Yoshiwara Higanbana is a debut R18 otome visual novel from MariaCrown. This story follows the main protagonist Rin (or her alias 'Chihaya')who is working as the top ranking oiran (courtesan) in Oukaya set in Yoshiwara during the Edo period.
Almost two years without an update, but never fear, for I have returned with a review for Bocchimusume × Produce-keikaku. (ボッチムスメ×プロデュース計画。) by Kalmia8!
The protagonist Ema Tachibana is quite literally a huge loner without a single friend. Because her intimidating stature and strong facial features draw uncalled attention, she tries to live her life as low-profile as possible. However, her uniqueness catches the eye of Miki Hiraizumi, an aspiring fashion designer declaring he’s found his ultimate muse in Ema. Together with his photographer friend Saitou Shinjou they decide on turning gloomy Ema into a world-famous high fashion model for Miki’s line, but they soon find whipping her uncooperative butt to shape will take more effort than they thought!
As of July 2016, MangaGamer has announced they will be localizing Bocchimusume as Fashioning Little Miss Lonesome. As far as I know, this is the first R-18 otome game officially released in English, so I highly recommend western otome gamers to give Kalmia8 and MangaGamer their support!
- Jan 20, 2020 Blerdy Otome is an otome games and visual novel review site that runs on Black Girl Magic and Dreams. While I mostly focus on romance themed games, I’ve been known to cover a wide range of nerdy and otaku themed topics. So, step right up and prepare your heart! Let’s talk about otome games!! Profile pic by @InkPlash.
- An otome game is a story based video game that is targeted towards the female market. Generally one of the goals, besides the main plot goal, is to develop a romantic relationship between the female player character and one of several male or female characters.
The review will contain slight spoilers for the game etc. So, without further ado, レッツボッチ！
First I have to mention that the digital version of the game was released a week before the physical version and with a noticeably lower price, too! This is great for me because:
- Shipping to Finland is pricey and games always get stuck in customs
- Because of the distance between Japan and Finland and the package getting caught by the customs, the wait for the game becomes annoyingly long (for example, the last time I ordered a game with the fastest shipping it still took a week to get here)
- I don’t even have a disk drive in my laptop in the first place
Other companies, take note! I bought my game from DMM, but they’re selling it over at DLSite as well.
Other things that stuck out to me were Ema’s height; at 173cm I never thought there’d be a heroine who’s exactly as tall as me! In all those self-insert games it feels odd when the guys go all “wow girls are so tiny and fragile” Uhhhh…yeah ;___;
& There’s a button for skipping to next or to the last choice! Usually I tend to see games where it’s only possible to go forward, so this was really nice for getting all the endings faster.
The game centers on the three characters’ interactions and and the character routes branch off rather late considering the game’s length is on the short side even for the price. Because of this and the comical nature of the game, it doesn’t feel like a romance game and the best routes for the characters end abruptly. As for the capturable characters, Saitou is the S obsessed with money and Miki is the M character obsessed with clothes, pretty much. There are instances showing the scenario writer would be able to flesh them and make them feel more like human beings, but they end up being wasted. In the end, I think the biggest weakness of the game is the male characters being too over-the-top to be relatable or charming. Not to mention looking at the characters didn’t make me want to play the game for the sex scenes, which is pretty important since this is an eroge after all. I’ll give them kudos for the setting, though, since it’s interesting and lets the characters be something else than instant otome game tropes.
The game has a total of 20 endings, most of them being short joke endings. I think my overall favorite endings include one where Ema gathers a fan club full of middle-aged women while working in a cross-dressing butler cafe and one where Ema decides to be a model in Japan using her father’s connections (which means ending up playing dumb on variety shows). Your enjoyment of this game will boil on whether you like the gags; personally I’d say I found them funnier than in most games I’ve played. Playing the trial I wasn’t convinced by the script and almost passed on the full game, but in the end decided to give it a try anyway. The game reads kind of like a very opinionated blog, in a good way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a variety of topics in a game’s jokes and as a foreigner it’s always fun to read what the game makers think about the world outside of Japan, as well.
Ema’s intriguing personality got me to try this game and considering how hyper the whole game is, she is a surprisingly reasonable heroine. I mean, they could have just gone and made her a spineless whiner, but instead her worries feel justified and she feels more equal with the guys than the average heroine. Despite being nervous and awkward she still regularly voices her own thoughts and is surprisingly cunning, too! Her character development is simply a joy to watch along the way.
