There’s no serious story behind it, but I found her relationship with Shinichirou the most entertaining and cute.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Tokura Temari

Temari is a computer whiz and is pretty much the brains of the maintenance operation. She speaks in a soft and pretty monotone voice, making her pretty unexciting. Takako, her roommate, is extremely overprotective of Temari and the biggest obstacle for Shinichirou in Temari’s path. Getting Takako to accept Shinichirou is an arduous and extremely annoying process.

Her SD images are cute.

She can eat a LOT.

Ever play Ever17? Yeah? Well, imagine Yuu’s path in that game. Except absolutely boring. Tenmari has to hack into the school’s central computer that her father helped create in order to take control of it. In the process, she has to solve riddles, including one that involves her name. Sound familiar?

Seem even more familiar? Yeah, that’s the map from Ever17.

However, in contrast to Yuu’s path in Ever17, there’s nothing that’s life-threatening. The solutions involve going to a place and using Shinichirou’s magic neckband. It wasn’t exciting, interesting, or funny. It was just repetitive. Takako made the process even more annoying with her constant overzealous protection of Temari. It doesn’t help that Temari keeps calling Shinichirou, “Darling.” ARGH! STOP THAT. Too much sweet deredere stuff. I’ve never wanted a path to end more than this one.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Kurumizawa Suzuki

Suzuki is the tsundere of the group, and my least favorite character in the game. Yeah, that’s right. A tsundere is my least favorite character.  She’s one of those tsundere that get really angry and violent at pretty much everything. And then once you go go down her path, she suddenly turns extremely deredere. I just can’t stand those type of tsundere.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Her path is the one I didn’t finish, but from what  I saw from the little bit I played, she met Shinichirou once when they were kids and they confessed to each other and promised to be together when they meet again. Right after she remembered that, she became super deredere and I couldn’t stand it, so I skipped the rest.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Subcharacters

Or at least some of them.

Fujigamine Serina

Serina is Ichino’s roommate and the vice president of the student council. She’s a serious person and often has to keep Ichino in line since she’s often fooling around. When she gets mad, she’s extremely scary.

Hayama Takako

Takako is Temari’s roommate and childhood friend. Like a crazy older sister/mother, she watches over Temari like a hawk and gets extremely mad whenever something potentially harmful or traumatizing is about to happen to Temari.

She’s a nutcase.

Hayama Hatoko

Hatoko is Takako’s twin sister. As the school’s reporter, she hosts the daily news show. And she’s extremely loud. And annoying.

H-scenes

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

To be honest, I have no idea what most of the sex scenes are like. I skipped through the sex scenes for everyone but Ichino. Ichino’s scenes were actually pretty decent and funny at times.

Every character gets two sex scenes, and there didn’t seem to be anything exciting about them. The only thing out of the ordinary was one anal scene.

Temari’s sex scenes seem forced in order to reach two scenes since her sex scenes come almost right after each other while all the other characters have a significant amount of time between them. Having a second sex scene shortly after the first one just seems to devalue the second one.

Overall

Te to Te Try On is a pretty laid back game about students who are pretty much maintenance workers for their school. Fun. The story for the game isn’t very important, and frankly, it isn’t very good. Romance is also not a strong point of the game. For the most part, the relationships aren’t interesting or well developed.

To make up for this, the game needs to have interesting events and characters. Unfortunately, the game largely fails at this. The events in the game are usually not very funny or interesting and most often revolve around the group trying to fix problems with the school. Stuff like berserk robots, power outages, broken showers etc. Yeah, that’s right. Fixing broken showers.

Fixing things seems to be the theme of this game, and it’s achieved by Shinichirou by holding hands with a girl to activate his special powers, hence the Te to Te part of the title. After they do that, the problems pretty much automagically get fixed. Blah blah blah, holding hands and fixing stuff seems to be an excuse to get him closer to a girl so they can fall in love and whatnot. It helps that whenever they’re fixing things, the neckband somehow makes them become mentally connected.

As for the characters, most of them are pretty typical and uninteresting. You’ve got your stupid genki girl, your quiet sorta-loli, and a (bad) tsundere. Ichino at least mixes it up a bit by less typical and you know, entertaining. And cute.

If I only played Ichino’s route and stopped, I probably would have had a really good impression of the game. Unfortunately,  I had to keep going until I wanted to pound my head into the wall. I couldn’t wait for the game to be over.

At least the game is only of medium length and only requires two choices for each path, though the results of the choices aren’t that obvious.

So let’s end it on a good note.

Score

My scale will probably be a lot different from most other people’s scale. My scores will be from 1 to 5, integer only. I don’t understand why people need to use a 10 point (or shit, a 100 point) scale. Do you really care about the difference between a game that gets a 3 or a 4 out of 10? Can you really tell me the difference between a 8.5 and an 8.6? Decimals are usually assigned purely on a whim. My score also is based on the overall game. My enjoyment of the game is the primary deciding factor. No subscores are given.

