Search Results for: otome games

Otome Games Review: Kiss of Revenge and Be My Princess

October 6, 2013 by Anna N 3 Comments

Kiss of Revenge

Kiss of Revenge is available on the iphone and on android.

This is another Voltage game like Pirates in Love which I reviewed previously. I’ve decided after playing this game that there was not nearly enough kissing or revenge, so the title was a bit misleading. Also, while the story is certainly going to appeal to fans of melodrama, I found the hospital setting to be not very interesting in the absence of pirates or ninjas. Perhaps I would have enjoyed this game more if it was a ninja hospital.

The storyline focuses on a young doctor who is determined to get her REVENGE after her mother was killed in a botched operation many years ago. She went to medical school and selected the hospital that was the site of her mother’s death in order to expose injustice and coldly execute her revenge. Unfortunately she is surrounded by a variety of handsome co-workers.

The current director of the hospital was the surgeon who botched the operation many years ago, so one easy course for revenge on the part of the heroine is to target his son.

Although she is occasionally distracted by the presence of her childhood friend, who just happens to have a salesman job pushing medical supplies.

While there are plenty of dramatic descriptions of close calls digging up ancient medical files and surgical preparations, I found the real world setting of this game to be a bit humdrum. Also, I was expecting more revengy antics earlier in the game but there’s more of a slow build to all of the emotional trauma that occurs in the later episodes. There’s also a narrative device that is interesting due to the branching storylines, but at the same time a bit annoying because it represents another set of episodes that has to be paid for. At one point in the story the heroine is prompted to chose revenge or give it up, and if you want to play the non-revenge ending (who wouldn’t choose revenge!) you have to buy those separate episodes.

The other thing that I found less than interesting about this game is that while there are other characters to play, clearly the one where the heroine concentrates on the son of the evil hospital director is going to be the most interesting one. I wasn’t all that invested in finding out what the story variations would be if I picked a different character. Overall, this game didn’t really capture my interest. The storyline also ensured that there wouldn’t be as much humor, and I wasn’t very entertained. If you enjoy more melodramatic stories with real world elements though, this might appeal to you.

Be My Princess

Be My Princess is available for itunes and android

This is a game that is actually fairly easy to play without spending any money on it, and after an attempt to buy game credit that didn’t show up in my account, I would really recommended that people do not even attempt to spend money on this game.

Be My Princess is the story of a young fashion designer who ends up in a tiny imaginary European country that seems to be bursting at the seams with princes! They all seem to be strangely attracted to her! They are also somewhat bland and fairly interchangeable, but their prince outfits have a hilarious amount of ruffles.

The storylines so far in this game are really not that interesting. So far I’ve played through three endings of a special event storyline, where the heroine runs off with a prince, and in each variation Their Love is not accepted so there’s an elopement scandal but it all works out in the end.

The virtual paper doll aspects of the game are probably the most entertaining aspect of it all. Here’s a screenshot of my character.

And her extremely cluttered room.

If you play this game you get five passes to read further along in each chapter that reset every morning. There are often checkpoints where you have to swap out your clothes for more elaborate clothes, and have to exchange your free virtual game money for a new handbag or dress. If you do not spend money on the game your closet and furniture storage is limited, thus you are Less Charming. I haven’t found this to be a tremendous hardship so far, although it sometimes led my character to have incredibly wacky outfits as she went through checkpoints. Overall, this game was fairly bland, and I wasn’t happy about the snafu that denied me the opportunity to buy more closet space. At the same time, it does seem to be ideally set up for very casual gaming. The plot might not be all that interesting, but it is entertaining enough to login for 10 minutes a day or so and progress through the princess rankings system.

Here are some random out of context screenshots from Pirates in Love, which I continued to play after my initial review.

Up next: the very entertaining Love Letter from Thief X, which is probably my favorite game so far.

Otome Games Review: Destiny Ninja and Pirates in Love

September 15, 2013 by Anna N 16 Comments

So I’ve always been leery of manga adaptations of Otome games, just because I find the plots a bit too formulaic. Even though I do have a strong fondness towards reverse harem scenarios, so far the Alice in the Country of franchise is the only Otome game manga where I’ve felt compelled to read more than a few volumes. I’ve been very busy recently and needing a new distraction, so when I saw that there was a game out called Shall We Date: Destiny Ninja, I decided to give that a try. Falling all the way down the Otome game rabbit hole, I also started playing Pirates in Love as well.

