Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- (金色ラブリッチェ-Golden Time-) Review

Heard the industry’s own tumor, minori, is finally closing up shop and quitting games. I was so happy I didn’t write a damn thing all day.

Plenty of people think minori made “masterpieces” like Ef and Eden, that it was a big-name studio worth mentioning, and that its sudden “collapse” (just quitting games, mind you) is somehow sad. But I still say the reason the Galgame industry is in this mess has a lot to do with these so-called “old studios, old stubborn farts” who refuse to die.

Go back to the ancient days, before the concept of Galgame even existed — there was only what they called エロゲーム, porn games, literally. Everything in them existed to deliver porn. Later, as some older studios joined in, the porn ratio in these porn games kept shrinking and the “story” kept growing. As the industry developed, “30% story, 70% porn” gradually turned into “70% story, 30% porn,” and some games even went “100% story, no porn,” becoming true visual novels. The hordes of otaku who’d been secretly playing porn games could finally straighten their backs and announce they weren’t in it for the dirty pictures, purely for the story — and some elite specimens among them even elevated “playing porn games” into an “artistic pursuit.”

So we see a lot of companies wanting to put out all-ages games, to finally operate in the clean light of day, goods out, people in, no longer forced to spend every day side by side with AV, becoming real game development companies.

Sounds like the birth and sprouting of some new art form… except Galgame’s audience was never the general public. It’s otaku who want to see tits and pussy.

Which is why KID, who went all-ages, died. 5pb., who inherited the mantle and wanted to go all-ages, is still desperately clinging to the accidentally successful Steins;Gate. Key puts out all-ages games too, but its output feels like it’s stopped running entirely. minori tried all-ages as well, took a massive loss, and afterward started frantically selling tits and ass to survive.

People always criticize otaku as disgusting — on one hand elevating themselves by saying they play for the story, on the other saying they won’t buy a game without 18+ content. In the end they just want to see dirty pictures. I thought that way years ago too, but now I’ve got a new take:

It’s not the otaku who are disgusting. It’s these old studios that are the tumor.

These former old studios successfully transformed part of the porn game into the “visual novel,” but they also fossilized the style of the genre.

Fossilized into what? Let’s think about the standard Galgame formula:

• A male protagonist who’s new in town?
• A transfer student who shows up out of nowhere?
• A school that’s guaranteed to have some utterly idiotic club?
• Shooting the shit in that club every day?
• Shooting the shit until the school festival?
• Picking which heroine to bang at the post-festival party?
• Said banging guaranteed to involve a costume change or two?
• Then the ED, a Fin CG, and it’s all over?

I’ve seen this formula more times than I can count over the past several years. Some big porn game studios even developed a new one: to be a masterpiece, you have to make the otaku cry.

Making people cry isn’t easy, but if it’s the heroine getting tormented, that’s much simpler. So some big studios started cranking out their “tearjerker” titles, not realizing that milking otaku tears is dead easy:

1. Hire an artist to draw a cute girl.
2. Have that girl “die naturally” (illness) or “vanish plot-wise” (worldline change, amnesia).
3. Focus on describing how brave she is in her final days.
4. Three, two, one — cry for me!

Or:

1. Hire an artist to draw two cute girls.
2. Have the two cute girls fight over the protagonist.
3. Whichever one he picks, the game dwells on how much the rejected one suffers.
4. Three, two, one — cry for me!

This K-drama template is tolerable once or twice, but some “big studios” abuse it with zero shame. As long as a girl “disappears,” “dies,” or “gets her heart broken,” otaku will sob at their waifu on the other side of the screen and the game’s reputation shoots up. It’s like phone marketing: once word of mouth takes off, even otaku with no interest in the game will buy it to boost their own taste, to earn “status” and “bragging rights,” and a legendary porn game masterpiece is born.

Besides fossilizing the plot, these tumorous old studios also fossilized the structure of the visual novel…

A porn game’s structure is painfully obvious now: first a “prologue loosely related to the main plot,” then a “massive common route padded with stuff barely related to the main plot,” then “individual routes loosely related to the plot,” and only at the very end “the real meat where the plot actually unfolds,” capped off with “formulaic boning scenes.” A single porn game takes at least 20 hours to clear, which is enough time to beat two AAA titles, watch at least three seasons of anime, or read four books — and all it tells you is one simple story. The ratio is completely off.

I’ve said 80% of a porn game’s content has nothing to do with the main plot. In a 20-hour Galgame, maybe less than 4 hours of text is actually useful to the story. Why not extract those 4 hours and make them tight? Why drown it in filler? Sometimes I look at page after page of pointless lowbrow jokes and feel it’s a waste of resources. If the scenario writer really had that much energy, why not do something else instead of writing toilet paper here? What’s the point?

All that rambling aside, I don’t think the “industry shrinkage” most Galgame companies keep talking about actually exists. What exists is their own ossification. My take on Galgame’s current problems:

1. Games are too long, and most of the playtime is “boring time.”
2. Settings are too formulaic — always the same few.
3. The target audience is too narrow: “Japan,” “male,” “otaku.” Most of that group are DDs, plenty pirate, so there’s no money to be made.
4. Games are boxed in — no matter how things unfold, you always end up back at confession, romance, and boning. Sometimes I think the “ambiguous feelings” in a game are more worth savoring.