I also give games scores based on what they’re trying to be. For example, I won’t ding a slice of life game for not having an epic story. It’s simply not what the game is supposed to be.

The meaning of my scores and their rough equivalent in a 1-10 scale.

5 – Excellent. Must play (9-10)
4 – Good. Play if you’re a fan of the genre (8)
3 – Average. Play if something about the game really attracts you. (7)
2 – Below average. Only play if there’s something about the game that really really interests you. You need to have a die hard fetish for it or something to make it worthwhile. (6)
1 – Crap. Avoid no matter what. (1-5)

2/5

If you think you’d like Ichino, play her path and then quit. Her path alone is worth a playthrough, but the remaining parts of the game detract from the experience.

Where to buy: Amazon (How to), Getchu, Erogeshop (because some people just don’t want to save money)

Name: 星空のメモリア -Wish upon a shooting star-
Developer: FAVORITE
Release date: March 27, 2009
Related links: Getchu, Walkthrough

Opening

Yep. Finally another review. The unboxing is also available.

Scenario

Hoshizora no Memoria is about Kogasaka You (from here on out, I will call him Kogayou to avoid confusing his name with the English pronoun), who returns to his hometown with his sister Chinami after moving to the city for seven years. The reason he moves back is because his mom died, so he has to live with his aunt. But he has a goal after moving back. Seven years ago, when he moved out of his hometown, he made a promise with a girl to meet again. They used to spend much time watching the stars at the observation platform in town. The problem is, Kogayou doesn’t know how to contact her. The only information he knows is her name and that they were supposed to meet again at the observation platform.

Armed with only this knowledge, Kogayou’s only choice is to go to the observation platform, where he meets a girl who looks just like the girl from his past… except the girl is the about the same age as the girl he knew in the past. The girl calls herself Mare and claims to be a shinigami who gets rid of nightmares.

Mare claims to have been waiting for Kogayou for a long time. She says her duty is to get rid of Kogayou’s nightmare, and she claims his nightmare is the girl from the past. Mare uses her power to make Kogayou forget the name of the girl from the past. With even less information than before, Kogayou has no choice but to live a more normal student life while trying to remember the girl’s name. He joins the Astronomy Club and continues to watch stars while trying to figure out who Mare is and how he’ll find the girl from the past again.

Characters

Kogasaki You

Not a completely faceless character, but you also don’t see his face a lot. Kogayou is a pretty likable guy, unlike many protagonists. He’s not a wimp. He’s not indecisive. He’s pretty much a normal guy that’s searching for his lost first love. Being a smart and dependable guy, you can see why some girls would fall for him, unlike some guys in other romances…

Mare S. Ephemeral

As mentioned before, Mare is a shinigami that gets rid of people’s nightmares. She’s also a nightmare herself because she’s pretty much the epitome of disobedient. Mare likes to disagree with or refuse to do anything anybody asks her to do. But she’ll usually do it anyway, so she’s not a bad person. She often gets mad at Kogayou and hits him with the handle of her scythe, just like a typical tsundere.

Download audio file (hoshizora.mp3)

“May I slash this girl?”
She likes slashing people.

Mare is one of my favorite characters in the game, but that’s not too much of a surprise. Tsundere <3.

Hisakaki Komomo

Komomo is part of the student council, and she’s a serious person who always works really hard. She’s opposed to the Astronomy Club because she hates stars, but her twin sister Kosame is in the Astronomy Club, so she gets a lot of yuri resistance. Komomo is another tsundere, but she’s not the same as Mare. She’s more the typical kind of tsundere, the type that gets angry easily. For some reason, she also seems to hate her own name.

Like this. (I want in on this.)

Download audio file (hoshizora2.mp3)

“If you ask, I’ll kick you!”
Like most tsundere, she’s violent. In a cute way.

Komomo’s path is about her having bad dreams and her ability to face the past. She always has a dream about her falling through a red sky until she hits the  ground and dies. Since she thinks this means she’s already dead, her path is about overcoming death. Always facing problems on her own, she finally realizes she needs someone to rely on, and that of course turns out to be Kogayou, which is actually her nickname for him. There’s a lot of deliberate confusion in her path, but her path explains a lot of things about the town and other people.

Komomo is my other favorite character for the same obvious reasons. I think she turns the right amount of dere once you get on her path. Girls who become too dere aren’t attractive to me anymore. Speaking of tsundere…

Download audio file (hoshizora3.mp3)

This is how you pronounce tsundere. Sooo many people get it wrong. Next up on my to do list: yaoi (almost nobody pronounces it correctly…)

Aoi Isuzu

If you’ve played Family Project, you can think of Isuzu as pretty much being the Aoba equivalent — a girl with a poisonous tongue who turns extremely dereでれ later on. Isuzu is Kogayou and Chinami’s neighbor, and they usually end up going to school together since they leave at the same time, much to the dismay of Isuzu. She can probably be classified as another type of tsundere (notice a trend?). Like Mare, she’s usually uncooperative.

Download audio file (hoshizora4.mp3)

“You should die.”
She says stuff like this with ease. Ice queen bitch.

