Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Catching Up on All the Recent Otome News

 Video games  1 Response »  Tagged with: ,
Aug 092021
 

With an Idea Factory live stream on July 28 that promised more otome news and a live stream from Aksys last Friday, it’s been an exciting time for otome news!

So let’s catch up on all of the recent announcements, because there’s a lot more than anyone expected.

Before we get into those, Bustafellows is out now and PQube said they’ll pick up more otome localizations if it sells well. So they could become a new otome publisher to keep an eye on.

(Bustafellows is waiting in my backlog, since it came out nearly on top of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and NEO: The World Ends With You.)

Now let’s get into the two events I mentioned previously.

Idea Factory hasn’t localized much otome in quite a while, so people weren’t expecting much… but they announced Cupid Parasite for this fall, teased Birushana Senki, and said they have another unrevealed otome on the way as well.

Then on Friday, Aksys came out swinging with release dates for their previously-announced otome titles (September 9 for Olympia Soirée, December 2 for Dairoku, and sometime in February for Variable Barricade) and went on to announced four new otome localizations: Lover Pretend, KimiYuki, Paradigm Paradox, and Piofiore: Episodio 1926.

(The first Piofiore is, you guessed it, sitting in my backlog. We’ll get there eventually.)

So between the two companies, that’s 7 upcoming otome games, even if one of them is still a mystery for now, in addition to the 3 that were already announced.

With so many upcoming otome games, I might need to do a little more research beyond “Visual novels, woo!” before I buy them, especially since these events also included several non-otome announcements that have my attention as well, much to the dismay of my ever-suffering backlog.

Who said this year would be slow for games, anyway? This year is so packed with exciting games, I need to ignore games that would have been day-one buys just because of how much else is coming out at the same time!

Are you excited for these upcoming otome titles? Which ones are you looking forward to the most? And what do you think Idea Factory’s unknown otome could be?

Sweet Fuse: Romance in a Deadly Game

 Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 262021
 

Sure, it’s not February, but I decided to move on to another otome after all.

I picked up Sweet Fuse: At Your Side amidst the concerns about the PSP/Vita/PS3 stores shutting down. I’d first heard about this visual novel years ago, while researching visual novels with unusual premises for a freelance assignment.

Sweet Fuse stars Saki Inafune, a young woman attending the opening ceremony of a video game theme park designed by her uncle, Keiji Inafune (yes, that one).

The opening ceremony is disrupted by a man in a pig costume who introduces himself as Count Hogstein, takes the park staff hostage, and threatens to blow up the entire park unless 7 people play his “games” over the next 7 days.

Saki volunteers for the game in order to save her uncle, while the other six participants are chosen by Hogstein. Together, they must try to overcome the deadly games he’s set up based on the park’s attractions.

Each attraction is based on a different video game genre, which was pretty entertaining.

The first three chapters make up the common route. Some of your choices are important to surviving the games, while others build your affection with one of the possible romance options. After the common route, the story branches based on which character you’ve grown the closest to.

I liked pretty much all of the characters. A few stood out much more than others, but it was interesting to see all of their stories and how the events in the latter half of the game changed depending on whose route I was on. There are some notable age gaps, which added some awkwardness, but the writing handled it well enough.

It is a bit weird that the main character is Keiji Inafune’s fictional niece, though. Every time she’d get a message from Uncle Keiji, where he’d offer some inspiring and motivational words of advice, it always felt surreal since he’s a real person.

Now, there’s also an overarching mystery about Hogstein’s motivations, and one problem is that while each route delves into the mystery from a different angle, some contain far more information than others. So my first route was accidentally the one that explained almost the entire mystery, leaving me with points in later routes where I was impatiently waiting for them to figure out something I already knew.

I enjoyed the mystery overall, though, and it all came together nicely once I played the final route.

In addition to regular choices, sometimes you have the option to just get mad. If a character does something particularly unfair, you get a special choice where Saki can blow up and shout at them. This is almost always the right choice and is pretty entertaining.

Saki also has “explosive insights,” a game mechanic where you choose from a list of key words in order to reach the correct solution to your current situation (although as far as I could tell, you always have to pick three, even if you know which is the right one).

Overall, I enjoyed Sweet Fuse and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys otome visual novels or death game mysteries. Digital PSP games still can be bought and played on a Vita, so it’s not completely out of reach yet despite the scarcity of physical copies, but it would be nice to see this one get re-released someday…

Nekopara – Catboys Paradise is Cute, but Feels Like an Intro

 Reviews, Video games  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Jul 162021
 

Yesterday saw the release of Nekopara – Catboys Paradise, the free otome entry in the Nekopara series.

Catboys Paradise started as an April Fools’ joke, but it got such a positive response that they turned it into a real visual novel. So, what is it like?

You play a young woman who recently inherited a café and needs to learn how to manage it along with four catboys who are there to help her, all of whom are eager to win her affections.

If you go into it expecting strictly a gender-swapped Nekopara, that’s not exactly what you’ll be getting. Instead of the animated sprites that always impress me in Nekopara, this one features regular still sprites (so no, you can’t pat your catboys’ heads whenever you want to). It is also split across four routes, with a common route leading up to a single choice where you need to pick which character’s route you want to follow.

Instead of the harem setup of the main Nekopara stories, Catboys Paradise instead has you focus on one catboy to get closer to in his route, with a few comments that suggest a true harem is impossible (although it’s also emphasized that the protagonist wants all four to be her “housecats” eventually).

Each of the four heroes is entertaining and loveable, and it’s a really cute story with some pretty funny moments. However, it feels more like an introduction to a story than a complete story in its own right.

You learn a little bit about the characters and grow closer to them, but it never makes it all the way to romance and ends feeling like it’s the prologue to your story with these characters. I hope that means they intend to make a full catboy Nekopara game if this is popular enough, because I’d love to see more.

If they do, I hope they reverse their decision to have a silent protagonist. Unlike the Nekopara protagonist, who gets his own dialogue, the Catboys Paradise heroine only communicates through nods and emotes.

And that gets really awkward in conversations, since the catboys have to repeat whatever she “says” so the player knows what it is, and more involved conversations mean they’ve got to repeat quite a bit. She’s a silent protagonist in a story that wasn’t written to support a silent protagonist.

It’s still a cute story, and Nekopara – Catboys Paradise is worth checking out if you want a free, cute catboy otome. I just hoping it’s leading to a more complete experience later down the line.

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