Aero-ge Review: Love-ressive

Hey all! It’s been ages since I’ve written something for the blog. Real life is partly to blame, but’s it mostly because I’ve been playing a lot of eroge lately. Also I’ve been going a bit crazy with board games and Dota 2 as well. If it’s any consolation, I do “intend” to be a little more active around here. I talk more about what I plan to write about at the end of this review.

Company: スミレ (SMILE)
Game site: ラヴレッシブ
Release date: February 28, 2013
Links: VNDB, Walkthrough

On Valentine’s day, Kaname was confessed to by four girls at the same time: carefree osananajimi Kotora, blonde rich transfer student Reo, baka genius kouhai Ryou, and small meddlesome senpai Mao. They vowed to try to make him love them before White Day. His objections would not waver the resolves of these aggressive girls who are after their man.

[from Micchi's blog]

Review – Motto Nee, Chanto Shiyou yo! (By Fuzzyhobo)

Fuzzy here again! I summoned the motivation to contribute another review. I played most of Mottoane a few months back, but I mulled over whether I should review it…mainly over the futility of this review. With the current trends in eroge and anime, imoutos have captivated the hearts and minds of many consumers of Japanese entertainment. While imoutos are great, I have always prefered onee-sans…sometimes I feel like an endangered species ;_;. Nevertheless, I think there will always be a market for ane lovers, hence why many eroge have at least one onee-san heroine. So I’m spreading the ane love! Or I’m reviewing a game no one cares about.

When I offered to review Mottoane, Aero seemed to think it was a nukige. On the contrary, Mottoane is a family comedy with a healthy mix of story and slice-of-life. Plus, there are 8 BLOODY ROUTES…and none of them are short. Since that’s a lot of ground to cover, I’ll forgo an in-depth review so that I can at least mention all the routes and heroines.

I had COMPLETELY forgotten that Fuzzy mentioned he wanted to write a review for this game.  He doesn’t mention it for months, then BAM! He emails me with the whole thing >___>. 

Anyway, this review here was written up by Fuzzy and I’m just posting it on his behalf. Enjoy ^^

Company: CandySoft
Game site: もっと 姉、ちゃんとしようよっ！
Release date: July 30, 2010
Links: VNDB, Getchu, Walkthrough

Souma Ichijou goes to an all-boys school by himself in Hokkaido. One day, he received a call from one of his older sisters, telling him that their father had become sick and collapsed. He quickly returns to Hakkakubashi and seeing his five downcast sisters and sickly father, he decided to stay to take care of his father (Borrowed from Micchi). However, this is all turns out to be a ruse to make Souma come back home. Now starting high school, Souma must come to terms with his family and friends, who have all drastically changed in the 3 years he’s been away.

Twins N’ Stuff

Recently I’ve been busy all over the space-time continuum saving lolis (and humanity as well I guess) from terrorists, orcs, mutants, aliens, superpowered villains, and other menaces, in a beta testing frenzy. But now that I’ve gotten bored of them, I figured I may as well announce my return with a post that I have a feeling is going to end up much more of a rant than anything. Sorry Aero, aqua, and other people who may have been waiting for a post from me, this is only a few …months late. Though, better late than never!

Now I shall spend the rest of the post explaining why you should blame everything on Kurafuta.

I’ll also be saying a few words to make it look like I’m actually doing stuff around here =D. 

Joint Review – Walkure Romanze

I recently switched from using machine translators to using Mecab and Jparser to play eroge. As you can imagine, this method of playing is more difficult. However I feel that I get more out of playing eroge this way and I intend to keep using this method. I intend to add a small section to my ATLAS guide to cover this play method after I have used it a bit more. The reason I mention this is because Walkure Romanze is the second game I played using this ‘no machine translators’ method. As a side note, the first game I played was Kurano-kunchi no Futago Jijou and the third game was Majikoi A-1.

Anyway fuzzy hobo was pretty passionate about writing something for Walkure Romanze, so I decided to write this joint post with him. To prevent confusion:

Black text – me (Aero)
Red text - me (Aero)
Green text – Fuzzy

Fuzzy provided all the images that are in this post, along with the accompanying comments that appear when you hover your mouse over them. Along with this, Fuzzy has kindly written up a summary of the jousting rules which I’m sure that potential players of the game will find useful. It can be found at the end of this post.