There’s some nice SD art in the game.

Download audio file (hoshizora5.mp3)

“It’s tsurupeta fortune telling.”
Wait. WHAT?

Isuzu’s path is about her learning how to get close to people again. In the beginning of the game, she doesn’t want anything to do with others because she’s actively trying to distance herself, but that distance gradually breaks down. Blah blah blah, cliche cliche cliche. Her story isn’t remarkable.  Unlike m3rry, she’s not the type of tsundere that I like. Speaking of which, there needs to be a good article about tsundere. Maybe I’ll write one.

Hisakaki Kosame

Komomo’s younger sister, Kosame is pretty much the opposite of her older sister. Kosame is pretty much always nice, supportive and polite but not deredere. Most people probably wouldn’t dislike her. Her frequent yuri actions makes me think she’s actually bi.

Download audio file (hoshizora6.mp3)

“Penetration is a bit hard, but I can make you feel good and at the end…”
Daaaamn. Kogayou needs to get them in a threesome.

Kosame’s path is closely related to Komomo’s path, and you can’t play it without finishing Komomo’s, so I probably shouldn’t ruin anything.

SCORE! Nice shot.

Minahoshi Asuho

Now we’ve reached the genki characters. In my opinion, Asuho is the main regular character as much of the story revolves around her. Asuho is the class president and vice president of the Astronomy Club. When she was a kid, she knew and liked Kogayou, but Kogayou doesn’t remember her since he was anti-social. She works in a cafe that her father owns and she makes Kogayou work with her through her sheer positiveness. So she’s one of those kinds of people (whom Micchi apparently likes). While she’s the most supportive of Kogayou finding his childhood love, she’s also the one most jealous of it.

Since Asuho and Komomo are pretty much polar opposites in everything, they argue. A lot. Komomo likes to threaten to dissolve the club and Asuho can’t do anything but complain. She really loves stargazing and is probably the most enthusiastic member of the club.

Probably the most romance focused path out of the regular girls, Asuho’s path is mainly about her trying to decide whether or not she has the right to go out with Kogayou since hs has the childhood girl. There’s also some family stuff, but it’s pretty unremarkable.

Kogasaki Chinami

Kogayou’s younger sister,  also known to me as the annoying fucker who should shut up. As another girl in the genki group, she easily trumps Asuho in energy and annoyingness.

Download audio file (hoshizora7.mp3)

You’ll hear this about a million times. I want to smack her.

Other outstanding characteristics of hers is that she can’t cook and she’s obsessed with aliens. As expected from her, she tries too hard to get close to people, so she annoys Isuzu a lot. She obviously is a bracon. She keeps observational diaries of her brother for fuck’s sake.

Download audio file (hoshizora8.mp3)

Another example of her never-ending annoying machine gun speak.  I don’t even have the energy to translate it.

Download audio file (hoshizora9.mp3)

“I hate you cause you’re noisy.”
Mare says what we all think.

Chinami’s path is mainly about family. Their family has a lot of problems in the past, but Chinami and Kogayou also have to accept their aunt Shino as family. I didn’t really care enough about her to remember much of the path. Also, I’m not going to tell you if she’s blood-related or not.

Route rankings (excluding the true path): Mare > Komomo > Kosame > Asuho > Isuzu > Chinami

System

It’s SO refreshing to play a modern game after Family Project and Cross Channel.

As you can see, the history screen easily beats those two previous games. Pictures, full screen, and easy (and existent) voice playback!

There’s really not much else to say about the engine. It’s nothing special. The animations are pretty decent. The game autosaves each game day and at each decision point, but it seemed to overwrite my manual saves, which was annoying. I think it somehow got bugged because it didn’t do that in the beginning.

H-scenes

This game definitely isn’t one you should get for sex. Some of the sex scenes seem forced in there to meet requirements. Speaking of requirements, all the regular girls have exactly the same types of scene scenes. Two intercourse (one ejaculating outside, one inside) and one blowjob scene. Checklist, anyone?

On a note related to art, the consistency isn’t very good. The artist obviously changes in the later parts of the game. Compare the above screenshot with shots of Komomo earlier. Her freaking eye color even changes pretty significantly.

Overall

Hoshizora no Memoria is a game about students overcoming their past, their nightmares. It’s a story about friends and family learning to rely on each other instead of doing things alone. There is also a lot of stuff about stars and people’s connection with them, things like eternity, existence, and birthplaces. The game can get depressing in certain paths as characters make sacrifices, break down, or reveal their past. If you’re looking for a happy game, you’re looking at the wrong game.

The normal paths vary significantly in quality. The true path easily trumps the rest since it’s the one that deliberately plays with your emotions the most. Unlike some other games, the true path isn’t very dependent on the other paths, though you still need to do all of them (excluding Mare’s) to get the true path. It’s more about getting to know the characters and their backgrounds. Mare’s path can only be gotten after you finish the true path, which I think is the wrong order.

One more thing to note about paths is that the common route is extremely long. The character routes (again, not including the true path) are much shorter in comparison and can feel lacking in length.