So a lot of people think minori died because it wanted to make the all-ages SPPL, otaku wouldn’t buy it, so it had no choice but to start selling tits and thighs, and then the industry went bad and the tits and thighs stopped selling too, so it decided to close up.

The real reason is that minori’s games had too many problems: a garbage engine, plots too Mary Sue, porn sold too cheaply, and the president’s own marketing splitting its reputation into two camps. Its death was an accident that was always going to happen.

Some people will say: “Look, Key makes all-ages games too and it’s doing fine.”

But Key’s parent company has a bunch of subsidiaries, and some of those subsidiaries sell nukige. Some sell formulaic stuff too — Saga Planets, for instance.

Speaking of Saga Planets, we can talk about the new game it released this month, Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- (金色ラブリッチェ-Golden Time-).

Strictly speaking, Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- should be a fandisc for Kiniro Loveriche, released the year before last. I thought that game was pretty mediocre, exactly as I said earlier: it just tells a very ordinary story, then forces the heroine to die of a terminal illness at the end to milk some tears.

Still, that game had one bright spot: the princess’s little sister, Mina. Her character was actually well done — proper, well-spoken, and constantly snarking at the pathologies of Japanese society. She ended up being the part I most looked forward to while playing.

Naturally, Mina gets promoted to a romanceable character in Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time-, and the black-haired rich girl from the original gets promoted along with her.

Normally a fandisc builds on the original by promoting new romanceable characters and expanding AFTER STORYs for the existing ones. Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- is different: it offers only three routes — Mina, the black-haired girl, and an Another Story for the original’s Ria. Everyone else just gets a few short stories in APPEND as a token gesture. And as a fandisc it has a route lock: you have to clear Mina and the black-haired girl before you can enter Ria’s route.

Which is not how a normal fandisc is supposed to work at all!

Only three routes, and other characters get just short stories — hard to call that earnest. And the game falls short on “earnestness” elsewhere too: the engine.

Anyone who’s played knows Saga Planets games use Key’s Visual Arts engine, which beats the most common Kirikiri on both anti-cracking and runtime efficiency. But in Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time-, it dropped the old engine and went back to Kirikiri!

The biggest tell is performance. Saga Planets games like to use chibi characters running across the screen for transitions, but in this so-called fandisc that effect is full of stutter… Not only that, characters bob and nod a lot while talking, and those motions run poorly on Kirikiri — frame drops everywhere. It was genuinely uncomfortable to watch.

Clearly Saga Planets had no idea what Kirikiri is actually like and just crudely ported over all the old effects, so it stutters like a dog. Yuzusoft, which has worked on Kirikiri for years, is far more seasoned — it avoids “character bobbing” and “characters running around,” so its games don’t look nearly as bad.

I still can’t figure out why Saga Planets would abandon its parent company’s engine for Kirikiri — ditch something good for something lower-grade. When I saw the OP, I even wondered if this entry had been outsourced to ensemble.

So aside from that awkward engine, how’s the story?

Thinking it over, there’s not much to say. It’s a fandisc, so Mina’s route is just chatting, confessing, dating, having sex… And Mina’s character setting has a problem: aside from her speech pattern, she doesn’t act like a rich girl at all — more like a maid (though she does wear a maid outfit the whole time). Her route does show some cute casual clothes, and if you treat it as “just chatting with a little sister,” the route isn’t bad.

But she’s an added character, and she has nothing to do with the “blonde beauty” the original project was built around.

The other route, the black-haired girl’s, is genuinely nasty. It not only inherits the original’s setting — that the black-haired rich girl is secretly a pervert who’s into butt stuff — but keeps playing the “lick ass, do ass, finger ass” gag as a sex scene. It made me sick. The route does establish her “Japanese-style young lady” identity, but it still feels perfunctory, more about selling flesh and… bursting chrysanthemums. I skimmed it and moved on.

Ria’s route, unlocked last, is mostly about making up for a regret from the original. In the original, Ria dies of a brain tumor; in this route the tumor is still there, just less severe. After she starts dating the protagonist it even seems to improve, and in the end, thanks to the rich girl’s financial backing, Ria survives, bears the protagonist a daughter, and gets a Happy Ending.

Honestly, on its few story routes this fandisc is at best middling. The writing opens with a “protagonist telling his little sister a story” memory frame that re-explains the original’s setting, plus a lot of slice-of-life gags — closer to one of those anime recap episodes with new material spliced in. The individual routes are just the branches after the split, i.e. the usual fare.

The game’s biggest selling point is giving Ria, the heroine who was already doomed to die, a chance to live — and happiness on top of it. But milking money with just that, taking a year to put out a fandisc, is a bit much. Sometimes I think making money off porn games is just too easy: write a cute girl, kill her off, milk a wave of loser otaku tears and sales, then put out a fandisc where the dead girl comes back to life, and milk another wave. Scamming fans is great — the longer you do it, the better it feels. Why not?

But scamming only works on the diehards of a given company’s games. I remember seeing the Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- poster and preorders at Animate in Nipponbashi, Osaka, along with the sad, unsold preorder bonuses in the store behind it, and I got the feeling nobody cared about this game. Yet on Getchu, Kiniro Loveriche -Golden Time- was still number one in preorders…

Which gives you an idea of how dire the even worse games must be…

If the industry keeps going like this it might really be done for. Is nobody going to step up and change things, rise from the ashes?