Shall We Date: Destiny Ninja is available for android and iphone.

I decided to start playing this because the name “Destiny Ninja” was hilarious. I was even more amused after sitting through a few minutes of the prologue, where the ninja are identified solely by their personality traits. The choices were Aggressive Pompous Ninja, Wicked Mean Ninja, Mischievous Masked Dark Ninja, Indifferent Merciless Stubborn Ninja, Mean But With an Angel Heart Brother Like Ninja, or Sexy Foreign Ninja. I decided to go with Mischievous Masked Dark Ninja at first.

Dark Ninja is Hyosuke, who seems to spend most of his time alternating between making jokes or indulging in cold and calculating revenge. He’s got a bit of a split personality.

The heroine of the story wakes up with amnesia near a battlefield, with no clues to her identity other than the expensive clothing and necklace that she wears. She’s taken under the wing of a local lord and his shinobi, and one of the ninjas is assigned to protect her. The heroine slowly uncovers the clues to her identity while falling in love with her chosen ninja.

Destiny Ninja is free to play, but it has some cumbersome game elements that are basically designed to frustrate the player into spending actual money. You can only progress forward through each chapter if your ninja has energy. You can revive your ninja by feeding him rice cakes, which you can attain through purchasing or winning them in ninja lotteries, or getting more energy through leveling up. Each energy unit is only worth getting through about a couple dozen lines of text, so it takes a long time to get through several chapters. The energy units also fill up at a very slow pace without using rice cakes. Players can earn points and virtual money through befriending other players. There are stopping points and checkpoints along the way where you have to have extra items like shuriken and passes. You also have to accessorize your chosen ninja’s companion animal by giving it scarves and masks. While I think it would be entirely possible to progress in the game for free, you would have to have a great deal of patience.

The storyline is fairly standard, and when the characters end up going through a lot of ninja history plot exposition it cam be a tiny bit boring, but generally I was entertained. I’m almost at the end of the storyline with the first ninja I picked, and I started trying to play from the beginning again just to see how the story would differ with a different character. This time I picked the Indifferent Merciless Stubborn Ninja, who indeed seems to be both indifferent and merciless as advertized, although as the story progresses, he begins to seem less and less indifferent.

There’s a complicated love meter for the game where depending on the answers you give, you can get one of four endings with each ninja. This means that if you have an obsessive personality and actually want to experience all the endings, you will have to play through the game four times per character. There’s a “sweet happy ending” which is more emotional or a “lovey dovey” ending which is evidently more risque. In terms of general romantic content though, the entire game is about at the level of a slightly risque harlequin romance novel. The English translation for this game is also not very good, but you can still understand everything that’s happening.

The game interface for this game is a bit crowded, because there are so many little add-ons and extra tasks needed for you to complete the story. I found the visual clutter a bit endearing, although I did get frustrated at the slow rate of progression for the game, even after spending money on rice cakes to power up my ninja. It was so slow I decided to check out another game, Pirates in Love.

Pirates in Love is available for android and iphone

This game requires you to pay for stories after a free introductory chapter. The interface for the game is smooth and easy to navigate, there’s some background music for the game that quickly becomes annoying, and the art looks less like clip art. With each decision point the heroine has three options, and there are no extra mini-games or tasks to complete. Pirates In Love functions pretty much like a classic choose your own adventure novel. It is easy to go through the storyline for a character in about an hour and a half or so.

I figured that when playing a game with pirate characters, one has to go for the guy in the eye patch.

Hello there.

As much as I enjoyed the looks of eye patch guy, whose name was Eduardo, I didn’t care very much for the storyline. He seemed to treat the heroine like a dim-witted mascot most of the time, and while certain aspects of Eduardo’s mysterious past were very interesting, there was a bit of a misogynistic vibe that I didn’t care for too much. By the end of the story he is much less of a creep, and he does get style points for the eye patch. I found the game interesting enough that I decided to play again with a different character, Russell the arrogant fencing pirate.

