A Ero-rant: Yakimochi Stream

I have been very inactive as of late for various reasons. One of the reasons is that I’m currently working full time, so my free time is now limited. Also I haven’t really been playing all that much eroge recently either when I DO have free time.

A couple of weeks ago I started reading the manga Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari, and it left a very deep impression on me. It made me pissed off as hell, but it does so in a unique way that makes it awesome. So for the first time in a long time I found myself repeatedly re-reading the chapters of a manga. Unfortunately only 8 chapters are out atm, so re-reading had its limits. I later found out that the series originated from a web novel, which is in Japanese. Normally I avoid reading things with large amounts of text when there are no pictures, but I made an exception. And THAT is what has been taking up most of my time lately.  However, I put my web novel reading on hold to play Yakimochi Stream.

Company: まどそふと (MadoSoft)
Game site: ヤキモチストリーム
Links: VNDB, Walkthrough

First impression

The trial for Yakimochi Stream covers the first half of the common route, and I found that it was very very solid. The game’s fast pace made it easy to play through all of the trial without feeling bored, and the game’s wacky comedy had me grinning the whole time. Yes, I imagine I would look like a creep when I’m playing an eroge like this, but I’m fine with it. Anyway, the heroines are also quite attractive, if you can get over the size of their boobs that is. Hell, their boobs are compared to “mountains” in their character bios…so yeah. Anyway, I don’t know how good a judge I am, but all the heroines felt quite high level for their type .

You have Sana, the super obsessive brocon little sister.

Mitsuki is your isolated Kuudere senpai

Throw in Kohane as the tsundere childhood friend

And finally you have Tanya, who’s a foreign chick who does things at her own pace.

The heroines are pretty much at max love points, and we see some light bits of jealously in the trial. You know, just enough to make you wanting more. So the trial was pretty awesome, and I ended up replaying it around 3 times. In my defence, the trial is very short.

So we’ve established that the first bit of the common route was pure awesomeness. Sadly, this awesomeness doesn’t last.

The rest of the common route

So the end of the trial introduces Tanya, and I expected a lot of jealously scenes from this point onwards given the game’s title. Unfortunately, these group jealously scenes are a rare occurrence, rather than the core of the game. Instead, the common route progresses with by showing heroine events for different heroines pretty much back to back to each other. For example, we might see a scene that closes the gap between Takumai and Kohane, and then the next day the almost the same thing could be happening with Tanya. Since events are stacked like this, events don’t feel all that special and it’s hard to keep track of things.

To add to the confusion, time feels more like it’s “jumping” instead of flowing in this game. This is typical in slice of life games because looking over every single detail would be boring as hell, but this game does it a bit too much. The date isn’t displayed anywhere, and days change with lines such as “the next day”, “another day” or by telling you what day of the week it is. To top it off, the world outside the heroines and Takumi is pretty non-existent. So hell, the game could progress 3 weeks in one of the scene shifts, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference (or care).

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Call me an old fashioned, but I prefer when there are choices that let you deviate the storyline to show individual heroine events. At least that way, it’s a lot easier to keep track of what’s going on.

There were still funny scenes in the rest of the common route, but things felt definitely felt lower quality than what was shown in the trial. So after some horrible pacing, we reach the individual routes.

Individual routes

I had very low expectations for the development leading up to the confession, and yet, I was still taken back at how bad it was. For a super dense guy who doesn’t realise when four hot girls are madly in love with him, Takumi sure makes up his mind about confessing easily. After one scene to set the mood or whatever, Takumi thinks, “What’s this feeling…? …must be love”. H-scenes follow very soon after the confession scene, which is lame. However given how bad the development to this point was, premature H-scenes is probably the smallest issue this game has.

From here onwards H-scenes pretty much become the plot of the route. Each heroine has about 8 H-scenes, which rival some nukiges out there. The lack of any real plot once you get into the heroines routes also makes it feel quite a bit like a nukige. Backstories are introduced briefly with what seems to be an attempt to pull at your heartstrings, but are thrown aside too quickly to have any lasting impression. There is bits and pieces of actual relationship development throughout the route, but it’s pretty much negligible. The pre-end of each route has a small bit of story, but like the confession scenes, the endings are also abrupt and feel very forced.

Miscellaneous

Even though all the heroines had huge as boobs, I still liked the games graphics. The voice actors for the main heroines really matched the heroines’ personalities, and that’s something which really attracted me to the trial. Minor system errors, but again, these are nothing much when you look at the over picture of this game.

Final Words

Play? => NO

So Yakimochi Stream started off as a high level charage, and then slowly deteriorated in quality. The amount of H-scenes during the routes really makes it feel like changed their minds at one point and decided to make a nukige instead of a charage. Admittedly, the H-scenes weren’t half bad. Nothing A-grade, but I would say they were above average. Of course, no nukige is gonna do well if you have to play through hours of mediocrity before you reach the R18 content.

So if you take anything away from reading this post of mine, I hope it’s that you go read Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari =D.