Also unlike the other games I’ve recently played, the characters in this game are more likable to me. They’re not the most memorable characters, but they’re pretty easy to sympathize with. Of course, having multiple tsundere probably helped.

If you’re looking for romance, this game might not be for you since romance isn’t the focus of most of the game, but if you want a solid drama, this is a good choice.

Or get it for this.

Now excuse me while I get a telescope. And move out of the city.

Score

My scale will probably be a lot different from most other people’s scale. My scores will be from 1 to 5, integer only. I don’t understand why people need to use a 10 point (or shit, a 100 point) scale. Do you really care about the difference between a game that gets a 3 or a 4 out of 10? Can you really tell me the difference between a 8.5 and an 8.6? Decimals are usually assigned purely on a whim. My score also is based on the overall game. My enjoyment of the game is the primary deciding factor. No subscores are given.

I also give games scores based on what they’re trying to be. For example, I won’t ding a slice of life game for not having an epic story. It’s simply not what the game is supposed to be.

The meaning of my scores and their rough equivalent in a 1-10 scale.

5 – Excellent. Must play (9-10)
4 – Good. Play if you’re a fan of the genre (8)
3 – Average. Play if something about the game really attracts you. (7)
2 – Below average. Only play if there’s something about the game that really really interests you. You need to have a die hard fetish for it or something to make it worthwhile. (6)
1 – Crap. Avoid no matter what. (1-5)

4/5

Where to buy: Amazon (How?), Erogeshop, Paletweb

Name: Family Project ~Kazoku Keikaku~ / 家族計画
Developer: D.O.
English publisher: JAST USA
Release date (English): July 2009
Release date (Japanese): November 2, 2001
Related links: Galge, Walkthrough (Japanese), Walkthrough (English)

Opening

Family Project is an ADV dramedy about a bunch of outcasts that are linked together by a single person, Sawamura Tsukasa. Soon, they try to create a family out of the group of outcasts who barely know each other. Along the way, they have to discover what a family truly is and how to overcome their emotional baggage so they can make bonds with others.

Scenario

“There are no answers in life.”

One day at work, Tsukasa finds a mysterious girl collapsed in the alley behind the restaurant. The girl, Chunhua, turns out to be Chinese and is searching for her mother in Japan. She can’t speak Japanese, and Tsukasa decides to take care of her. Like the idiot he is, he finds some pills in her bag and decides to randomly take a bunch. Then stuff happens.

Stuff like this.

Soon afterwards, Hirota Hiroshi stalks the two of them, and in a turn of events, somehow ends up staying with them.

He then meets Takayashiki Aoba in the park, a girl who dresses in all black and draws pictures for a living. She draws what characteristics she thinks a person has, and the results are not pretty. Her drawings seem cursed. If you try to throw them away, they’ll just come back to haunt you. By using these pictures to scare people to get money, her method of income seems more like extortion than commission.

Kawahara Matsuri is a girl who lives in cardboard boxes in an empty lot. She finds an old house that seems abandoned and decides to live there.

Due to some circumstances, Tsukasa is driven out of his apartment. On the way to finding a new place, he saves Itakura Masumi, who’s trying to kill herself by jumping off a bridge. Tsukasa, Hiroshi, and Chunhua end up finding the same house Matsuri is living in, and they choose to stay there too, not knowing about Matsuri.

Tsukasa then is forced to work in a host club and meets his old friend, Ogawara Jun. They seem to have a history together.

They soon find out the house is Aoba’s. Various things happen, and they reluctantly form a pact to create a family out of all these people who are weakly bonded to each other. A fresh start from the past that many of them want to escape from. All of them are weak as an individual, but can the bonds of a group strengthen them? Can they overcome their trials and become a family? Do they know what family really means?

“There are so many things you can’t do alone but can do accomplish with two people.”

Characters

Sawamura Tsukasa

“The only one I trust is myself.”

He seems afraid of commitment and relying on others. He’s scared of being dependent on others, and he can’t see that dependency bringing happiness, so he never tries to get really close to people. Like Jun, he’d rather never get close to people than get hurt by being betrayed.

Takayashiki Aoba

“I don’t believe in family love.”

She’s a pretty cold and cruel person, more so than the typical tsundere. Her verbal attacks are venomous, and she’s one of the few tsundere I don’t really like. Aoba says some scary things in her dreams.

Since all the people involved in the Family Project are strangers, she doesn’t think it’ll succeed.  She thinks they’ll only interfere with her life.

She kinda reminds of Tsugumi from Ever 17.

She’s extremely attached to the house since her grandfather left it to her when he died, and her only good memories of her youth was with her grandfather.

Ogawara Jun

Jun is a pretty aloof person. She distances herself from the rest of the family and only shows up when required. For some reason, she can’t seem to get too close to people. When Tsukasa tried to get close to her in the past, she pushed him away.

Jun looks cuter in the past. But then again, girls with long hair >>> girls with short hair.