This storyline focuses more on the hero gaining a more mature sense of his place in the world, and it wasn’t as complex as Eduardo’s journey where he deals with his past, eye patch, and various conflicts with other pirates. It was less annoying but also a bit less interesting than the first character I tried. This game does a good job of balancing appearances from all the characters in every story, so it is easy to start wondering about all the different outcomes if you tried to play through the game with yet another character.

For my third time through this game, I picked the womanizing borderline alcoholic pirate captain.

Captain Morgan’s story involved ensuring an island’s water supply, mysterious twins, him being chased through a towm by all the woman in port that he wronged before, a hydra, and pirate captain political maneuvering. It was probably the most entertaining of the stories I’d tried so far in Pirates in Love, and of course the heroine cures him of his alcoholism and womanizing by the time the story is done.

Pirates in Love was much less frustrating to play than Destiny Ninja, because once you’ve bought a storyline you can play it until the end, and you can also go back and switch your answers to try to get a different ending without having to pay any extra. I actually played through three full stories in Pirates in Love for less money than I spend on buying rice cakes and other items in Destiny Ninja. Overall, I think Pirates in Love is a better value for what you get from the game, although I do find all the ninja quite amusing. I found my first foray into Otome gaming much more entertaining than I thought it would be. I’m going to continue with both of these games, as there are a couple characters with stories I’m still interested in from Pirates in Love. I might just adjust to the glacial pace of Destiny Ninja and play it more casually, as the lag time in normal game play makes it a bit frustrating to follow the stories closely.

If you do decide to give Destiny Ninja a try, my invite code is:CqWB9YLrSW (we both get bonus rice cakes!)

Who exactly are these pirates in love with?

Otome Game Review: Love! Sushi Rangers

September 12, 2014 by Anna N 2 Comments

I think I’ve figured out why I originally burnt out on Otome Games when I started playing them a year ago for just a few months. I generally tend towards games of the “freemium” variety, but they are so slow to progress that I end up playing a bunch of them at once, which then results in me deciding that I’ve been playing far too many otome games, so I just stop and go back to more productive pursuits like knitting, watching k-dramas, and not putting away the laundry. So this time around I’m going to give up on games I find a bit boring a bit earlier in the process, and just go ahead and write a review. I figure playing one storyline all the way to the end is enough, if the game isn’t that great, right?

All that being said, this game Love! Sushi Rangers is bonkers, because it features the typical reverse harem scenario of any otome game but with sushi ingredients. Sushi ingredients given human form and personalities. Japan, everybody!!!!!!

Love! Sushi Rangers is available on android and iPhone

This game starts out with a premise familiar to any manga fan – someone’s parent is going crazy and abandoning them for no logical reason. It is almost as good as the plot device where a sudden marriage where the heroine gets an annoyingly attractive new sibling. In this particular case the heroine’s father, a world class sushi chef, announces that he is going to walk the earth to bring the gospel of sushi to foreign lands, leaving the family restaurant in the hands of his daughter, who is absolutely inept at making sushi. Yukari, who is a sensible girl except for her habit of falling in love with sushi ingredients, is angry and upset about this turn of events. She finds some unlikely helpers, as the sushi ingredients her father left behind turn into handsome young men, prepared to help her keep the restaurant running.

Other than the nutty aspect of dating sushi ingredients, this game is pretty boring. There isn’t really much of a plot to speak of in either of the routes I tried. Salmon and Tuna are engaged in a petulant rivalry with each other.

This rivalry sometimes becomes violent. Sushi fight!!!!!

While there is no plot to speak of, this game did at least have a sense of humor, as when the sushi ingredients ponder the morality of sushi ingredients eating sushi.

I did appreciate the heroine’s tendencies to yell in all caps when she’s upset.

As a free game, I think you can play up to three character’s story lines for free. I only played through all of Tuna and part of Salmon. It is very very unfortunate that Shrimp and Avocado don’t have routes. The power expended to get through the game for free is about the slowest to regenerate that I’ve ever encountered in a freemium otome game. You basically get only 2 chapters a day, which is a very slow pace. I didn’t think that the character designs were very attractive. Often the game presents you with empty rooms and subtitles, I’m assuming to save on the costs of doing additional illustrations. Lackluster art combined with almost no plot to speak of doesn’t really add up to a game that I’d be interested in playing much further, even though there are flashes of humor due to the wacky premise.

