Visual Novel (P)Review: Ecchi de Hentai! Yakimochi Ojou-sama!!

Introduction

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I’ve been pondering a lot whether I should even (p)review something like this: Just looking at the title it’s already obvious that this visual novel doesn’t really wanna tell a story, but show you da sexy. But then I was like: Why the fuck not?

Who Would Like this Game?

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The story so far doesn’t have much comedy in it. But it’s no drama either. It’s a picture-perfect world where everyone gets along with everyone. It’s relaxing, if you want. But also borderline boring with the lack of excitement it has. Give it a try if you wanna keep your heartrate low. It’s also got two “true” ojou-sama characters, more of that further below.

Difficulty

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If you really want to get all the coffee ‘n beans talk in here, it might be of medium difficulty, otherwise it’s pretty easy stuff. 4 without and 5 with the specific stuff counted in, most of which, by the way, would likely not withstand a fact check.

Difficulty 5/10

Translation Where?

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Nothing I know of.

Art

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It’s average, it sometimes dips below, somtimes climbs above the bar. The backgrounds are very sharp and neatly arranged, but at the same time overly clean and can feel empty. Speaking of empty, I wanna start and point out that I find it disturbing that all backgrounds of rooms in visual novels and even the cities tend to be deserted. At least put some shadows or whatever in there, maybe varying in how bustling the room in question is at the time. Empty classrooms, cafes, and streets are just creepy.

Speaking about the character art, some characters – like Alice – look fantastic, other characters – like Meru – look off, and there are characters – like Mayu – who look partly off in certain sprites. I guess altogether this spells “average.”

Premise

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Shinichi is a high school student and works part time at the coffee shop of his older sister, Chihiro, as a barista. Close by is an ojou-sama school, attended by his childhood friend, her friends, and his little sister. For their school festival, the club that said girls are in decides to do a maid cafe. Shinichi is asked to tutor them on how to properly brew and serve coffee and whatever they decide to put on the menu.

Characters

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Mayu
Mayu is Shinichi’s childhood friend and obviously has been having a crush on him since forever. Despite of her subtle hints and advancements on him, he seems to be dull when it comes to her interest in him as a man.

Alice
Alice is one of two “true” ojou-samas. She’s only been knowing Shinichi for a short time but fell for him right when she first saw him – and didn’t bother trying to be roundabout it. As soon as she hears that Shinichi is going to tutor the girls at their club, she hurriedly joins it too.

Kazuha
Kazuha is the other “true” ojou-sama in this visual novel and the “Yamato Nadeshiko”-kind of girl around. She’s what you’d imagine from an ojou-sama: Gets brought to school by limo, wears Japanese clothing in private, and is sheltered to hell. She’s the only girl outside of the club and isn’t befriended with any of the girls.

Hibiki
Hibiki is supposed to be the “tomboy.” She’s frequently being confessed to by other girls but is actually quite bothered and worried about whether she doesn’t got any womanly charm at all. While she does seem to have a crush on Shinichi, she’s burrowed it deep down into her heart for the above reasons. Apparently, she also has a huge interest in cosplaying, but doesn’t want anyone to know about it, for some reason.

Meru
(The picture is just a normal dialogue scene, I don’t have any CG unlocked yet, don’t ask me.) Meru is the girl with the pokerface and sleepy tone of voice. In the past, she’s been saved from drowning by Shinichi and has a crush on him ever since. She isn’t quite delicate about it and makes direct advances on him, yet, for some reason, nothing happens.

Side Characters
There are three noteable side characters so far: His older sister, Chihiro, the girls’ club advisor, Koyomi, and Shinichi’s little sister, Yume. Chihiro is the strict boss at the coffee shop who does, however, like to tease Shinichi into getting touchy-feely with the girls. Koyomi is an old friend and former classmate of Shinichi’s older sister and appears to be one of those “oh shit, I gotta get married”-kind of women with a taste for BL. Yume is an airhead – there’s really nothing more to say about her.