She never really participates in the meals. Due to something in the past that scarred her for life, she can’t eat food that’s been prepared by others. So all she does is eat Calorie Mates.

She still has a soft side though.

Her daily life revolves around money. Everything she does it for money, but there’s no clear reason why she wants it. She charges Tsukasa money for any favor, and Tsukasa seems to have racked up quite a bill. Her specialty is investigating.

Kawahara Matsuri

Matsuri is your typical super bright, happy, and optimistic girl. The type of girl I don’t like. She’s also constantly apologizing and being submissive to others because she doesn’t want to be alone. Afraid of people abandoned, she tries really hard to win the favor of others.

“You’ve got to try your best, or nothing good happens. That’s what a family is about.”

All those characteristics means she’s a staunch supporter of the Family Projected. She’s the one who convinced Tsukasa to take part.

“As long as there’s a home, and people in it… that’s the place where we want to live.”

I don’t think her voice really fits her character. The age doesn’t seem to match up. She’s really immature and probably young, and the sounds older.

Itakura Masumi

Masumi is an airhead. For example, she often doesn’t have any money on her but goes to cafes because she smells something she wants. Then she gets trapped inside because she can’t pay. She’s really weak and easily succumbs to others. Because of her weakness, she can’t live alone. She needs someone else to be there, and that’s why she was attracted to the Family Project.

“I want someone to need me. That’s what happiness is all about, right?”

As the oldest female of the group, she acts as the mom and tries to take care of the house and everyone. She’s sensitive about her age. It seems like she’d suck the youth out of Tsukasa if she could.

Those are some horribly drawn boobs. They look like balloons floating on her chest.

Wang Chunhua / Takayashiki Haruka

Chunhua is her Chinese name, and Haruka is the Japanese reading of her Chinese name. Her special skill is giving orgasmic massages. Like Matsuri, she’s super cheerful, but she’s not apologetic.

I don’t like Haruka at all because she’s pretty dumb. Tsukasa always pampers her, no matter whose path you’re on, which is pretty annoying. The only thing she really does is eat. She’ll even eye a neighborhood dog or two.

Hisami Kei

Kei was another one of Tsukasa’s classmates. She’s not part of the Family Project, but Tsukasa runs into her on the street one day. She works at a care center for kids, and she drags Tsukasa into helping her. She’s always trying to do her best (as can be seen above). She’s cheerful but not annoyingly so.

She’s not a sexable character.

Hirota Hiroshi

A crazy salaryman, Hiroshi is the one who came up with the idea of the Family Project. Throughout the game he does a lot of stupid things. Some people may find him funny. I found him annoying as hell.

Lau

The assistant manager at the restaurant where Tsukasa works, Lau is more comedy relief. He’s more likeable than Hiroshi. Lau also happens to be bi. I’d say he’s roughly equivalent to the gay friend in Yume Miru Kusuri.

System/Miscellaneous

Since the game is quite old, the engine used seems extremely outdated. The save slots are extremely basic with no picture or comments, and there are only 27 save slots. There’s also no quicksave. There’s no ability to replay voices.

One very annoying part of the game is that is pauses when you put it in the background, making skipping text harder than it should be (which will be a lot). It also seems to use up 50% of my CPU on a dual core system.

I think by now most people know some CGs in the game are censored. It makes the scenes make less sense censored since Matsuri’s panic would be too much if she was wearing underwear. There’s less than a year between when she first meets Tsukasa and sex, so censoring because of that doesn’t make sense.

You see this within a year of her meeting Tsukasa anyway.

Also, near the end of Matsuri’s route, the text says Matsuri is deciding about what to do about college, but I wonder if JAST purposely added that.  Because in the epilogue, it says several years pass and then Matsuri decides not to go to college. It wouldn’t make sense for her to wait several years to make a decision about going to college if she’s graduating high school.

The length of the game is on the shorter side of medium. There are five routes. The common route is long, but on subsequent playthroughs, the common route probably comprises 2/3 or more of the game (with some exceptions). If I were to make a random guess, I’d say Matsuri’s path is canon.

Route rankings: Jun > Matsuri > Aoba > Haruka > Masumi

Translation

Oh boy. This is going to be a long one. I played this game with the 1.1 patch. To be concise, it fixes pretty much nothing.

There’s a lack of quality editing in this game. The voices sometimes don’t match the names (e.g. “onii-san” for “onii-chan” and vice versa). Sometimes, within several lines of using “onii-san,” they’ll randomly choose to translate “onii-san” into English. What the hell? I also saw a few cases of the wrong gender being used in lines.

Honorifics are an iffy thing in this game. In the beginning of the game, they’re used most of the time, but in the end of the game, they’re mostly dropped. But it’s not even consistently dropped. They still randomly add honorifics and sometimes “onii-san” is still used. Talk about inconsistency. Hire an editor.

Another inconsistency is the name order. The game starts out with Japanese name order (note: my blog will always use Japanese name order), but it changes back to English name order later. This is very noticeable later on in one line, where Tsukasa accidentally starts to introduce himself as Sawamura. It went something like, “I’m Sawa…. Tsukasa Takayashiki.” Takayashiki is his new surname for the Family Project.  HIRE AN EDITOR.

