Ikemen Sengoku◆Toki wo Kakeru Koi Aratanaru Deai// Overall Thoughts

When I was dying and working on my thesis, I promised myself I’d play something light and fun after I finished. And that was Ikemen Sengoku◆Toki wo Kakeru Koi Aratanaru Deai.

Ikemen Sengoku was originally a ticketed mobile otome game by Cybird, which was announced for a port to Vita at AGF in 2015. Since then it’s grown massively, spawning a…really bad anime, several stage plays and the app game got an English localisation.

I picked it up because Cybird released several collaboration PVs with Fujita Maiko, who is a singer I really like. And I was in a bad place in life probably, so I became invested in Ikemen Sengoku. The Vita game took 3 years to finally release as well so there’s also that.

Moving on, Ikemen Sengoku◆Toki wo Kakeru Koi Aratanaru Deai, loosely meaning “handsome Warring States ~love surpassing time and new meetings~”.

ngl Yamada Shiro art is beautiful

In IkeSen, the heroine Mizusaki Mai is in on a holiday in Kyoto, visiting landmarks of the Warring States period right before she starts her new job as a clothing designer. When visiting the remnants of the Honnouji temple, the area is hit by a sudden storm and both her and another passerby are sent back in time 500 years to the Warring States period. When she wakes up, she smells smoke and realises the building she is in is on fire and that a man near her was about to get attacked in his sleep, so she wakes him up and they escape the burning temple. Turns out the man she saved was Oda Nobunaga and he claims her as his woman, to everyones’ dismay and effectively adopts her. She reunites with the man who slipped through time with her, a graduate student who studies time travelling worm holes for fun, who tells her that they can return in 3 months. Through her saving Oda Nobunaga’s life, she meets other important figures of the Warring States period and builds bonds with them in the 3 months that follow.

Click here to skip the spoilers completely

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Dengeki Girl’s Style Girls Game Award 2017 // get bent

If you like mobile games and think they’re all you need then you don’t need to read this post, you have been warned

For all those who missed the voodoo ritual I was holding on twitter, today was the release of the results for the annual Dengeki Girl’s Style (DGS) Game Awards.

Kokuchou no Psychedelica// Overall Thoughts

I originally picked up Kokuchou no Psychedelica (Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly) because I had heard it was short and I knew several people who would swear by it. For various reasons I’ll delve into later, I took about 3 weeks to actually finish it.

Given this game was announced for localisation by Aksys, I’ll just write my short thoughts on it and you can skip my spoilery discussion as usual.

koookooochoo of the psychodoodlydoo

Briefly, Kokuchou no Psychedelica starts with a girl who wakes up in a strange mansion with no memories of who she is or why she’s there. She find herself attacked by strange monsters but are saved by Monshiro (CV: Matsuoka Yoshitsugu) who promptly disappears and discovers others like herself with no memories. They are soon lead to believe that their only way out is by helping a mysterious”Master of the Mansion” complete a kaleidoscope which can grant the users’ wish. The girl takes on the name Beniyuri (CV: Nakahara Mai), and the others, Hikage (CV: Ishikawa Kaito), Karasuba (CV: Kakihara Tetsuya), Kagiha (CV: Toriumi Kousuke) and Yamato (CV: Hosoya Yoshimasa). Soon they learn that not everything is as it seems.

ITABAGS! // The more u kno

Recently itabags have been all the rage in Japan and they’re slowly spreading overseas with many fans collecting way too much merch of their favourite anime/seiyuu/actor/etc.etc. Being an avid collector myself it was like a epiphany moment “you mean I can actually use all 12489049013 of my rubber straps?!” and thus began the spiral to hell.

I’m doin this because I realise I’ve accumulated info which may be out there but I’m not trying to push my merch on ppl and shit so have an (un)biased look at itabagging from someone who lost her wallet to this as well as other expensive hobbies.