Conclusion

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On my eternal quest for ojou-sama visual novels (I’m a sucker for the typical Japanese ojou-sama way of speaking) I’ve filtered vndb for visual novels with, well, ojou-samas and stumbled upon this! I don’t think I’ve to translate the title for you, you probably already guessed it on your own: It’s a visual novel with a high amount of sexual content. Curiously, it’s not enough for me to say it’s a nukige (a visual novel that just wants you to nut), but too much for it to just be a bishoujoge (a visual novel where your goal is to get a cute girl to go out with you and then you usually experience some sort of “adventure” (a big word for what little usually happens) with her). It’s sitting between chairs, which is why I played through all of the common route, nonetheless.

If you just play it for the sexy, you’ll have to climb over walls of pretty un-exciting text first. The common route here is rather short and even less interesting. Apart from you (not the protagonist, just literally you, the player) realizing that the girls are totally into the protagonist, nothing worth mentioning happens; maybe Shinichi being put on tutor duty, that’s the “twist.” The story isn’t really that poorly written or anything, it’s just that nothing really happens. The story for now is just slice of life in a picture-perfect world. It won’t get you excited but you can still kinda click through it without getting the urge to throw it altogether. Just borderline-boring, not quite in the boring zone yet but always damn close to getting there. It’s hard to approximate the length of the common route, my best guess is that is should take you somewhere between 4-8 hours maybe. 10 if you’re a total slowpoke and 2 if you pace through it quickly. The choices you get to make during the common route are freaking two. I don’t think the first one even matters, in the second one, however, you simply pick the route you wanna enter (see picture above/to the right). Lazy writing much.

To my dismay, three of the five girls aren’t “true” ojou-samas in my book, meaning that they don’t have that cliched ojou-sama manner of speaking you might’ve heard in anime, nor do they have dem sexy ojou-sama behavior. Basically, you get two “true” ojou-sama heroines, three “normal” heroines, and three female sidecharacters.

Now if you’d be so kind to have a look at the picture, this is the “weird sprite” I talked about under “Art.” It’s one of Mayu’s dialogue sprites and I can’t help but feel she looks like she’s stretching her neck out as if she wants to say “what the fuck?” or as if she’s got a humpy back or whatever. The necks on all characters look like toothpicks, but in her case specifically, the way her face protrudes so far from her neck makes me think of a xenomorph from “Alien” and I cannot unsee it.

Before I totally forget to mention them: The H scenes so far are, like most of the time, overly clean vanilla sex (in a bad way). Mayu almost made me feel guilty for letting Shinichi have her, she seemed to be so miserable and just enduring it all the time, jeez… With all the porn and hentai and whatnot available on the internet for free, I don’t see why you’d play this for the H. The common route is way too short to bond with the girls and get some sort of satisfaction from their sexy times, but maybe the game puts the pedal to the metal later on, who knows? Maybe I’ll find out.

One technical note: The font in this game is awful. It’s a really fine black font with thick white outlining on a pink background – and the font’s small. Thick white outlining on pink background equals poor contrast, add small characters and you get: Hard as fuck to read on smaller screens.

A strong point is the music: It’s calm and relaxing in cafe scenes and is very reminiscent of classical Japanese music during Kazuha’s scenes – it fits the game and doesn’t ever get annoying even when on loop for a long time.

And let’s not forget the voice acting: Hibiki’s voice actress sounds amazing, in my opinion. Alice’s seiyuu does a great job, too. Meru, Yume, and Koyomi are doing okay. Chihiro’s voice actress does a great job for a side character, while Mayu’s is alright. Only Kazuha falls short, but not because of her voice acting, but her voice itself just sounds kind of strange in a bad way, I can’t quite put my finger on it. Anyway, no voice acting issues here.

All in all, Yakimochi Ojou-sama (let’s call it like that, it just means “jealous ojou-sama” (I like to leave “ojou-sama” untranslated)) is a pretty average visual novel that doesn’t quite fit into any “meta” genre in my opinion. It is just barely interesting enough to keep you clicking, but by far not interesting enough to get you hooked. That goes for the girls, the story, the H. I’m torn between a strong 6 or a weak 7, but going by my impressions so far, it’s gonna be a visual novel where I’m like “eh, okay” once I played through it. So I’m gonna stick with a slightly-above-average 6.

(P)Rating 6/10

 

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