Otome Game Review: Love Letter from Thief X

September 7, 2014 by Anna N 6 Comments

Love Letter from Thief x is availabe on Android and iPhone.

I played a few Otome games a year ago, and I’m playing a couple again. Perhaps there is something about fall that makes me want to play Otome games. Before I move on to the games I am currently playing (spoiler alert! there might be sushi and ninjas involved), I thought I would go back and write about my favorite game to date, Love Letter from Thief X.

There’s something about the premise that really appeals to me, even more than games involving pirates and ninjas, as hard as it may seem. In this game, the heroine works in a museum and finds herself caught up in a ring of Robin Hood-like thieves. It is vaguely like that great Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole move “How to Steal a Million”, except there’s no Givenchy costumes and instead of Peter O’Toole, you get six Japanese dudes.

The heroine of this game works in a museum. Her great-grandfather was the Japanese equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci. One day when she’s at work after hours, she runs into two thieves. She bumps into a display case as she chases after them, almost toppling a statute on top of her. One of the thieves saves her from being brained by the bronze. They notice that she’s wearing an heirloom ring from her great-grandfather, then quickly run away as the police approach. There are rumors floating around about a ring of thieves known as the Black Foxes, and the heroine wonders if the strange men she encountered are part of the group.

The next day the heroine finds herself meeting two other strange men who are also part of the secret band of thieves. She finds herself at a bar where they all hang out, told that she’s the key to unlocking the secret of her great-grandfather’s legacy, and has to pick a thief to accompany her at all times in her new role as a member of the Black Foxes.

There’s Riki, the arrogant leader:

Takuto, a socially inept computer genius.

Takuto and the heroine often get into fights over who ate the last serving of pork noodles.

Hiro, an androgynous art student and master of disguise:

and Kenshi, the boy next door:

You can also play storylines with Atsumu, the oddly superstitious older boss of the gang, and Tatsuro, an old childhood friend of the heroine’s who happens to be a police detective tracking down the Black Foxes.

Depending on the route you pick, you get a different scenario for the mystery the Black Foxes need the heroine to solve. Sometimes they are chasing paintings, an advanced scientific invention, an Indiana Jones style lost city, or a precious artifact. I played through all the routes on this game, although I haven’t invested the time and money to play the many sequels, epilogues, and special stories.

There are a lot of similarities in the personalities of the characters to Pirates in Love. In particular, Riki and Eduardo and Atsumu and Morgan were a bit similar. This was the first Otome game where I’ve been interested in playing every route, and it was interesting to see the variations on the story with each character. Riki’s story is good if you enjoy the whole clumsy maiden with a chaebol dynamic that pops up so often in k-dramas, and there’s even a bit of second lead syndrome as Riki and Takuto struggle a bit over the heroine’s affections. Takuto’s story was probably the most emotionally intense. Kenshi’s storyline was simple but sweet. Atsumu’s storyline delves into issues that unfold when you have a leading man who is superficial on the service because he’s dealing with a tragic past. I was happy to play through all the stories, but Hiro and Tatsuro were a bit less entertaining for me.

There’s plenty of humor throughout. I know that many otome game aficionados aren’t necessarily the biggest fans of Voltage Games, but if you aren’t able to play games in Japanese, at least the translation quality is good, you do get plenty of chapters for the $4.99 per game route you’re playing, and the storylines are generally entertaining. This has been my favorite otome game so far, and I would rank Pirates in Love second. I always meant for these reviews to turn into a regular feature! We’ll see what I can manage with the few games I just started playing recently. If you have suggestions for games for me to check out, please let me know. I know that Alice in the Country of Hearts was just released in English, but the translation quality seems so bad, I’m not sure if I can stomach paying for any chapters.

Search Results for: otome games

Otome Games Review: Kiss of Revenge and Be My Princess

Otome Games Review: Destiny Ninja and Pirates in Love

Otome Game Review: Love! Sushi Rangers

Otome Game Review: Love Letter from Thief X

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Search Results for: otome games

Otome Games Review: Kiss of Revenge and Be My Princess

Otome Games Review: Destiny Ninja and Pirates in Love

Otome Game Review: Love! Sushi Rangers

Otome Game Review: Love Letter from Thief X

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