The game’s world is a kind one and they get insane amount of views for their stuff online and work contracts with people like Michael ×ors just like nothing. Actually, I’m happy about that since the game doesn’t have people actively bullying the heroine either, even though with this setting it would have been very easy to slip in. Most importantly, I’m jealous about how Ema has a figure like this, even though she eats nothing but pizza and confectionery breads:
The art is rather amateurish looking, especially during the sex scenes which makes enjoying them difficult when you’re trying to distinguish which body part belongs to which character. They’ve tried to hide using that angle you see on the pictures above, but it ends up making them even weirder. That aside, I’m appreciating the amount of different expressions the characters have (that one Saitou grin had me grinning like him everytime) and Ema’s sharp eyes that look like she has thick cat eye-style eyeliner, being a prominently western make up style makes that a nice detail even if it’s not intentional.
During the break between my posts, I’ve tried A LOT of different otome games, only to be bored to death with every single one. This game is actually the first game I have completed since then (with the exception of Tetrascope’s Sakuya, but I didn’t feel like writing an another review for their games right after WataJuu), so going by that alone, it must have done something right! I’d say I’d recommend this game if you want an unusual heroine in an otome game-like setting. The romance is sparse and doesn’t have much of an impact, but that doesn’t stop the game from being enjoyable in general. Being a half-price title, it’ll go as a light snack game even if you’re about to be crushed by your towering backlog.
Don’t even think of escaping, because I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth…not because I love you but because your obaasan fan club paid for their yearly membership already!
Starting this blog off with a review for Chou no Doku Hana no Kusari (蝶の毒 華の鎖)!
The Nomiya family has become debt-ridden, but despite this, they throw a big party for their daughter Yuriko’s birthday. After finding out the party was arranged so her parents would be able to get Yuriko marry into money to save the house, she despairs and wants to run away. However, the night gets interrupted by a group of people who start ravaging around the house and try to attack Yuriko, before she gets saved by a man she has never seen before. The game starts unfolding from there, with Yuriko simultaneously trying to get her house out of debt and unraveling the mystery behind her family.
This review is spoiler-free.
Characters:
Yuriko Nomiya (no voice, name changeable)
A young lady living in the Taisho era. People claim she has a sweet, intoxicating scent lingering around her. Despite her appearances, she has bit of a tomboy streak and is surprisingly rebellious for a woman of that time period (and for an otome game protagonist). In my opinion, the “ordinary girl”-type of otoge protagonist done right, since while also being very polite and traditionally ladylike, she also has a healthy dose of common sense and reacts to what’s happening realistically.
Yoshiki Majima (CV: Takashi Kondo)
The gardener of the Nomiya family and Yuriko’s first love at the start of the game. Majima has been working in the Nomiya house since Yuriko was little, making him an important family member for her, despite him being a servant. Emitting a calm aura, Majima treats everyone with kindness. He is also quite knowledgeable about tea.
Mizuhito (CV: Daisuke Hirakawa)
Yuriko’s older brother, who is a skilled painter, but instead of painting spends most of his time at the red-light district and because of this he is considered the black sheep of the family. He also has a massive sister complex and isn’t afraid to show it even in front of their parents. Mizuhito strongly opposes his parents’ plan about marrying Yuriko with a rich man and treats Shiba, who is smitten with Yuriko, noticeably colder that other people.
Hitoshi Fujita (CV: Hiroki Yasumoto)
The Nomiya family’s butler who is half Japanese. His unusual appearance (…well, in-universe at least) has made him a victim of severe discrimination in Japan. Fujita was hired to work as a butler by Yuriko’s father when no one else would hire him, which made him extremely loyal towards the house.
Hideo Ozaki (CV: Junji Majima)
Yuriko’s childhood friend. He and Yuriko used to be really close, but at some point started drifting away from each other and Hideo’s attitude for Yuriko turned cold. This makes him unnecessarily blunt when talking to Yuriko at times, but he quickly reverts back to his old gentle personality after seeing her upset by his words.
Junichi Shiba (CV: Masayuki Katou)
An oresama type character, Shiba is an upstart and the man who saves her from the attackers in at her birthday party. No one knows about his family history or how he became rich in the first place. He seems to have his eye on Yuriko from their very first meeting and will stop at nothing in making her fall for him.
Kyouko Amami (CV: Masako Katsuki)
A liquor store owner’s wealthy daughter. Loves cute things and even though she’s married, there’s rumors of her also being interested in women. A long time friend of Yuriko’s mother Shigeko. Probably scarier than everyone else in this game added together.