Sometimes Chinese is used in the original voice, and Tsukasa is not supposed to understand it, but the lines still use English (and onii-san!)

Food name translation are also really random. Onigiri was translated to rice cakes. Seriously? That’s more of a translation for mochi than onigiri. But they then later decided not to translate gyuudon. Some consistency here please,  people.

There’s also some misuses of they’re/there/their, your/you’re, and to/too. E-D-I-T-O-R.

Name translations can also vary. In one scene, Tsukasa says “Oba-san” before the person speaks. I thought it was some middle aged woman. But it turned out to be Ooba-san (a guy), which the name in the textbox reflected. Come on. Did nobody actually play the game? Lau was also translated as “Rau” one time.

Some of Aoba’s crazy curse bombs are also cut significantly short. The translators were too lazy or something, but it takes away from the ridiculousness of her cursing.

There are quite a few typos and unnatural word choices. There’s sometimes bad wording that makes the line really hard to understand when the line isn’t supposed to be hard to understand.

I’m pretty sure a lot of the game (especially the end) wasn’t translated by a native English speaker. Some telltale signs were particle errors and some ridiculously bad phrasing that no native speaker would ever use. For example, the translators used “wow” pretty much exclusively for exclamations. In most situations, it was an exclamation from being sneaked up on. People don’t say “wow!” in English when that happens. No native speaker would make that mistake. This is one error of the errors I told Shingo about when they asked for errors to fix. They didn’t fix it.

Some other sentences that native writers would not make: “Now that one smarts” and “I didn’t get the taste” (instead of “I couldn’t taste it.”)

One other annoying thing was that they often didn’t use question marks for questions.

They also kept using “could care less” instead of “couldn’t care less.” This is a pet peeve of mine. Look at this handy guide I stole from someone. If you think about what you’re saying, you should never make this mistake.

Simple, no?

There were also some overly literal lines. For example, “家族、家族なのに” was translated as “Family, but we’re a family,” which is pretty much what it literally says. The repetition of family was more like stuttering, so it should have been translated as something like, “But… but we’re a family.”

Another example is when Haruka is asking why Tsukasa is apologizing. Then when he apologizes, she says, “ぜんぜん悪くない,” which is translated as “You’re not bad at all.” Again, pretty much literal. It should have been something like, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Time for visual examples.

Hole. Not “whole.”

I think it’s time to treat Aoba for internet addiction. It’s supposed to be ogle, not google.

What? You’re only 50 cm tall together or something?

For example, that stupid translator of there!

Aoba apparently became a nun.

I’m unawares of how bad your translation can get.

no comment

Yes. Me a luck guy. Me live long time.

Blank box. There’s supposed to be a line there.

I honestly have no idea what this means. It’s not an in-game joke.

Overcome, I give up on commenting on the translation.

Seriously, JAST. This took two years to translate? And then two months to patch? Cross Channel took, what, 3 months to translate? And it’s virtually free of major errors. The scripts are of comparable size. Maybe it’s time to hire some fan translators, JAST. They do better quality work and faster. Cross Channel is not an isolated incident. Look at Mirror Moon once they got their act together. The Fate/Stay Night translation was extremely fast once they were organized.

Hire someone who cares.

Overall

“You only regret losing your family once they’re gone.”

Family Project is supposed to be an emotional game about the struggles of a bunch of strangers trying to form a family. They all have something they’re looking for that they hope the others will give them. They all have some issues in their past that they wish to overcome. This should be a great game that I should enjoy.

But I didn’t. I simply didn’t give a crap about any of the characters. The old art probably didn’t help. By the end, I could tell the actual story was pretty good. But still. I didn’t care. Getting the player to sympathize with the characters is one of the most important steps to creating a good story, but the game didn’t seem to try. Each character has a major personality flaw that makes them unlikeable. That may make it more realistic, but it does not make a good game. In fact, I disliked the characters in general so much that this was one of the few games I skipped nearly all the voices.

For other people who may more easily get emotionally attached (it’s quite rare for me to do so actually), this would probably be a great game. It’s emotional and has some decent romance in it.

Score

My scale will probably be a lot different from most other people’s scale. My scores will be from 1 to 5, integer only. I don’t understand why people need to use a 10 point (or shit, a 100 point) scale. Do you really care about the difference between a game that gets a 3 or a 4 out of 10? Can you really tell me the difference between a 8.5 and an 8.6? Decimals are usually assigned purely on a whim. My score also is based on the overall game. My enjoyment of the game is the primary deciding factor. No subscores are given.

I also give games scores based on what they’re trying to be. For example, I won’t ding a slice of life game for not having an epic story. It’s simply not what the game is supposed to be.

The meaning of my scores and their rough equivalent in a 1-10 scale.