Anyway I imagine that not everyone reading this post would be my usual otome game loving visitor so I’m putting a warning here: I’m probably gonna swear. A lot. If you’re reading this to fix up your own itabag lol you’re probably an adult anyway to be able to afford goods.

What are itabags?

Bags. With merch on them. Technically any bag with merch on it is considered an itabag. However, its becoming increasingly more associated with bags that have at least your body weight in merch on it.

Yoiyomori no Hime// All other routes and Final Thoughts

It took me a while but I! Finished! Yoiyomori!

As promised I’m gonna write a thing on the game. I posted a poll on twit a month ago asking if people wanted me to do non-spoiler posts or one with spoilers and…the latter won by a small margin so I hate you all (❀╹◡╹)

I’m going to keep writing a summary I suppose, but I’m gonna condense it down to the bare minimum given I can’t be bothered half the time and probably just not bother when it’s a game that’s worth playing. I dunno I need to work that all out first.

Moving on, this post is about the entirety of the remaining routes in Yoiyomori no Hime.

From my last post on the game:

yoyoforest

The game is set during a war between Schonwald and Stahl, two neighbouring countries with the supposedly cursed Dark Night Forest (Yoiyomori, gomen I couldn’t think of a better english translation aside from literal evening night forest) lining their borders. The story opens with the heroine Ilza running through Yoiyomori, just barely escaping with her life after an attack on her village Blume, left everyone else dead.

She collapses in the forest but is rescued by Julian who then takes her to a mansion which is shared by him and 6 other young men, Claus, Harold, Miriam, Lutz, Ulrich and Lambert. Upon realising her situation, the group’s “leader” Claus takes Ilza’s only memento of her parents hostage and forces her to stay in the mansion with them for reasons unknown. He reveals that every single one of them have been exiled to the forest by Dictator-Prince Erenfried of Stahl, and all harbour a deep grudge against the country. They all live with each other under the same common goal of hoping to exact revenge one day and tell Ilza her best chance of doing right by her village is by being with them anyway.

Click here to skip the spoilers completely

Analysis // Otome game sales number crunching

So I came across the sales rankings for otome games (and some other games geared toward a female audience ie. BL/games with otome elements) since 1997 to 2017 and I decided this was what all my extra years of higher education had been preparing me for…..

And I analysed the data a little.

For the sake of clarity, this data is for Japanese language games only and I’m going to group everything under otome game even though there are some other games in here (like 3 or 4 titles from what I could see). Also depending on the source the values for each of these columns can vary so take my analysis as an indicator rather than as an absolute sale volume.

DYNAMIC CHORD feat.apple-polisher// Overall Thoughts

I’m gonna try just compressing all my future posts down to something simpler to reduce the strain it puts on me because honestly I never planned on summarising game routes but somehow ended up doing it anyway. So what I’ll do now is just write up a basic thoughts/compaints etc. without spoilers as usual, but under the spoiler-y parts I’m only going to mention whatever is relevant so it won’t contain everything that happens.

DYNAMIC CHORD originally didn’t interest me at all because I thought it was just another idol thing but I got interested in apple-polisher because of Umehara Yuuichirou – but all their songs were sung by Aoi Shouta… So since the games started coming out I’ve been waiting for the apple-polisher game.

Given the things I’ve heard about the other games, my expectations dropped quite dramatically but I was bored enough to pick up this one. And in summary boy am I glad I did!

I kind of like the whole unmasking of each char when you finish their route too

In this game, the heroine Hiiragi Miu is a singer under the stage name MIU who is at the peak of her popularity. She is shown the ropes of the entertainment business by Grieflullaby, a senior band and they put her in contact with apple-polisher, who is a relatively unknown band under DYNAMIC CHORD. The singer of apple-polisher is NaL – Amagi Narumi, who was actually Miu’s childhood friend and first love from when she lived in America. And with that connection, she ends up becoming close to each of the members, Kurosawa Shinobu (Kuro), Aoi Yuuki (UK) and Otoishi Yuusei (Toi).