Writing:
I would say the level of writing in this game is well above average in general. The script isn’t stretched out, unlike so many other novel games I’ve had the… pleasure of playing lately. The script has a hefty amount of old Japanese, so with unnecessary filler this would have been a pain to wade through. I can’t exactly recommend this game to someone just starting with the language, but the writing style does add to the game’s mature feel. It’s refreshing to see a R-18 game which is actually more mature as opposed to R-18 games which are exactly the same as all-ages games, only with porn tacked on to make them “for mature audiences”.
The writers have a great sense of humor as well and I found myself laughing a lot more than I thought I would playing a seemingly serious game like this. As one would expect from first appearances though, this game has next to none of that traditional sugar sweet otoge romance. That’s not to say it isn’t romantic, but playing this one for the romance will surely leave you disappointed, since it has relatively little of it even when compared to other history themed games out there.
I also love a game with a lot of bad endings and ChouHana sure delivered in that aspect. One of the characters doesn’t even have anything besides bad ones and even most of the happier ones are more bittersweet than anything. Most of the endings in this game are solid and wrap the story up nicely, save for one of characters, whose all endings feel incomplete and as a result, he as a character ends up feeling a bit shallower than I expected. Even after the plot twist in his routes happen, we don’t really get to know what he thinks about anything, really. That doesn’t manage to ruin him as a character, but since he had a lot of potential to be a really complex character and the game forces you to do his route last, I have to admit being disappointed.
The characters in general, though, are written believably and were surprisingly easy to sympathize with. My favorites were Shiba and Kyouko, who are very similar to each other, now that I think of it. I usually tend to avoid possessive characters, since they just irritate me for not being believably written 99% of the time. Here, however, the writers didn’t play too safe and I didn’t have worry about them taking some cheap shortcut to conveniently explain their actions.
Sound
The voice acting is great! The voice actors really nailed the whole olden timey speaking style and sounded effortless, making the atmosphere of the game feel authentic. For some reason I liked Hirakawa’s voice as Mizuhito a lot more than I usually do, maybe his signature dry laugh just works for the character this time around or something. I hadn’t heard Shiba’s voice actor in anything before and I didn’t think he’d be very fitting for an otome game role at first, but I grew to like his voice. The way he and Kyouko say おひいさん is just hhnnnggh ♥（ﾉ´∀`）Made me really feel like a princess!
R18 Otome Games
Rita should get more opportunities to make more songs like the OP song, it fits her voice well. There’s not many standout tracks in the BGM, but it’s generally pretty and fits to the mood. I could listen to this all day:
Art
Mostly very pretty, even if there’s a bit of quality fluctuation sometimes (I’m guessing this game had been on development for a while?). I’m guessing it divides opinions, since it’s often far from what you would consider generic otome game art:
I have to admit getting used to the art was a bit hard at first for me too, but after that I think it only adds to the game. (Even if I still question Shiba’s color coordinating sense hahaha) One thing I don’t like about the sprites though is that they are on the screen scaled by the game engine most of the time, which makes the line art all pixelated looking. It looks a little distracting, but then again that way the sprites are nice and crisp in their full size at the close-up shots.
The system for this game is nothing out of the ordinary and menu functions are in kanji like they tend to be in historical games. What stands out a bit weird to me, though, is the clicking noise which plays whenever you hover over any button in the game which makes navigating the menus kinda annoying with it loudly going CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK.
R18 Otome Games Steam
Porn-wise it’s the usual porn otoge fair with a sizable portion of sex scenes being rape. At least most of them are in bad ends and Aromarie does advertise themselves as “the creator of dark-themed otome games”. I think Fujita’s scenes in general disturbed me more than anything… I mean I kinda knew what was coming beforehand so I force-skipped over them but even then my expression went from （´＿｀）to (∑(O_O；) in a split second. And I thought I could handle it since I read Seikon no Qwaser but NNNOPE. Didn’t help that his voice is unsettingly deep, so I got the heebie jeebies whenever I heard him in an anime for months after completing his routes. （゜◇゜）
Otome Games Pc
I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who is craving for something other than the usual school stuff or is fed up with stupidly long fight scenes in history games usually (I know I am). If the whole eroge thing turns you off from playing, the game has also been ported to Vita and PSP this year with added new endings and remade graphics. I think this would be worth a play even if you’ve got no interest in otoge otherwise, since like I said, the fluff level is low and the character interaction are written in a way that you could easily enjoy this as a regular history drama game instead!
^The best ChouHana right there.