A Vn with actual ecchi content, with an attached rhythm game you can completely skip. It also has a complete genre shift at route into a post apocalypse zombie thing, kinda.

It got a Switch release four years after its Steam release, and that is probably the better version? I hope it runs better at least. I played the Steam port for this.

As for being a Halloween VN, it’s a mix of drama and romance with some mutant zombies thrown in.

Gameplay-2

So lets start with the chart, the scene selector the game has as it does an odd thing. So the game lets you jump to any scene you’ve seen in the game and change choices. From what I can tell, this system is a mess. For decisions the game just checks what the last decisions you made in the important ones, aka the ones marked in pink and the pool trip that seems to lock in your route for that run. Thing is, the game doesn’t tell you what your last decisions were. Which is odd because of how important a lot of them are to getting the good endings, or how speaking to the combat personalities a lot in a run is needed to get all of their side content. Hell the game doesn’t even tell you which of the seven characters you hung out with in any event other then the pool trip. I somehow dropped out of a girl’s route at some point and noticed the game had changed my pool trip to another girl. How? No idea. Most of the game works but it’s hard to read how it’s tracking things.

Speaking of the combat personalities, the “combat” is bad. It’s a rhythm game of sorts, you pick a song from your list of 5 girls and then some backup singers based on a cost bar that goes up as they level. Then you play the song. There is no health bar. There is no apparent damage. Passing the song section does damage, but who knows how much. The song doesn’t even last the entire minigame duration! After the tutorial though you get an option to skip all of these, even the random encounters and final boss. Which still gives xp, which is shared to your overall save. This is just a huge mess of a system that feels grafted on. There is a fight you have to lose to get all the scenes in the game as well. Nothing tells you this, the game’s chart shows it as a choice. It’s also the only time the game has a second bad end in a route.

I guess the random encounter thing needs to be addressed as well? So during the second half of the game you are sometimes given a tile based map to move to a specific point. These are mostly pointless unless you want to grind random encounters, as there are no hidden scenes or timers in these. They just slow down an already mechanically slow game.

Which I guess would be the next point, how poorly the game feels to read because of how often it just sits to load something into the screen. Every character loading in for a line, every screen movement to focus on a new character for their next line, any transition, they all take way to long. Like 1/4 of the game’s playtime could be cut by fixing the delays.

Story-5

This is a Vn that goes from moege to zombie apocalypse, which is not a spoiler, they hint at it in the second scene of the game. I want to call it horror, but its really not going for scary. Mostly it goes for drama in it’s second half, which I do think is overall the better written part of the game. The common has a lot of forced scenes due to everyone needing almost daily content with nothing to say, and even some scenes that really shouldn’t happen but do because something had to fill that slot(girl coming to dinner without any on screen plans having been made, even when you do her content it still feels out of nowhere). Or some scenes even feel out of order. Fuuka had a good one, she’s actively avoiding you near the end of her common route portion only for the next scene to be her going to the mall alone with the protag and being all giddy about it. She was depressed in the last scene!

Anyway, the moege segment is a pretty basic high school thing. You have six heroines and a big festival coming up. There’s some news about a virus that makes people go crazy berserk, but your main character just thinks it’s nonsense. Even when he starts fighting mutant monsters in his city with a cell phone with an idol unit on it who fight with the power of song. That he just found in his childhood friend’s stuff, who’s parents were researchers trying to save their sick daughter’s life. He thinks nothing of it, his daily life is normal, nothing’s going to change.

Anyway, the heroines.

Kanon is the main heroine aka the main story girl and the one who shows up the most. She’s the sickly type, can’t do much and everyone worries about her. The story starts with her finally leaving hospitalization for the first time in years to move in with protag and his sister. While she’s very important for the story, she’s kind of just there. Her personality is pretty weak in all honestly. Her route is probably the darkest in terms of body count and how people act on screen.

Yuno is the other childhood friend. She promised Kanon she would reach the Olympics for the sick girl, and is doing just that in gymnatics. This leads to a lot of male attention, as Yuno is probably the most sexually attractive girl in the game for a standard horny teenager and she practices in the gym. She’s also in story half foreign and a doormat(she calls herself this), enjoying taking orders and having a hard time saying no to anyone. She’s the energetic girl, but doesn’t make any moves on protag out of consideration/pity for Kanon.

The above two represent the main heroines of sorts. I sort the routes into two groups, Yuno girls and Kanon side. Two of the other heriones are obsessed with Yuno, while the other two are very interested in or live with Kanon. The game has two split times for the routes which use a different scene each before the second half of the game starts. So with that said-

Satsuki is the least likeable girl in the cast during the first part of the game. She’s an overly serious kuudere(pretty sure that’s what they were going for) who’s main job is being Yuno’s trainer. Not because Satsuki knows how to train, but because Yuno wants someone else to dictate the workout schedule to her. Yuno is also Satsuki’s only friend, she finds all the guys a pain and spends half her on screen time berating the male friend character and generally being rude to everyone else. The second half of the game she gets a lot better, partly because she stops treating the lead like ass but also because her aloof wolf thing makes way more sense in that environment. While I liked her relationship with the lead probably the most by the end, I hated her during the entire first half of the game.