Greetings all! I’m a long time reader of this blog and other English eroge blogs. When Aero expressed an interest in Walkure Romanze, I “gently” encouraged him to try the game. I still use ATLAS, but Japanese proficiency-wise, I suppose my level is at what Aero’s was before he made the non-ATLAS jump. Anyways, whether I contribute more reviews to this blog in the future is up to Aedes and Aero. So let’s get the show on the road!

Company: Ricotta（リコッタ
Game site: ワルキューレロマンツェ［少女騎士物語
Release date: October 28, 2011
Links: VNDB, Getchu, Walkthrough

The protagonist of the story, Takahiro, studies at a prestigious academy where jousting is the main sport. Takahiro was once a promising knight, but he retired from jousting due to a past incident.  Now he is a begleiter, something like a knight’s assistant/advisor, although he idles the days away with his friends and horseback riding. The new school year begins and he is soon approached by two female knights requesting him to be their begleiter for the upcoming annual tournament. One is Noel, a knight with a mysterious background; the other is Celia, the student council chairman and the current school champion who has won 2 years in a row. As he ponders these requests, Takahiro’s childhood friend, Mio, somehow ends up being forced into a jousting duel. Wanting to help out his friend, Takahiro decides to become Mio’s temporary begleiter.

Shiden ～ Enkan no Kizuna ～ Review

It may be a little late but…Welcome to a brand new lamia, uh…I mean snake year 2013!

Speaking of a new year, it is often associated with new aspirations, new resolutions and…new エロゲ〜(￣▽￣〜) (〜￣▽￣)〜. Nonetheless, I feel that re-challenging some of the older games that I have not managed to finish is as important and for this reason, I decided to open my 2013 erogaming with an old game that I have dropped in the past.

Shiden ~Enkan no Kizuna~ is the title of this game which I have attempted once before, but was unable to bring myself to complete it. It is not because this game has a poor storylines or boring heroines; it is a more basic and fundamental problem that I was having: I had no idea what the stories is about!

This game was released on the 26th of November 2009, which was approximately four months after I started my career as an erogamer. Naturally, my Japanese was not very good at the time and ATLAS was not of much a help either. After several gameplay hours, I found that I barely understood what was going on and eventually chose to drop the game.

About three and a half years have passed since then and my Japanese has improved considerably too….maybe（￣～￣;）. Therefore, I see this as a good opportunity to gauge my current Japanese language proficiency while enjoying some actions and chuunis. Hopefully this time around, I will be able to have a better grasp of what is happening in this game.

Let us get the review started then and I hope everyone will be able to enjoy their stay here, お手柔らかにお願いします。

Game Name: 紫電～円環の絆～
Website: http://www.hibiki-site.com/shiden/
Release date: 2009/11/26
Categories: Adventure, School Life, Duel, Japanese Mythologies

Thoughts on Majikoi A-1

To you loyal readers out there (if any), I’m sorry about the lack of activity around here recently. I have basically NO idea what the other two are doing, but the holiday season made me very lazy. Also among the other things that happened in RL, I recently received notification that I’ve passed the first stage of the JET Programme application process. So yeah, they told me my interview will be on the 7^th of February.

Excitement level from JET interview notification: 7/10

More importantly, last Friday I was basically checking Anime-Sharing every hour to check if Majikoi A-1 was out.

Excitement level when Majikoi A-1 download links up: 10/10, and rising

Yes that’s right; an eroge release was more important to me than prospects of working in Japan. Honestly I was a little surprised myself =p. Anyway it’s time to talk about Majikoi A-1.

Links: Walkthrough, VNDB

A-1 is the first of the 5 Majikoi A fan-discs and it features routes for Benkei, Azumi and Sayaka. For those of you who don’t already know, I am a HUGE fan of the Majikoi series and I often find myself daydreaming about it. Among the Majikoi heroines, Benkei is one of my favorites. So as one might suspect I was SUPER looking forward to A-1.

