Once upon a time, I wrote a freelance script about ten of the weirdest romance visual novels available at the time.
One of the visual novels I learned about as a result was Creature Romances ~Kokonoe Kokoro~, a visual novel about a romance with a giant grasshopper.
So of course I vowed to play it if it ever got an English release.
I figured there were two directions a visual novel like this could go. Either it would be disturbing and weird, with the protagonist seeing a world full of monsters around him like in Saya no Uta, or it would be silly and played for laughs like Hatoful Boyfriend.
But there was a third possibility I hadn’t even considered, and that was that the weird premise would be entirely inconsequential.
You play a high school boy who isn’t prepared to think about higher education or his future until his best friend Kokonoe Kokoro asks him to study hard so they can both be accepted into the same university. He is the only human character in the game, which no one ever mentions. Only one or two lines reference the characters being insect people at all. You could swap out the characters for humans and the visual novel would remain unchanged.
In the end, Creature Romances just left me asking why, and not because you’re romancing a giant bug.
It’s just a high school love story, a little cute but mostly bland. The juxtaposition of these normal romantic thoughts with the giant bug girl causes a mild amount of humor at first, but since the story never does anything with it, it loses even that once the novelty wears off.
So if you buy Creature Romances ~Kokonoe Kotoro~, just be aware you aren’t getting much besides the ability to say, “Yes, I played the grasshopper romance game.”
