Koibumi Spiritchu (恋嵐スピリッチュ) Review

I can’t remember who Parasol’s parent company is, I just always got the feeling they’re half-dead.

By “half-dead” I mean they keep making games that feel out of step with the times, the kind you look at and think “no way this sells,” and the wildest part is they make them and still don’t go under.

Still, every now and then Parasol puts out something normal—though those games always make me suspect the writer’s brain is wired wrong. Take their most famous one, Haru na Hana. But I do think Parasol genuinely wants to make good games, and Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou from two years back was actually pretty solid. It even introduced this surprisingly ahead-of-its-time concept, basically an “internet addiction boot camp” school. Shame is, a lot of Japanese players didn’t get it—they kept saying “no way a school like that exists, where they lock kids up and force total obedience to the principal, that’s so fake.” Apparently the game got an official Simplified Chinese release, so maybe Chinese players would understand it better. Not that I’ve looked into how they actually felt about it.

If they can make something like Sakura Hitohira Koi Moyou, that proves Parasol’s got some skill. So naturally, strike while the iron’s hot—make something even better, reinvent yourself, achieve self-actualization, all that. So I waited, and in 2019 Parasol dropped a game called Koarashi Spiritchu. At first glance it looked pretty hype. Then I saw the premise and immediately spat out my drink.

So what’s the premise? The protagonist’s school is haunted. The ghost ringleader is a white-haired loli named Elise, and she’s basically a succubus—always causing trouble around campus and making students and teachers do all sorts of twisted, lewd things. Eventually the school and the protagonist, who’s student council president, can’t take it anymore and call in exorcists to take this ghost out…

Hold on, what the hell is this setup? This isn’t the Parasol I remember. I thought Parasol did fluffy, sentimental stuff—Guo Jingming-tier melodrama. Why’d they suddenly crank out something that looks like a nukige?

And then you actually play it, and holy shit, it really is basically a nukige. The two exorcists the protagonist brings in are a shrine maiden named Sakuramori Itose and a cat god named Botan. They show up at school at night, fight for a bit with zero strategy, and quickly run into the final boss, Elise—only to find they’re completely outmatched. And Elise offers our exorcist team leader, the protagonist, a deal: if he sleeps with her, or just donates a little semen, she’ll let them go for now.

Oh right, those two dumbass exorcists couldn’t beat Elise, and she sealed away their magic in a gourd… no wait, a box.

That’s when our protagonist has his big realization: turns out he has super rare demonic bloodline. What’s so great about it? He can use his semen to recharge other people’s pussies, and once charged, they become super strong. We’ve all gotten used to calling this “mana transfer” by now.

So the common route is basically: protagonist takes the two exorcists to school every night to fight Elise, they lose every time, and then for various reasons he ends up mana-transferring to the exorcists. Meanwhile he also meets a “foreigner” at school—actually just a blonde—named Tsujigou Tsubasa, who also came to this school to take down Elise. Everyone teams up to fight the boss and get mana transfers from the protagonist. Ain’t that neat?

Just when everyone thinks they can take down the boss together, the boss starts monologuing. Elise says she wasn’t actually trying to cause chaos—she herself is being tormented by an evil spirit called “Für Elise.” She was doing all this to attract more exorcists and absorb their power to raise their skill level. Now that there are enough people, they can all go destroy “Für Elise” together…

The logic is dumb as hell but at least it tracks. So the group takes out the mastermind (I never even saw what the mastermind looked like), frees Elise, and then…

And then the game’s story basically ends.

After that it’s routes as you’d expect—sex scenes and ED? Nonono, we’re a “story-driven” visual novel, we gotta add some “backstory.”

So in the cat god Botan’s route, we learn her origin: she used to be a normal cat kept by a mistress, then the mistress wished to grow old with her cat and somehow the wish came true, turning the cat into an immortal cat god. After the mistress died, the cat god had no choice but to go on a killing spree and got sealed away. Years later, the shrine maiden Sakuramori Itose unsealed her, and here we are.

Oh right, there’s also an Elise route—you need a patch to see it. It’s very simple and粗暴, just tossed into the Afterstory. Not much content: Elise, now free, sleeps with the protagonist, but since she’s a ghost and already dead, she needs to reincarnate and pass on. She goes to heaven, but because she’s pregnant, she gets kicked back down, so she ends up staying in the human world living with the protagonist.

All in all, Koarashi Spiritchu left me kind of baffled.

First, the art style. From the coloring to the backgrounds, this does not look like a 2019 game. It’s got a thick early-2000s vibe. Especially the little sister’s sprite—you could tell me it’s from Alcot’s debut and I’d believe you. Second, the premise feels deliberately engineered just to cram in more HCGs. The game’s systems changed to enable more HCGs too—you can literally choose whether the heroine’s breasts are big or small.

The story has zero highlights. You can tell they tried to make up for it in the second half, but it’s just a band-aid. It doesn’t raise the overall quality.

I can’t believe this is a Parasol game from 2019. Did the anniversary title from two years ago not sell well? Is the company about to go under? And I once again see Anzu Mitsu voicing the main heroine, mouth full of dirty talk. I don’t know the details, but maybe Anzu Mitsu, as a single mom raising two sons, really needs the money and will take any role.

That said, the game does have some bright spots—the EDs. Still done by Solfa, each heroine gets her own ED. The cat god Botan’s ED, “Neko no Wagamama,” is genuinely great: arrangement, melody, all of it. There’s even a hint of sadness in it. Maybe it’s meant to match her slightly pitiful story in the game.

Even so, I can’t recommend this game. If you’ve got time, you’d be better off playing Pulltop’s even worse Sakurairo, Mau Koro ni—at least that one is bad with style.