5 – Excellent. Must play (9-10)
4 – Good. Play if you’re a fan of the genre (8)
3 – Average. Play if something about the game really attracts you. (7)
2 – Below average. Only play if there’s something about the game that really really interests you. You need to have a die hard fetish for it or something to make it worthwhile. (6)
1 – Crap. Avoid no matter what. (1-5)

3/5

Where to buy: JAST, Jlist, RightStuf, Play-Asia

Name: CROSS†CHANNEL
Developer: FlyingShine
Release date: September 26, 2003
Related links: Galge, Getchu, Walkthrough, Walkthrough (English)

Opening

Cross Channel is an ADV by FlyingShine that follows Kurosu Taichi, a member of the Broadcasting Club at a school for troubled kids, Gunjou. Stuff happens. Unfortunately, any more than that and I’ll be spoiling the story. This review will be free of major spoilers. This was quite a hard game to review since I really couldn’t say much without ruining the story.

I was lazy, so this review is based off the English translation. I didn’t bother extracting the images, so the shots are lower quality screencaps. This will probably be the norm. To see what’s in the box, go to the unboxing.

Scenario

This is likely be my shortest ever section on scenario since elaborating will ruin the story. More than anything, the story is about one’s relationship with oneself and others. The ability to love yourself, the need to be connected with others, and what you impose on each other.

“What friends require from each other is nothing.”

With all their personal problems, the students at Gunjou are all extremely unsociable. The Broadcasting Club members have grown apart, and Taichi just wants to bring them back together to have some fun memories, but things are obviously not as easy as they seem…

What Taichi wants

This is one of those games where you must complete everyone’s path for the true end, but Cross Channel does it in its own way. This isn’t a game about romance. Don’t play it for that. Lots of sex scenes seem sudden and are unnecessary.

Another warning. This game is dense and confusing. The writing is often purposely confusing and random. Be prepared to be frustrated or have headaches.

“Everyone is born alone and dies alone.”

Characters

Kurosu Taichi

Quite a pervert

Taichi has the most serious problems out of anyone in the school. What’s his problem? Well, I can’t tell you. Play it and find out.

Other than that, Taichi is probably one of the biggest perverts I’ve ever seen. He takes every opportunity he can to sexually harass the girls in the game.

He’s

always

skirt-flipping

Hasekura Youko

She’s always watching.

My favorite character. Youko is cold and never shows any emotion. To everyone in the club except Taichi, she’s their respected Senpai. She’s known Taichi since they were kids, so she’s always watching over him. She’s extremely perceptive, smart, and strong. She’s not one you want to cross.

This is pretty much her only expression.

Not only is she overprotective of Taichi, she also gets VERY jealous. She’ll even resort to using flashbangs to stop Taichi from doing something she doesn’t want.

A jealous Youko. How cute.

Youko and Taichi are very physically intimate. She won’t even mind giving him a BJ to wake him up. But they’re not even going out.

Wouldn’t you love to wake up to this?

Yamanobe Miki

Delicious flat chest

Miki is probably my second character. She’s Taichi student in perversion, and she’s the only one who doesn’t get flustered or upset by his sexual harassment. She’s also the most loli out of all the sexable girls, but she’s not a true loli. She even admits it.

She says awesome lines like this.

Miki is a girl who comes from a poor family, and like most other girls in these games that come from poor families, she’s on the energetic side, though I wouldn’t say she’s a genki girl. She sounds extremely cute, and I just want to bring her home~~

She seems tsurupeta.

Kirihara Touko

The legendary Kirihara blade.

Touko is your typical tsundere. I usually like tsundere, but for some reason, I didn’t find her that appealing. She’s a rich girl who eats caviar on a daily basis, doesn’t know what canned food is, and has never been to a konbini.

Her typical tsuntsun face, but feed her…

and she turns super deredere.

I think that’s one of the main reasons I don’t like her. She turns extremely deredere, and she does it pretty much literally overnight. Tsundere are only cute when they retain some of their original self.

Miyasumi Misato

Nice view

Misato is the president of the club, and she’s Taichi’s senpai. She’s an onee-chan type of character, and she’s a bit airheaded. Her redeeming quality is having the biggest breasts in the game. She’s Tomoki’s sister, even though their last names are different.

She’s probably the only one in the game who can do this.

Sakura Kiri

Kiri is my least favorite character out of the bunch. She hates Taichi pretty much throughout the game, and even ignores logic when it disproves her reason for hating him. She has a grudge that she can’t seem to let go of. Also, she’s cold to pretty much everyone except Miki since they’re best friends. Though she looks it, she’s not really the athletic type.

Nanaka

Nanaka is a mysterious girl who usually shows up out of nowhere to run Taichi down with her bike. She seems to know Taichi’s name, even though it’s Taichi’s first time meeting her. She often says mysterious things and seems to know a lot about what’s going on. She’s genki, which I usually dislike, but I can tolerate Nanaka for some reason. She’s not a sexable character.

Shima Tomoki

Tomoki is Misato’s brother. Though he’s serious siscon, he’s fighting with his sister and they rarely talk. They even participate in different clubs so they don’t need to interact. He’s a serious guy and tries to help everyone out later.