Natsume is the most sexually designed girl in the game. Biggest bust, thinnest waist. No one other then the lead interacts with her cause according to her she’s way to shy. She fangirls over Yuno and that’s what leads the protag to talk to her and get her less shy, I guess. There’s way more to that shy thing and really Natsume in general, but it’s really easy to figure out to the point that if I write anything else about her I’ll give it away.

Fuuka is the protag’s not sister. You find this out like 10 minutes into the game. She’s 2-3 years younger then the rest of the cast, and her crush on the lead is super obvious. She’s the house caretaker for the most part, and the genki girl who isn’t into sports. Her common is very jealousy focused, her route is not. She’s actually barely in her route.

Akira is the adult women of the cast and is the last met heroine. She is first met posing as a door to door hospital checker obviously looking at Kanon and then just shows up here and there. She has the most combat focused content, with chasing her adding 5 fights to the common route. She’s serious, mysterious, smart, and technically an antagonist. She is also the only other character in the story who can fight the monsters.

Makoto is the friend character, I guess. He gets a section cause he has an ending, but honestly he sucks. Perv is his only trait for common, with him dragging protag to watch Yuno practice just to worship her boobs a bunch. His only role is to badly flirt and get shot down hard a bunch. I have no idea why the protag is friends with him, they never do anything together other then watch Yuno practice and the proatg is very against being open about being attracted to the girls sexually. I just don’t get how these two are suppose to be friends.

So the second half of the game, the routes portion of it, starts out as early fall of society stuff. You’ll usually have a couple events of the main character getting devastated by the state of the world, getting food, and the reality of the virus. It can get very samey as the early parts of each route are very similar, with the first big difference being the route heroine cheering the lead up. Usually. Then a lot of thing get worse, big romantic moment, maybe some love comedy time before things crash until the ending where a love confession pulls full power out of the idol phone the lead has to fix everything. Kinda. Every route’s true ending still has a few heroines die. It’s actually kind of surprising how many happy endings have 1/3 of the female cast just dead.

So the last thing I want to bring up is the idol phone fighting tool itself. It’s called D4U, or Dream 4 You. It has 5 idol girls loaded into it who will slow the game down to add their opinion to stuff a bunch. In some routes they get more lines then a majority of the heroines. They get a surprising amount of content each, like unlockable short stories and a bunch of scenes where you choose one to talk about what just happened, but ultimately they are at best cheerleaders. They can’t physically do anything beyond singing, which helps the sick and fights the viruses. Which gets to one more point, how the fuck does combat work?

Akira’s route has a lot more written out combat then the other routes, and apparently it involves dodging, weaving, and blocking escape routes. Despite the fact our hero cannot physically do anything to fight back. It’s just his idol phone singing to beat them, why does physical stamina or positioning matter? I swear Akira just punches the monsters while singing. The hero does too, for some baffling reason.

Lewd-6

Game has the emote system, so character art and cgs all have small movements to them. Mostly jiggle in fact. Each girl has at least one devoted ecchi scene, though half have 3 or more. Lots of cleavage and some ass shots.

I have to bring up the censor steam since it’s used in absurd amounts. A number of girls have bathing scenes for different reasons, and in all of them there’s so much steam you cannot even see their body lines. It kind of defeats the purpose to these images with how overboard they went.

Yuno gets the most sexual stuff, with a changing cg while sweaty, a couple of cleavage shots, and her gymnastic uniform being form fitting. She also has in story sex with cgs that intro and outro the event. She’s the only one with that, though Akira’s true ending admits to sex being a thing they do with the hero groping her. The rest of the routes don’t. Surprisingly Satsuki gets the second most echi shots despite being the least busty of the cast. She’s the only one who has a bathing scene without ludicrous steam.

Kanon, Fuuka, and Natsume get the least with 1-2 each at best. Kanon and Fuuka even make their pool cgs SFW unlike the rest. They played really safe with those two. Natsume gets a bikini pose at least with her barely covering anything two piece, but is never used for ecchi anywhere else, not even for cleavage stuff.

Verdict-

Don’t really have a better spot to mention other weird things with the game. So I bought the Steam version. Turns out that if you run the game via the exe Steam puts on your desktop it will always run the Japanese version. I had to run the game via Steam to get English. There is no resolution option and full screen is way higher then any monitor I own, so I had to play in windowed. The game did crash once, though I don’t know how much that was the game’s fault or mine for running three games at once.

Anyway, it’s alright. The writing isn’t strong enough to pull me into the world, and a lot of the scenes feel kind of pointless even from a romance building angle. It also gets very repetitive as you go through the routes, with the game dropping similar big story beats at the end of every route.

It is unique though. Ecchi vns are already rare. Vns with complete genre shifts also aren’t that common. So it stands out. Just wish there was something to actually praise beyond it being unique. It’s not bad though, I just want to be clear. It’s clunky, but never poorly done. That goes for the whole game really.

Save for Song of Memories

Has all cgs and a filled out flowchart, so everything that can be unlocked is.