Aero-ge Review (?) : Ano Ko wa Ore kara Hanarenai

Based on the opening, I assumed that this game would be a slice of life comedy filled with lots of hilarious, random otaku moments. When I decided to play this game, I happened to be reading bits of the Haganai LN and all of the Fujimura-Kun Mates manga, so that kinda style of game was exactly what I was looking for. Was this game what I was looking for? Read this rant and see. Otherwise skip to the very last bit.

Company: 戯画 (GIGA)
Game site: 彼女（あのコ）はオレからはなれない
Release date: September 28, 2012
Links: Walkthrough, VNDB, Getchu

On his first day since transferring to Shihouin Gakuen, Hiroto happened to watch a girl confess to her senior in the courtyard. He wondered if this was what a riajuu was like. “Do you envy them so much?” Next to him was a blushing girl who then offered to make him into a riajuu, which he said yes to in surprise. But how does one become a riajuu? Make friends and go out together? Or be all lovey-dovey with a girl? Is it possible for them to be like that?

[Borrowed from Micchi-sama’s blog]

Ryuusei no Arcadia Review

Welcome to my third review which features yet another chuuni game and this time it is a new release from Dandelion called Ryuusei no Arcadia (流星のアーカディア). Changing the topic a little here, with Christmas and New Year just few weeks away, this will probably be my last review for this year. I still however plan on doing some shorter non-review posts if time permits and hope that three of us (Aedes, Aero and I) can come up with a Christmas or New Year joint post. No promise though (´･ω･｀)!

流星のアーカディア is a game from last month(October 2012) releases that catch my attention because of its unique opening. This game is the fourth product from a pretty new company call dandelion (だんでらいおん) which debuted three years ago. Although I have never heard about all of their previous games except for one, being able to produce games other than their first probably means they are holding up well enough. Taking in these two factors into account, I decided to give this game a try.

Let us get the review started then and I hope everyone will be able to enjoy their stay here, お手柔らかにお願いします。

Game Name: 流星のアーカディア
Website: http://d-lion.net/product/arcadia/main.html
Release date: 2012/10/26
Categories: Adventure, School Life, Duel, Japanese Mythologies

Pure Girl – So Pure [But Not Exactly SFW]

So I’ve been thinking about this Pure Girl post for about 3 weeks now ever since I finished the game, but never got around to it until now. Well, maybe instead of “thinking”, perhaps putting it at the back of my mind and only remembering it occasionally would be a more accurate description. I’m just a hopelessly lazy bastard if you haven’t figured that out already.

Instead of a review, this time I’ll be putting little lists of what to expect and what not to expect from this game. That should get the general point across in a concise manner, in theory, I think. I did say I am lazy right. Oh and I’m going to have some fun with formats. Hope it won’t be messed up too badly on your screen.

Tsukumo no Kanade ~Kake Gatsu no Yasoukyoku~ Review

After I submitted my  ‘＆’-空の向こうで咲きますように-  review, I was surprised to see my gravatar appeared on the “The A team” side-widget. According to Aedes, it seems like the side-widget will automatically add anyone who has posted an article on this blog. With my gravatar stamped on every page of this site, I am seriously considering about staying as a permanent writer if both Aedes and Aero do not have any objection against the idea.

This time around, I will be reviewing a new game from SkyFish titled 九十九の奏～欠け月の夜想曲～  which coincidentally has very similar themes as  ‘＆’-空の向こうで咲きますように-. Just like ‘＆’-空の向こうで咲きますように-, this game revolves mainly around Gods(九十九神), wishes(願い) and magical items(形代). Despite those similarities, 九十九の奏～欠け月の夜想曲～ is packaged and presented in a very different manner.

Warning: Due to the nature of this game, there are many old and difficult words which make it really hard for players without extensive vocabulary to understand the story properly. 

Let us get started then, I hope everyone will be able to enjoy their stay here, お手柔らかにお願いします。

Game Name: 九十九の奏～欠け月の夜想曲～
Website: http://www.sky-fish.jp/tsukumo/tsukumo_fl.html
Release date: 2012/09/28
Categories: Fiction, Romance, Horror.