Sakuraba Hiroshi

One of the least significant characters in the game. As a rich kid, he’s usually pretty laid back and spontaneous. He’s the type of guy who loves curry bread but hates curry.

System

The game is getting old, so the engine it runs on seems outdated now. There’s no way to replay voices (hence the lack of voice clips). It has all the usual features like CG album, H-scene playback, and BGM player. It has 100 save files, but you can’t put comments on them.

Translation

The overall text flows pretty well, and there aren’t any major errors. There are still loads of minor grammatical errors, but 99.9% of people won’t notice them. The original text is supposed to be vague and hard to follow, so the translation follows it.

There’s also a lot of translation notes in the game to explain a lot of obscure things. It was pretty helpful.

Overall

The game is definitely one most people should experience, but it’s also not a game recommended for newbies to the genre. It’s ridiculously difficult to follow at times and it defies a lot of conventions of the genre. Its story is well fleshed-out. Each character’s motives are usually clear by the end, and that’s a pretty important aspect of the game. Finding out the past of each character and why they all behave the way they do. That’s why my character profiles are sparse on info.

The game is a very heavy, and I recommend it for people who are looking for a more psychological game. If you’re looking for a pure love game, look elsewhere.

But I also never truly cared about any of the characters in the game. This combined with hard to follow text brought the game down a notch for me.

“See you next week.”

Score

My scale will probably be a lot different from most other people’s scale. My scores will be from 1 to 5, integer only. I don’t understand why people need to use a 10 point (or shit, a 100 point) scale. Do you really care about the difference between a game that gets a 3 or a 4 out of 10? Can you really tell me the difference between a 8.5 and an 8.6? Decimals are usually assigned purely on a whim. My score also is based on the overall game. My enjoyment of the game is the primary deciding factor. No subscores are given.

I also give games scores based on what they’re trying to be. For example, I won’t ding a slice of life game for not having  an epic story. It’s simply not what the game is supposed to be.

The meaning of my scores and their rough equivalent in a 1-10 scale.

5 – Excellent. Must play (9-10)
4 – Good. Play if you’re a fan of the genre (8)
3 – Average. Play if something about the game really attracts you. (7)
2 – Below average. Only play if there’s something about the game that really really interests you. You need to have a die hard fetish for it or something to make it worthwhile. (6)
1 – Crap. Avoid no matter what. (1-5)

4/5

Where to buy: Erogeshop

Random comments: Sorry for the low quality pictures in the beginning. I didn’t realize saving at jpg would make it that bad. I’ll try to reupload some as png. Note: quotes from the game are from memory and may not be exact.

Update: I added info about two more characters. Also, I’m currently tweaking the layout and style of the review, so the page may change if you come back later.

Kagamin’s going to stare you down if you piss her off.

I don’t know any Miku-esque poses, so I made some random one with the leeks. If I did something wrong, Miku fans can condemn me to hell.

LEEK BLOCK!

For anyone disappointed in the lack of panties in the last review, here you go. The obligatory panty shot.

All you perverts will probably like this shot too.

Hey, her mouth is even open. It’s like the figure was designed for that pose or something.

At a distance, it’s not quite as perverted. You can just claim she’s nibbling on the leek… right?

Figmas are a tough call. The quality is obviously not as high as a scale figure, but the variety of poses actually makes the figure fun to play with (a shocking concept, isn’t it?). It shouldn’t be your main figure for your favorite character, but at its cheap price, there’s no reason for fans to pass on the figure as a secondary one. The figure shouldn’t be as rare as the Horo one, so you can actually get it.

Buy it at HLJ

Fans of Horo REJOICE! The best Horo figure has arrived. Unlike the other subpar figures released, this figure is based on the vastly superior original novel art. The design is simple, just Horo running around in a field, but it captures the essence of what makes Horo so great. Luckily, I was able to get the re-run of this figure before it disappeared. By the time I received my figure, most stores seemed to be already sold out.

Her dress and cute tail are removable, but why would you? Removing her dress would destroy the tranquility of the pose. And her tail is just awesome. Removing it would be a crime, and I would hunt you down.

Her face from below seems to completely change her expression. She looks mischievious, like she’s defying Lawrence again.

Her face from the front looks like of pure happiness. With a face like that, who could resist her? Unfortunately, her bag is part of the figure. It would have been nice if Kotobukiya went the extra step to make it a separate accessory and even better if it were made out of cloth (assuming it’s a cloth bag).

Horo from the side, this time with her ears showing, making her look even better.

Here’s the weird grass stand she’s on. I’ve never seen it before, but then again most characters aren’t in a field. The figure is very stable on the stand. Oh, and Horo isn’t wearing any panties.

She’s wearing some sort of trousers instead. Sorry for destroying some of your hopes.

At 5800 yen, this figure is a great deal. It’s a must buy for any Horo fan. And even if you’re not, you should still get it. Unfortunately, she won’t be easy to find. But all that effort will only make the the payoff more worthwhile.